Handwork and Handicrafts - Waldorf Research Institute

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made it necessary, he would occasionally recommend for Steiner schools in other towns
different colors from those in the Stuttgart school.
He also gave quite definite indications concerning the “artistic arrangement” of the
rooms. But he put it forward as an ideal that the artistic arrangement should really arise
out of the anthroposophical pedagogy itself. For handwork and craft rooms he made the
following suggestions:
For handwork rooms, interiors should be used which give special emphasis
to the soul-element. The craft room should be decorated with artistically
executed motifs from everyday life and from the crafts, so that one has on the
walls something that receives with a certain sympathy all that is done in these
rooms. This would apply to spinning too. 8
Steiner insisted repeatedly upon the educational value of color. The following
remarks about painting illustrate the point particularly clearly. Steiner showed how, if
he works artistically, the teacher can use color in an extremely beneficial way, namely by
“individualizing from child to child within the world of color.” In his Oxford lecture cycle he
showed how children can be educated through painting. He spoke of a child in whom
what we give him cannot escape into the rest of his organism … If I have
such a child, I shall use colors and paint with him quite differently from
another ... whose ideas, far from sticking in his head, escape through his head
as through a sieve; in him everything goes into the body, and the child grasps
nothing because his head is really like a sieve. 9
Steiner went on to describe in detail the painting exercises that should be used with these
children.
In the field of medicine Steiner showed various doctors of the Anthroposophical
Society new ways of applying color for healing. He indicated to parents and teachers that
certain colors can have a beneficial and healing effect upon overactive children, and others
upon those who have the opposite tendency.
A few more examples may be given. A nervous, that is to say, excitable child,
should be treated differently as regards environment from one who is quiet
and lethargic. Everything should come into consideration, from the color of
the room and of the various objects that are generally around the child, to the
color of the clothes in which he is dressed. One will often do the wrong thing
if one does not take guidance from spiritual knowledge. For in many cases the
materialistic idea will hit on the exact reverse of what is right. An excitable
child should be surrounded and dressed in red or reddish-yellow colors,
whereas for a lethargic child one should have recourse to blue or bluish-green
shades of color. For the important thing is the complementary color which is
created within the child. In the case of red, it is green, and in the case of blue,
orange-yellow, as may easily be seen by looking for a time at a red or blue
surface.