Cultivating new capacities of human consciousness through contemplative practice and pedagogical research

Two Contributions to the Study of the Sixth Core Principle

CP#6: Relationships: Enduring human relationships between students and their teachers are essential and irreplaceable. The task of all teachers is to work with the developing individuality of each student and with each class as a whole. Truly human pedagogical relationships gain in depth and stability when they are cultivated over many years. They cannot be replaced by instructions utilizing computers or other electronic means. Healthy working relationships with parents and colleagues are also essential to the wellbeing of the class community and the school. 

First Contribution 

By Judy Lucas

Rudolf Steiner delivered a series of lectures to members of the Anthroposophical Society during February and March of 1919, in the aftermath of the Great War, in an effort to bring order out of chaos. In one of those lectures Rudolf Steiner boldly stated: “People hardly know what it means to be human” (cf, p.2). Waldorf education was indeed founded with the intention of bringing social renewal and a new understanding of human existence and the social organism. At the core of this new social organism is the image of the human being (Core Principle #1) and the individual’s relationship to other human beings (Core Principle #6). He addresses the development of a new kind of cognitive feeling and what it can generate in us:

It is solely by means of this feeling that spiritual science can bring us to a proper appraisal of what a human being is, to a feeling for human dignity in the context of the world. This feeling can fill our whole soul, and only if it extends to every part of our inner being can it put us in the proper mood to sort out, if need be, our relationship to another person. We can regard this as one of the first substantial achievements of modern anthroposophically based spiritual science: a proper respect for the human element in the world. (p.3)

Steiner explains that in olden times our thoughts and actions were driven by spiritual leaders and that we were therefore joined in a spiritually driven community. Now our thoughts and actions largely come out of our own individual freedom, thus necessarily separating us one from the other. Therefore, we must consciously direct ourselves to be in community, to cultivate human relationships. 

One strategy Steiner gives us towards accomplishing this is to “recognize that divine activity is at work in our neighbor,” (p.12) and that we can sharpen this recognition through a specific meditation. He suggests that we take moments to reflect back upon our own lives, asking

________

11 Rudolf Steiner, The Esoteric Aspect of the Social Question (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2001).

ourselves how this life of ours has unfolded since childhood, noticing not so much what we ourselves have enjoyed and experienced, but rather:

…the people who have entered our lives as parents, brothers and sisters, friends, teachers and so on and, in place of ourselves, focus our attention on the inner nature of each of these people. After a while we shall come to realize how little we actually owe to ourselves and how much is due to all that has flowed into us from others. (p.13)

And further:

If a person looks again and again into his own being and recognizes the contribution which other people, perhaps long dead, or who have ceased to be close to him, have made to his life, his whole involvement with other people will become such that on forming an individual relationship with someone, an imagination of the true being of this person will arise within him. (p.13)

Steiner ends the lecture with a suggestion that the best situation arises when we learn from each other, especially inter-generationally. The youth can know that all stages of life hold teasures ––perhaps a necessary comforting thought at times––and the elders can be inspired by the youth. The class teacher’s commitment to work with a group of students over eight years, the enduring human relationship between a class of students and their class teacher, allow for an evolving, inter-generational collective learning. When we are honest, we have to recognize that no one individual can be an expert in all of the curriculum areas covered during these eight years. Therefore, the opportunity Waldorf education provides for a teacher to stay with the class over this period of time (when possible) places a value on relationship over curriculum content. In fact, this Core Principle was inspired by Jorgen Smit’s lecture, in which he spoke about the “general stream” (the curriculum taught to everyone in the class) and the “individual stream” of relationships with each student. It is the seeing of the individual child that needs the ripening of several years, as mentioned in the body of the principle. There is an impulse for social renewal underlying Waldorf pedagogy, and this impulse can only be realized by attending to each individual as well as to the class as a whole, which can also mean the nurturing of the student-to-student relationships. This level of instruction cannot be replaced by computer instruction or other electronic means. This is what it means to be human. 

