Handwork and Handicrafts - Waldorf Research Institute

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CHAPTER II
Directions for Education in General and for
Finding the Right Forms in Technology and the Crafts
The training a child receives even before school age must be such that his soul is
allowed to grow, and is not stunted by what is false and ugly in the world around him. When
speaking of the education of the child, Steiner said:
Up to the seventh year the child lives under the impression: The World Is
Good. It still lives under the guidance of those moral laws in which it had its
being before it was born. Everything the child receives from the grownups
around him which is untrue, or in other ways a negative soul-impression,
hinders its development. To set a good example is, therefore, the best
education one can give between the child’s first and seventh years.
From the seventh to the fourteenth year the child lives under the
impression: The World Is Beautiful. Therefore one notices in children of
this age that carefree, happy-go-lucky kind of behavior which worries some
parents a good deal. This [behavior]is quite justified, however, and one should
not yet appeal to the child’s intellect but instead place pictures before the
child’s soul. First of all one should tell fairy stories, then myths and legends,
and finally give descriptions of the characters of great people, not in a wooden
and lifeless way, but dramatically, as an artist does on the stage. All teaching
must take an artistic form.
From the fourteenth to the twenty-first year the student lives under
the impression: The World Is True. Only now should one appeal to the
intellect of the young student and require him to use his own judgment. 1
This shows that it is during the first years of school that the child wishes to
experience beauty in a living way. His soul is open to all that comes to him through the
teaching of handwork.
In the lecture on “Aesthetic Education,” given in the course for teachers at Dornach,
Christmas 1921, Steiner spoke with particular emphasis of the need for the awakening and
development of the aesthetic sense in the child of this age, and gave very profound reasons
for this. He said:
From Play, through Beauty, to Work: This is a golden path for education. In
later life the most abstract tasks, the most difficult techniques, do not arouse
antipathy if this path has been followed during childhood. Locomotives and
railway stations can be built in a way that is both artistic and technically
sound. Such an education would give incalculably powerful impulses for