Meeting the Needs of the Child TodAY

Lectures by Michaela Glckler, Johanna Steegmans, and Renate Long-Breipohl from the 2008 International Waldorf Early Childhood Conference in Wilton, New Hampshire, USA

Edited by Nancy Blanning

Published by the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America in association with the International Association for Steiner/Waldorf Early Childhood Education

Table of Contents

Foreword Nancy Blanning The Archetypal Roots of Waldorf Education Michaela Glckler
Editor: Nancy Blanning Managing Editor: Lory Widmer Hess Cover Design: Julie Schwartz Administrative Support: Melissa Lyons Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America First English Edition, 2009 Published in the United States by the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America 285 Hungry Hollow Road Spring Valley, NY 10977

1 2 7 12 16 26 35

The Developing Child: Lecture One Johanna Steegmans The Developing Child: Lecture Two Johanna Steegmans The Developing Adult: Lecture One Renate Long-Breipohl The Developing Adult: Lecture Two Renate Long-Breipohl Biographical Notes on the Lecturers

This publication is made possible through a grant from the Waldorf Curriculum Fund. ISBN 978-0-9816159-5-0 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles.

Foreword
Nancy Blanning
Early August 2008 was a special time for Waldorf/Steiner early childhood education in North America. The Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America (WECAN) had been asked by the International Association for Steiner/Waldorf Early Childhood Education (IASWECE) to host an international teachers conference. Accepting this honor, Wilton, New Hampshire, with the gracious facilities of Pine Hill Waldorf School and High Mowing School, was chosen as the conference location. Then the exciting and daunting task of planning such a major gathering began. The theme of the conference had to be one which recognizes the situation of children globally. This would include the needs of children living in poverty and deprivation, with huge practical needs, even down to survival, alongside the encroaching loss of healthy childhood experiences in industrialized countries. In modernized countries the fast pace of life, intellectualization, and material excess threaten different aspects of growing into a full human being. Economic needs and changing social patterns are also putting younger and younger children into the care of people other than their own parents. The face of the world is changing rapidly, with children pulled or pushed, or sometimes forgotten in the upheaval. Meeting the Needs of the Child Today was chosen as a theme which encompasses this huge range of concerns. Keynote presentations set the standard around which workshops and mini-presentations of international work with children from birth to age seven revolved. International speakers from three continents were graciously willing to share their thoughts and insights with the assembled teachers. Michaela Glckler, MD, from Dornach, Switzerland, represented a European voice as she spoke of the archetypal roots of Waldorf education. To educate properly we have to be aware of archetypal physical stages of development, of the unfolding of consciousness and learning capacity through time, of the development and importance of relationship, of the unfolding of ego development, and of the spiritual orientation of the human being. Each of these is fundamental in educatingleading forth the individuality of the childand in educating ourselves as well. Johanna Steegmans, MD, from Seattle, Washington, represented North America as she spoke the following two days on the sensory development of the young child. Using the autistic child as a guide through this bewildering landscape, she described how the tender nature of the young child is bombarded and even traumatized by the overwhelming onslaught of sensory demands. This bombardment affects everyone, child and adult as well. Looking to the deep sources of anthroposophic spiritual science, she also provided sources for practical tools and meditative insight to help us meet these challenges. From Sydney, Australia and the southern hemisphere came Renate Long-Breipohl, PhD. Dr. LongBreipohl reminded us that healthy education for the child depends upon continuous and intentional self-development by the adult educator. She brought cosmic images from the zodiac to illustrate virtues toward which the adult must strive. Other images from the zodiac described archetypal human activitieshunting, farming, trading, for examplewhich still manifest in our lives but now in transformed, subtle ways. Understanding these impulses and activities in ourselves and the children can help us guide Waldorf education more sensitively, intentionally, and joyfully. The fruit of these lecturers years of intense study and experience in the elds of medicine and education is shared on these following pages. It is a rich feast that calls to be shared with a wider audience than the early childhood educators from thirty-three countries who were able to gather in New Hampshire. May these thoughts reach out to invite each reader into the circle of inspiration created at the conference, and encourage those who are striving valiantly to love, protect, and educate young children.

The Archetypal Roots of Waldorf Education

Michaela Glckler, MD
There are reasons why we have come together to consider the care and education of young children from birth to seven. One reason is that we live in a century in which changes are happening rapidly. The attack on early childhood is growing, even if we know much about giving small children the best possible care. We have never before had so much scientic knowledge about development, but there is a shadow side to this. Though we know much about supporting healthy development, fewer children benet. We are gathered together here from thirty-three countries. Working together we can develop strategies to become more active in our own institutions. We can, likewise, create outreach and communication with other institutions which have different standards and skills, but which have the same interest and longing for the well-being of young children. We all share this deep interest and want to share our experiences. In Switzerland there are more Waldorf educators working in public schools than in private. This points us toward the needs of the future. To open up channels of communication, we need to learn the language of our public school colleagues to facilitate dialogue. Another reason we are glad to be here is because the pedagogical impulse in Anthroposophy has marked its one-hundredth anniversary, dating from the publication of Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner refers to this lecture in the readings we prepared for this conference. In this rst presentation I wish to share the archetypal roots of the Waldorf impulse and how they are key to the education of children and to the self-education of the adult. If we want to educate, we need to know why and to have a goal that indicates a path. The longer-view the goal is, the more focus and concentration we can bring to our intention to make our arrow y far. To help us understand these things, we will look at the developmental tasks of the seven cultural epochs so we can better orient ourselves to nd goals for education and self-education in our time. A ve-pointed star can represent key questions for us for education. Paracelsus, the father of modern medicine, said there are only ve pathways leading to illness and ve to healing. Finally there is only one overall remedy to heal every pain, every illnesslove. Contemplation of the key questions for education can lead to a ve-pointed star as well. We begin with the left foot of the starthe standing leg. This can represent the physical consideration of the human being. Here is an age-specic orientation. We study the child in each year from birth to seven. We study the milestones of each year so we can identify the age-specic, physical developmental markers of a childs growth. The right foot indicates the etheric nature of the human being and the time element. Here we have our age-specic curriculum. How do we nourish the age-specic condition of the child? Research shows that we human beings do not have the possibility to develop faculties from our genetic makeup. Everything specically human has to be learned, which includes almost all human activities. But we are genetically disposed to so-called reaction norms. We have age-specic learning dispositions, which last throughout our human biography and give us the possibility to react to certain inuences in our environment. Every year has new learning dispositions, even beyond the rst seven. Last year for the rst time I met an aboriginal master in Australia whom I asked to describe initiation for his culture. Instead of describing a specic ritualand their life is still very ritualizedhe replied that initiation is nothing other than learning. Initiation is not something only for advanced persons

but is for everyone and occurs throughout life whenever we learn something new. The art is to nd the age-specic nourishment and step that is appropriate. The curriculum provides this step-by-step initiation. Then we come on the star to the astral levelthe left handwhich is all about relationship and karmic background. What is Waldorf education without relationship? Nothing. Rudolf Steiner was deeply concerned that teachers understand the importance of relationship. On one visit he asked the children whether they loved their teachers. They hearteningly replied Yes! In our time we feel awkward asking children such a question. Yet a high school teacher in Stuttgart related this story to her students. A twelfth grade boy approached her later and said she should, indeed, ask this of her students, for they would also acclaim yes. Relationships become complicated with our emotions, intentions, and energy in this work. We need to learn how we can act in such a way that children are able to love us in an objective way so that we do not draw the childrens attention to ourselves or try to please them. We want to give them enjoyment that we are interested in and engaged with them. Whatever we do in this conference, we want to keep in mind relationship-building with parents and students. Research done in the last thirty years has asked what makes a good relationship. The outcome was astonishingly simple, something we already know. The rst factor of a good relationship is honesty; transparency is on the top. Young people suffer now from lies and deceptions, and it is hard to communicate through words what we truly mean to say. The more truth and transparency we bring to relations, the better. Empathy, loving understanding, is next element. The third is respect for the freedom and integrity of the other person. The more freedom, autonomy, and respect that live in a relationship, the better it is. In relating to the other person through these aspects of thinking, feeling, and willing, we meet the whole person. An essential question for us is how we can bring these elements into a relationship that needs improvement. We can explore how to bring more interaction through questions, through interest, through dialogue with the other person. We must be interested in understanding the other person rather than focusing on being understood ourselves. We want to strive to give the other person the same time, space, and tolerance for errors that we each require to make this earthly journey ourselves. Rudolf Steiner wanted us to learn that the directing body of a group acts in service to support the development of the individual members. No one misuses the other. This is the astral or soul sphere that we can work on. Our ego organization is represented by the right hand of the star. The ego is supported through the methodology we develop. Derived from the Greek, methodology means a path, the way. Methodology is what gives the path its signature; it is the way we teach. Rudolf Steiner clearly meant ours to be an artistic education, through which we do not dene but characterize. We have the goal of the educational process identieddeveloping capacities and skillsbut the path is as important as the goal. The process through which we achieve the goal is an end in itself. We have to have the goal and the path in balance, not concentrating on one to the exclusion of the other. If we do this, every child can nd his own rhythm, speed, and specic access to the goal. My husband has taught high school math for twenty years. In his rst teaching block, he asked if everyone understood what he had just explained. A number of students said they had not. Though he explained twice more, the same number of students raised hands each time. He began to feel frustrated with the students for not paying more attention. Then a girl pointed out that he had explained it all three times the same way. There had been no artistic methodology adjusting and changing the educational approach.

