books
This book is the culmination of a three-year project of the Pedagogical Section Council. As a collection of articles, it brings together the threads of many conversations exploring various aspects of a College of Teachers. Despite differences in perspective, the articles are based on the common insight that a better understanding of the College is needed if Waldorf schools are to grow stronger and Waldorf education is to fulfill its mission.
A Waldorf school is more than just an independent school that provides a developmental education. It is an organization that seeks to allow the spiritual impulses of our time to manifest on earth in order to transform society. The group that is primarily responsible for recognizing and realizing this mission is the College of Teachers….
Whether a College focuses more on earthly matters or spiritual matters depends on the needs of the school. What is most important is that earthly matters be informed from the point of view of the spirit and that spiritual matters be informed by down-to-earth practicality….Excerpt from Chapter One
This book is the culmination of a three-year project of the Pedagogical Section Council. As a collection of articles, it brings together the threads of many conversations exploring various aspects of a College of Teachers. Despite differences in perspective, the articles are based on the common insight that a better understanding of the College is needed if Waldorf schools are to grow stronger and Waldorf education is to fulfill its mission.
A Waldorf school is more than just an independent school that provides a developmental education. It is an organization that seeks to allow the spiritual impulses of our time to manifest on earth in order to transform society. The group that is primarily responsible for recognizing and realizing this mission is the College of Teachers….
Whether a College focuses more on earthly matters or spiritual matters depends on the needs of the school. What is most important is that earthly matters be informed from the point of view of the spirit and that spiritual matters be informed by down-to-earth practicality….Excerpt from Chapter One
These lectures –– which Jørgen Smit, the leader of the Pedagogical Section of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum, held in June 1989, just two years before his death –– are a precious legacy especially for teachers in the English-speaking world. The steps which he so clearly describes here can serve as a path of understanding for every teacher who sincerely wishes to be an educator, whose teaching arises not only out of good techniques but from spiritual insight. Jørgen Smit’s contributions to this Waldorf Teachers’ Conference in 1989 illustrate the transformation possibilities of Rudolf Steiner’s pedagogical impulses by someone who lived and worked with them for the sake of the child and also for self-education. Indeed one aspect of the uniqueness of Jørgen Smit can be found in the manner inwhich he applied anthroposophy as a schooling for life. When we enter into these lectures, we find that basic aspects rest upon our willingness to wrestle with polarities.
Those who had the opportunity to work with Jørgen Smit could perceive how he had a special capacity to fathom the
secret of polarity, polarity as Rudolf Steiner describes this phenomenon in a lecture held in Berlin, January 14, 1913:
“What is living needs polarity, needs opposites; one cannot just wish to do away with various opposites, but rather life strides forward in polarity. …Progress cannot be made through neutrality, but through mutually maintaining and harmonizing opposites.”
“What is Waldorf Education?” was a question that arose initially in response to trademark issues within our movement. The Pedagogical Section Council offered to articulate seven principles by which the education could be distinguished. The essays in this publication bring these principles to life out of the experiences of practicing teachers and illuminate the essence of Waldorf education. School communities have used these essays as study material to build common understanding within their Faculties and Boards.
We organize the daily life of running a school through shared agreements…. As we live our commitments and agreements, day by day, we have the opportunity to model what it means to be in a relationship that can develop. This process needs time, not too much, but enough. We can revisit our agreements when needed and exercise the kind of responsible innovation that requires dialog. From the Seventh Principle of Spiritual Orientation.
This book is a collection of excerpted writings, talks and contemplative verses given by Rudolf Steiner and others for the teachers in Waldorf schools. It is meant to aid teachers and faculties in finding ways to work out of the Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions which are the true source of Waldorf education. Thus, to become a successful Waldorf teacher, each of us is asked to develop a connection to the spiritual sources that will guide us in our work. Only in this way will our teaching truly meet the deeper life- questions of the children and young people before us.
This book is meant to stimulate the teachers and the faculties to constantly renew the education so that it will become ever new and fresh. As such, this material is meant to be regularly worked with and contemplated. Its value is not only for its content but for the approaches it suggests for practicing teachers. The text also provides guidance to the full articles and lectures within the book to facilitate further study.
This slim volume includes five essays, each drawn from articles by Elan Leibner that were previously published in the Waldorf Research Bulletin and draw from his extensive research, work with a range of schools, and public addresses. Topics address inner work and collegial striving as pillars that support our ability to know and love the child. Chapters cover authenticity in education; contemplative work in the College of Teachers meeting; language, art, and deepening study; reflections on Steiner’s Teachers meditations; and human encounter in the light of anthroposophy. They offer rich reflections, ideas for further study, and practical tools and study methodologies. Reading these essays, we are reminded of the need to deeply observe each child in our care, to approach our task with love, and to continue the journey of self-knowledge – all in service in service of the mandate to now teach!
Two excerpts offer a sense of Elan’s approach to the nature of our individual and collegial task:
Doing better means doing authentically, doing in accord with the spiritual essence of the human being and of nature…..See the child, love the child, know yourself: Now teach. This is the immensely simple and so endlessly difficult maxim of authentic education. For what it includes, and also for what it excludes, it comes close to pedagogical anarchy if applied selfishly—and to a truly human education when applied with humility and courage.
A second contribution of the inner path is the notion that one’s colleague is also “on the path.” Sensing that the other, too, is working to become a better vessel for the spirit increases the willingness to be patient with his or her idiosyncrasies, since there is hope that the gaps that yawn between colleagues may narrow in the next minute (or the next year). Colleagues are less likely to view each other as forever destined to remain the same. Sustained over years, colleagueship in Waldorf schools needs the optimism that the hope (indeed the anticipation) of change brings.
