Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

Language
65
the dead word—the Latin tongue in its decay. The dying word of
speech became the chief medium of education up to the time of the
sixteenth century, when there arose a certain inner revolt against it.
What then does civilization signify up to the sixteenth century?
The death of human feeling for the living Logos as it is contained in
the Gospel of St. John. And the actual clinging to a dead language
is an outer manifestation of this death of the Logos. If one wanted
briefly to characterize the course of civilization in so far as it fundamentally
affects the impulses of education, one really should say: All
that humanity has lost is expressed most of all in the fact that it has
understood less and less of such things as live in the Gospel of St. John.
The course of civilization through the Middle Ages up to the
sixteenth century lost the inner force of a writing like the Gospel of
St. John, and this has resulted in the lack existing in humanity today;
hence the clamor for educational reforms. The question of education
in our age will only assume its right bearing, when people realize
the barrenness of the human heart when it wants to understand the
Gospel of St. John, and compares this with the intense devotion
which arose in man when he believed self to be transported from
his own being out into all the creative forces of the universe, as he
allowed the true content of this first sentence of the Gospel to ring
out within him—“In the Beginning was the Word.” We must realize
that the cry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for a different
kind of education arose because the most godly people of that time,
those who felt most deeply the need for a renewal of education, also
sensed the loss of the inner elementary life‐force which enables man
also to have a living understanding of the spirit. For it is the spirit
to which the Gospel of St. John refers when it speaks of the Logos.
We have reached a point where we do indeed long for the spirit,
but our speech is composed of mere words. And in the words we
have lost the spirit that still existed for the Greeks, inasmuch as the
whole human being in his activity in the world dawned upon them
when the word was uttered, just as in still earlier times the activity of
the universe dawned upon man when in the world-creative, cosmoscreative
words he recognized the Divine that the world rests on and
that must become living in man if he is to become a whole man. And