Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

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Language Arts Compendium
Stenography and Typing
1. Shorthand and Stenography
Instead of seeing me here talking to you, imagine that you are in
ancient Greece, where a rhapsodist is reciting Homer to an audience
in that strange style we no longer use—part song, part speech.
Imagine a stenographer sitting by the side of this rhapsodist reciting
Homer. What a strange scene—completely impossible. Impossible,
if only for the simple reason that the ancient Greeks had a very different
memory and did not need anything so far removed from the
world as the shapes of shorthand to remember what came to them
through speech. You can see from this that an exceedingly destructive
element constantly interferes in our culture. We need this destructive
element. In the whole of our cultural life we cannot possibly do
without shorthand, but we should be aware that there is something
destructive in it. What in our cultural life is this awful habit of writing
everything down in shorthand? It is as though we were no longer able
to regulate our appropriate rhythm between waking and sleeping and
were to use our sleep time to carry on all kinds of activities so as to
implant in our soul life something that it no longer takes in naturally.
By using shorthand, we retain something in our culture that, if left
to ourselves with our present natural aptitudes, we would cease to
notice and, in fact, forget. We thus keep something artificially awake
in our culture that destroys it just as much as all-night studying ruins
the health of overzealous students. For this reason, our culture is no
longer truly healthy.
We must realize that we have already crossed the Rubicon— that
was in ancient Greek times. Humankind has passed the point when
we had an absolutely healthy culture. Now our culture will become
ever more unhealthy, and human beings will more and more have
to find within education a healing process against all the things that
make them sick in their environment. We must not allow ourselves to