Kingdom of Childhood Lecture 2 in Essays

Pg 18 Quote; ” But is is what you are that matters: if you are good this goodness will appear in your gestures; and if you are bad-tempered this also will appear in your gestures- in short, everything that you do yourself passes over into the children and makes its way within them.
Know that everything that is done in their presence is transformed in their childish organisms into spirit, soul, and body. The health of children for their whole life depends on how you conduct yourself in their presence. The inclinations that children develop depends on how you behave in their presence.”
Parents have ultimate responsibility for the environment in which their child exists. Children are a reflection of their environment; they absorb whatever is in the world around them. Bad or abusive parents by definition never take responsibility for themselves and are careless, neglectful or even punitive of their child’s environment and the resulting consequences in the behavior of the child. This lecture of course is to clearly and explicitly identify that educators of children, and parents, should be above all virtuous in character if they are to be successful. Nothing at all matters more to the child’s development than having a good parent who is virtuous, and will choose only virtuous educators.
This principle will necessarily exclude public institutions, public union employees, daycare workers, and anyone that is held to the lowest common standards in society, to having an authority position over one’s child.
Moral philosophy is necessary to judge people by their virtue or lack of virtue.

Pg 19 Quote; “it is for you to see that you are worthy of this imitation. This is what you must pay attention to during the first seven years of life and not what you express outwardly in words as a moral idea.”
Steiner denies the idea that children can be dictated to; Do as I say and not as I do is as useless to a child as the color spectrum to a blind person. As natural empiricists, the child sees the adult do one thing and say another, and learns that no consistency in principle is required for the highest honor that can be bestowed, namely the raising of a human being. The child will internalize that principle, which is that no consistency is the most powerful tool.

Pg 19 Quote; “What kind of school plan you make is neither here nor there; what matters is what sort of person you are.”
Again, the child’s empirical knowledge of what you do as a parent can never be superseded. Steiner calls for the adult/parent/educator to strive for themselves to be credible, consistent, and have integrity in action in order to call forth the very best in the child.

Pg 27 Quote; “A child who cannot write properly at thirteen or fourteen (I speak out of my own experience because I could not do it at that age) is not hindered for later spiritual development as one who early, at seven or eight years, can already read and write perfectly.”
Here, I believe, although I am not certain, that Steiner refers to the development of the child’s free will. If the child is subjected to compulsory reading and writing when he has no interest in it for himself, he is only learning that material skills are more important than his own experience of interests, tastes, and ideas. Or indeed even the experience of being forced to do something the child would rather not do. I can say for myself having been forced in this compulsory way to learn to read and write, that my teachers and parents found they had to compulsively continually reward with outside motivators like privileges or even money to get me to continue to read and write. This was an incredible shame to my childhood and to my inherent love of reading and writing, as well as an insult to my person hood and ability to choose for myself what I was interested in pursuing as a six-year-old.
From the afore sections of this lecture, if a parent so wishes a child to be interested in reading and writing, that parent must be himself avidly pursuant of these habits. The educator need only exhibit great interest and joy in reading and writing himself in order to interest the child in it.

Pg 30 Quote; “You must be quite clear that before the ninth or tenth year the child does not know how to differentiate itself as an ego from its surroundings.”
We must keep in mind the technical definition of Ego (especially as it’s used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries)- the self especially as contrasted with another self or the world.
So the child does not distinguish himself from the world entirely until nine or ten years of age, and I would pose the ability to introspect as a marker of the development of the ego. Steiner emphasizes the uselessness of trying to get a young child to introspect, and instead encourages the nurturance of children’s natural imaginative powers.
The experience of the child before the full development of the ego, or introspection, is that he simply exists unquestioningly in the environment that he finds himself in. The point in realizing this essential developmental milestone is that as a parent, it is less than useless to try to appeal to this faculty, as many parents do and have done in the past; “There are starving kids in Africa so you’d better eat that.” is a line that, I think, every one of us has heard either directly or indirectly. And it is an attempt to appeal to the ability to compare one’s experience with the inner experience of another. This never works, and the reason why is that children are embodied in their environment; and to compare this embodiedment only testifies to the disconnection that parents/educators have to their children.

Pg 34 Quote; “you cannot work with children of this age, as their teacher, unless you are yourself the unquestioned authority, unless, that is, the children have the feeling: this is true because you hold it to be true, this is beautiful because you find it beautiful, and this is good because you find it good- and therefore you are pointing these things out. You must be for the children the representative of the good, the goodness, and beauty simply because the children are drawn to you yourself.”
Steiner here is simple and concise. Appeal to the natural empiricism of the child by subjecting yourself to the strictest standards of truth, beauty, and virtue.
The damage that a bad teacher does when he points to something beautiful and calls it ‘beautiful’ is not just in his dishonest interactions with the children, but he discredits the category of beautiful in the mind of the child. Inconsistency, lack of discipline, and a lack of adherence to principle leaves the child in doubt of everything you say, even if it is true.

Pg 34 Quote; “If you can meet the situation and can preserve your authority by the warmth of feeling with which you deal with these particular difficulties, if you meet the child with inner warmth, sincerity, and truth, then much will be gained. The child will retain its belief in your authority, and that is good for the child’s further education, but it is also essential that just at this age between nine and ten the child’s belief in a good person does not waver. Were this to happen then the inner security that should be the child’s guide through life will totter and sway.”
So much can be said about the realization, when it comes, that the people in charge of us as children were (or are) immoral, uncaring, sadistic, evil, or just disinterested and neglectful. The terror of this realization takes many into dark depression, or rage, or withdrawal from the world. It is up to us to love children fully, honestly, and be open about our own shortfalls.