For me, this is essential. In fact, one of my life’s commitments is to try to have an imagination of the true being of the “other,” of the people with whom I interact daily. In the context of education, the teacher leads the students in a process whereby they learn to bracket their own interests and identity long enough to perceive and even appreciate the interests and identities of others. We develop the students’ critical thinking to allow them to utterly open themselves to the views and needs of other human beings. By creating opportunities for students to

__________

2 Jorgen Smit, The Child, the Teachers, and the Community, lecture 2 (Spring Valley: Mercury Press, 1992).

examine their own generally unexamined assumptions, biases, and prejudices, we allow students to explore the perhaps unexamined assumptions, biases, and prejudices of others. We can then push the critical thinking, through an analytical process, to enter the realm of empathy. Students can learn to experience the feelings of other human beings; they learn to empathize.

Carl Rogers, one of the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology, identified three conditions necessary for therapeutic change: empathy, unconditional positive regard for the other, and the communication of both to the other. I suggest that we must go beyond the recognition of the importance of human relationship in education towards a conscious cultivation of our human relationships, a cultivation that includes empathy and an unconditional positive regard for the other. Steiner says, “The kind of relationship there is between one person and another, this kind of interest in things, this conscious participation in life, will be there as a matter of course in an independent organism that is on its way to becoming sound.” (p.43) A school as organism, a faculty council, even education itself, is sound inasmuch as the people involved cultivate an interest in one another.

Leading Thoughts

When I was asked to write an article on this Core Principle, I was struck by my own need for human relationships as a way to understand the need for human relationships more generally. The Pedagogical Section Council does not intend for these Core Principles to be pedantic or prescriptive but rather to be inspiring, to be leading thoughts for dynamic conversations on what is essential in Waldorf education, and to stimulate different interpretations and perspectives. Therefore, I felt the necessity to engage in my own conversations around this specific Core Principle. What follows are some leading thoughts from my community of relationships.

From a Waldorf parent:

At one level, relationship in Waldorf education is a spiritual commitment, a recognition of the essential value and divinity of every single person. At a second, it is an ethical commitment to honoring each individual’s right of self-determination, combined with responsibility to the collective well-being. And at a third level, that of society, it is that responsibility to respect all of other human beings, to embrace diversity and difference of all kinds, and to work toward the good of the community and the world, in engaged citizenship. Thus relationship is at once spiritual, ethical, and social. In the realm of education, it is preparation of Waldorf students with very real-world dispositions and skills: the ability to think critically about different perspectives, including one’s own; the ability to work with others, all others, in teamwork situations; the ability to solve complex real-world problems, all of which include human relationship; and the ability to think and act inclusively, which is an essential skill in a global world.

A colleague of mine, a teacher at the Denver Waldorf School, spoke of his own curiosity to understand the people behind world events and to shed light on these individuals in his classes. Who was Rosa Parks?  Why did she refuse to surrender her seat to a white person?  Was this an impulse of the moment, or the consequence of fatigue, or a well-laid plan?  My colleague asks me, when we say, “The South segregated black people,” who do we mean by “the South”?  When we look at an atomic clock and try to understand how it works, can we also try to understand a little about Isidor Rabi, a physics professor at Columbia University, who suggested that a clock could be made from a technique he developed in the 1930s called atomic beam magnetic resonance. 

When visiting a sister Waldorf school on behalf of the Pedagogical Section Council, I guided the staff, and then the board members, in a collaborative discussion on the Core Principles. They have continued to study together these core principles, since my visit, as a school community. Here are some of the comments that I heard from these groups:

In my inquiry into how others perceive the importance of human relationship to Waldorf education, I  came across an article by Craig Holdrege entitled “Reality-Based Education in a Hyper-real Culture” in which he talks about “commanding presences,” a term coined by Albert

_______________

33 Craig Holdrege, Reality-Based Education in a Hyper-real Culture, available at: natureinstitute.org/txt/ch/techno-utopia.htm

