Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

Speech and Recitation
225
When we see the prevalence of nervous disease in this third decade
of the twentieth century, we cannot but conclude that there must
have been much confused thinking on the part of the educators about
the beginning of the century. Many diseases of the nerves to‐day are
really due to confused thinking, and again, the nerve troubles from
which people suffered at the beginning of the century were equally
the result of the confused thought of the last three decades of the
nineteenth century.
Now these matters can be handled in such a way that physiology,
hygiene, and psychology no longer need to remain shut off
from each other as specialized branches of knowledge, so that today
the teacher must call in the doctor the moment any question of
health arises. Physiological education, school hygiene, and the like,
can be so united, that then the teacher’s spiritual mission will come
to include an understanding of the activity of the soul and spirit in
the physical organism. But since everyone has, in a certain sense, to
educate children from birth up to the seventh year, a social task stands
before us, inasmuch as a true knowledge of man is necessary for all
if humanity is to follow an ascending, and not a descending, path.
[A Modern Art of Education, 1972, pp. 109-113.]
4. Learning Speech through Imitation
The strength of children’s tendency to imitate can be recognized by
observing how they paint and scribble written signs and letters long
before they understand them. Indeed, it is good that they paint the
letters first by imitation and only later learn to understand their
meaning. For imitation belongs to the time when the physical body
is developing, while meaning speaks to the etheric, and the etheric
body should not be worked on until after the change of teeth, after
the outer etheric envelope has fallen away. All learning associated with
speech in these years should be especially through imitation. Children
will best learn to speak through hearing; no rules or artificial instruction
of any kind can be good for this. It is important to realize the
value of children’s songs, for example, as a means of education in early
childhood. They must make pretty and rhythmical impressions on
the senses; the beauty of sound is of greater value than the meaning.