We need to observe and come into interaction with the subject, the student, and the process. We have to perceive and listen to develop the right action. If what we are explaining is not accessible, we have to stop and observe the childs actual potential. We must ask how we can mobilize the situation and support a new way of learning not yet discovered. This girls comment was my husbands initiation into Waldorf education. He realized that this mobility in teaching was what he had to learn. He realized that the problem was his as the teacher; it was not the childs problem. A difcult child is our dear problem. We are the professionals. For us every individual child is the challenge we have been looking for, about whom we never complain but act. This is artistic methodology. The kind of truth we are trying to approach is accessible to everyone individually. Those who are looking for truth, however, have to walk alone. No one can be the companion of the other. But if we are all working for truth, we will meet. We want to become companions and accept the reality that each of us must walk alone. May our encounter here become a festival of exchanging what we learn of the truth. At the top of the star is spiritual orientation. Waldorf education has a clear spiritual orientation. It is holistic, beyond religion or cultural approaches. This spirituality is based on thinking as the general spiritual language every human being uses. In our conference here it is beautiful to have many languages translating from one to the other. We trust that the thoughts we are trying to share will come through imperfect wording by our reaching up to the archetype of thought and interpreting what is said. Spiritual orientation is what can be received in thoughts as spiritual substance, which we can bring into words and then into actions. This is a two-way path from spirit into matter and also from matter into spirit. We look to recognize what our own spiritual orientation is. To what thoughts are we giving the power of our existence? What thoughts are we serving with our hands, feet, money, with our friendships? What inspired us with the idea to come here? Though there were obstacles, we did still come. The spirit is so seless that we do not notice it, and then we think we have no spiritual orientation. Let us be attentive to what thoughts are leading us. We all know the legend of Offerus who wanted to serve the greatest master in the world. He thought the devil was the greatest until the devil avoided a cross. Then Offerus knew there was someone higher than the devil. Yet he could not nd this highest master. He ended up carrying people over the river, becoming a guardian of the threshold. One night he was called by a child who became so heavy that Offerus could not go on to cross the river. He asked the child, Who are you? The child replied, I am the one you are looking for. Then Offerus discovered this power of becoming, this divine spiritual being, the Christ, the I am. He was always carrying this child within. So this is a Christopherus question. Do we really know what power we want to serve? The Foundation Stone Meditation for Waldorf education was written when the rst Waldorf school was founded. One rendering, from Towards the Deepening of Waldorf Education, is as follows: May there reign here spirit-strength in love; May there work here spirit-light in goodness; Born from certainty of heart, And from steadfastness of soul, So that we may bring to young human beings Bodily strength for work, inwardness of soul and clarity of spirit. May this place be consecrated to such a task; May young minds and hearts here nd Servers of the light, endowed with strength, Who will guard and cherish them.

Those who here lay a stone as a sign Will think in their hearts of the spirit That should reign in this place, So that the foundation may be rm Upon which there shall live and weave and work: Wisdom that bestows freedom, Strengthening spirit-power, All-revealing spirit-life. This we wish to afrm In the name of Christ With pure intent And with good will. Only once did Rudolf Steiner, along with forty-two other people, sign a document in the name of Christ. It begins with love, truth, and freedom. Then it ends with we wish to afrm in the name of Christ in pure intent and with good will. Steiner called unto the highest teacher and master to help him and his child of sorrow, the Waldorf School. How do we meet in the name of Christ? We must question what the leading thought of our professional life is. What is worth putting all our energy toward? We need clear vision for education of the child and for self-education of the adult. Giving us another aspect of development, Rudolf Steiner described goals ascribed to each of the cultural epochs. One goal embracing us all through these epochs is individualization. There was a different goal before the post-Atlantean epochs. And there will be another goal after the seventh of our post-Atlantean epochs. Once we have achieved individualization we will have to socialize. We are now in the fth epoch when individualization is in crisis; ve is the number of crisis. Our goal in this time is to become crisis-competent. We have within us both genetic and cultural inheritance. We carry in us what mankind has learned from our beginning. Each epoch lasts an average of 2160 years. This allows a long time to learn what the goal is through a number of incarnations. The experience of the rst, the Indian, epoch was maya, an experience of an abyss between spirit and matter. This was the rst experience of going into a physical body that made us feel separate and isolated. The experience of isolation and separateness was the goal of the rst post-Atlantean epoch. In the second epoch, the Persian, the goal was to carry thinking consciousness into the sphere of matter. Herein lies the secret of number, because numbers are the clearest thoughts structuring matter. The third epoch was that of Egypt and of the Old Testament, which pictures guilt and the Fall. Mankind for the rst time learned to suffer from personal errors. In previous times the human being could not get ill because of his own sins; spiritual guidance was still too close. But in the third epoch, the goal was alchemy, treatment to nd the right balance between oneself and the body. The fourth Greco-Roman epoch held as its secret the development of the threshold experience of death. The crisis in this fourth epoch was the experience of the end of ones individual existence. There was a huge fear of death and loss of identity. The Greek adage was It is better to be a beggar on earth that a king in the realm of shadows. Golgotha brought an appreciation that individual resurrection and awakening of ones individualized spirit after death is possible. This was a wonderful but difcult step of development in the last epoch.

In this, our fth epoch which we have just begun, it is obvious that we have to learn how to individualize by struggling with the evil in us and around usprimarily in us. As long as we think evil is only around us, we have not struggled with the goal of this epoch. Only if we take the bitter pill of acknowledging evil inside ourselves can we become a small Goethe who confesses that he has discovered all the small evils in himself. In our time the individual is brought onto the individual path of initiation. All previous paths required priests. Self-initiation happens when we wake up the inner initiator of the higher self within our lower self. This can only happen when we can accept the evil power in our own nature. Then we learn to transform the evil within the self. What is evil from an esoteric point of view? It is a good thing in the wrong place, or the wrong time. There is nothing inherently evil. But due to the development of freedom, due to the different speeds at which things have been allowed to happen, good things could happen at the wrong time in the wrong place. We carry this potential of evil within ourselves, as well. During the sixth epoch we will come through self-initiation to the ability to master the secret of the word. Then words will transport what we really want to say, will work magic, will build communities, and will become trust-inaugurating entities. The seventh epoch, the so-called American epoch, is the last step of individualization. We can hold the image of death on the cross as divine powerlessness. Not to misuse the wisdom we have gained will be the new task. We need to overcome group spirits. The nal step is to meet God as an individual. Rudolf Steiner had a phrase for this, which means delightfulness of God or Gods delightedness. It must be extremely delightful for God to meet his newly individualized entities after they have come through their transformation and purication.

The Developing Child: Lecture One

Johanna Steegmans, MD
There is a story of Rudolf Steiner visiting a fth grade geometric drawing class. The teacher had given the class the task of drawing gures for love and hate. Steiner had walked around the class, looking at what the children had drawn. He came to a girl who obviously did not know what to draw; he himself drew a gure in her book. It is the Mercury staff, the picture of the heart, of the etheric. At the bottom is a curve, which is a picture of the body. In the center is the crossing (St. Andrews cross) where two individualities come together. In the spirit are two separate individualities. Embracing this story, Dr. Helmut von Kgelgen, who was such a friend and supporter to our work with young children, thought this would be an appropriate symbol for the kindergarten movement. We all stand under the sign of love. The pictures and imaginations of the child through Anthroposophy unite us, as all care for and about young children in this love. This talk continues the theme shared in this same auditorium in 1996 when this sign for love was placed in symbolic blessing over our work. Then I spoke of the germ of a physical body as it passes through the planetary spheres on the way to incarnation. In the earlier address I wanted to say, Love the children. The message has changed. Love, per se, belongs to a different cultural epoch. Now we have to love understanding what we see. The childs development in the rst seven years is an immense undertaking, his journeying into life a most courageous deed. The child completely surrenders himself to this planet to fashion a new body in its new incarnation. In todays talk we will look at the very beginning of life when the human soul-spirit has entered a living body and opens all the windows and doors to the new world, in order to fashion the second body.1 This second body is fashioned out of interchange with the people and experiences that surround the child during this time. The child needs other human beings to help him fashion the body. In order to become human, the child needs upright humans as imitative models around him. The doors and windows to the worldthe sensesare openings to elds of experience; and only as much as these elds of experience are matured and opened will the world open up to the child. If the senses are allowed to mature, are nurtured and nourished, the childs world will be large. If they are not cared for in the right ways, the child will be thwarted. We now have a wave of children who are under the umbrella of autistic spectrum disorder. As we understand how the child takes hold of the body through the senses, we can better understand this autistic phenomenon. Even adults can be tortured by being overwhelmed in our sensory life. Too much white noise, light, and unexpected sound, for instance, can tax us, especially when we are tired. This can serve as an exercise in understanding what it is like for the child to be completely exposed to noise and not be able to move away from it. The little child receives what is given through the senses without any ltering. The child selessly receives the information of the world around her. In the Curative Education course (published as Education for Special Needs), Rudolf Steiner speaks of how the ego of the

The rst body is inherited from the parents according to the blueprint of the spirit germ. Once upon earth, the childs spirit works to individualize the physical body so it is a tting home through which the child can fulll his destiny.

incarnating being, the feeling body, dives into the world and meets it immediately and directly. He calls this meeting of spirit and soul, of the I and astral body respectively, a magical occurrence. When we move into the world via the senses, it is this type of magical experience of the world. Much has been said about the lower2 sensestouch, vital/life sense, self-movement, and balance and how these so-called lower senses are foundations for development of higher senses. Touch has to do with whole surface of the human being. While the sensors of touch lie on the surface of the body in the skin, the sensation becomes internalized and becomes a deep feeling of trust, conrming that the person exists. If the sense of touch is not internalized, nourished rightly, or enabled to mature properly, the child will not have a feeling that the body is his house in which he can joyfully live because he trusts that the body will carry him. Of this and the other lower senses we should remain unconscious. If awareness rises to consciousness, we show disordered behavior. Children who do not like socks or fuss about seams in clothes are too aware of touch. When we empathetically feel into the childs sensory experience, we realize how open and vulnerable she is when she is born into the world. Of this vulnerability we are unconscious when we lie in the protective, embracing arms of our parents. Being conscious of this vulnerability and sensitivity is very painful. Think of the child who, when born, screams for hours. When we empathically listen to the childs screaming, we get an inkling that there is something conscious that should be unconscious. Dr. Judith Bluestone3 works with children in the autistic spectrum. She suffers from autism herself. She is able to tell from the inside out how this feels. She describes that this vulnerability, this soul soreness, meets the world unprotected. If the vulnerable child meets the world unprotected in the rst years of life, we can imagine what we will see in the children in our kindergartens. This vulnerability is not only to clothes and other physical touch sensations but also to encounters with another human being, a more subtle form of touch. The child lashes out when he feels too vulnerable. A child suddenly lashing out at another is now called impulse control disorder. We only feel safe when deep down we know where we come from and feel in connection to our source. Touch is the vital sense that allows us to be in the world and feel this safety. The vital or life sense gives a different experience. This has to do with all the surfaces of our inner organs. It is a sense that is active all the time but only becomes conscious when one or another vital organ is giving a signalsuch as feeling hungry, wet, tired, or when experiencing some kind of discomfort. Then the vital sense says, Do something. This sense has to do with the uid life of our organs and rays a sense of comfort to the soul. One not only feels safe, but likes to be in the body because it feels good. In these two senses, those of touch and of life, are little buds, like germinal points of the future senses of Ego and Thought. If the child feels safe in the body, feels her I am, then she is open to meet the other human being. In touch lies the possibility of recognizing another person as a distinct individuality. If we feel comfortable in our body through the life sense, we can meet another person in thought and understand even if there are language difculties. Imagine that your life sense is acting up. You
2