Second Contribution

By James Pewtherer

As insightful as is the curriculum which Rudolf Steiner and the teachers developed in the first Waldorf school, it would have had little value if there were not dedicated teachers bringing it to life for those first children in the school. For a Waldorf teacher’s primary job is not only to teach children to love learning and to introduce them to the richness of the world, but it is also to so

________________

educate the children and students that they can grow into full human beings. It is for this reason that Steiner also recognized that it was crucial that the children and teachers build class communities in which mutual love among them would grow out of warm interest in all that went on in each of those classrooms. Out of the trust which was then developed between teacher and children and among the children themselves, the teacher could help each child grow to know him- or herself, that is, to become a self-educator. A central task of education, in Steiner’s view, was to remove the obstacles which stood in the way of a young human being’s discovery of his true individual tasks in life. To achieve this, the teacher is obliged to develop intimate knowledge of each student, working with their unique being. Along with this gentle, loving guidance, the teacher also was to lead the child to learn about and to love the world around them with a love that would continue to grow for their lifetime. This is a work which no machine can do. For as marvelous a tool as a computer is, it is no substitute for the complex tasks which a true teacher undertakes.

Instead, internet technology is well-suited for such undertakings as accruing facts and compiling lists of such things as formulae, tasks which are well suited to the binary system underlying internet technology. But the complexity which is a human being cannot be reduced to the point that it can be properly met by an algorithm, no matter how sophisticated. Many “educational” software programs exist which can help to organize facts, explain mathematical processes, provide lists of spelling words or have children practice their skills. But at the end of the day, a teacher is needed to seize the unique moment with this particular class, on this particular day, to expand on this particular question from a child in the context, for instance, of that child’s struggle over many weeks. In spite of the business plans of some technology companies to develop curricular software that would have teachers reduced to being clerks who implement identical pre-packaged curricula in every school across the land, the real teacher will win out every time. For it is the teacher’s intimate knowledge of the child and the child’s deep love for his teacher that is the basis for true education. 

So it is that the world over, six-year-old first graders look up to the teacher as the model in their lives. This revered person even supplants the parents in some ways in the mind of the child as the one who knows how the world works. The children invest their teacher with near mythical powers when it comes to doing the things that happen in school. “Ms. Jones is the best artist, the best singer, the best story-teller…,” and so forth. They have complete faith that she will be there loving them and helping them to learn everything there is to know and do in the world. And the trust in their teacher that is established in these first years of schooling will serve as the “rock” upon which they will build their confidence in her guidance, demands and expectations of them in sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

When the class teacher (and also subject teachers who devote themselves to a class over years) demonstrates to the child his deep confidence in and loving knowledge of him/her, the foundation for an abiding trust in the world is established for life.  The child must have the feeling that the teacher knows him so well that this revered figure will not allow him to be less than he could be. Of course, what the child is capable of on a given day can vary somewhat

______________

based on levels of fatigue or health or other outer factors. The teacher, then, needs to have a sense of the “range” of ability of the child overall so as to judge what is possible at that moment. At the same time, the wise teacher inculcates the expectation that one’s sense of dedication to the work will also be a strong incentive to rise to the occasion no matter one’s mood. With the teacher’s wise guidance, each child must learn over time to be his or her own judge of whether they have worked hard enough and in a healthy enough way so as to put beautiful and thoughtful work into the world. The important thing along the way is that, responding out of the love and authority of the teacher, the child feels deep down, “My teacher knows what is best for me right now, even if I don’t want to do it.” Even when the child’s resistance is over-ruled in that moment, that underlying confidence is there. This means that it will also be incumbent on me as teacher to know what support the child needs at that moment, whether in academic, practical or artistic work in the class. This determination also needs to be augmented by a fine sense for the feeling and will life of the child.  

