Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

Speech and Recitation
227
dren whom we have to educate bear half their world within
them, all there and ready-taught—that is, the spiritual half,
including, for example, the moral and metaphysical ideas.
For this very reason, language, equipped as it is with material
images alone, cannot give the spiritual archetypes; all it can
do is to illumine them. The very brightness and decisiveness
of children should give us brightness and decisiveness
when we speak to them. We can learn from their speech as
well as teach them through our own. Their word-building
is bold, yet remarkably accurate! For example, I have heard
the following expressions used by children three or four: “the
barreler” (for the maker of barrels); “the sky-mouse” (for the
bat); “I am the looking-through person” (standing behind a
telescope); “I’d like to be a gingerbread eater”; “he joked me
down from the chair”; “see how one o’clock it is?”
It’s true that our quotation refers to something other than our
immediate subject; but what Jean Paul says about speech has its value
in the present connection also. Here there is also an understanding
that precedes intellectual comprehension. Little children receive the
structure of language into the living organism of their souls and,
for this process, do not require the laws of language formation in
intellectual concepts. Similarly, for the cultivation of the memory,
older children must learn much that they cannot master with their
intellectual understanding until years later. Those things are afterward
best apprehended in concepts that have first been learned simply from
memory during this period of life, just as the rules of language are
best learned in a language one can already speak.
[ The Education of the Child, pp. 29-31.]
6. The Effect of Speech on the Young Child
Between the change of teeth and puberty, the forces of comprehension
and the whole activity of soul have a pictorial quality. It is a
kind of aesthetic comprehension that may be characterized in this
way: until the change of teeth children want to imitate what happens
around them, what is done in front of them. Their motor systems