Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

Reading
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1. The Benefits of Waiting to Introduce Reading
We receive the children into our school from their parental homes.
Today, we live in an age when writing and reading have produced
conventional symbols no longer bearing any direct inner relationship
to the human being. Compare the abstract letters of our alphabet
with the picture writing used in ages past. What was fixed into
written forms in ancient times still bore a resemblance to people’s
mental images. But writing nowadays has become quite abstract. If
we introduce children directly to these abstract letters in reading and
writing lessons, we introduce them to something alien to their nature,
or at least something inappropriate for six-, seven-, or eight-year-olds.
For this reason, we use a different method in our Waldorf school.
Instead of beginning with the letters of the alphabet, we engage our
young pupils in artistic activity by letting them paint and draw; that
is, work with colors and forms. In this activity, not only the head is
engaged—which would have a very harmful effect—but the child’s
entire being is involved. We then let the actual letters emerge out of
these color-filled forms. This is how our Waldorf pupils learn writing.
They learn writing first. And only afterward do they learn to read, for
printed letters are even more abstract than our handwritten ones. In
other words, only gradually do we develop the abstract element, so
necessary today, from the artistic element which is more closely allied
to life. We proceed similarly in other subjects, too. And we work in
this way toward a living, artistic pedagogy that makes it possible to
reach the very soul of the child. As for the nature of what we usually
think of as plant, mineral, and so forth, this can be fruitfully taught
only after the child has passed the turning point just characterized
and can differentiate itself from its surroundings.
Working along these lines, it might well happen that some of
our pupils learn to read and write later than pupils in other schools.
But this is no drawback. On the contrary, it is even an advantage.
Of course, it is quite possible to teach young children reading and
writing by rote and get them to rattle off what is put before their
eyes, but it is also possible to deaden something in them by doing
this, and anything killed during childhood remains dead for the rest
of one’s life. The opposite is equally true. What we allow to live and