CHILD DEVELOPMENT
‘We shouldn’t
ask “What does a person need to be able to do
in order to fit into the existing social order today?”
Instead we should ask “what lives in each human
being and what can be developed in him or her?”
Rudolf Steiner
STEINER’S THEORY OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Steiner Education is designed to enhance, enrich and
support the developmental phases of childhood.
Dr. Steiner referred particularly to three essential
phases – each of approximately seven years duration.
In each of these phases, different faculties are coming
to birth, different growth forces are operating and
the child learns in correspondingly different ways.
To provide meaningful support for the child in the journey
from infancy to adulthood, curriculum and methodology
must be based on a deep comprehension of these phases.
It is of the greatest importance that each stage is
experienced fully and not cut short – the aim
of our education is to help children develop strengths
for a lifetime. Thus, the uniqueness of the Steiner
system lies not so much in what is taught but in how
and when.
EARLY CHILDHOOD (0-7)
The first six or seven years are of vital importance
to a child. Tremendous life forces are evident in this
period and the experiences a child has in these years
can be said to pre-condition the bodily, mental and
moral life in the adult years.
In this phase, and at a very rapid pace, children master
the skills of movement, speech, gesture, verbal and
non-verbal communication, uprightness and many others.
Most of this is learnt through IMITATION – the
young child mimics everything – from physical
movements through to attitudes and values. The child
at this age has an intuitive sense for GOODNESS and
REVERENCE and the environment surrounding the child
needs to honour and reflect this. There are strong will
forces at work during this period and the children learn
naturally through “DOING” – it is
the life of action and of will that predominates at
this time and if supported will lay the basis for a
healthy will in adulthood.
THE HEART OF CHILDHOOD (7-14)
This phase is the bridge between infancy and adolescence
and is characterized by the development within the child
of a vivid life of imagination – the beginning
of an inwardizing of experience which if fostered will
become the basis for conscious personal experience in
adult life.
The child in this period lives strongly in a world
of pictures – those that are presented to them
and those which they form themselves. In this phase,
if supported to do so, children naturally think poetically,
in imagery – their thinking is a feeling-thinking
rather that the analytical abstract thinking which comes
later. If they are allowed the time and the space to
live into the pictures and the imaginative experiences
presented to them, they will carry with them into adult
life, vivid and strong powers of imagination and will
be capable of inspired insights.
The life of Feeling predominates at this time and a
sense for BEAUTY. As the child moves through the phase,
the faculty for more conscious and consecutive thought
emerges but the pictorial world of the imagination remains
the child’s most precious asset.
ADOLESCENCE (14-21)
With puberty, children enter into the third phase of
their development. This phase is characterized by a
wish to make one’s life one’s own.
The adolescent begins to discover him/herself in the
world of ideas. Ideas are to be enjoyed, explored, argued
and absorbed. A personal search for TRUTH emerges as
does a new questioning – of themselves, parents,
teachers, values, philosophies, society to name a few.
This phase can be characterized by a life of THINKING,
crucial for the cultivation of good judgment, discernment
and clarity of thought.
Associated with this comes a healthy and valuable idealism
which, if not nurtured, can quickly descend into cynicism
and, combined with the extreme sensitivity of this age-group
can make for great vulnerability. Young people at this
time are looking for role models and need to be surrounded
by positive, compassionate adults who hold up a mirror
showing all that a human being can become and can achieve.
‘Those human beings
who have not learnt to work in the ways of beauty and
through beauty to capture truth, will never come to
the full humanity needed to meet the challenges of life’
Rudolf Steiner
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