will not nd the inner space of calm to meet the other in the space of her thought. So with children whose life sense has not been nourished, has not matured properly, we nd often that they dont seem to hear. The sense organ of hearing is healthy and functioning as it should, but these children cannot meet us in the realm of thought. The next of these lower senses which help us take hold of our body is the sense of our own movement. Movement is a miracle. We do not just ex one muscle and extend another and then move. Movement involves the whole body as a cooperative unity. When I move my toes, the rest of the body cooperates so that the toe can move. All muscles are active in any movement. The resting muscle has to be active in holding still to allow the other to move. This movement body has to do with the sense of muscle tone. I get information on where the body is in space all the time. This is different from touch, which tells me that I exist. The sense of self-movement, which comes through the joints and muscles, gives information about how the body is arranged in space. The senses of balance and self-movement have to work closely together. Muscle tone, which my I perceives from inside, involves the sense of self-movement. Posture in space is perceived by the sense of balance. The sensory organ for balance is the three semi-circular canals in the inner ear. These senses are miracles, tools for the child coming out of the great space, the great time into a small space and measured time. These are tools to connect us to this world where we can experience our incarnating goal of this epoch, which is to individualize. When we look at the world of individualization and autism, we see that autism is an individualization process gone wrong. Autism means to be thrown back on oneself. Individual means that I become myself. The physician who named autism was actually quite inspired in seeing that the autistic person is thrown back on himself. Judith Bluestone describes the intense loneliness in being cut off from the world by autism. Only humans can experience loneliness and then meet the other again and form the gure of love in freedom, as pictured by the symbol of love mentioned at the opening of this talk. The autistic person is helplessly thrown into meeting the other through vulnerable senses. He or she does not experience the social healing and comfort that comes from meeting the other under the sign of love. One aspect of the autistic spectrum is that social weaving between the autistic person and the other cannot happen properly. The four deeply body-related senses that we have been considering are the foundation for a free interchange with others in the soul realm. If these basic senses are not healthy, if we are not comfortable in this body, are not free human beings in movement, cannot feel our position in space, then it is very difcult to establish a human relationship that is trusting. The child is one big body of complete trust, one open being of surrender. Without complete trust, the child cannot imitate us, meet us through imitation. According to a denition suggested by Margret Meyercort, empathy is a owing out of oneself and meeting the other. At birth the spiritual beings let go and allow a soul-spirit to come into the world again, which can almost be too much to bear. But the baby is endowed by the spiritual world with reexes and a developmental unfolding that ensure the body will know what to do in the rst days and weeks of life. As development proceeds, there is always one moment, individual for each child, when she searches for the face of the mother. This event occurs through energies of the etheric-life body that are mostly in the service of growing the organs. But part of that organ-building force is still free to see the face of the mother. This is perhaps the rst step in coming toward social encounter with the other human being. The world sees so many children who are developmentally challenged or traumatized by life experience. How do humans have difcult experiences without being damaged? In an effort to answer this

The term lower does not mean lesser or inferior here. Steiner used this term to indicate that these four senses are essential for the healthy development of the other senses and form the foundation upon which all further sensory development depends. They can also be called the foundational senses. Dr. Judith Bluestone is the founder of the HANDLE Institute and its therapeutic approach to sensory integration and autism spectrum disorders.

question, studies on resiliency4 have been done in the last decades. One of the rst factors research identied in fostering resiliency is consistently seeing the face of one person for the rst six months of life. One loving, caring face is the essential element. After six to seven months, the father becomes part of this too. The loving face expresses the soul-spirit of the caregiver. This consistent, loving face helps the child remember what she knew in the spiritual world and evokes a memory of where the child has come from. In autistic disorder, this recognition often does not take place. A story was told of a student in a teacher training class, whom others experienced as a little odd. She nally told the group that she was not able to recognize faces but knew others only by their voice and hair. This created pain, insecurity, and isolation in not being able to recognize the face of another. Through the protection and healthy nurturing of the four lower sensestouch, vital/life sense, selfmovement, and balancecomes the foundation for a healthy sense of self. The individuality feels comfortable in the physical body and trusts that the body will house and shelter him in this incarnation. Through self-movement he learns the geography of his body, and balance gives him the experience of standing stably and securely on the earth. The face of the dependable, consistent care-giver in the rst half year of life reassures the child that the spiritual world he has come from and his new earthly life are connected and support him in coming to his fullest unfolding. Looking further at Steiners explanation of the twelve senses, we see there are other senses that have more relationship to the outer world. Of these, we shall focus on smell and hearing specically, because most of the time they are disordered in challenging behavioral syndromes. Through smell we are attacked by the outside world. We cannot close our nose as we can our eyes. The young child has an acute sense of smell. If the sense remains so sensitive, the world is a constant assault; so many smells go through a room. The sense of smell can evoke strong memories. The child may smell danger. Children with behavioral problems may suddenly start to scream, become aggressive, or refuse to enter a room. When we are exible and artistically moveable inwardly, then we realize that the child is fearful because something in the room smells shy. The child has no protection from the raw world of the senses; this sensory world is the only world the child knows. When we adults get tired, we are more sensitive and susceptible to the sensory experiences around us. We can lose it just like the sensitive child. This can give us a little reminder of what the little child is experiencing. The soul-spirit enters the world of physicality and light and warmth and music and movement in an immediate way. The senses we are endowed with were fashioned for a world with experiences we can digest. Our world of today constantly bombards us and is one where the vital, etheric forces of light and uid/chemical ethers are compromised. The child enters this world with the same sensory capacities that served human beings well two hundred years ago. The sensory systems are the same, but the force, speed and magnitude of stimulation have become overwhelming. When we talk about this with parents, as early childhood teachers or doctors, we do not have to be moralizing at all. We need only talk about the senses and imitationabout how all sensations and experiences are taken

inward from the world and then tried on, moved around inside. The parent can perceive the pain of what the child is experiencing. This objective description is a potent tool to help others want to protect the child from our modern sensory onslaught. The next sense to consider is hearing, a sense often impaired and compromised for the child with behavioral disorders. Imagine that, when you speak to hear your own voice, you cannot tune out any of the other noises around. Imagine further that your balance is insecure, so the experience of your body in space is not intact. Balance and hearing are closely related. If one is disordered, it often affects the other, and will result in a confused sense of hearing and orientation in space. We use sound to orient our body in space by perceiving its directionality. Imagine that you experience some sounds as distorted and loud, while others are jumbled. Our ability to speak depends upon hearing well and accurately. We must have a human model to help us learn to speak. If the sense of hearing is compromised, the human voice is like a radio station that has interference. The connection to the other human being is disrupted, perhaps even shattered. These interferences are painful and the child screams. The last sense to mention is sight. More and more children have difculty with their eyes. While each eye may see accurately, the pair does not track together to follow what the teacher writes or draws on the blackboard. Then the children are not able to perform the drawing in the lesson book. More children than ever have this problem. What has happened to make the world such an endangering place? The dive into the world through the senses, by the soul-spirit, is supposed to be magic and immediate. But now the experience gets stuck in the sense organ, and the sense organ becomes conscious of itself. Then the sense organ, which should only be a door to let in and out the elds of experience, becomes conscious in itself. This consciousness of our physical body is experienced as pain. Behaviors we see in the classroom that are a riddle to us are based on pain. Judith Bluestone says this pain comes from a stress that has been experienced either in utero, during birth, or within the rst three years of life. Is not the origin of all this dysfunction a state of fear? Rudolf Steiner spoke in Education for Special Needs in 1924 of the thin-skinned child who feels the world too consciously, too directly. Judith Bluestone describes the same gesture as I cannot do this. It is a shying away from the deed of incarnating into life. But we cannot shy away from the world, because coming into relationship with the world and other human beings is the task of incarnation. When we insist to the autistic-spectrum child that we have to do it, there comes an explosion of the screaming, moving restlessness; we see the expression of pain. We can do more to help the children who fall under this spectrum of autismmore and more is being placed under this descriptionby learning about the senses and what it means to incarnate. We can support these children to stay in our schools by developing the imagination of what it means to be a child in such circumstances.

The resiliency studies referred to in these lectures can be found in EducationHealth for Life, by Dr. Michaela Glckler, Stefan Langhammer, and Christof Wiechert, available from WECAN. This volume, published in connection with the 2006 Kolisko conference, was used as a companion volume for the 2008 WECAN/IASWECE early childhood conference.
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The Developing Child : Lecture Two

Johanna Steegmans, MD
Yesterday I described the many things that interfere with healthy development of the senses. Children are bombarded with overwhelming stimuli that they are expected to process and digest through sensory systems that are more attuned to the pace and ow of life two hundred years ago. To this situation can be added the challenge of media. I confess to having watched an hour of the pictures that come out of that magical box in my hotel room last night. If what the television shows is real, we are in serious trouble. The images can be so persuasive as to make us doubt our own values and capacities. Out of this doubt arises fear. Even if the children do not see television, they are surrounded by this inuence through those around them, such as their parents, who do watch. Those who watch become lled with doubt and fear, which subtly spills into the children, too. This inuence needs to be added to other challenges the children face with immunizations, toxicity, and so on. Media images are fabrications and untruths. Such things that do not carry truthful pictures work right into the etheric and undermine the sense of life. Without being dogmatic, we can ask our parents about how they feel when they watch television, how they feel when they carry these pictures into their sleep. If they can develop awareness of their own experiences, this can give insight into how the children are being affected. The strongest antidote to this state of doubt and insecurity is either true poetry or a lecture by Rudolf Steiner. In my own state of doubt and fear, I turned last night to the three lectures of The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity. In her address, Dr. Glckler brought to us how humanity is guided through the purposefulness and direction of the spiritual world. Today we apply this to the developing child. Renate Long-Breipohl will present the picture of development for the adult in the next lectures. Thinking back to the pictures of yesterday and autism spectrum disorder, many of us can recognize in ourselves moments when we are ourselves autistic, when we are utterly alone and isolated. We all have moments like this at some point, and this gives us some insight into the experience. We want to understand what the label of autistic spectrum disorder means and then get rid of it. In all of Rudolf Steiners lectures, he never labeled; he always described. The downfall of medicine today is that it has started to be content with the label, with pathology. Medicine has worked more and more with pathology, widening the gap between observation and what actually leads to therapy. All the tests and such have moved medicine further and further from the social encounter with the other human being, which is what leads to the intuition of what to do. To prepare for this encounter we have to study, not look to a book with all the labels and lists of methods to deal with the pathology. This is a danger creeping into even our Waldorf early childhood classes. Out of doubt and fear, we turn away from our intuition and the encounter with the child. We turn to books to tell us what to do. We need for the children to imprint upon us their need, which we can take into the night. Out of our helplessness and powerlessness, the answers can come. The answers may not come quickly. Some children are forerunners for others, making us ask questions now so answers may come for future children. This state of helplessness is one we have to allow in order to help the child who is asking us the question. In our search for answers, Education for Special Needs is an essential study. Some have said that we are not advanced enough to grasp these lectures content. But they touch on the mystery and magic of the relationship of soul-spirit with the structural physical body. We need to work with these ideas and make them our own.

Today we are looking at the young childs development in achieving uprightness, walking, speaking, and thinking. All these are under the guidance of the spiritual hierarchies and are gifts of the highest spiritual being, the Christ himself. But what does this actually mean? Imagine that we were born and were conscious of ourselves quickly, like animals. Remember that our earthly I is connected with our soul, living in sympathy and antipathy. Imagine that we would have to learn all our movements consciously; we would have to think of how to learn to walk. If we had to do this, we would never be able to. We only learn uprightness by giving ourselves over selessly to the powers who know. What do these powers who know do for us? They help the incarnating new human being, soul-spirit, give over selessly into the environment, ow into mother and father, trees and birds, the sun, and imitate it all. Everything that is around is touched and moved inside the child with the will through imitation. We could not do this consciously. To some of this we would have to say no, be antipathetic. We need to become totally lost in our experiences to let it enter into us. We need to be deeply unconsciously conscious. For example, if the mother is sad, she takes on a certain posture, which the child mimics. In doing so, the child experiences the feeling that the mother has inside. She lovingly imitates the feelings of the mother without having to feel them directly. The ability to be upright is made possible from conception, from the beginning. When we study embryology, we see the moment, a touching moment, where the human being and the animal separate in their development in form. In the embryo we can see a tiny stretching in the neck. The animal will continue to have a forward bow of the head and stay that way. Being able to stretch in the spinal column in an almost musical element of uprightness is there from the beginning. But after birth it has to be regained in earthly life. If a newborn is not surrounded by upright people the child can imitate, this will be lost, as was shown by children raised by wolves. The mightiness of being upright gives a feeling for why this is under the protection of the hierarchies. There is a stream going from above to below that slowly, in the course of one year, is practiced over and over again. The child practices in all positions, through the three planes of space. This rst year is a form of play that is very serious. When nally the child is upright and can walk where she wants, what a feeling of freedom has been accomplished! Once uprightness is achieved, the gestures of movement and posture become internalized in a way, and the larynx becomes the focal point. It has also been developing through the rst year in a different way, as the child vocalizes. In the rst year there is a universality of sound. Children everywhere practice with their instrument. Then it is important that the child hear others speak, to tune the instrument through the mother tongue. When we learn to speak, we build our environmenttrees, houses, what we seewe mirror it and reect it back out as the consonants. That which is within us in the feeling realm we sound in the vowels. The child practices more and more with his language, tasting the words without yet understanding them. Imagine that we would have to learn to speak by thinking about how to do it. We could not. In watching a child learn to speak, it is as though the whole world of speaking descends upon him as a whole, even with understanding. If we had to sequentially learn to speak, it would take us a whole life. We know how difcult it is to learn another language as an older person. A child is completely unself-conscious and allows language to be born into him. When the child has achieved uprightness and the ability to speak, he begins to make connections between one word and the other. He starts to see how things relate. Thinking is a completely new ability for the child and is felt in the body. When there is one concept clad in the word and another concept clad in the word, children make remarkable connections. Just before this happens, there is a moment of silence of experiencing uprightness and of holding something in both right and left. Suddenly the child grasps the connection. First the grasping and connecting experience has come

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through the body. Then it happens in the soul in thinking. This is a moment of delight for the family to experience how the little child discovers the world in concept and language. The young child is a physicist, a chemist, all in playful ways. He drops an object over and over from his high chair. This is a concept developed from a bodily experience of the physics of the world, not a thought-out concept. How confusing it is for a child to see a big red, plastic object that should be heavy but is light. This is actually a betrayal because it is untrue and deceptive. The material the child is working with needs to be real. Likewise, the words the child experiences need to be real and true. When we describe how the child learns of the world in this way, it is possible for parents to understand. The childs experience must come out of reality, not out of a stubborn, thought-out adult world. When people say that Waldorf education is not real enough, does not prepare the child for the real world, we can point out that this truthful education of what is truly real in the world begins in the kindergarten. We all know these things, but it is so helpful to remember them together. In relationship with the highest hierarchies under the guidance of the Christ, these capabilities are acquired during the childs early years. Then the human body, the human constitution, cannot hold this quantity of spirit presence any more. The hierarchies move into the background. This happens at about three years of age, and the child does not know what to do any more. It depends on the child as to how intense this will be and how long this will last. There is a feeling of emptiness. Then the I awakens to the experience of I am an I. Now the child enters the happiest time of childhood in a certain way. Children in the rst three years are matter-of-fact beings. They do what they must through imitation. Their religion is us, is the world. Then the time comes when they realize that there are others around them. Their reality becomes the world and other people. They go from being scientists to becoming play-ers. Everything around the child is alive or can be made alive through play. In the rst three years of a childs life, we have to be very strict with ourselves, with the environment, as a teacher and educator. We have to make sure the environment allows the proper unfolding through supporting imitation through truthfulness. Between three and ve, the children can forgive us more because the world becomes alive; and the child can make everything become alive. Even in situations where the child is surrounded by rubble, he can imagine a string or a toothpaste tube into something alive. This is the golden time of play. Adults have to get out of the way of the play at this time. Here it is important that we not clutter the social and emotional eld by asking too many questionsHow do you feel? What do you want? In the resiliency study1 mentioned yesterday, a second factor that fosters resiliency is that children are not given choices, in addition to having one consistent, loving face for the rst six months of life. There are many tired children who are exhausted by being given choices. The child needs to have its forces available for fantasy and imagination, not used for making choices. Even though we know this, it is a challenge for us not to offer subtle choices too. From ages ve to seven, this magic world of imagination recedes. The child feels for the rst time that there is a world without magic and he becomes bored. Now it is incredibly important to understand this in the right way. This expression of boredom really is a request for help in knowing how to use these freeing forces to support healthy development. Telling the child to go read a book or watch TV is an empty and disappointing answer. Imagine that these newly-freeing forces are xated with the untrue and trivial images seen on TV; what emptiness would ood the childs soul life. To help our parents understand this point, we can ask them how it feels to see TV compared to a puppet play.
1

Asking such questions is a powerful tool. We can then observe our own experiences as a means to understanding the childs needs for healthy development. It is a true statement that all we truly need to know for life we learn in kindergarten. The concept of doing that which is health-providing, salutogenesis,2 needs to permeate everything we do with the children. It is important for the child that what she sees and imitates in the environment is good and true. This is more important than that it be beautiful to our adult sensibilities. This is not a metaphor; this is a truth. We need to look at our environments, physically and socially, and see how we have penetrated our space. How do the adults meet each other? Are we able to experience that the other person is a spiritual being too? Our material, social, emotional, and spiritual environment needs to be penetrated by our understanding. This is Anthroposophy in practice. It is common sense, but a heightened common sense. Addendum: Dr. Steegmans answered some questions which came out of the previous days discussion groups. These questions and answers are appended below. Out of our discussion groups have come some questions. One asks what one can do with a child who is screaming. The attitude of the adult toward the child who is skinless and unprotected is the attitude of the archangel Raphael. He stands gently to the side, communicating that he knows the others pain. This is the rst gesture for the educator. Then as teachers we must feel Michael speaking, saying that he will help us to do what is needed. When a child falls down because he cannot handle the situation, if we do not have a better answer, we hold this gesture of knowing his pain, for that is also a doing something. This inner attitude is more powerful than knowing techniques of what to do. Biographies of those who were challenged children describe that this attitude within others was the most helpful of all as they struggled with their development. Another question asks why it is so important that in the rst six months of life for the baby sees only one loving, caring face. It takes ve to seven months for the reexes from birthgifts bestowed by the spiritual hierarchies which guide the body to know what to do, such as latch onto the nipple, suck, grasp, etc.to be integrated and transformed into higher-level developmental opportunities. The reexes have to be overcome to allow individualization to begin. Anchoring to one secure face allows space and time for maturation and integration of the reexes to happen. What is the signicance of the rst forty days after a childs birth? This is a spiritual time period. For the mother and baby to be protected for this time allows for the spiritual impulse for incarnation to settle in. There is a sheath around mother and child that needs to be protected. This sheath will slowly move into the child and enable harmonious rhythm of breathing to take place. Mothers actually feel this sheath and recognize it when it is described for them. As mothers are spared the distractions of our culture during this time, they can participate more consciously and deliberately in this process.

See footnote 4 in the previous lecture.

Salutogenesis can be understood as an approach through education that intends not merely to convey knowledge but to teach all that is worth knowing in a way that produces, promotes, and cultivates health (Education as Preventive Medicine, Dr. Michaela Glckler).

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The Developing Adult: Lecture One

Renate Long-Breipohl, PhD
Self-development is an ongoing task for everybody who is working with young children out of Rudolf Steiners indications. It is an ongoing theme in conferences, training courses, and recent publications.1 There are many different pathways into self-development. In this lecture we will begin with pictures of the incarnation process and the question of what is spiritually essential for working with young children. In a lecture by Rudolf Steiner on self-education in the light of Anthroposophy, which was recommended as preparatory reading for this conference, Steiner differentiates between selfeducation in the realm of thinking and self-education in the realm of the will.2 These paths of selfdevelopment are quite different. In educating ones thinking, one strives to develop the ability of clarity in the realm of ideas and ideals, the ability of discriminating between what is essential and what is not. Essentials can be of help in nding the big picture or strengthening it within us. The process of identifying these essentials is like nding signposts in the vast spiritual landscape of ideation. In educating ones will the situation is quite different. We place ourselves in the middle of life and are as open as possible to whatever comes. We try not to retreat from what surrounds us, but to accept what meets us as the challenges of life. In approaching the question of the essentials of early childhood education let us begin with four imaginations of incarnation, which will extend our thinking as far out as the Zodiac. Rudolf Steiner has encouraged us to do so, to look at these pictures of incarnation, if we want to educate children and especially, one may add, very young children. In Practical Advice to Teachers, he says The time is now that the human being must extract the essentials of education from the knowledge of the connection of the human being with the cosmos. The growing child experiences the continuation of happenings which have occurred in the supersensible world before birth.3 This is a very clear indication of our great task in early childhood education for this epoch. On the one hand, out of the cosmos, the Zodiac and the planets, come those forces which form the childs body in the womb and continue their formative activity all through the rst seven years. On the other hand, Rudolf Steiner indicates that there is a continuation of cosmic inuences, something like archetypal experiences shared by all children around the world. These archetypal experiences are called here essentials of childhood and they are connected to the spiritual qualities behind specic signs of the Zodiac. In particular, Steiner points to the signs of Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and Cancer, which he describes as powers behind incarnation. When we arrive in the world, the rst

four powers or impulses [meaning the rst four signs of the Zodiac] are already in us, though we only develop them afterwards.4 The younger the child, the closer he or she still is to these four principles or powers. Discovering the connection between the young child and the Zodiac is like an inner journey. Once on a trip to Thailand I was very moved when I accidentally discovered a wood carving depicting the Zodiac in the entrance area of an old house from Northern Thailand. It was the beginning of my journey into the realm of the Zodiac, which I had not explored very much before. On the tableau one sees a man and a woman sitting in the opening of a gateway. The man is lifting up a baby and hands it to the mother. Around this scene in circular arrangement are the twelve signs of the Zodiac. A second outer circle is formed by the twelve animal signs as known in the Chinese tradition, those which give the theme for each year in a set sequence. The special thing is that a being is sitting very upright on each of these outer animal signs. In the case of the signs of the dragon and the snake, the being holds them under control. Even though in Thai culture these beings would be seen as Devas, lower divine beings, one could also see them as images of the higher self of the human being overcoming or taming the animal

Self-development is an ongoing topic in the publications of WECAN. See Susan Howard, The Essentials of Waldorf Early Childhood Education in Gateways No. 51, 2006, pp. 6f, and articles relating to selfdevelopment in Gateways No. 54, 2008. Self-development is also addressed in the WECAN publications Mentoring in Waldorf Early Childhood Education (2007) and A Warm and Gentle Welcome (2008). Impressive is the number of training courses offered by various centers and by the Lifeways Movement in North America.
1 2

Rudolf Steiner, Self-Education in the Light of Spiritual Science, p. 18. Rudolf Steiner, Practical Advice to Teachers, Lecture 2, p. 37.
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Rudolf Steiner, Cosmosophy, Vol. 2, p. 78.

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forces still present within the human being. The outer circle could be understood as pointing to moral forces in the cosmos, beyond the Zodiac.5 Thus the family group in the center is surrounded by and part of the world of the stars and the world of morality. A second experience occurred at a kindergarten in New Zealand. The kindergarten room had a most unusual dolls house, an area without the usual draping, but with a specially decorated back wall. In accord with the Maori creation myth, the wall was decorated with a woven arch above which stars representing the Zodiac could be seen. In front of them grass stars were hung, representing the planets. Below there was a three-dimensional woven form similar to a lemniscate. Below this was a pedestal on which wooden gures were standing, depicting the ancestors. Then on the oor were the dolls with a special weaving behind their beds. What a wonderful picture of the human beings connection to the cosmos! The intellect does not help to nd this connection, but in the soul experience of feeling one can build a bridge to this realm. While the childs connection to the cosmos is a gift of heaven,6 adults have emancipated themselves from the connection with the cosmos. Building a relationship to the world of the stars does not come naturally anymore. The body has long been completed, the ties to the past are cut. In the act of thinking and in the performing of deeds the human being experiences to a certain degree a sense of freedom and independence. As Steiner puts it, Man has renounced the universe at the head end and at the limb end so that we are only wholly given up to the rhythm of the universe in so far as we are rhythmical human beings.7 We experience this, for example, whenever we endeavour to understand the spiritual forces in and around the child. When we consider the planets and the days of the week, we reach out into the cosmic rhythms related to the earth. We reach out and bring the I into contact with these rhythms. A further step is to embrace what comes from the region of the Zodiac and inuences the child in the rst seven years. This step is an act of conscious inner development. One becomes interested in the soul experience of the Zodiac oneself and in the practice of those virtues which are related to the signs of the Zodiac.8 The practice of the virtues which correspond with the rst four signs can become our effort as developing adults to attune ourselves to this realm of the cosmos and to the incarnation process of the child.

Images of Incarnation Aries in relation to the child: The ram looking back The image described by Steiner is the ram with his head turned back, a frequent form of depicting this zodiacal sign.9 Looking back also is one of the gestures of the young child, not as a conscious act but out of a kind of spiritual habit. Steiner speaks about the telephone connection which children still hold to the spiritual world.10 Living in the spiritual world has shaped their way of relating to human beings. From spiritual existence originates the childs ability to imitate and to live in total trust in the goodness of the world and those human beings surrounding the child. In many children we witness the acceptance of the spiritual reality behind birth and death as an unquestioned reality. We observe the ease with which children connect to worlds different than ours, how easily they slip into images depicting other worlds as offered in the fairy tales, and how naturally elements of long-gone cultures appear in their play. How can we as adults relate to this? What is the adults gesture of looking back? Aries in relation to the adult: The virtue of devotion As educators we have learned to meet with respect this connection of the child to the spiritual world as depicted in the image of the ram looking backwards. We respond with consciously striving to build our own individual relationship with the spiritual cosmos in becoming ever more aware that the spiritual realm is in and behind the things we see and do. In the presence of people who are open to the spiritual realm, the child will feel at home and will feel met with acceptance. If we want to accompany the child who still so easily traverses the border between worlds, we also need to offer an environment which facilitates incarnation into the earthly world, because it contains elements which still remind the child of his heavenly home. This does not mean prescribing the kind of cubby house or kind of dolls or soft toys, as this is only the outer appearance of something that is much less tangible. It lives in the inner mood of the teacher, which radiates out into the environment and shapes it. I would like to give an example from a recent experience. I was invited into a Steiner School to do the required appraisal of the teacher of the kindergarten. On the day of my visit the teacher and her assistant were working very hard. Lots of things were going on in the room. The assistant made the dough for the bread. The teacher set up a table for painting in small groups, calling new children from time to time and tidying up between children. She had to leave the painting table several times in order to redirect children whose play did not move smoothly or who requested assistance. Once painting was nished a task for the autumn festival was already waiting. All children were called to sit down a circle to decorate their little autumn tree with coloured beeswax. The teacher conducted herself with gentleness and love. One could see that she really was committed to her work and wanted the best for the children. Yet there was not a mood of devotion, because the teacher was stressed inwardly and the children responded with being unsettled. The teacher recognized the hectic schedule as the cause of her stress and was able to reduce and slow down her activities. At another visit to this room not long after I saw at least four groups of children busily creating landscapes on the oor and the teacher was sitting down close by with her

In Chinese consciousness, morality is seen as the highest principle, not only ruling the cosmos beyond the Zodiac but also demanding the highest moral qualities from each human being. Rudolf Steiner, Cosmosophy, p. 80. Ibid., p. 118.

Rudolf Steiner, Cosmosophy, p. 67. Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity, p. 9.

We received the gift of the descriptions of these spiritual virtues through the work of Madame Blavatsky. Her ndings were conrmed as spiritually correct by Steiner. In recent years there appeared a comprehensive study on working with these spiritual virtues, authored by Robert Sardello.

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work. It was calm; there was intense play. The teacher was able to be with the children rather than to control them. And in this being with there lived the virtue of devotionas openness to what happened, and as timelessness within intense activity. When we work in devotion, we work in a sacred space. It is our form of looking back, of relating to the spiritual world. Devotion is different from performing ones duty. One cannot rightly say that one is devoted to ones duty. For devotion requires that we feel ourselves as working in the face of the spiritual powers and toward the highest possibilities of the human being. This we can bring to the children as a mood. Creating a mood of devotion demands of us that we are able to let go of tight time schedules and a continuous succession of planned activities as well as an initiating or supervising role in these. When we are able to be less driven by a schedule and more open to the sacred quality of the work with the young child, then the children will sense that we also are looking back. Then we are working in the realm of devotion. Taurus in relation to the child: Movement and balance The image which Steiner describes for Taurus is the bull jumping sideways. This gesture expresses movement and balance at the same time. What better picture could be given for the young child! In moving the child nds himself in the new world, in space. In moving he learns about his body and its relationship to space and he learns what the body can do, the twists, the turns, the bends, the walking and running. In the practice of nding out about the forces behind movement and balance, the child has his rst experience of what it means to be on earth. There is a second aspect as well: inherent in movement is the gesture of going towards the future, the new. Young children are immensely curious about the world and eager to learn. They learn from the moment they wake until they go to sleep and areif healthyin movement for most of the time, a tremendous will activity. They experiment with the physical laws of movement and balance. When we work with children we use rhythm in speech and rhythmical movement to assist with mastering new movement patterns. We know how much the rhythmic movement in the morning circle or the rhythms of hand gesture games or nursery rhymes can help the child to incarnate into their bodies. There is a wonderful anecdote about this related by Maria Luisa Nesch:11 He had gotten to know the kindergarten and the teacher only recently, but he learned quickly that the teacher understood his language. He did not take any initiative in play himself. If he played with others, he could do that only in a role such as a wild animal or a monster. His fantasy was lled with characters of a virtual reality. The little knitted sheep which the teacher had made for him was brought back by him into the kindergarten, there was no room for it in his world. You are now my mummy and you must go and get me from the back there, because I am frozen into an ice block. He really stands there like an ice block, without any movement. Some children help me to carry him away. You have to bring me into a warm country, he said. But

