Steiner and Waldorf Education: February 2004 Archives

I found this Steiner quote to be interesting in light of advances in technology in education. First radio, then television, and now computers promise to revolutionize education and make the incomprehensible comprehensible in an ever easier manner. Neither radio nor television fulfilled this promise, but somehow computers will succeed where film failed?

"Recently we were forced to experience an article in an important weekly paper. It said, more or less, that many of our contemporaries find that when they read Spinoza and Kant, the concepts get so confused that they cannot cope with them. But then the author of the article suggests applying a new technical accomplishment to this problem, too. Let's make a film! Imagine a film in which Spinoza first explains how he grinds lenses and then goes on to explain the development of his thoughts and philosophy, and so forth. All you need to do is sit passively, and your thoughts on the subject will no longer be confused. This is totally in line with current preferences. Slide presentations would show us how Spinoza's Ethics and Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason came about. People would go to lectures like that."

Rudolf Steiner. "First Steps in Inner Development". Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1999. Page 88.
The Lecture is titled: How does the soul discover its true being? and was given in Kassel on May 8th, 1914. Translated by Catherine Creeger.

"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."
Rudolf Steiner
The Education of the Child in light of Anthroposophy
London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1965. Paages 22-23.
Translated by George and Mary Adams