Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

Language
37
the period before birth, and what exists in the human will points
to what comes after death as a seed for the future. As the threefold
human being stands before us, first we see what belongs to the time
before birth, then we see what lies between birth and death, and,
third, we see what awaits us after death. Our life before birth enters
our existence as images, and the seed of what lies beyond death exists
within us even before death.
Only facts such as these will give you some idea of what actually
happens through human interrelationships. When reading older
works on education (the pedagogy of Herbart, for example, which
was excellent in its day), we always have the feeling that those people
were using concepts that could not help them reach the world; they
remain outside reality. Just consider the way affinity permeates all
willing when properly developed in the earthly sense—how the seed
of the future that belongs to the time after death, yet exists in us as
a result of the will, is permeated by love and affinity. Likewise, in
education, we must watch everything in an especially loving way, so
that it can be arrested or cultivated properly. We must assist children
in their affinity by appealing to the will. What will the true impulse
for an education of the will have to be? That impulse can only be the
affinity we must develop toward the child. As that affinity develops
toward our students, our educational methods will improve.
Because educating the thinking is the opposite of educating the
will, since it is permeated with aversion, you might ask whether we
should develop aversions when we educate the thinking intellect of
students? Yes, indeed, but you must understand it correctly. Place your
aversions on the proper foundation. You must try to understand the
students themselves if you want to properly educate their thinking
capacity. Such understanding contains within it an element of aversion,
since it belongs at this end of the scale. By comprehending your
students and endeavoring to penetrate all their nuances, you become
the teacher of their understanding, their faculty of knowledge. The
aversions exist in this very activity, but you make the aversion good
by educating your students.
Furthermore, you can be certain that we are not led to meet one
another in this life if there are no preconditions for such a meeting.