Philosophical Foundations

Instruction and education must not proceed from applied knowledge but rather from a living abundance. With this abundance the teacher deals with the children as though she were an instrument enabling the world itself to speak to the child. Then there will be an inherent life-stimulating quality to the instruction and not mere external pedantry.

The task of the teacher is not to mold the mind but to enable it to grow to new dimensions, perhaps beyond the teacher’s own reach. This is how the teacher serves the present for the future.

Pedagogy must not be a science: it must be an art, but the feelings in which we must live ordered to practice that great art of life, the art of education, are only kindled by contemplation of the great universe and its relationship with humanity.

Through imitation in the pre-school years: a feeling for the freedom and integrity of other people arises; through authority in the primary and middle school years: a feeling of security in life, and with that the ability to participate in democratic cooperationarises; through close, unauthoritative human contact with instructors during the process of learning in the teenage years: a deepened interest in the world and for the life-situations of other human beings arises.

Art itself is the fruit of free human nature. We must love art, if we would see how necessary to a full humanity it is.

The three golden rules must be embraced by the teacher’s whole being, not held merely as a theory. They might be summarized thus – to receive the child in gratitude from the world it comes from, to educate the child with love, to lead the child into the true freedom which belongs to humanity.

The curriculum must be a copy of what we are able thus to read in the developing process of the human being.

The office of teacher becomes a priestly office, a kind of ritual performed at the altar of universal human life.

The teacher must understand also the times in which she lives, for she has to understand the children who, out of these very times, are entrusted to her for their education. The teacher must be one who never makes a compromise in her heart and mind with what is untrue. Our teaching will only bear the stamp of truth if we are intently striving after truth in ourselves. We shall only be able to achieve our task if we see it as not only to do with the intellect and feeling, but with the sphere of the moral and spiritual in the highest sense.

The teacher must never get stale or grow sour. We must cherish a mood of soul that is fresh and healthy.

Imbue thyself with the power of imagination, have courage for the truth, sharpen thy feeling for responsibility of soul.

The teacher should be one who is interested in the being of the whole world and of humanity. All that is happening in the outside world and in the lives of humanity should arouse our interest. The teacher must be a person of initiative in everything that she does, great and small. She must never be careless or lazy; at every moment she must stand in full consciousness of what she is doing in the school and how she behaves towards the children.

Our rightful place as educators is to be removers of hindrances. Each child in every age brings something new into the world, and it is our task as educators to remove obstacles out of her way, to remove hindrances so that her spirit may enter in full freedom into life.

Intuitive Learning bears a remedial character to it. The methods themselves of teaching and education aim at having a healing effect on the child. That is to say, if the pedagogic art is so arranged that the right thing is done at each stage of the child’s development, then there is something healing in the pedagogic treatment of children.

The child must be allowed to remain as long as possible in the peaceful dreamlike state of picture imagination. If we allow her organism to grow strong in this way, she will, in later life, develop the intellectuality needed in the world today.

Deep truths are embedded in the myths, legends and fairy tales, truths more concerned with reality than those that are expressed through modern science.

Mythology holds the history of the archetypal world, which contains past, present and future.