Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

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Consequently, we will have to rearrange much of how we teach. You will find that what we aim at
in reading and writing today cannot, of course, be established exclusively as indicated here; all we can do is
awaken the necessary forces as a basis. If we were to base our teaching only on the process of drawing
evolving toward reading and writing (modern life being what it is), we would have to keep the children in
school until they were twenty. The normal period of education would not be enough. All we can do now is
accomplish our method in principle while continuing to educate the children and retaining the artistic
element. Practical Advice to Teachers (1-3)
Strengthening Reading Comprehension
Experimental psychologists have recently been particularly interested in what they call the process
of comprehension, for instance, the process of comprehension in reading, in the reading of a given passage.
In order to determine the nature of the process of comprehension, they have tried to work with people
whom they designate “experimental subjects.” Put briefly, the very lengthy experiments take the following
course. An experimental subject, a child or an older person, is presented with a written passage to read, and
investigations are then made into what the child, for instance, should most profitably do first in order to
achieve the most rapid comprehension. It is noted that the most expedient method is first to introduce the
person to the subject matter of the passage.
A further series of experiments shows that the experimental subject then carries out a process of
“passive assimilation.” After the content has been introduced, it is then passively assimilated. Out of this
passive assimilation of a written passage is supposed to arise the faculty of “anticipatory learning,” the
ability to reproduce what was first introduced and then passively assimilated in a free spiritual activity. And
the fourth act of this drama is then the recapitulation of all the points that are still uncertain, in other
words, that have not entered fully into the person’s life of soul and spirit. If you let the experimental subject
carry out in proper sequence first the process of becoming acquainted with the content of the passage, then
passive assimilation, then anticipatory learning, and finally, recapitulation of whatever is not fully understood,
you will come to the conclusion that this is the most expedient method of assimilating, reading, and
retaining. Do not misunderstand me—I am putting this idea forward because I must, in view of the fact
that people talk at cross-purposes so much these days; it is possible to want to express an identical point
with diametrically opposed words.
Accordingly, the experimental psychologists will maintain that by such painstaking methods we
can learn what we ought to be doing in education. But those who recognize more deeply the life of the
human being as a whole know that you cannot arrive at a real educational activity by these means any more
than you can put together a live beetle after you have dissected it. This is just not possible. It is equally
impossible when you anatomize the human being’s soul activity. Of course, it is interesting, and in other
connections, can also be most fruitful to study the anatomy of human soul activity. But it does not make
teachers. This experimental psychology will not, in fact, lead to a renewal of education, which can arise only
out of an inner understanding of the human being. I had to say this lest you should misunderstand a
statement I now want to make, a statement that will very much irritate those who are attached to the
present-day climate of opinion. The statement is naturally one-sided in the way I shall put it, and its onesidedness
must, of course, be counterbalanced. What do the experimental psychologists discover when they
have anatomized, or should we say tortured (for the procedure is not pleasant), the soul of their experimental
subject? They have discovered what is, in their opinion, an extraordinarily significant result that is
written boldly again and again in educational handbooks as a final conclusion. Put in clear language, the
result, roughly, is that a passage to be read and learned is more easily retained if the content is understood
than if it is not understood. To use the scientific idiom, it has been determined by research that it is
expedient first to discover the meaning of a passage, for then the passage is easier to learn. Now I must make