Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

72
emerge only later on. In this way, you are working on the children’s will, and that is what you should do,
indeed, you must do. On the one hand, you must try to bring to the children whatever is preeminently
artistic—music, drawing, modeling, and so on. But, on the other hand, you must introduce the children to
things that have an abstract meaning. You must introduce them in such a way that even though the children
cannot understand the meaning as yet, they will be able to do so later on, when they are more mature,
because they have taken them in through repetition and can remember them. If you have worked in this
way, you have worked on the children’s will. You have also worked on the children’s feeling life, and that is
something you should not forget. Just as feeling lies between willing and thinking—and this is revealed
from the point of view of both the soul and the spirit—so do the educational measures for the feeling life lie
between those for the faculty of cognizing through thought and those for the will and its development. For
thinking and knowing we must certainly undertake measures that involve the revelation of meaning: reading,
writing, and so on. For willed activity we must cultivate everything that does not involve just the
interpretation of meaning but needs to be directly grasped by the whole human being—everything artistic.
What lies between these two will work mainly on the development of the feeling life, of the heart forces.
These heart forces are quite strongly affected if the children are given the opportunity of first learning
something by rote without understanding it and without any explanations of the meaning though, of
course, there is a meaning. When they have matured through other processes, they will remember what
have learned and will then understand what they took in earlier. This subtle process must be very much
taken into account in teaching if we want to bring up human beings who have an inward life of feeling. For
feeling establishes itself in life in a peculiar manner. People ought to observe what goes on in this realm, but
they do not do so effectively. Practical Advice to Teachers (76-82)
Brahma
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson