Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

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however clumsy the children’s first efforts may be when working with color, sound, or other artistic media.
One learns to know children intimately, both their gifts and limitations; watching the artistic element of
the sculpture as it flows from little hands, living in empathy with the child, one learns to recognize the
strength with which the child directs every bit of attention and forces toward the spirit worlds, and then
brings that back into the physical world of the senses. One learns to know the children’s entire relationship
to a higher spiritual world. And if music and poetry are brought to the children, as a teacher, one gains a
glimpse of the latent strength in them, ready to develop later in life.
Having brought the children into close contact with the plastic, poetic, and musical arts, and
having brought eurythmic movements into their bodies, having awakened to life through eurythmy what
would otherwise be the abstract element of language, we create in the human being an inner harmony
between the spirit-winged musical and poetic elements, and the spirit-permeated material elements of
modeling and painting. Human consciousness, spiritually illumined, weaves soulfully and artistically into
the physical corporeal part of the human being. One learns to teach by awakening spirit and soul in children,
in such a way that teaching becomes health-permeating, stimulating growth and strength for all of
life. This brings to mind a beautiful and deeply meaningful Greek expression. The ancient Greeks spoke of
Phidias’s statue of Zeus as “healing magic.” Genuine art will not only take hold of soul and spirit, but it will
also enhance health and growth. Genuine art has always had healing powers.
Educators and teachers who have the proper love for art and the necessary respect for human nature
will always be in a position to implant the artistic element as a magic healing into all their teaching. Then
training the intellect, which is a necessary part of schooling, as well as religious teaching and training the
heart forces, will be permeated by an element that is inextricably connected to human freedom and human
love. If teachers themselves feel a strong bond with the artistic element and appeal to the artistic appreciation
in their pupils, and if they create an artistic atmosphere in the classroom, the proper teaching methods
and human influence will stream out into all other aspects of education. Then they will not “save” the
artistic element for other subjects, but let it flow and permeate all their teaching. The attitude must not be:
Here are the main subjects—this one will train the intellect, this one the feelings and the sense of duty, and
over there, separate, more or less on a voluntary basis, is the art lesson. On the contrary, art is in its proper
place only when all teaching is arranged so that, at the right moment, the students’ souls feel a need for the
artistic; and art itself must be cultivated so that, in the artistic activities themselves, students feel the need
for a rational understanding of, and dutiful concentration on, the things they have come to see as beautiful,
as truly free, and thus as human. This is intended to indicate how art can pervade the entire field of
education, how it can illumine and warm through the entire pedagogical and sermonizing realm of education.
Art and the esthetic sense place knowledge of the human being at the meeting of purely spiritual
knowledge on the one side, and external sensory knowledge on the other. It also helps lead us most beautifully
into the practical aspects of education. “Education and Art” Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy II
(59-60)
The Effect of Poetry and Imagination on the Etheric Body
Now what about this etheric body? In the waking state we are ordinarily entirely dependent on our
physical body. Materialists are quite right in stating that the thought the human being evolves in the
physical world is connected to the brain or nervous system. We do need the physical body for ordinary
thinking. But the moment we deviate even a little from this ordinary thinking to a certain freedom of inner
life and experience, as in the case, for example, of exercising artistic imagination, the almost imperceptible
activity of the etheric body grows more intense. Therefore, if a person is thinking in the ordinary “matterof-fact”
way (we must do so in ordinary life, and I am really not speaking of it in a derogatory sense), then