Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

Language
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having the experience of the vertical and an arc, not simply that a
child has an abstract understanding of that, of the vertical and the
arc, but a feeling for a felt experience of such things.
By slowly developing everything intellectual out of the artistic,
that is, out of the entire human being, you will also develop the entire
human being, people with real initiative, with a real force of life
in their bodies. They will not be like people in our own population
who no longer know where they are after they have done their final
examinations. This is a real tragedy. If your professional task is to
understand human beings, then it is possible that you can experience
the following. You are, for example, to test someone around the age
of twenty-five or thirty whether he is to receive a given position. You
approach him with the expectation that he should develop some
initiative, particularly if he is to go into a practical profession. The
person tells you, however, that you expect one thing or another but
that he wants to go to India or to America in order to learn more
about the profession. What that means is that he actually wants to
move into the profession passively. He does not want to develop
anything out of his own initiative, but instead wishes to have the
opportunity that the world will make something of him. I know that
saying this is something horrible for many people, but at the same
time I am pointing out something we can see in people who have
completed their education in the last decades. It has not developed
a genuine initiative, initiative that reaches down into people’s souls
when it is necessary later in life. It is of course easy to say that we
should develop initiative. The question is, though, how we do that,
how we can arrange the material we are to present in education so
that it acts not against initiative in the will, but strengthens it.
[The Renewal of Education, pp. 83-86.]
12. The Formative Effect of Dialect
As for teaching languages, you first need to gain a sense of how to do
this. I first became aware of this sense of teaching languages when
I had the opportunity of pursuing the result of having children
who spoke dialect sit in the same classroom as other children who
did not speak the dialect. It is very interesting to observe children