Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

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Language Arts Compendium
That the children have brought the sense of truth with them can
be seen in the fact that they have learned to speak before entering
school. Language, as it were, incorporates truth and knowledge. We
need language if we wish to learn about the world. This fact has led
people like Mauthner to assume that everything is already contained
in language. People like Mauthner—who wrote the book Critique
of Language—actually believe that we harm human beings by taking
them beyond the point at which they learn to speak. Mauthner
wrote his Critique of Language because he did not believe in the
world, because of his conviction that human beings should be left
at a childlike stage, at the time when they learn to speak. Were this
idea to become generally accepted, we would be left with a spiritual
life that corresponds to that of children at the time when they have
learned to speak. This manner of thinking tends toward producing
such human beings who remain at the stage of children who have just
learned to speak. Everything else is nowadays rejected as ignorance.
What now matters is that we can enter the concept of imitation
with our feeling and then to understand the concept of authority
as the basis, between us and the children, for the development of
the sense for the beautiful. If we manage to do this up to the time
of puberty, then as the children are growing into their inclinations
toward ideals, the sense for the good is correctly developed. Before
puberty it is through us that the children are motivated to do the
good; through the reciprocal relationship we must affect the children
in this way. It is necessary for the eleven-, twelve-, and thirteenyear-old
girls and boys to have the teacher’s authority behind them,
to feel their teacher’s pleasure and satisfaction when they are doing
something that is good. And they should avoid bad actions because
they feel their teacher would be disappointed. They should be aware
of the teacher’s presence and in this way unite with him or her. Only
at puberty should they emancipate themselves from the teacher.
If we consider the children to be already mature in first grade, if
we encourage them to voice their opinions and judgments as soon as
they have learned to speak—that is, if we base everything on direct
perception [Anschauung]—we leave them at the stage of development
at which they have just learned to speak, and we deny them any fur-