this does not help. He hides in a cave (under a table), he obviously needs protection and quiet. Now something will come out he announces. But it is not a thawed child which appears, but another horrible monster. Many weeks later he comes back to the theme. Look, I am all frozen, he says. He stands there in a twisted position, even eyes and hair look as if affected by stiffness. This time the teacher takes him on her lap and starts to massage his arms and legs rmly while talking to him with humour. Also the ears, he says. (He had surgery because he did not hear well.) The teacher shakes him a little and he is content when she tells him that the frozenness now is owing out. He says it has to ow out from both his ears. Then the teacher takes him on her lap like a little parcel, kneels down herself and rocks him backward and forward. I am not a baby, he cries, but it sounds content. The teacher says that this is what one has to do if somebody was frozen. After a while the teacher lets him go with a little friendly smack. His face is now relaxed. This is working with the Taurus quality. It requires courage to try new ways. It also requires acceptance that not everything which one would wish for can be achieved. The child left the kindergarten shortly after this event so that the situation remained open-ended. But something had shifted. Taurus in relation to the adult: Balance becomes progress There is no recipe as to how one should live the virtue of balance. Finding balance in working with children is an act of attuning ones inner perception to what is needed for a child, inwardly and outwardly. One may have to leave behind familiar ideas, habits and conventions to experience inwardly how a situation wants to be moved. One will discover that there is a rhythm between the old and the new, that they both belong together and need to be moved to come to balance. Steiner describes this in respect to the relationship of the younger generation to the older generation. He speaks about three enemies of Waldorf education: set phrases, conventions, and set routines.12 For example, repeated sayings like gentle hands or inside voices can become set phrases in our kindergartens. While there is a place for repetition in early childhood, there are many situations where a new way of saying things may be needed and where the right word can be found from what we have seen just happening. Conventions are demonstrated when we do something that has lost its meaning but we still do it, because it has always been done like this. For example, this may be the case with lighting a candle. Unless we have reected on why we do it and are convinced of the relevance of lighting a candle in a particular situation, it is better not to light a candle. The children will feel it if the candle lighting has become a convention and they may react with misbehaving. In mentioning set routines in an early childhood context, we acknowledge, of course, that young children need routine. But routine needs to have a rhythmical quality, a slightly moving quality as well, so that there is the possibility of little variations. We would not break the rhythm of the day but we do allow activities to move slightly within the daily schedule, thus giving the schedule a living Taurus quality. The child is so eager to do both, going forward as well as looking back. How much can we tolerate the child trying something new? How do we work with staying in movement within ourselves so that
12

11

Maria Luisa Nesch, Spiel aus der Tiefe (Play from the Depths), pp. 87f. Translation of passage by Renate Long-Breipohl.

Rudolf Steiner, The Younger Generation, Lecture 4, p. 72.

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we do not become rigid? Becoming aware of the danger of stagnation in the set phrase, the convention, and the routine, one can take what is stabilizing and combine it with openness for what needs to be changed. Then there is not only balance but progress as well. Gemini in relation to the child: The I meets Self The image of Gemini is two-ness in oneness, the twins holding hands. Consciousness of self is possible only in the realm of matter, where there are borders around things and where beings are physically separated from one another. It is the greatest transition that the child has to make from the spiritual world to the physical world, the transition from being able to merge and live within other spiritual beings, to separation and individualization. It takes years for the child to go through this process. We know that the ability to imitate is a great helper in this transition, and we know of the crucial role that the educator plays in this process. From birth onwards there is two-ness: the adult and child holding hands, practically and metaphorically. The self of the child rests within the mother and caregiver who are the earthly helpers of spiritual powers. Then from around age three to the end of early childhood it is still the time of holding hands with mother/teacher/caregiver, but also of becoming aware of oneself as separate entity. When a child says I am Laura, or I dont want to, or I dont like my drawing, then the child has learned to look at herself in the gesture of I and self facing each other. In some children this individualization does not come about easily. There is a wonderful report about this process of discovering oneself as an I in a book by Virginia Axline, Dibs: In Search of Self.13 Axline writes about the rst session of play therapy with a ve-yearold boy: When we got into the playroom, Dibs walked slowly around, touching the materials, naming the items with the same questioning inection he had used on the rst visit to the other playroom. Sandbox? Easel? Chair? Paint? Car? Doll? Every item he touched, he named in that manner. Then he varies just a little. Is this a car? This is a car. Is this sand? This is sand. After he had completed the rst circuit of the room, I said, Yes. There are many different things in this room, arent there? And you have touched and named most of them. Thats right, he said, softly. I did not want to rush him. Give him time to look around. He stopped in the middle of the room. After a while I ask him, I say, Dibs! Would you like to take off your hat and coat? Thats right, he said. You take off your hat and coat, Dibs. You take off your hat. You take off your coat, Dibs. He made no motion to do anything about it. All right, I replied, Take off your mittens and your boots too, if you want to. Thats right, he said almost in a whisper. He stood there, plucking idly and restlessly at his coat sleeves. He began to whimper. He stood in front of me, hanging his head, whimpering. You would like to take them off, but you want me to help you? Is that it? I
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asked. Thats right, he said. There was a sob in his voice as he replied. (Then she helps him, mittens and boots on his request.) It is obvious that this child has not been able to form his own identity, that he speaks about himself in the third person as if he were an onlooker with no relationship to himself. In the therapeutic process he came to the discovery of himself as a human being who relates to himself as an I, as well as to the expression of feelings which are identied by him as his. Axline describes the twelfth session:14 He ran over to the table, got the nursing bottle, and went back to the sandbox. He lay down and sucked on the bottle like a small baby. He closed his eyes. When I was a baby, he said. Then he suddenly sat up. No, no, no he said and got quickly out of the sandbox. I am not a baby. I was never a baby. (He changes subject) Later: He got the nursing bottle, took it to the sink, relled it, tried to put the nipple on, but it was too slippery. Miss A. will do it for you, Dibs, he said. Miss A will not turn you down. She: You think Ill x it for you? Thats right, said Dibs. I know you will. He handed me the bottle.(She does it and returns the bottle to him.) He stood in front of me sucking on the bottle looking steadily at me. You do not call me stupid, he said. I say help, you help. I say I dont know, you know. I say I cant, you can. And how does that make you feel? I asked. Like that, he said. I feel. He looked at me steadily, seriously. (Then he goes to the sink and starts splashing water) Gemini in relation to the adult: Perseverance becomes faithfulness One can learn something about the virtue of perseverance through this story of a therapist who walked alongside the child, holding hands. She loves him in a form of objective devotion. She serves him (taking off mittens, helping with the bottle) even though she knows he could do it himself. She does not ask for actions of independence which he may be able to do but does not want to perform as yet. She follows his steps, she mirrors his actions and intentions out of the deep conviction that what the child harbors in the depth of his soul is valuable and that in due course he will bring forth his inner treasures. This is the virtue of perseverance and faithfulness: to take the place of self of the child at a time when he cannot do it for himself. Temporarily she becomes one of the twins. Today it is a well-known method of dealing with autistic children, that one mirrors what the child does in order to awaken the ability in the child of seeing himself. In the education of healthy children we too work with mirroring, but in this case the child is able to do the mirroring or imitating himself. He is able to actively accept the adult as his twin. Rudolf Steiner tells us that the benet for a child is all the greater the more he is able to live not in his own soul but in those within his environment.15 This ability to live in the soul of the people in his environment forms the basis for the childs experience of trust and belonging. The part of the adult in the forming of a relationship of trust and belonging is the virtue of faithfulness, faithfulness to what the child is not yet, but wants to become. We can do this by holding within us the picture of the childs higher self, which will lead him to his destiny. To take the other into oneself is the gesture of love.
Axline, pp. 126f. Rudolf Steiner, Education as a Social Problem, p. 13.

Virginia Axline, Dibs: In Search of Self, pp. 3334.

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In that we as teachers persevere in being a model for imitation by the children for as long as they need it, we help them to become individualized and independent when they are ready. It seems to be a contradiction that imitating should lead to freedom, but such is the way of the healthy development of the child and the way of the twins. Cancer in relation to the child: Enclosing, embodiment Of the sign of Cancer, Rudolf Steiner says, All the way to where we enclose ourselves, using the crab principle, we are head. This is the gift of heaven and we do not have to contribute.16 The essentials of incarnation contained in the rst four signs of the Zodiac are all linked to the process of bodily development, to growing down from the head. They relate to what is working in the child as the living etheric forces working downwards, enlivening and ne-tuning the physical body. The skull bones can be understood as an image of the hard shell of the crab, protecting the brain, the delicate organ of human thinking, the image of the cosmos. The crab principle is the building of a bodily house around the soul and spirit of the child. At age three, the child will act out in her play this fundamental need for enclosing, protecting. The child will build or seek out cubby houses and hiding places. The cubby is a wonderful image for the body house of the human I. Cancer in relation to the adult: Selessness becomes catharsis A most beautiful depiction of incarnation is the painting of the Sistine Madonna by Raphael, the Madonna who carries the child from the realm of the heavens towards earthly life, holding the child in the heart area and enclosing it with her veil. Infancy and childhood are times of being protected, nurtured, carried, embraced, and surrounded by human warmth. Being served, being nurtured and loved, create the necessary foundation for developing selessness later in life. Young children cannot yet be expected to be seless. They need the adult for the fullment of their needs and for the development of trust in the world. Selessness as a virtue cannot be demanded. One is either seless or one is not, otherwise the seless behaviour becomes pretence. There are reasons why a person may not be able to engage in acts of selessness, and these reasons need to come to the light, to be looked at and understood. The problem with early childhood education is that children are dependent on our selessness, outwardly and inwardly. They depend on our giving and our ability to freely decide not to pursue our own needs and wishes at a time when these collide with the needs of the child. It is one of the great illnesses of our time that more and more parents and teachers experience the foregoing of ones own needs, emotionally and physically, as very difcult or impossible. In wrestling with such inner stumbling blocks, mothering or teaching/caring can become a path of initiation. It opens up the potential of becoming a different, spiritually more aware person. It opens up a process of purication, of transformation of the egotistical gesture of the crab, the closing off, into inner openness and receptivity for the needs of others. Thus four essentials of incarnation are written in the signs of the Zodiac as archetypal processes in becoming a human being: the preserving of the connection to the spirit world whence the child comes, the childs desire to move forward and orient himself towards the future, the process of developing consciousness of self, and the childs need for embodiment, enclosing, enfolding.
16

The question is how we respond to these essentials. It was suggested here to practice the four virtues of devotion, balance, faithfulness, and selessness as a deepening of our pedagogical work in response to the essential spiritual needs of the young child. Thus we may take seriously the task given to us by Rudolf Steiner, to learn to feel ourselves more as part of the universe and to base our educational work on what is present in the spiritual cosmos as images and as powers for us to recognize and to help bring into earthly reality. Note: for complete references to works cited, please see the bibliography at the end of the second lecture on page 33.

