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The Waldorf Kindergarten: The World of the Young Child
The first seven years of life are a time of tremendous growth and transformation. Having left the spiritual worlds, the child begins the journey of incarnation, and the soul and spirit have to struggle to adapt to the vessel of the body. During the first three years of life, the child faces the monumental challenges of learning to walk, to speak, and to think. In the following years, countless other capacities and skills will need to be developed in order for the child to become independent. The education of the young child is a particularly challenging endeavor, for it demands that parents and teachers penetrate both the spiritual and the practical tasks of leading the child into earth existence. In Foundations of Human Experience, Rudolf Steiner summarized this endeavor:The task of education, understood in a spiritual sense, is to bring the soul-spirit into harmony with the temporal body. They must be brought into harmony and they must be tuned to one another, because when the child is born into the physical world they do not yet properly fit each other. The task of the teacher is to harmonize these two parts to one another. (p. 39) The Nature of the Young Child Although young children are earthly beings, to a certain extent they are still cosmic beings. Living as they do between these two worlds, they need to find a relationship to time. This relationship is developed through the etheric body, which is working on the physical body to make it into a suitable instrument for the child’s later life. The etheric body is a body working through time, and etheric processes are always rhythmical. Young children respond strongly to rhythm, and they are tremendously helped when there is rhythm and regularity in their lives. Waldorf kindergartens therefore build a strong rhythmic clement into their program. In all Waldorf kindergartens each day has a rhythm. The morning might begin with a period for play and work followed by circle time, consisting of verses, nursery rhymes, songs, and circle games. Next comes a session of outdoor play, and the morning session ends with a nature story or a folk or fairy tale. Each week has its rhythm as well; there is one day for baking, another for painting, a third for crafts, and so on. Seasonal activities such as harvesting grain, planting bulbs, tapping maple trees, or gathering nuts serve to deepen the children’s awareness of the world around them. Seasonal festivals, which celebrate the bounty of the autumn or the advent of spring, foster a connection to the cycle of the year. Through such activities, which are taken up rhythmically, a child’s feeling for the cycles of life and of nature is strengthened. In later years this feeling may sustain a sense of well-being and a sense of connection to the natural world. Young children also have an intimate connection to their surroundings, and everything they encounter makes a deep impression on them. Because they are so sensitive and receptive, one might conceive of young children as sense organs that perceive the world with their whole being. What is localized as a sense in adult ears, however, is spread out through the entire organism of a young child. For that reason, children do not differentiate between spirit, soul, and body. Everything that affects a child from outside is recreated within. Children imitatively recreate their entire environment within themselves. (p. 91) Since the surroundings in which children are raised and educated affect them deeply, great care must be taken to create an environment that is nourishing to the senses. Waldorf teachers therefore strive to create an environment where order and beauty prevail. The walls of the kindergarten are usually painted with luminous washes of watercolor; the window curtains are made from plant-dyed fabric; sturdy tables and chairs are constructed of solid wood; and most of the imaginative toys and playthings are handcrafted from natural materials. These beautiful surroundings are simple and calming and the sense impressions that they engender promote the child’s physical growth and health. Because the materials used in the kindergarten are natural and real, they help the child develop a healthy relationship to the material world. Young children not only perceive and respond to their environment, they also reflect and express the gesture of their surroundings and of the people in their lives. This places a great responsibility on the adults responsible for raising and educating the child: they must be worthy of imitation. In lecture two of The Kingdom of Childhood, Steiner says: These are the things that matter most for young children. What you say, what you teach, does not yet make an impression, except insofar as children imitate what you say in their own speech. But it is what you are that matters; if you are good this goodness will appear in your gestures; and if you are bad tempered this also will appear in your gestures, in short, everything that you do yourself passes over into the children and makes its way within them. This is the essential point. Children are wholly sense organ, and react to all the impressions of the people around them. Therefore the essential thing is not to imagine that children can learn what is good or bad, that they can learn this or that, but to know that everything that is done in their presence is transformed in their childish organisms into spirit, soul, and body. The health of children for their whole life depends on how you conduct yourself in their presence. The inclinations that children develop depend on how you behave in their presence. (pp. 17-18) The education of young children is therefore largely a matter of the adult’s own self-education. We must become ever more conscious of ourselves and committed to our strivings; we must work to transform ourselves so that the children in our care will be nourished by the truth, beauty, and goodness living in our thoughts, words, and deeds. This work is supported by the path of inner development suggested by Steiner. Why are young children such imitative beings? According to Steiner, this trait is a continuation of the child’s pre-birth experiences. Before birth, the spirit of the child is united with angelic and other spiritual beings, whose impulses are expressed in and through the child. After the child is born, the child still responds to and expresses impulses from without; this becomes imitation. The realization that we as human beings continue the work of the angels, the archangels, and even higher spiritual beings can fill us with awe and inspire a feeling of gratitude. This feeling is essential in a teacher and educator, and it should be instinctive in anyone entrusted with nurturing a child. Thus, the foremost thing to strive for in spiritual knowledge