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Handwork & Intellectual Development, page 3

For example, a well-known psychology teacher at a major university in Florida said, “It’s a source of amazement to me how many students can’t link ideas together; they can’t follow one idea logically with another...”[1]

             To knit properly, the child must count the number of stitches and the number of rows.  By using different colors and different row lengths (as in the pattern of an four-legged animal) the teacher encourages not only attentiveness to numbers, but also flexibility in thinking.  As children learn more arithmetic, teachers can devise patterns that call for two rows of blue followed by four rows of yellow followed by six rows of blue, etc.  In this way numerical skills are reinforced in a challenging, yet enjoyable manner.  Nor should we underestimate the self-esteem and joy that arises in the child as the result of a skill that has been learned.

             Years before the first Waldorf school was founded, Rudolf Steiner and some of his associates had provided educational courses for the workers of the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Factory in Stuttgart.  One of the aims of the courses was to provide each worker with a sense of how the work he did on the assembly line fit into the “big picture” of the whole factory, how that factory fit into the bigger picture of the conveyance of cigarettes from place to place, and how that movement of goods fit into the currents of international commerce.  Waldorf schools arose so that the factory workers’ children could experience the same feeling of being part of a process, which is in turn one of a multiplicity of processes that “make the world go round.”  When describing some of the qualities that were essential in a Waldorf school, Steiner stressed an active interest in working with one’s hands: 

      ..Anthroposophy itself is not to be taught in a Waldorf school. 

       What matters is that its teaching should not become mere theoretical knowledge, or a world outlook based on certain ideas, but it should become a way of life, involving the entire human being.  If therefore a teacher who is an anthroposophist enters school, he must have so worked upon himself that he has become a many-sided and skillful person, someone who has developed the art of education.  And it is this latter achievement which is important, but never a wish to bring anthroposophical content to pupils.

        Waldorf Education is meant to be pragmatic.  The Waldorf school is meant to be a place where anthroposophical knowledge can find practical application.  And if one has made such a world outlook — so linked to practical life — one’s own, one will not turn into a theorizer who is alienated from life, but into a skilled, capable person.  By this I do not mean to assert that all members of the anthroposophical movement have actually reached these aims.  Far from it!  I happen to know that there are still some men among our members who are not even capable of sewing on a trouser button which may have dropped off.  And no one suffering from such a shortcoming could be considered a full human being...

     Whoever has to deal with theoretical work ought to stand in practical life even more firmly than people who happen to be tailors, cobblers or engineers.  In my opinion, any passing on of theoretical knowledge is acceptable only if the person concerned is also well versed in all practical matters of life, for otherwise his ideas will remain alienated from life...[2]

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