Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

is really so. If you used mathematical terminology the same way you do grammatical terminology, you
would soon see how horrible it is. All your horrible habits do not allow you to see how terrible the grammar
classes are. This is caused by the culture that has used language to mistreat Europe for such a terribly long
time, it has used a language that was not livingly integrated, namely, Latin. That is why we have such a
superficial connection to language. That is how things are. …As it is taught today, grammar is the most
spiritless thing there is, and that gives a certain color to teaching. I must say there is much more to it than
what we do. It is just horrible. We cannot always have everything perfect, which is why I do not always want
to criticize and complain. You need a much better inner relationship to language, and then your teaching of
language will become better.
It is not always the children’s fault when they do not pay attention in the language classes. Why
should they be interested in what an adverb is? That is just a barbaric word. Things only become better
when you continually bring in relationships, when you repeatedly come back to the connections between
words. If you simply make a child memorize and yourself have no interest in what you had them memorize,
the children will no longer learn anything by heart. They will do that only if you return to the subject again
in a different connection so that they see there is some sense in learning. Faculty Meetings with Rudolf
Steiner II (547-550)
Noun, Article, Adjective, and Verb
I have already given you hints on how to help the children distinguish between nouns and adjectives.
You help them see how a noun refers to something that stands outside in space by itself. You say to
them: “Let us take the word tree. A tree is something that remains standing in space. But look at a tree in
winter and again in spring and again in summer. The tree is always there, but it looks different in winter
than it does in summer and different again in spring. In winter we say it is brown. In spring we say it is
green. In summer we say it is many colored. These are its characteristics.” We first teach the children to
distinguish between the characteristics that remain the same and those that change. Then we say: “If we
need a word to describe what remains the same, that is a noun. And if we need a word for what changes on
the thing that remains the same, that is an adjective.” Then you teach the children the concept of activity:
“Sit on your chair. You are a good child. Good is an adjective. But now stand up and walk. You are doing
something. That is an activity. The word you need to describe this activity is a verb.”
In this way we try to lead the children to the fact, and then we make the transition from the fact to
the words. By using this method, we will be able to teach the children, without doing too much damage,
the meaning of noun, article, adjective, and verb. It is most difficult to understand the nature of an article,
because the children cannot yet grasp the relationship between an article and a noun. We shall have to
flounder about in abstractions to teach the children the definition of an article. But they must learn it. It is
better to flounder in abstractions (since we are dealing anyway with something synthetic) than to invent all
sorts of artificial ways of explaining to children the significance and nature of an article, which is impossible.
Practical Advice to Teachers (169-171)
Working with the Parts of Speech
A teacher: Our proposal in teaching languages was to begin with the verb with the lowest beginners. From
the fourth grade onward, we would develop grammar, and beginning with the ninth grade, we would do
more of a review and literature.
Dr. Steiner: It is certainly quite right to begin with the verb. Prepositions are very lively. It would be incorrect
to begin with nouns. We also need to answer the question of what is removed from the verb when it
becomes a noun…. In English, every sound can become a verb. [Nouns in German are often formed by
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