Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

48
Steiner on the High School Literature Curriculum
Ninth Grade
A teacher asks about the lessons for the ninth grade.
Dr. Steiner: I will write it down for tomorrow, but we will get farthest if we see it as a continuation of what
we have already done. I would, therefore, ask you to provide me with all the information about what you
have done and achieved in German and literature.
A teacher: I went through Goethe, Schiller, and Herder, but that was all. I was able to bring into history
some discussion of things like Dante’s Divine Comedy, but mostly it was Goethe, Schiller, and Herder. In
grammar, we wrote essays and I attempted to work on spelling from the perspective of speech. We did
nothing with grammar as such.
Dr. Steiner: Well, what you will need to do in literature is to take care of Jean Paul. In particular, you will
need to look at some sections of Aesthetics, or the Schooling of Beauty with the ninth grade—particularly the
ones concerning humor. You should not pay too much attention to history. That would be about a semester’s
work. Afterward, you would then go on with the students to something very different. They are, after all,
fourteen and fifteen years old, and you could read and discuss some of the chapters in Herman Grimm’s
lectures on Goethe. That is what you need to do in literature.
In German, I would recommend that you not go too deeply into grammar in the first semester.
Discuss the phonetic law, particularly Grimm’s law. In the essays, I would recommend that you handle
historical themes. The students should work primarily with the material you gave them last year in history.
You will certainly have adequate opportunities to discuss grammar and syntax in connection with corrections.
Before you have the children write an essay, though, you should have the children from last year
orally discuss the theme for the new children in the class. Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner I (176-177)
A teacher: In the eighth and ninth grade German class, we are reading Herman Grimm.
Dr. Steiner: Have you had an opportunity to bring other things into the lectures by Grimm? How far have
you come in history? What did you do with his first lecture where he speaks about Rome in the second part
of his characterization of the last centuries?
A teacher: The children did not know that history.
Dr. Steiner: It is important that you cover the history of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries, at least in the ninth grade. Perhaps you could do it that way. It is missing in the ninth
grade. In teaching about these centuries, the goal would be that the students understand the present, don’t
you agree? They are now fifteen years old. You could go through those themes as Herman Grimm presents
them in each chapter and take the nineteenth century as a confluence of the histories of various peoples.
Use the themes of the last four centuries as leitmotifs. Actually, it would be important to do that in both
classes, only you should do it in different ways. In eighth grade, more narratively and in ninth grade, go
more into the major ideas of the last centuries. You need to work toward being able to present the major
ideas to the children. There is a great deal of material in those lectures you can expand upon by bringing in
literature from everywhere. Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner I (194-195)