is gratitude that the universe has given a child into our keeping. (SG, p. 57) Imitation can take several forms. A young child might imitate someone’s actions directly. If a teacher is carding and spinning wool, for example, a child might also want to card and spin. Children might also imitate in their play the actions that they have encountered. For instance, a group of children might join together to form a moving company. They will pack up the toys in the kindergarten into a moving van that they have made of some chairs and boards and drive it to another land. Children also imitate our inner attitude. Kindergarten teachers therefore try to pervade everything they do with care. This will be reflected in the way they place an object on the seasonal table, or the way they put the toys away at clean-up time and make sure all the babies are tucked in and don’t have any cold toes sticking out. If parents and teachers approach common life tasks such as cooking or cleaning with reverence and care, children will develop a deep respect for work and for material things. If, however, such tasks are done quickly and sloppily, this will be reflected in children’s difficulties in finding meaning in life. Through imitation, children become human beings and learn the three fundamental capacities that distinguish the human being from the animals: to walk upright, to speak, and to think. In Walking, Speaking, Thinking, Steiner describes how children develop these three capacities, and he indicates how parents and teachers can affect this process. According to Steiner, “The real secret of human development is that what is ensouled or made spiritual at a particular stage in life is later revealed physically, often after many years.” (p. 105). How we approach the child during these early years can therefore determine the child’s future health. Because children have a natural impulse to raise themselves upright and to walk, these activities need not be forced or aided by artificial means. Parents can best help their children learn to walk through loving guidance and gentle assistance. This will “create health-giving forces in the children that will reveal themselves as a healthy metabolism when those children reach fifty or sixty years of age” (p. 104). Speaking is a further refinement of the child’s limb activity, for “all the nuances of speech arise from the forms of movement. Life consists first of gestures; those gestures are then inwardly transformed into the source of speech” (p. 105). Adults can best help the child learn to speak by cultivating a deep inner truthfulness. Speaking in an artificial or childish manner should be avoided, for children want to learn the speech of adults and inwardly resent and reject baby talk. According to Steiner, children who learn to speak by imitating the spirit of truth in the adults around them will be strengthened in their respiratory system later in life. The ability to think evolves from the capacity for speech. The best help we can give young children in learning to think is to bring clarity and precision into our own thoughts. If we are inconsequent in our thinking, if we confuse children by giving orders and then reversing ourselves, we may not only impair the child’s ability to think but may lay the foundation for nervous diseases in adulthood. The capacities for walking, speaking, and thinking establish the foundation of our humanity. Walking establishes our relationship to the world, speech allows us to communicate with our fellow human beings, and thought gives us the capacity to know ourselves. We serve the whole of a child’s life if we cultivate the inner qualities that will help in the proper acquisition of these capacities. Learning through Play Young children love to play. Through play, they enter the activities of the adults around them. The best kind of activities for kindergarten children are therefore those that allow them to engage, on a child’s level, in the work of adults. In the kindergarten, “we should not allow the children to do anything, even in play, that is not an imitation of life itself” (KC, p.118). In the Waldorf kindergarten, children are offered the possibility of participating in the traditional activities that might take place in a home: cooking and baking, cleaning and washing, sewing and ironing, gardening and building. Because these activities are done rhythmically, they create a feeling of well-being and a sense of security in the child. Because they are real, they help a child become grounded in the realities of life. Because they serve a purpose and are filled with meaning, they help the child enter more fully into life at a later age. The materials and toys in a Waldorf kindergarten stimulate the children to use their powers of imagination and fantasy. As these powers are developed, children become able to transform natural materials into any kind of toy. They can use pieces of wood that have been left in their natural shapes as tools, musical instruments, telephones, vehicles, tickets to a performance, food for a feast, or the gold and jewels of a buried treasure hidden by pirates. If one observes children playing with toys that have a great deal of detail, one can see that there is a different quality to the play. Whereas an “unfinished” toy leaves children free to exert their imaginations, a “finished” toy ties the child to a certain group of activities. If, for instance, children are given a toy yellow taxicab, they are likely to limit their play to activities involving a taxi. If, however, they are given a plain wooden car, it can serve many different purposes: a racing car or moving van, a sight-seeing bus or a tractor trailer, the caboose of a freight train or an ambulance. The possibilities are endless, limited only by the children’s imagination. However much they may seem fascinated by toys that are realistic, children have an inner antipathy toward such playthings, because they cannot imbue such objects with the living powers of imagination. In “Walking, Speaking, Thinking,” Steiner says that to give children such toys is a form of inner punishment. In another lecture on early childhood, he says that playing with building blocks has far-reaching affects on the development of the child’s imagination, for it begets an atomistic-materialistic mentality that always wants to put bits and pieces together in predictable, limited ways. These statements should challenge us to find toys and playthings that will be nourishing to our children, that stimulate their imagination and develop the sources of creativity and intellectual capacities that will develop in later years. Paradoxical as it may seem, we help children lay the foundations for capacities of thought by letting them dwell in the dreamy state that is engendered through imaginative play. In lecture thirteen of The Renewal of Education, Steiner speaks about the importance