When the child gradually grows to become a youth in the later elementary years and into high school, the habits and values that they have membered into their souls in the early years increasingly become their own, but now in a more conscious way. The single class teacher and the elementary school subject teachers are now replaced by a circle of high school teachers, experts in their own fields, who now draw out of them what was cultivated in their less-rigorous thinking life and in their childlike feeling life in earlier years. They converse with their teachers and classmates, examining their inchoate and often unarticulated thoughts from within, learning to develop these thoughts in a way that they can then express them. In addition to this gradual awakening at the hand of the high school faculty, each student needs at least one dedicated teacher (often called an advisor) who makes it his/her special task to meet with them and gently inquire as to how they are doing. Here again, the deft teacher puts the right questions at the right time, allowing the adolescent the room to open his deepest thoughts to the teacher if the time is right. Creating intimate and safe places in which to explore a teenager’s inner questions can also help to cultivate the student’s own developing powers of reason. 

Throughout the grades, the teacher develops curriculum and lesson plans that will meet the children as an entire class community in terms of their studies and in what is of particular import at that point in time. Rudolf Steiner’s curriculum indications were predicated on the thought that each teacher’s understanding of human development would guide him/her in finding the topics, approaches and activities which would guide the educational choices made for the class. Here, then, the regular and on-going study of The Foundations of Human Experience/Study of Man and the other educational and anthroposophical courses which Rudolf Steiner gave is essential. The levels of complexity in the human being and in human development call for lifetimes of study. Just to understand such concepts as the activity of soul, spirit and body obliges us to ponder Steiner’s explications again and again. But at the end of the day, it is only out of our understanding of who is the child at any age, be it 4, 9, or 16, for instance, that we can claim to be good teachers for the particular group of children or young people before us.

_______________

We can now turn from our consideration of the teacher’s relationship to the individual child and its destiny, including the preparation for its prospective individual life tasks, and look at the class community which surrounds him/her. Here, an apparently random group of children comes together and forms a cohort which will be together for as many as 12 or 14 years. The gender balance, the relative youth or maturity of the group within its grade, the balance of temperaments, the bonds between particular children – all these contribute to what a particular class will be known for over the years. This class becomes a kind of home for the children in which they and their peers will learn such things as kindness, caring, dispute resolution, working together for the good of the whole, helping others and being helped by them. They also will learn to work hard, to share common tasks, to have each one do his/her share as a member of the community, and to listen to other points of view. These and many other life lessons are taken in by learning together in a community.

In this constellation, the child can feel him-/herself surrounded by an entire group who are rather like siblings. The give-and-take of living together; of rubbing off each other’s “sharp corners;” of learning to appreciate the differences between us; of subjugating my wishes for the good of the group; of taking up leadership when it is needed; of standing up for “what is right” when others don’t necessarily see it; all these lessons and many more are part of the reality of the class community which is a central element of Waldorf education. Here again, the teacher or teachers are ones who are crucial to guiding this important process. The teacher needs to have enough self-knowledge to know when to consciously guide the community and when to stand back and allow the students to learn as they develop their own social processes. 

One of the most telling of Rudolf Steiner’s remarks to the teachers in terms of their relationships came at the end of a faculty meeting in Stuttgart on September 26, 1919. There he said, “The vital thing is that there is always contact, and that teachers and pupils form a unity.” Being together in a healthy way with their class really means giving the students another home.

In addition to his/her focus on the children, the teacher in a Waldorf school must also turn his attention, as far as human relationships is concerned, to the relationship with other adults. Without these other relationships, this sacred task of truly educating children cannot be achieved. Beyond the primary relationship with the children and students, teachers will only be successful educators if they also develop healthy relationships with colleagues, parents, administrative staff and beyond. In all these relationships, different social skills are needed, for in the work with ego-endowed adults, the teacher needs to build partnerships based on equality. 

Our interactions with teaching colleagues are an ever-present model for our students. The very considerations and skills which we seek to cultivate in the children are also demanded of us. This entails seeking the views of others, especially when an action or policy will affect other classes or the school as a whole.  When we become teachers in a Waldorf school, we give up a certain amount of independence, but we do so with the knowledge that my colleagues can provide me with important insights that I might not have. Done well, making decisions as a conscious and responsible group leads to actions based on insight. At the same time,we all know how cumbersome the process of getting to a decision can be for a circle of colleagues in a

_______________

Waldorf school. Yet our task of learning to steer the school is very much an important process itself. Rudolf Steiner’s clear admonition that the Waldorf school would be run in a “republican” manner instead of with a principal or headmaster makes our work clear. Taking the time to counsel each other is also part of the teacher’s task.

Perhaps the most challenging part of the teacher’s more outward-looking tasks is the cultivation of the work with the parents of the children in his/her care. These children have come to them from the world of spirit, and it is they who must feel the teacher to be a trusted partner. If that is there, the teacher can participate in the child’s upbringing, making the education as effective as it can be. The Waldorf teacher is in a unique position in the experience of most parents. For in the Waldorf school over eight years, the teacher develops an intimate knowledge of the child. Unlike with the parents, the teacher’s relationship comes without being related to the child by blood. Accordingly, the teacher can have more of an objective distance from the child and can see some things about him/her more clearly than can the parent. Yet the perceptive parent can have intuitive and experiential knowledge of the child which is invaluable for the teacher’s understanding. Thus, the better the teacher can listen to the parent’s observations and experience and also clearly communicate the “what” and the “how” of the approach she is taking to meet the needs of the child, the more powerful will be the partnership on behalf of the child. 

Turning to another area of relationships, we can recognize that the administrative burdens of 21st century schooling and the effective operation of a school-organism have become more complicated. These tasks can be greatly aided when there are administrators and office staff who collaborate with the faculty to execute required expectations. Here, too, it is the teachers who must take the lead in making sure that administrative forms and tasks in the school are structured so as to benefit the children. Yet sharing the imaginations and inspirations which inform the teaching work while at the same time eliciting, listening to and learning from the observations of administrative staff can also serve the children. So, too, where there is a board of directors, who in safeguarding the operation and financial health of the school can also provide very helpful support, the faculty has a strong ally in meeting its tasks.

Perhaps of greatest importance in our work with the children insofar as it is in the realm of human relationships, is the need to reckon with and work with the spiritual beings in whose name we teach. Rudolf Steiner put this need to the first teachers at the very beginning of the Study of Man introductory course noted above on the evening before it began, August 21, 1919. He told the gathered teachers that, “…we first try to be conscious of the links which we want to forge with the spiritual worlds…” [and of the charge] “…to be aware of the need to create contacts with the spiritual powers at whose behest and under whose mandate each one of us will have to work.” Steiner evokes the names of the Third Hierarchy – Angels, Archangels and Archai – again and again in his lectures about the education: These beings are the sources of our Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions respectively, and it is these gifts which make our work successful with other human beings. These beings, however, leave us free. It is completely up to us whether or not we develop an inner relationship with them. This relationship depends upon Borgmann. In his article, Holdrege talks of commanding or genuine presences “as characterizing the real—when you perceive that something is rooted in a larger context of which it is revelatory.”  He gives an example, “a leaf in the fall, loosed from its tree and floating through the air, is revelatory of the whole context of wind and temperature at that moment.”  He goes on to raise the question:

_______________

… how do we orchestrate or facilitate experiences with commanding presences today for children in education? Because we all know and perceive how today, from an early age on, the experience of children is often mediated through so many gadgets and devices. We really need to concentrate, then, on how we can help children still come into contact with commanding presences. How could we make that the main focus of their existence for the first 10 or 12 years of their lives?

It would mean that school would have to become very different in our technological age and less what we typically imagine school to be. Tests would have to go away; 45-minute periods would have to go away. Meeting with people, meeting with nature, meeting through meaningful work in the world, such as gardening—all of that would become the heart of education.

_______________

what he called the only truly free deed of which we are capable as inhabitants of the earthly world, that is, choosing to be meditants. 

Rudolf Steiner implied the relationship with the gods when he spoke about the relationship with people: “In the evenings before your meditation, ask the Angels Archangels and Archai that they may help you in your work on the following day. In the mornings, after the meditation, you may feel yourself united with the beings of the Third Hierarchy.” 

