Soul Economy: Body, Soul, and Spirit in Waldorf Education (CW 303) (Volume 12)

by Rudolf Steiner

16 lectures, Dornach, Dec. 23, 1921-Jan. 5, 1922 (CW 303) Today’s schools fill children’s heads with information instead of helping them develop their natural human faculties and capacities. They place too much stress on memory, leading to inner exhaustion instead of real learning for a healthy, fulfilling life. The important lectures in this volume were given in Dornach, Switzerland, to leading educators, including many from England. As a result, he was invited to Oxford to expand on some ot the themes presented in these talks. Steiner begins by placing Anthroposophy as the foundation for understanding the principles behind Waldorf education. In what follows, he describes an education based on the human as a continually developing being of body, soul, and spirit. From this perspective, Waldorf education depends on the teacher’s ability to observe and respond to each stage of a child’s development. Steiner shows how Waldorf education emphasizes the efficient use of children’s inner energies and how children can be nurtured through their natural stages of development by giving them just what they need at the right time―an approach that Steiner calls “soul economy.” These detailed and accessible lectures give parents and teachers the keys to a much-needed renewal of education for our children and their future. German Erziehung und Unterricht aus Menschenwesens. Eine Einführung in die anthroposophische Pädagogik und Didaktik. Weihnachtskurs für Lehrer (GA 303).

Genres: Education

384 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2003

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.