Art And Soul Rudolf Steiner Interdisciplinary Art And Education

This book brings together Steiner's philosophical, biodynamic and cultural contributions to education, where 'spirit' and ‘soul’ are the creative elements in human evolution. His thought is applied to selected examples of innovative artistic practice and pedagogy of the present. This volume is intended for researchers in the arts and education with an interest in Rudolf Steiner's huge influence on educational thought and policy.This is an urgent point in time to reflect on the role of arts in education and what it might mean for our souls. An accessible yet scholarly study of interdisciplinarity, imagination and creativity is of critical widespread interest now, when arts education in many countries is threatened with near-extinction.

In this fine introduction to Waldorf education, written out of a series of lectures given in 1924, Steiner provides one of the most comprehensive introductions to his pedagogical philosophy, psychology, and practice. Steiner begins by describing the union of science, art, religion and morality, which was the aim of all his work and underlies his concept of education. Against this background, many of the lectures describe a new developmental psychology. On this basis, having established how children's consciousness develops, Steiner discusses how different subjects should be presented so that individuals can grow and flourish inwardly. Only if the child absorbs the right subject in the right way at the right time can the inner freedom so necessary for life in the modern world become second nature.

14 lectures, Stuttgart, August 21-September 5, 1919 (CW 294) How do Waldorf teachers put their educational ideals into practice in the classroom? How does a teacher connect geography and art and language in a way that enlivens the souls of children? What does a child's respect for the teacher mean for later life? These are only a few practical aspects of this initial course for Waldorf teachers. During an intensive two weeks, Rudolf Steiner gave three simultaneous educational courses to those who would be the first teachers of the original Waldorf school. One course provided the foundational ideas behind Waldorf education (The Foundations of Human Experience); another provided a forum for questions and lively discussions on specific issues in the classroom (Discussions with Teachers). In this course, Steiner takes the middle-path by integrating theory and practice. Here, Steiner spoke of new ways to teach reading, writing, geography, geometry, language, and much more. His approach is tailored to the spiritual and physical needs of the children themselves, not to an arbitrary curriculum based solely on external results. At a time when public education is in a state of crisis, this book describes how children around the world are being guided into adulthood with a fuller sense of themselves and with a creative approach to life and the world around them. German source: Erziehungskunst. Methodisch-Didaktisches (GA 294).

A social basis for education; The spirit of the Waldorf school; Educational methods based on anthroposophy; The child at play; Teaching from a foundation of spiritual insight and education in the light of spiritual science; The adolescent after the fourteenth year; Science, art, religion and morality; The spiritual grounds of education; The role of caring in education; The roots of education and the kingdom of childhood; Address at a parents' evening; Education in the wider social context.

Rudolf Steiner's vision of art, as with all forms of human expression, is that it should reflect our human experience of the Divine. This was not intended to suggest vague, mystical fantasy. As one of the few true initiates of the twentieth century, he was able to experience the realms from which humanity and all nature descend into temporal and spatial existence. He was able to speak with confidence of the qualitative and dynamic worlds of soul and spirit, from which all the phenomena we experience spring, including our individual existence. The means by which the living nature of these realms can be expressed is not through rationally expressed concepts--which point only to the material, quantitative perceptions from which they are derived--but through the various forms and languages of art. Through art, human beings express the qualitative experiences of life. But Steiner goes even further. In the more recent history of art, especially that of the West, artistic expression has become less a product of spiritual inspiration and more the expression of personal experience, which is identified with materialistic existence. Naturalistic and realistic representations of the physical world are devoid of spiritual expression. As humanity has descended into a materialized, spiritually void experience of life, art has followed that trend. Today, it is little more than expressions of subjective, sensory views of the world. Modern nonrepresentational art, on the other hand, is an instinctive backlash against that trend, but does not get beyond personal expression. Contemporary art remains sadly isolated from the source of its own being: the world of soul and spirit. Steiner, however, attempts to unite personal human experience with the spiritual source of art, so that artists are spiritually conscious of the realm from which inspired expression descends into human existence. Such artists are neither isolated from the spirit, nor do they act as automatic mediumistic channels, but as a conscious and cooperative instruments of spirit. Human consciousness must come to truly sense some experience of spirit before real progress in art can occur, and this is what Steiner tries to help artists achieve in the lectures and writings collected in this volume. Some of the works in this collection have been unavailable in English for some time. Topics include the being of the arts; Goethe as the founder of a new science of aesthetics; technology and art; new millenniums; the purpose of modern art and architecture; living walls; glass windows; wall colors; moving the circle; the seven planetary symbols in the first Goetheanum; "The Group" statue; and color, faces, and physiognomy.