The Child's Changing Consciouness as the Basis of Pedagogical Practice
These talks were given in 1923-three and a half years after the founding of the first Waldorf school-to an audience of Swiss school teachers, most of whom have little knowledge of anthroposophy. This is the context of these lectures, among Steiner's most accessible on education. A teacher who attended the lectures wrote in the Berne School Paper: Every morning, as we listened anew to Dr. Steiner, we felt we had come closer to him and understood better what he had to say and how he had to say it.
In these eight talks on education for adolescent-aged young people, Steiner addressed the teachers of the first Waldorf school two years after it was first opened. A high school was needed, and Steiner wanted to provide a foundation for study and a guide for teachers already familiar with his approach to the human being, child development, and education based on spiritual science. Steiner's education affirms the being of every child within the world of spirit.
These five talks were given during an educational conference in 1924. They are the last public lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Germany. According to one member of his audience, "Seventeen hundred people listened to him; the prolonged applause from this great crowd at the end of every lecture was deeply moving, while at the end of the last lecture the applause became an ovation that seemed as if it would never end." This kind of adoration was the result not only of who Steiner was as an individual but of what he accomplished as well.
This book from Rudolf Steiner constitute one of the most comprehensive introductions to his philosophy, psychology, and practice of education. He describes the union of science, art, religion, and morality, which is the goal of all his work and underlies his comprehensive ides on educational renewal. Against this background, Steiner describe a new developmental psychology. Based on the development of children’s consciousness, he discusses the ways various subjects should be presented so that they can grow inwardly in children.
The Genius of Language - Observations for Teachers: Six Lectures
During the first year of the first Waldorf school, Rudolf Steiner agreed to give a science course to the teachers, which was to be on the nature of light. At the last minute, he was asked to give an additional course on language, which he improvised. "The Genius of Language" is the result. Steiner demonstrates how history and psychology together form the different languages and how ideas, images, and vocabulary travel through time within various cultural streams. He describes how the power to form language has declined, but that we can still recover the seed of language, the penetration of sound by meaning.