Rudolf Steiner, Cosmosophy, p. 80.

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The Developing Adult: Lecture Two

Renate Long-Breipohl, PhD
Rudolf Steiner spoke about the Zodiac on many different occasions. He spoke about the Zodiac in relation to embryonic development, about the different qualities of the senses as related to the Zodiac, about the twelve philosophical outlooks on life, about the twelve moods of the Zodiac in relation to eurythmy, and many other topics.1 In our contemplation of the developing adult we will focus on insights from his lecture series on Cosmosophy, where Steiner gives a picture of the three human soul forces of thinking, feeling, and willing in relation to the Zodiac. In the rst lecture we have looked at the rst four signs, which are related to the process of incarnation, and we will now proceed to looking at the last four signs, which Rudolf Steiner relates to the will activity of the human being.2 When we look at our will life, our earthly endeavors, we have to turn to the images contained in the signs of Sagittarius, Aquarius, Pisces, and Capricorn. In order to approach our will life in respect to self-education, I would like rst to go back to the preparatory reading for this conference. Steiner speaks in the lecture on self-education about placing oneself in the middle of life with an openness to what life brings and with an attitude of gratitude and acceptance towards destiny. This attitude of openness is present in young children when they play without a concept or plan of what this play is going to be. The process is important, not the outcome. The child surrenders to the ow of play. In the same way should we stand in the middle of the stream of life, with openness to what comes towards us. We live in a time that has a tendency to one-sidedness, to regulations and restrictions, especially when it comes to educating children. There is the danger of dividing up education into specialist areas, of becoming fettered by guidelines and government regulations and accreditation requirements. There is the danger of educating by plan rather than through life and life activities. In the kindergarten work, a teacher may become trapped by having a strong preference for certain kinds of play and placing restrictions on others. A childs play may look unsettled to us but may not be from the childs point of experience. There is a danger of becoming imprisoned by ones own very good intentions even in such an area as taking actions in guiding play. In one of his many comments on the ailments of modern times, Steiner described the restrictions and one-sidedness of modern life, including the one-sidedness of modern materialistic thought life and the modern scientic approach to the understanding of the human being. In experiencing these restrictions and limits, there will arise, especially in children, something like a feeling of deprivation and longing. It is the feeling of being unable to get to the true human being. And this will lead to melancholy in children.3 We have seen this, children coming in as though they were carrying a heavy load, joyless, burdened, and tired.
1

One of the remedies for this situation is the experience of the working adult. If we take children into the stream of our will activity and if we are fully present in what we do, then the children are able to experience the adult as a complete human being. They nd what they are looking for. Through our activity we also build up a eld of warmth in which the child can nest himself and in which he can experience closeness to another human soul. The working context allows for a warm, activity-centered closeness, without burdening the child prematurely with emotional sentiment. Steiner speaks about what will happen if we take the children into our sphere of will activity: But this living interest, devotion, and sympathy will be there if at the right age we permeate all branches of our teaching and education with the principle of imitation. What is lacking is the power to enter into the spirit of nature, the spirit of the cosmos, into the universe as a mighty whole. This power must be regained.4 We return now to the big picture of the Zodiac and the four will signs of Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces. About these signs Steiner says something very interesting: they do not directly inuence our deeds. The picture he gives is of the human being standing on earth with the zodiacal signs from Aries to Scorpio in a semicircular arch above. But the signs from Sagittarius to Pisces have to be envisaged as if below our feet, going through the earth to the other side of the earth. The earth sphere thus separates the human being from these zodiacal signs. Their inuence therefore is only indirect and weaker and leaves us free for our will activity. Through the activity of the limbs we create something new independently; in the activity of the head, in thinking, the cosmic inuence is active.5 Steiner describes the qualities of Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces as related to archetypal forms of human activity. However, we do not see this archetypal form of human activity directly anymore in our time. We have to go back to older civilizations in order to discover these activities: hunting, animal breeding, tilling of the soil, and trading/travelling. To the stars down there on the opposite side, which are covered by the earth, human beings owe their existence as hunters (Archer), animal breeders (Goat), tillers of the soil walking across the eld carrying urns to water the elds (Water Carrier); and we are traders thanks to the part of the starry heavens that takes us across the seasin far distant times boats were built to look similar to sh, and two ships side by side that have sailed the seas in pursuit of trade are the symbol for trade. In the past, people really had a feeling for the way the human being is connected with the universe and the earth.6 Of course, over time there were added many more occupations to these, and no attempt should be made to try to bring them all into relation to these four archetypal activities. Steiner states that in having moved into the age of the shes, in which the modern industrialized civilisation was developed, the four honest occupations were somewhat modied. However, for the time of childhood, where the consciousness of the child does not yet correspond to our modern consciousness, it seems appropriate to turn to these archetypal activities in the kindergarten work.

References can be found in the following lecture series by Rudolf Steiner: The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution and Human and Cosmic Thought. For references regarding the Zodiac and eurythmy see Hedwig Erasmy, Cosmic and Human Evolution; for references to the senses see Gilbert Childs, 5+7=12 Senses.
4

Leo, Virgo, Libra, and Scorpio we will not treat in these lectures because they have very little to do with the little child. They have to do with us in how we unfold our relationship to other adults. The virtues related to these signs would be important for working from the realm of feeling with parents and in communities. Rudolf Steiner, Polarities in Human Evolution, Lecture 10.

Rudolf Steiner, The Roots of Education, p. 94. Rudolf Steiner, Cosmosophy, pp. 70f. Ibid., pp. 72f.

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Sagittarius: The archer, the hunter The image is a human gure with the upper part astride an animal, with the lower part animal himself. We know this gure as the centaur, a being which is half animal, half man. The centaur reminds us of the lower nature of the human being, which is as yet untransformed. The activity is, according to Steiner, hunting. I would like to add gathering as well, as it is a kind of hunting in the plant realm. Hunting and gathering are very early occupations, but they live on up to this day. Is the businessman not a hunter and gatherer? He searches out good markets, gathers in, resells. Look at the old merchants houses: goods were brought in, stacked up, sorted, registered and resold. In our days we have the phenomenon of bargain hunting! In respect to young children, the gathering of what the earth gives us and the nding of/hunting for treasures are important activities. We take children to places where such things can be found in nature. But we also see children inside gathering toys and piling them up. Hunting and gathering are part of childrens archetypal play. Some hunt for treasures, some for specic toys, and children may even snatch them from others. This is the unrened hunting gesture, and there is still much learning ahead for the child. As teachers and caregivers we can model hunting and gathering on the many walks and outings on which we take the children. We can practice interest in our surroundings, gratitude for what can be found, joy about the beauty and richness of the world. The gathering can also be cultivated in harvesting fruits and vegetables for preparing meals and preserving food. There is a great temptation in the hunter and gatherer to live his lower instincts, doing things for his own advantage. But this activity can also be honest and become ennobled. The virtue related to this sign is truthfulnesstruthfulness in conducting business; truthfulness in words, thoughts, and deeds. We do have cunning children who cheat and lie sometimes. What is this? A child deep down may not really want to cheat, but something is inuencing the child, taking over. Deeply within each child there is a great longing for experiencing truth through the deeds and words of the people around him. Children look for truthfulness in how we do things, for truthfulness in the materials we offer to the child, for truthfulness in how we think and speak. As adults we are asked to look at our unrened soul aspects and come to know ourselves. Truthfulness in this respect means that we do not delude ourselves as to the quality of our work, as to who we are, and as to our progress in spiritual learning.7 Capricorn: The goat-sh The image is the goat-sh. Steiner says about this sign that it is the only man-made-up hybrid that does not exist naturally. It is an expression for the activity of animal breeding, which culturally followed the stage of the hunters and gatherers.8

The goat-sh somehow looks like a mis-bred creature and can make one feel uncomfortable. It reminds us of the difcult aspects of animal breeding, of genetic engineering, cloning. Great risks are taken in this activity. The human being is changing nature on a very deep level and therefore needs to develop a great sense of responsibility and courage in going into unknown realms. For me animal breeding as an archetypal activity also has the purpose of developing the human qualities of caring, looking after another, providing comfort, and nursing the ones who are sick. It embraces the entire range of the caring/social professions. One of the positive aspect of breeding is that one has to provide care. This is an archetypal human gesture intrinsically connected with the breeding of animals. One could say that the caring professions are derived from the animal breeders. Education belongs here as well. Breeding can be for the good or the bad. For example, we can try to model children to suit our own intentions, or we can facilitate childrens development without trying to predetermine the outcome. There are children who already at a young age are involved in acts of caring and also act out caring for others in their play. There is an archetypal quality to role play such as mother and baby or nursing sick people. I like to quote a description by Maria Luisa Nesch which describes such a play situation and shows how she modelled caring for others by participating. Nine children play together, the teacher is sitting close by, sewing. Three girls live in a house made from cloths. One is cooking and distributes coffee and soup. One is shopping. This girl buys so many things that the house becomes very full and at last there is no room left to be in the house. This girl is ceaselessly busy. She has two hunting dogs, two boys who wanted to play as well, but did not dare to offer themselves as father or children. These dogs soon became ill, one of them seriously. One dogs paws were limp; the other dog had a broken leg. The owner remained detached in the face of this suffering, still shopping busily. You can look after them, she said. Then the teacher started to nurse the sick animals, put cream on their limbs and bandages. More and more animals came, all very ill. Some died and the teacher covered them with a cloth. But luckily new puppies came forth from under the cloths. The dog owner now quickly became a little kitten herself, newly born. The kitten was blind and roamed about for a long time. Then the blind kitten came very close to the teacher who had resumed the sewing. The kitten wanted to sleep very close by. The kitten slept very restlessly and needed to be caressed and calmed down again and again.9 One may question whether it is appropriate for a teacher to become so involved in the play of the children. If one decides to do so, it must be for a good reason. In this example the need of the children for special loving attention and care was expressed through the play. Nesch had sensed that behind the rough outer faade there was a needy child. It is individual moral intuition which guides such actions and determines the way we act for the sake of a child or group of children.