And perhaps the most powerful picture of all of relationships of is the picture Rudolf Steiner gave to the first teachers on that first evening as to how they would work together in what is variously known as the Teachers’ or the College of Teachers’ Imagination. There, he portrayed the gathered teachers as having spiritual beings behind them, above them, and contributing gifts of light to the circle they form when they are meeting together. Here then, the matter of relationships broadens and deepens to include beings from the non-physical world.

When we can enrich our human relationships with some of those elements referenced in this article, we will find that we have the strength, the courage, and (sometimes!) the wisdom to educate the children so that they can become healthy human beings.

Why? Because the commanding presences give us roots in the world and help form the way we think about the world. They are in the best sense of the word formative and can inform our being. If there is to be a future in which human beings form ideas that are rooted in reality, it will be in part because they’ve been allowed to participate in commanding presences as children. And they will have experienced that reality is relational, that as a person you are active and you are being acted upon by commanding presences.

“Have Courage for the Truth”

Steiner, in the lecture cycle mentioned repeatedly, develops an understanding of what he calls the Threefold Social Organism. He begins the lecture by explaining that “it is people’s soul needs which cause them to seek each other out, and it is these similar soul needs which unite them. Education, too, means that one person cares for another in the realm of the inner life.” (pp.45-46) And then: 

What human beings shall gradually acquire through working with spiritual science [for instance, in Waldorf education] is an awareness that every human relationship is inwardly related to the whole of humanity and to the wider world. (p.54)

Steiner then describes that in our striving towards human collaboration, we can find two different paths, the thinking path and the willing path, both of which are important as we engage socially.

We can find our way to human collaboration through a thinking path in this way:

We must strive for the mental honesty – pluck up the courage to be able to admit it, in utter sincerity, that…we are not born free from prejudice where our world of thought is concerned; we are all born with certain prejudices. (p.59)

He goes on to explain that, though we are born with prejudices, we can become reborn out of the thoughts of others with a comprehensive feeling in our own thoughts. We can choose to embrace a collective thinking. He adds, “It must become a serious part of our lives to educate ourselves to acquire a sense for considering other peoples’ thoughts, and to correct bias in ourselves through conversations with others.” (p.63) When I can stop thinking that I myself am the sole source of everything I think and recognize in my innermost soul that I am a part of humanity, then I have found the path to human collaboration. 

When we bridle our impulse to share our own thoughts in a faculty council and instead take a moment to listen deeply to what is being said, when we begin a meeting with parents by allowing them to speak from their hearts while we listen to them with deep concern and interest, when we work with our colleagues to build a picture of the child from many perspectives, when we allow a high school student to lead a review or present new material in class, then we are truly able to “enquire into the path of thought which consists in acquiring

tolerance of mind for the opinions of mankind in general, and developing a social interest in the thoughts of others.” (p.63) We can model this state of mind and heart for our students, leading them in their own interactions to the thought that it is not only acceptable for them to have different opinions, but desirable. As an administrator I came to love the ability within a Waldorf setting to allow for social conflict, to allow students a chance to become really angry. I was challenged to normalize, not remove, conflict. Yes, when the conflict becomes severe it is the task of the adults to intervene, but not with the intention of ending conflict. Instead, the task is to allow the students to express their differences in a heartfelt manner, then to ponder the differences of opinions, then to value those differences. In this way, we lead the students towards a connection to the other, towards an overcoming of individual bias, towards a healthy social organism, out of the “chaos of war” in which they are living.

On other occasions, when high school students would come to me enraged over a rule they felt to be arbitrary, I felt challenged to understand how they felt about the rule, why they did not understand it or feel they could abide by it. And through an understanding of the students’ perspective, I could then either explain the rule in a way that would make sense to them and therefore allow a conformity to the rule, or go back to the high school teachers and advocate for a process either to remove the rule or modify it.

