Steiner and Wholeness
by Pearse O'Shiel M.A. in Ed.

There is no doubt that all our lives are being transformed by technology and there is a generally expressed sense that "things" are speeding up. We all seem so busy, too busy perhaps to realise fully the extent to which our lives and the lives of our children have changed over the past few years. Children, of course, appear to be well able to adapt to change but there is a danger that some essential elements of the developing child and of our own adult development are not being addressed in a world transformed by economic and technological forces. The counterpart to this change is an emerging desire for a paradigm that seeks wholeness or connectedness, that values the qualitative, which is beyond analysis but which informs the secret inner core of our lives. It is in the context of this emerging paradigm that Steiner's work is rendered modern and relevant and it is within a re-evaluation of how we understand the development of human consciousness as part of a whole world process that Steiner can be more readily understood.

Steiner presents a picture of human development as occurring in distinct phasesⁱ. Each phase having an integrity and wholeness that makes it worthwhile in itself and not merely as a preparation for a later phase. Within this phased development process there is a principle that operates in all natural systems. This is the principle of metamorphosis, in which all the capacities and qualities developed within any one phase and belonging to that phase carry, within them, all the potential for future development. The example of this process of metamorphosis, which is most familiar to us, is that of the transformation of the caterpillar into the butterfly. The earthbound caterpillar, as it moves slowly from leaf to leaf carries within it all the potential that will become that most ephemeral and free flying of creatures - the butterfly. The caterpillar, however, is not yet a butterfly nor is it only a kind of "pre-butterfly". It has a necessary and integral place in the wholeness of nature as a caterpillar. Just as, with the caterpillar, we would not attempt to teach it to fly in the hope that it will become a better butterflyⁱⁱ, so it is not appropriate to reach into any phase of child developmental and draw children prematurely into a later phase.

The capacities and qualities that live in a child up to c. 7 years of age have an integrity in themselves and they should be valued for what they are and for what they contribute to the whole of human experience. In the form in which they appear in the young child they carry all the potential for future development including the development of the highest cognitive capacities. In some respects the experience of early childhood is the most difficult for us to grasp because we are distanced from it by the qualitative changes in consciousness that occur over the years. The young child experiences the world through, what Henri Bortoftⁱⁱⁱ describes as, participatory consciousness in which the child's sense of self-as-separate from the world has not yet developed. In a very real way the child does not make a distinction between herself and the world in the way in which we, as adults with our observer consciousness do. Human development is thus a phased process of becoming aware of the self-as-separate from the world in which the young child retains a relationship of self-as-world and the world-as-self.

We are, therefore, talking about a way of knowing the world, which differentiates the consciousness of the young child qualitatively from our way of knowing. This epistemological base to Steinerian pedagogy makes it difficult to give an easy answer to the question "What is different about the Steiner approach?" and it may be useful to describe how the theoretical basis informs the pedagogy.

The implication of what has been said about the consciousness of the young child is that the world is meaningful in a direct and unmediated way. The world has its significance in how it tastes, smell, feels etc. and young children learn in a direct response to the events of the world around them. They learn through imitation. Young children learn to walk, to talk and, through speech, to think by imitating and early childhood education is thus not a question of instruction but of allowing the children to imitate healthy activity. The task for the educator is to provide a context, which will engage the child in activities that are directly meaningful to the child as activities not as opportunities for us to be didactic in any kind of abstract way. Perhaps the best illustration of the nature and value of imitative activity is in looking at childrens' play.

Childrens' play is complex and in any extended sequence of play there is a wide tableau of imaginative and collaborative events. In play we see the events of the adult world played out in imitative sequences that are sustained and deeply engaging for the children. In play, children are doing more important work than any teacher could plan and the complex weave of events has a value for the child's development far beyond our consideration of them as opportunities for instruction. Any attempt to engage the children in directed reflection about the events of their play is to draw them from their participatory or subjective relationship to all that went on and to bring them into our reflective or objective relationship with events. It is, to follow the example cited earlier, to teach the caterpillar to fly.

The young child's experience of the world is complete and worthwhile in itself and in many respects it carries for us the possibility of insight into aspects of human experience that we have lost sight of as adults and on which, as a society, we place little value. In the education and care of young children we can enter imaginatively into this experience and regain a sense of what it is to experience wholeness. Thus the care and education of young children becomes an area of professional endeavor that carries a value and a status of the highest order for our society.

References

1. The Child's Changing Consciousness (1923), Rudolf Steiner press, London. 1988
   
   
2. Nikos Kazantkis, in his book Zorba the Greek (p125) describes wonderfully just such an event.
   
   
3. The Wholeness of Nature (1996) Floris Books, Edinburgh