Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

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Language Arts Compendium
Accordingly, the experimental psychologists will maintain that by
such painstaking methods we can learn what we ought to be doing
in education. But those who recognize more deeply the life of the
human being as a whole know that you cannot arrive at a real educational
activity by these means any more than you can put together
a live beetle after you have dissected it. This is just not possible. It
is equally impossible when you anatomize the human being’s soul
activity. Of course, it is interesting, and in other connections, can also
be most fruitful to study the anatomy of human soul activity. But it
does not make teachers. This experimental psychology will not, in
fact, lead to a renewal of education, which can arise only out of an
inner understanding of the human being. I had to say this lest you
should misunderstand a statement I now want to make, a statement
that will very much irritate those who are attached to the present-day
climate of opinion. The statement is naturally one-sided in the way
I shall put it, and its one-sidedness must, of course, be counterbalanced.
What do the experimental psychologists discover when they
have anatomized, or should we say tortured (for the procedure is not
pleasant), the soul of their experimental subject? They have discovered
what is, in their opinion, an extraordinarily significant result
that is written boldly again and again in educational handbooks as
a final conclusion. Put in clear language, the result, roughly, is that
a passage to be read and learned is more easily retained if the content
is understood than if it is not understood. To use the scientific
idiom, it has been determined by research that it is expedient first to
discover the meaning of a passage, for then the passage is easier to
learn. Now I must make my heretical statement. If the conclusion
of these experiments is correct, then I could have known it anyway.
I should like to know what person equipped with ordinary common
sense would not already realize that a passage is easier to remember
if you have understood the sense of it than if you have not. There
is no doubt that results of experimental psychology bring to light
the most obvious truths. The truisms you find in the textbooks of
experimental psychology are on occasion such that no one who has
not been trained in the pursuit of science to accept the fascinating
along with the absolutely tedious could possibly be persuaded to