Kingdom of Childhood Lecture 7 in Essays

This lecture begins with an overview of methods for the 9-and-a-half or 10 year old through puberty, or around age 14. Steiner again emphasizes the importance of relationships in presenting these children with material; he warns that even at these ages, too much abstraction and intellectualizing are tiring and even damaging.
Pg112 Quote; “The golden rule for the whole of teaching is that the children should not tire.”
This quote illustrates a very concise empirical proof that the method of education need never stray from the goal of meeting the needs of the child. If the child is struggling or striving in ways that tire him, or drain his emotional, mental or physical resources, then the method of education is not serving him. And it is the parent/educator who is responsible for creating and maintaining the nurturing educational environment for him; it is not for the child to exhaust himself in attempts at what he is not yet equipped for.

Pg117 Quote; “You must guide the child to think only about things that are to be found in life. Then through your teaching reality will be carried back into life again. In our time we suffer terribly from the unreality of people’s thinking, and the teacher must consider this very carefully.”
Adults, older children and children who have been intellectualized too early all find it very easy to imagine and even feel to be real things that are patently impossible. The ability of the human being to abstract, to conceptualize, to pursue lofty ideas and universal principles while abandoning the evidence of the senses is unique and powerful. The obvious benefits to this ability are all around us; we defy nature and create things never before seen. The pitfalls are also all around us; contradictory ideologies, biases, the inability or refusal to subject oneself to reason and evidence, insanity.
Teaching children to ground themselves always in tangible reality and by disciplining ourselves to in every instance test ideas against reality empirically, we can avoid the pitfalls of the human condition.

Pg118 Quote; “You should always call their attention to it if they stray from reality. The intellect never penetrates as deeply into reality as fantasy does. Fantasy can go astray, it is true, but it is rooted in reality, whereas the intellect remains always on the surface. That is why it is so infinitely important for the teacher to be in touch with reality as he or she stands in the class.”
A distinction between the intellect and fantasy might be drawn at the level of conscious abstraction and unconscious images or impressions. Fantasies are often experienced as coming to us in the forms of dreams, visions, feelings, intuitions, or something similar. These fantasy experiences are wholesome in their inclusion of feeling life, emotional power, and the impact of some idea or concept- usually moral. Contradicted to these fantasy experiences is the intellectual exploration of ideas. The intellect is, evolutionary speaking, the newest and least integrated mental capacity of the human being. As such, it is the least connected to our unconscious, which has the task and goal of integrating our perceptions of the world into relational understanding so that we may most profitably survive. The intellect has no survival impetus, and so it is by far the most dangerous mental faculty.
When this is understood, it becomes very clear that the responsibility of the parent/educator is to give the child the strong, lasting, and reliable ability to remain rooted in reality- from which intellectual exploration may be launched safely.

Pg120 Quote; “We must also consider those children who have to leave school at puberty, at the end of the elementary period, and who cannot therefore participate in the upper classes. We must make it our aim that by this time, through the whole tenor of our teaching, they will have come to a perception of the world that is in accordance with life itself.”
The limitations of attaining higher education were much higher in Steiner’s time. However, we can still take wisdom from this warning as many children never develop an interest in higher academia, and indeed lose interest in education entirely after puberty.
Steiner has some indications as to what may be done in the years preceding puberty with the goal of imparting the knowledge of 1) the human being and 2) some idea of the place of the human being in the world.

Pg121 Quote; “Think of how many people there are who drink beer and have no idea how the beer is made. This is really an unfortunate state of affairs. Now we cannot of course achieve everything in this regard, but we try to make it our aim as far as possible to give the children some knowledge of the work done in the various trades, and to see to it that they themselves also learn how to do different kinds of work that are done in real life.”
Steiner laments that children in schools are not taught practical skills nor knowledge about how things are made in real life. Instead they are taught mathematical equations that they will never use and which might be learned in 5 minutes on the job when necessary. Steiner advocates for real first hand practical knowledge of many trades, jobs, careers, and business in order to prepare children for meeting the real, living world.

Pg122 Quote; “If, therefor, we want to educate the children not only out of knowledge of the human being, but also in accordance with the demands of life, they will need to know how to read and write properly when this is expected of them today. And so the curriculum will have to include many things simply because that is what is demanded by the customs of the time. Nevertheless, we must still try to relate children to real life as much as possible.”
Steiner advocates for doing all that we can to meet the needs of children; to accept the reality that children are perfect in their ability to learn life skills, and not just broken adults.
My own impatience with Steiner in these instances is his refusal to criticize or even identify the evil of contemporary pedagogues. Steiner shies away from identifying how government schooling takes advantage of the nature of children, and instead simply assumes this rampant indoctrination is due to a lack of knowledge.
Perhaps we in the 21st century have the benefit of over 100 years of history with which to condemn the tactics of governments in the treatment of children. Yet, there is no doubt that Steiner’s unwillingness to identify and criticize the actors and perpetrators of this harm has set back the state of education and humanity by at least as long.