Proceedings Colloquium on World History - Waldorf Research Institute

The Role of the Humanities in Waldorf High Schools:
Thoughts from <strong>Colloquium</strong> Members
The following were contributions made by participants related to this theme.
The purpose of the humanities is to give children an opportunity to relive the epochs of evolutionary
consciousness. When we visit all those epochs, in a sense, the students are recapitulating their own
development. This is particularly so in the lower school. By the time students enter the high school that
development is finished. As high school teachers we draw upon that experience, and revisit the historical
epochs again, this time through a more cognitive lens.
In the high school we’re trying to have the students move from an experience of a group to an
experience much more of their own individuality, and the destiny that that individuality has to pursue.
And whether it is history or literature, this is a thread that we follow in the high school curriculum.
It seems to me the humanities offer a humanizing function, because the students are not only
experiencing the evolution of consciousness in the grade school, and then more consciously in the high
school, but it is that the students are gaining a picture of the human race, and its passage from authority to
freedom. So I think having this kind of experience and understanding will help students deal with some of
the key questions of their time out of a perspective of the past. In fact, identifying the questions of our time
is a focus of the senior year.
Another aspect the students can experience through their study of the humanities is how people
problem-solve at different stages of consciousness. Consensus is becoming an important way of solving
problems, because it is a consciousness soul way of working with problems. But this has not been the way to
solve problems in the past. The leader, rather than a group of people working together, gave the answer. In
the ancient world as well as in the Middle Ages, people did not problem-solve as a group. In those times a
spiritual hierarchy guided the people who then carried out the instructions. That’s so different today. I
think a strong humanities curriculum can help our young people gain perspective and understanding about
the changes. Otherwise, they can get very depressed. We’re still fighting wars, we’re making the same
mistakes we made before. How do our adolescent students find an impulse for the future? The humanities
curriculum may help them grasp why they were born in this time and what their task is.
I recall an experience I had once at Chartres Cathedral, with someone known to many of you,
Malcolm Miller. You may know that Malcolm Miller will take you around the cathedral, but he will tell you
at the beginning of this tour, that he’s unable to show you the cathedral. Jaws drop, because that’s why
people go to the cathedral, and that’s why they pay him several hundred francs to spend an hour with him.
No, he says, I can’t show you the cathedral. What he means is he can’t show you the cathedral in an hour;
it takes more than a year. So what he will do instead is he will show you a window, or a set of windows. I
remember as a young person, going to see him with some others, and standing in front of one of these
beautiful stained glass windows, and just sort of bathed in the esthetic experience of it. And then he began
from the bottom right, zig zagged, to read the window. And suddenly, what was up until that moment, an
artistic thing, a beautiful experience, now became a cognitive experience. That is to say, meaning suddenly
shone through what was previously just experience. I remembered that moment recognizing, that’s what
the study of history could do. That is, take the kind of bath of experience, and bath of events and things
happening, and biographically juicy narratives and so forth, in a sort of sentient kind of experience.
What history can do, especially in symptomatology, is begin to show the meaning, the patterns, the
hand of God, as it were, writing these events. I remember in that moment being so relieved that there was
significance, there was meaning in events, and more importantly, the human mind could see them. Like
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