Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

Language
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ideas—our horizon will be endless; we will continue on and on and
never come to a boundary, to a point where we can survey the whole.
The understanding that will come from understanding sculpting
and music will make human beings more rational—and, believe
me, their training will actually be accelerated rather than delayed.
Consequently, this inner course of development will be the correct
method of training educators, and not only teachers, but those others
who have so much to contribute to educational work—the doctors.
[The Roots of Education, pp. 23-24, 45-47.]
11. Developing an Inner Feeling for Language through Dialect
If a feeling for the inner organs is not cultivated in the years when it
is important, that is, between the ages of six and nine, the intellect
will take over. This intellect is essentially the enemy of intellectual
human life as well as of social life. I of course am not in favor of
making people dumb. It is important, however, that we recognize
the parasitic nature of the intellect and that we recognize the intellect
as being complete only when it arises out of the entire human being
and not in a one-sided way. That, however, is possible to achieve
only when drawing and music instruction are supported in all areas
of instruction, most importantly in speech and arithmetic.
We can certainly assume that all grammar already exists in the
human organism. If you take that assumption seriously, you will
realize that by making grammar conscious in a living way, you work
on the creation of an I-consciousness in the child. You must orient
everything toward that knowledge that exists in the body around the
age of nine, when a consciousness of the I normally awakens. You need
to bring forth into consciousness everything that exists unconsciously
in the child’s organism. In that way the child will reach the Rubicon
of development at the age of nine in a favorable way. In that way you
bring into consciousness what is unconscious. You then work with
those forces in the child that want to develop, not the forces that you
bring from outside the child. There is a way of teaching language by
using the way the child already speaks and supporting the instruction
through a living interaction between those children who speak a
more cultivated language and those who speak a dialect. In this way