Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

Writing
105
so that in them weaving, articulate spirituality is wafted towards him,
the more adequately do we respond to the demands of his innermost
being in these early years. They are years when the feeling life of the
soul must flow into the processes of breathing and of the circulation
of the blood and into the whole vascular system indeed into the
whole human organism. If we educate in this sense, the child’s life of
feeling will be called on in a way right for our times, so that the child
will develop strongly and naturally in his organism and life of soul.
It is of incalculable benefit to the child if we develop this element
of feeling in writing and then allow a faint echo of the intellect to
enter as he rediscovers in reading what he has already experienced in
writing. There is then a gentle accompaniment from the intellect. This
is the very best way of leading the child on towards his ninth year.
Between the ages of seven and nine or nine-and-a-half, it is essential
that the teaching shall make a direct appeal to the element
of feeling. The child must receive the various forms of the letters
into his life of feeling. This is very important. We harden the child’s
nature unduly, we over-strengthen the forces of bone and cartilage
and sinew in relation to the rest of the organism, if we teach him to
write mechanically, making him trace arbitrary curves and lines for
the letters, making use only of his bodily mechanism without calling
upon the eye as well.
If we also call upon the eye, and the eye is of course connected
with the movements of the hand, by developing the letters in an artistic
way, so that the letter does not spring from merely mechanical
movements of the hand, the eye itself will take pleasure in the results
of its own activity. Qualities of the soul are thus brought rightly into
play, and the life of feeling develops at an age when it can best flow
into the physical organism with healing power.
[Modern Art of Education, 1972, pp. 135-43.]
8. From The Essentials of Education (1924)
When we read modern books on embryology, botany, or zoology,
we feel a sense of despair in finding ourselves immediately forced
to plunge into a cold intellectuality. Although the life and the development
of nature are not essentially “intellectual,” we have to