Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

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Language Arts Compendium
fads. The ideas that underlie all three methods are good—there is no
denying that each has its merits. But what is it that makes this so?
Imagine that you know a person only from a photograph showing
a front view. The picture will have created a certain image within
you of that person. Now imagine that another picture falls into your
hands, and someone tells you that this is the same person. The second
picture shows a side view and creates such a different impression that
you may be convinced that it could not be the same person. Yet in
reality both photographs show the same individual, but from different
angles. And this is how it always is in life: everything has to be
considered from different angles. It is easy to fall in love with one’s
own particular perspective because it appears to be so convincing.
And so one might, with good reasons, defend the spelling method,
the phonetic method, or the whole-word method to the extent that
anyone else with an opposite opinion could not refute one’s arguments.
Yet even the best of reasons may prove to be only one-sided. In
real life, everything has to be considered from the most varied angles.
If the letter forms have been gained through painting drawings
and drawing paintings, and if one has gone on to a kind of phonetic
or whole-word method—which is now appropriate because it leads
the child to an appreciation of a wholeness, and prevents it from
becoming too fixed in details—if all this has been done, there is
still something else that has been overlooked in our materialistic
climate. It is this: the single sound, by itself, the separate M or P,
this also represents a reality. And it is important to see that, when
a sound is part of a word, it has already entered the external world,
already passed into the material and physical world. What we have
in our soul are the sounds as such, and these depend largely on our
soul nature. When we pronounce letters, such as the letter M, for
example, we actually say “em.” Ancient Greeks did not do this; they
pronounced it “mu.” In other words, they pronounced the auxiliary
vowel after the consonant, whereas we put it before the consonant.
In Middle Europe today, we make the sound of a letter by proceeding
from the vowel to the consonant, but in ancient Greece only the
reverse path was taken. This indicates the underlying soul condition
of the people concerned.