“Imbue Thyself with the Power of Imagination” 

A second way to the human collaboration is through willing, which Steiner describes as an acquired idealism and enthusiasm, or the ability 

…to acquire the kind of idealism that does not spring merely from the blood and youthful enthusiasm, but is acquired out of our own initiative…the kind which springs from taking hold of the life of the spirit, and which can be rekindled afresh again and again because we have made it part of our soul independently of our bodily existence. (p.63)

When we offer fairy tales and Aesop’s fables without the moral, simply allowing the student to live deeply with awe into the magic of the story, then we are educating the student towards an acquired idealism and enthusiasm. In the grades, when a child begins to learn the laws of mathematics, the orderliness and beauty of multiplication leading into geometry, the enduring truths of mathematics, they are filled with an imagination of the infinite, which they will later explore further in projective geometry. When we allow the students to discover what happens when an electric current passes through a coil rather than tell them first and only demonstrate it as evidence for the theory, students uncover for themselves an abiding belief in truth. 

If you enquire into the path of the will you will not hear of something abstract but of the need to educate yourself in idealism. And if you cultivate this idealism or, which is particularly necessary, you introduce it into the education of growing children, a sense will awaken for acting out of the spirit; out of this idealism will come impulses to do more than one is pushed into doing from outside. (p.63)

“Sharpen Thy Feeling for Responsibility of Soul” 

And now we can find a third path, through feeling, through a sensing of what is needed. Out of this idealism will come impulses to do more than one is pushed into doing from outside oneself. When the teacher guides the students, through relationship, to recognize their biases and begin to shed them and to acquire idealism through the uncovering of truth and beauty, the students can begin to recognize the need to become an active member of a growing healthy social organism and to be responsible for the development of this same organism.

Out of a thinking which is intrinsically tolerant and interested in the thoughts of others, and out of a will reborn through acquiring idealism, something arises that cannot be called anything else but a heightened feeling of responsibility for everything you do. (p.65)

In a Waldorf school, we teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, but we use these three R’s as a tool to uncover three more essential R’s: rhythm, ritual, and reverence. Through the rhythm and cadences of iambic pentameter in recited verses, or the bouncing of the ball to the times tables, or the daily, weekly, seasonal, and yearly rhythms we establish, and through the observation of these natural rhythms, we allow our students to see themselves integrally connected to the world of nature around them. “Everything that speaks to us from the various kingdoms of nature, if we contemplate all this in the light of anthroposophically based spiritual science we find that in one way or another it is connected with the human being.” (p.4) The establishment of ritual in a classroom, the speaking of a morning verse followed by birthday verses and an exercise in eurythmy, for example, establishes the student in relationship to the class of students. Through an understanding of the student as a human being and a further understanding of students in relation to others in a classroom and a ritualistic order defining these relationships, we enable students to “attain a living relationship between ourselves as human beings and the whole of the rest of the world.” (p.5) And through deeply rooted rhythms and carefully established social rituals, students are led to an idealistic enthusiasm for the divine, a reverence for the mystery, and a “direct presence of the spirit, the active power of the spirit.” (p.5) In the words of Emerson, “Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you: build therefore, your own world.” 

The world that Steiner invites us to fashion is intended to create true spiritual harmony, real spiritual collaboration. This world can in fact be an ordering of our current chaos. “We must not take an exclusively pessimistic view of the present time; we can also draw from it the strength to achieve a kind of vindication of contemporary existence.” (p.89) This world is not possible without humans in relationship with one another. While the metaphor of a chain link fence may seem overused, it is in fact an essential picture of social harmony. Each link in the chain must have its own individual integrity, and the integrity of the chain is dependent on each of the links. Likewise, each link, no matter how strong, cannot fulfill the intention of a chain without being linked to the others. As educators we need to respond “to the clear pointer calling us to play our part in social healing” (p.89) and that this is done through human relationship.

I end with our well-loved verse:

The healing social life is found only

When, in the mirror of each soul,

The whole community finds its reflection,

And when, in the whole community,

The virtue of each one is living.