The Education of the Child: And Early Lectures on Education (Cw 293 & 66)

A classic gem of an essay. Over ten years before the first Waldorf school, Rudolf Steiner lays out a program for the reform of education. Contains much common sense, such as, "Vague and the general phrases - 'the harmonious development of all the powers and talents in the child,' and so forth - cannot provide a basis for a genuine art of education. Such an art of education can only be built on a real knowledge of the human being. Not that these phrases are incorrect, but that at the bottom they are useless as it would be to say of a machine that all its parts must be brought harmoniously into action. To work a machine you must approach it, not with phrases and truisms, but with real and detailed knowledge. So for the art of education it is the knowledge of the members of man's being and of their several development which is important. There is of course no doubt that they truly realistic art of education, such as is here indicated, will only slowly make its way. This lies, indeed, in the whole mentality of our age, which will long continue to regard the facts of the spiritual world as the vapourings of an imagination run wild, while it takes vague and altogether unreal phrases for the result of a realistic way of thinking."