I would like to express gratitude for the work of Robert Sardello on the practice of the virtues in the selfdevelopment of adults. In The Power of Soul, Sardello provides a wealth of wisdom related to the deeper understanding of the human soul.
9

Steiner, Cosmosophy, p. 74.

Maria Luisa Nesch, Spiel aus der Tiefe (Play from the Depths), p. 73. Translation of passage by Renate LongBreipohl.

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The virtue related to this sign is courage, not in the sense of bravery or heroism, but in the sense of accepting mistakes, accepting the truth even if it hurts, enduring blows of destiny, and never giving up being active. Courage is the determination not to go backwards or drop out, but rather to stay engaged even if the situation is difcult. In education this courage to go forward and learn from mistakes is important for the teacher, as children at times stagnate in development or even seem to go backwards. There is much opportunity in kindergarten work for practicing courage. Often the nearly overwhelming amount of selessness required in educating young children makes it hard to keep going. But it is an experience in all caring professions. The inner strength to keep going is the practice of the virtue of courage. Aquarius: The water carrier In respect to the image and activity of this sign, Rudolf Steiner says: Agriculture is represented by the Water Carrier. There is a certain spiritual justication for thinking in terms of water, but what matters is the way he walks across the eld. He holds an urn in each hand and pours water from these. This is the gardener and the tiller of the soil.10 Cultivating the land is will activity. In our time we have discovered the importance of taking care of the land. Todays environmental movement is about taking care and responsibility for the well-being of the earth. With the image of the water carrier one may think about the nurturing of the etheric forces of human beings and of nature. In early childhood it will be the teacher gardening at outside play time, watering the plants, digging the soil, weeding and planting, often with the participation of some children. I remember a strongly-built boy in my kindergarten group whose grandfather ran a nursery for bulbs. I remember how on the occasion of a home visit this child took me into the nursery garden and proudly and precisely explained to me the working of the watering system. He was totally at home there, and the grandfather had been the model of the gardener for him. It had gone deeply into the body of this child. When we watered plants in the kindergarten, he was there immediately. Watering was not a chore for him; it was in his blood, a natural activity. In relation to other activities or in his entire ductus, this boy was phlegmatic, and it was difcult to motivate him to anything which demanded effort. This was a lesson for me of how deeply the work of the adult sinks into the unconscious, bodily responses of the child and how this slipping into the adult through imitation brings about an intensity of will activity, which we may not reach through activities of an instructional nature. If we are looking at the virtue as our spiritual response to this star sign, we come to the virtue of silence and discretion, the virtue of pausing, observing, waiting, and then making a wise judgement. Out of the space of silence, out of the space of discernment, the right decision can be found for what is needed.11 Is it not the gardener who knows about the value of waiting, of not pulling out a plant immediately, and who through this waiting improves his ability to make the right judgment about what his plants need?

Kindergarten teachers and caregivers are well advised to do the same, not stepping in too quickly in a conict situation, not reacting too quickly when a child has done something wrong. Rather one could step back for a brief moment of inner silence and then act from a space where ones own emotional reaction does not blur the recognition of what has happened. We need this approach of waiting so we do not fall into a supercial educational activism. The practice of silence and discernment will develop into the practice of meditation. Looking quietly at a leaf becomes part of a spiritual understanding of all that is behind the happenings in nature. If we are in the space of silence and discernment, we will be better equipped to calm down a noisy, restless group of children. To become still in the middle of chaos is a challenge for the adult. When we can do this, children can more easily nd their way to connect with us, because they feel our effort to understand. Pisces: The shes Steiner explained the sign of the shes as being the image of two boats sailing together across the sea. It is a big picture. It conveys a mood of making ones soul wide open to the world, embracing not only what is close by but also what is out there. The activity: We are traders thanks to the part of the starry heavens that takes us across the seas.12 Traders are travellers, they roam the world. They are also adventurers and risk takers. Risks are always there when we widen our eld of activity. In the image of Pisces it is not so much the trading aspect that concerns us, but the travelling as an activity of widening our consciousness. Young people travel a lot these days. We are, after all, in the age of Pisces. On the level of the child, we nd that they are very much drawn to the activity of travelling. It is a favorite play for many children, and it appears in many variations: creating means of transportation, travelling in various kinds of vehicles, including boats, trains, airplanes and rockets, trucks, cranes, and front end loaders. Here is an example from children in a Steiner early childhood center in Bangkok: A group of six boys had turned a table upside down, attached cords to it and pulled the table across the oor as a carriage. They experienced difculties as the table top caused resistance on the oor and as the carriage was heavy with at least one child sitting in it to be pulled along. They managed to get a blanket underneath, so that the carriage was easier to push. After many rides of children, the carriage became a car, pushed along by one child. The car was stopped by a child taking the role of parking lot guard with a whistle, waving the car professionally into a parking slot. The child imitated this perfectly. In another part of the room an upside-down table became a removal truck and was loaded with big furniture: three freestanding shelves used to hold toys were loaded and other smaller things. The load was secured with lots of ropes. Next to the truck three girls had set up a food shop. As the truck started moving, the shop was in danger, so the shopkeepers packed up very quickly and moved to a big table further away. The shop was re-established on top of the table, but then moved again under the table, where it stayed until the end of playtime. There was no complaint by these children of having been disturbed in their play by the removal truck.
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10

Steiner, Cosmosophy, p. 75.

Steiner, Cosmosophy, p. 72.

11

Robert Sardello has pointed to the special connection between silence and discernment. See The Power of Soul, p.181.

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The virtue related to Pisces is magnanimity. Steiner describes it as moving beyond ourselves out into the world. It includes going beyond ones personal wishes, feelings, and attachments. The child needs to experience that adults can open their souls wide and embrace them, their parents, and the school community. Steiner suggested that we read the news and hold events inwardly, even if they are difcult and painful. The practice of magnanimity, of the wide-open heart, will increase our ability to love. Rudolf Steiner speaks about not passing by our fellow human beings without bothering to know them.13 Love cannot be demanded or forced, either by oneself or by others. It has to grow and be given freely. But magnanimity and developing interest for other human beings can be practiced by will for the sake of our fellow human beings. This completes the picture of the four spiritual virtues of our will: truthfulness, courage, discretion, and magnanimity. They all have in common the gesture of inner openness. Openness to the spiritual world is part of the gesture of Aries, of the practice of devotion in the face of the spiritual world. Openness and magnanimity is the beginning of the practice of love in the face of the needs of the earth. Aries and Pisces: these two belong together as the beginning and ending of the journey through landscapes of the thinking-feeling soul and the working elds of the will. I remember the 1997 Australian Steiner early childhood conference in Adelaide. As it came to an end, we were introduced to a farewell song. I would like to close with the words of this song, because it expresses the image and virtue of Pisces so beautifully. My love, the sea is calling and I must leave you now. Blessed are those who cast their nets upon the sea, Blessed are those who cast their nets. My love, the sea is calling and I must leave you now. We are the ones who cast their nets upon the sea, We are the ones who cast their nets. (Source unknown)

References

Note: The numbers given to Rudolf Steiners works in the complete German edition (Gesamtausgabe, or GA) are included for reference. Axline, Virginia. Dibs: In Search of Self (New York: Penguin Books,1986). Childs, Gilbert. 5+7=12 Senses: Rudolf Steiners Contribution to the Psychology of Perception (UK: Fire Tree Press, 1996). Erasmy, Hedwig. Cosmic and Human Evolution (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 2003). Nesch, Maria Luisa. Spiel aus der Tiefe. Von der Fhigkeit der Kinder sich gesund zu spielen (Schaffhausen, Switzerland: K2 Publisher, 2004). Sardello, Robert. The Power of Soul (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2002). Steiner, Rudolf. Cosmosophy, Volume 2, GA 208 (Mooroka, Australia: Completion Press, 1997). . Education as a Social Problem, GA 296 (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1984). . Human and Cosmic Thought, GA 151 (UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1991). . The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution, GA 212 (Anthroposophic Press, no year given). . Practical Advice to Teachers, GA 294 (UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1976). . Polarities in Human Evolution, GA 197 (UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1987). . The Roots of Education, GA 309 (UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1982). . Self Education in the Light of Anthroposophy, GA 61; lecture given on March 14, 1912 (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1995). . The Younger Generation, GA 217 (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1967).

13

Steiner, Polarities in Human Evolution, p. 183.

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Biographical Notes on the Lecturers

Michaela Glckler, MD, Dornach, Switzerland, is the leader of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum in Dornach. A former pediatrician and school doctor, she is actively involved with the Waldorf school movement worldwide as a lecturer and is the author of many books on child development. Johanna Steegmans, MD, Seattle, USA, is an anthroposophical medical doctor with a special interest in early childhood development. She is active in Waldorf early childhood teacher training at the Sound Circle Center in Seattle, and lectures and offers courses throughout North America and internationally. Renate Long-Breipohl, PhD, Sydney, Australia, holds a doctorate in theology and a bachelors degree in early childhood education. Before migrating to Australia in 1985 she lectured on early childhood in Germany. In Australia she taught kindergarten for ten years; in 1997 she moved to Sydney to take up a position at Parsifal College as director of the Waldorf early childhood courses. She lectures widely and has taught, mentored, and coordinated Waldorf training courses in New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Thailand. She is a member of the Council of the International Association for Steiner/Waldorf Early Childhood Education and a member of its Working Group on Early Childhood Training.

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