These three lectures given by Johannes Tautz in 1986 provide research material for faculties and Individual teachers seeking approaches to transformative self-development in service to the education of the children in their care in the context of social renewal. They were spoken to members of the pedagogical Section who were familiar with the foundational ideas expressed by Johannes Tautz. His early colleagues were some of the original group of teachers taught by Rudolf Steiner. His description of those early days and the meditative path the teachers explored provides the introduction to contemplative practices increasingly relevant today. This content is thought provoking, challenging yet worthy of serious study.
“Within the Pedagogical Section we look at the fundamentals of pedagogy as given by Rudolf Steiner. The question arises, as asked by Hans Gebert yesterday: What actually is a Waldorf school? How must it work if it wishes to confront the challenges of our present time?”
A collection of five essays by leading Waldorf educators to explore what Rudolf Steiner meant by “the Christ Impulse” and how to relate it to Waldorf teaching without being misconstrued.
[Excerpt: page 49 from reprinted edition (2022) of the book And Who Shall Teach the Teachers? The Christ Impulse in Waldorf Education: lecture by Betty Staley on “How Do Teachers Transform Themselves and Come to Experience the Christ Impulse?”]
In sweeping away references to Christ, at least as they are used by religious denominations, perhaps Rudolf Steiner is preparing the ground for a new understanding of the Christ, a ground more appropriate for the period of the Consciousness Soul in which we live. Perhaps he is showing us that we can relate to the deepest questions of spiritual existence without relying on the name “Christ,” which has been abused both by sacred traditions and by a long string of secular customs, such as
the barrage of Christmas carols that can be heard blaring from shopping mall loudspeakers each year. Rudolf Steiner is pointing to something new in human understanding that has nothing to do with dogma, with rules, or with religious coercion, but rather with freedom as each of us comes to our own understanding of and relationship to spiritual knowledge and the Christ. When we refer to the Christ, we can take three different aspects into consideration—the Christ Event, Esoteric Christianity, and the Christ Impulse—and none of these refers specifically to organized Christianity.
In this slender volume of 28 pages Henry Barnes shares some questions and ideas about “the creation of social structures in which the individual is inwardly and outwardly free, yet the community of which they are a members, capable of wise, humane and effective action.”
Governance questions abound, who makes decisions, where is the voice of the individual teacher, how can the voice of a group be heard and taken seriously, how can leaders lead?
Henry unpacks a reference made in January 23, 1923 when Rudolf Steiner said: “Perhaps we may say that the Goetheanum in Dornach and the Waldorf School and its procedures show how anthroposophical actives should be carried on in all the various spheres of culture.” What a tantalizing, enigmatic and puzzling statement.
The Goetheanum had a structure that served an intention and Henry, in describing the interrelation of the large and small domes and the third space where they intersect, shares perceptive and illuminating ideas that can serve us as we reflect on what kind of community for cultural transformation a Waldorf School could become.
Johannes Tautz seeks to reground the Waldorf movement in the spiritual impulses of its founding. Tautz does this by uncovering new details of Rudolf Steiner’s work with the founding teachers and placing the founding of the first Waldorf school in a historical and spiritual context. Reading Tautz’s lectures brings the idea of Waldorf education to life, lifting it into a living being, streaming from the past to the present, ready for it to be carried into the future.
Excerpt from pg. 42-43
(On September 9, 1919) Rudolf Steiner for the first time calls the staff of teachers together, that is, the founding teachers, the twelve original teachers. For the first time, the future teachers–those very human beings who had made teaching their professional destiny–the teachers gathered together. Now Rudolf Steiner transmits to them–and this is the decisive thing–the spiritual technique by which each one, each day, can form a connection to the spiritual world…. And this takes place in the form of a solemn vow, a pledge to one’s self….. Rudolf Steiner expressed the following: “In the evening, before your meditation, ask the Angels, the Archangels, and the Archai that they may help you in your work the following day.” Rudolf Steiner assumed that each teacher strives to build up a meditative consciousness….. “In the evening, ask the Angels, the Archangels, and the Archai, that they may help you in your work the next day.” What does this mean? That I open myself and lift up the chalice, as it were, of my beseeching and pleading which during the night is filled with the spiritual substance of the Angels, the Archangels, and the Archai. And in the morning the content pours itself into my soul being, into my will, my feeling, and my thinking so that I can acquire the true intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations for my work…
This small book is the result of several months of research and discussion by members of the Pedagogical Section Council of North America. Members took up a study of the important and somewhat mysterious role of sleep in human life and in education. Each member explored a different aspect of our study and that work formed the basis for the following chapters. We are fortunate to also include observations by Florian Osswald, former co-director of the Pedagogical Section at the Goetheanum, on this topic. These are some of the questions voiced during our work together.
How can we support our work with the healing and strengthening power of sleep? These questions, and more, are addressed in the following pages from the perspectives of anthroposophy and contemporary research. Some of these essays explore the nature of sleep and waking primarily from social or spiritual perspectives. We trust that you will find them helpful as we all continue to study and better understand what Steiner meant in giving us this primary task.
This booklet is dedicated to Betty Staley (1938-2025), a member of the Pedagogical Section Council for 40 years, student of Rudolf Steiner and Waldorf education for 57 years. Fittingly, she developed a series of questions on sleep for our consideration.