The Spiritual Ground of Education (Used)

The Spiritual Ground of Education

9 lectures, Manchester College, Oxford, August 16–25, 1922 (CW 305)

Steiner was invited to Oxford in the summer of 1922 to speak to an English audience of teachers about the school that had opened in Stuttgart three years earlier. What he gave them was not a method but its ground: an argument that teaching becomes an art only when the teacher can see the child as a being of body, soul and spirit, and that no technique will substitute for that seeing.

The cycle moves from the need for spiritual insight, through the older disciplines that once trained it — yoga among them — to the body understood from the spirit, and then to the practical life of the Waldorf School: how it is organised, how boys and girls are taught, and what is asked of the people who teach there.

About the Author

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) was born in the small village of Kraljevec, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Croatia), where he grew up. As a young man, he lived in Weimar and Berlin, where he became a well-published scientific, literary, and philosophical scholar, known especially for his work with Goethe’s scientific writings. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he began to develop his early philosophical principles into an approach to systematic research into psychological and spiritual phenomena. Formally beginning his spiritual teaching career under the auspices of the Theosophical Society, Steiner came to use the term Anthroposophy (and spiritual science) for his philosophy, spiritual research, and findings. The influence of Steiner’s multifaceted genius has led to innovative and holistic approaches in medicine, various therapies, philosophy, religious renewal, Waldorf education, education for special needs, threefold economics, biodynamic agriculture, Goethean science, architecture, and the arts of drama, speech, and eurythmy. In 1924, Rudolf Steiner founded the General Anthroposophical Society, which today has branches throughout the world. He died in Dornach, Switzerland.