Struwwelpeter 2.0

8 Media competency and Waldorf education
With puberty, thinking, feeling and
the will have established themselves
as independent fields of activity to
such an extent that it increasingly
lies within the autonomy of the adolescent
to bring them together into
a unity again. With regard to the further,
now fully conscious learning, it
is exceptionally important that they
experience in adults that the latter are
in this sense in control of their thinking,
feeling and will, in other words,
have obtained an individual relationship
with the world and form both
their judgements and their actions out
of such an awareness.
All learning experiences are based on
the archetypal image described at the
beginning: just as in learning to stand
upright and walk it is the active, acting
will which is at work, language
has a direct relationship with an experience
of the world through the feelings
(as the search for the right word
clearly shows) in order then to become
the teacher of the thinking.
In the fifth lecture in “Study of Man”,
Rudolf Steiner describes the extraordinary
threefold step which leads from
inference via judgement to the concept:
the first step is that children
should concern themselves with a
subject through perception, action
and experiment in order then to describe
it precisely and thus develop
a basic power of judgement (what do
I describe, what do I leave out, etc.).
Once this activity of perception and
judgement has been able to be
processed at least once in sleep, the
children together form concepts which
result from looking back on what they
have experienced and remembered.
This path from experience into consciousness
enables the individual formation
of judgements and concepts
because it does not roll out a finished
result but moderates an open-ended
process which challenges the will,
feeling and thinking.