of this kind of play. . During the time between birth and the change of teeth, we acquire the forces of our still unborn spirituality through the activity of playing and through what is enacted before our eyes in such a dreamlike way. They are unborn because they have not yet been absorbed by the physical body. As I have told you, the forces that have been building up the child’s physical organism become independent of the body after the change of teeth and become the forces for thinking and ideation. During the change of teeth something is being withdrawn, as it were, from the child’s physical body. However, by contrast, the forces that £low through the activities of a child at play have yet to anchor themselves to earthly life and its practical tasks; they have not yet incarnated in the child’s physical organism. This means we are confronted with two different forces at this time: those working through the child’s body, which after the change of teeth are transformed into the capacity of forming concepts that can be remembered; and other forces active within the child’s soul and spiritual sphere, hovering lightly and etherically above the child, pervading play activities just as dreams pervade our sleep during our lives. For the child, the activity of these latter forces develops not only during sleep, but also while awake-when the child plays. In this way these forces become outer reality. However, what is being developed through this outer reality begins to recede after the seventh year. Just as the germinating forces in the plant recede during leaf and petal formation and reappear only when the fruit is forming, so also the forces that pervade the playing child reappear approximately in the twenty-first or twenty-second year as powers of intellect that enable the human being to gather free and independent life experiences. (RE, pp. 168-169) The curricula of many modern kindergartens include various kinds of readiness activities that prepare children for formal learning. In some kindergartens, children are even taught the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Waldorf kindergartens also prepare children for the academic challenges of elementary school, but they do so by engaging the will through meaningful life activities, by cultivating the feelings through the arts, and by stimulating creativity and fantasy through imaginative play. Waldorf kindergarten teachers do not place premature academic demands on their students. Rather, they allow the children’s intellectual faculties to unfold naturally so that by the time children enter the elementary grades; they are ready and eager to experience new forms of learning. Awakening Reverence Young children are imbued with a natural piety, for they view the world with wonder and they give themselves fully to every experience. Waldorf kindergarten teachers try to keep alive children’s natural sense of wonder and their sense of oneness and unselfconscious participation with the world. This is done by surrounding the children with a mythic consciousness, one that affirms the living reality of the elements and creatures of the natural world; the children greet Father Sun in their morning verse and give thanks to Mother Earth at snack time; gentle Prince Autumn must make way for King Winter with his blustery moods, and lovely Princess Spring is warmly welcomed by all. In the Waldorf kindergarten, the child’s sense of reverence is fostered and deepened through activities, stories, and festivals that enable children to participate in the cycle of the year. In the autumn, for example, the classroom might be decorated with stalks of corn and sheaves of ripened grain. Bouquets of bright-hued leaves and autumn flowers sparkle here and there, adding color and fragrance to the room. The seasonal table might be draped with red and golden silks on which pumpkins and gourds are displayed; a little squirrel is hiding acorns, and a gnome peeks out of a small hollow stump. The morning circle time includes songs and poems that express the bounty of the year. The children might learn a finger play to a verse such as, “Way up high in the apple tree, two little apples are smiling at me. I shook that tree as hard as I could; down came the apples-umm, they were good!” or play a circle singing game such as “Old Roger.” Apples are plentiful and the children may make applesauce or apple crisp or an apple pie with a fancy latticed crust. They might create little boats out of walnut shells and sail them down the stream, or dip leaves in beeswax and hang them in the windows. The season might culminate with an autumn festival to which the parents are invited. The children wear bright colored capes and autumn crowns and their faces glow with excitement and joy. The teacher tells a story; parents as well as children are transported to another time, another place. Then everyone gathers in a circle and voices rise in a song of thankfulness and praise before the harvest feast is served. Fortunate are the children whose experience of the season has been enriched in so many ways! The seeds of reverence sown in the kindergarten and early elementary grades yield fruits that may ripen much later in life. If one observes children who, through proper upbringing, have developed a natural reverence for the adults around them, and if one follows them through their various phases of life, one may discover that their feelings for reverence and devotion in childhood gradually transform during the years leading to old age. As adults, such persons may have a healing effect on others, so that through their mere presence, tone of voice, or perhaps a single glance they spread inner peace to others. Their presence can be a blessing, because as children they have learned to venerate and to pray in the right way. No hands can bless in old age, unless in childhood they have been folded in prayer. (RE, p. 65) Working with young children is extraordinarily challenging, for it demands that teachers work out of the very essence of their being and be willing to put themselves aside in the service of the child. Teachers who choose to work in the kindergarten must be willing to ask themselves: What must I do to obliterate, as far as possible, my personal self in order to keep those entrusted to my care from being burdened by my subjective nature? How should I act so that I do not interfere with the children’s destiny? And, above all, how can I best educate the children toward human freedom? (SE, pp. 107-108) Although the responsibilities of working with young children are immense, the rewards are boundless; the seeds that are sown during these early years will sprout and grow, and their blossoms and fruit will enrich the rest of the children’s lives. Reprinted from the Rhythms of Learning, by Roberto Trostli, Anthroposophical Press, 1998.
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