Strengthening Initiative

52 Weeks of Steiner – Week 14  (This is part of a weekly serial started on Michaelmas 2023. To see the other entries, please see the post linked HERE and scroll down to the bottom for individual links)

By slowly developing everything intellectual out of the artistic, that is, out of the entire human being, you will also develop the entire human being, people with real initiative, with a real force of life in their bodies. They will not be like people in our own population who no longer know where they are after they have done their final examinations. This is a real tragedy. If your professional task is to understand human beings, then it is possible that you can experience the following. You are, for example, to test someone around the age of twenty-five or thirty whether he is to receive a given position. You approach him with the expectation they should develop some initiative, particularly if he is to go into a practical profession. The person tells you, however, that you expect one thing or another but that he
wants to go to India or to America in order to learn more about the profession. What that means is that he actually wants to move into the profession passively. He does not want to develop anything out of his own initiative, but instead wishes to have the opportunity
that the world will make something of him. I know that saying this is something horrible for many people, but at the same time I am pointing out something we can see in people who have completed their education in the last decades. It has not developed a genuine initiative, initiative that reaches down into people’s souls when it is necessary later in life. It is of course easy to say that we should develop initiative. The question is, though, how we do that? How we can arrange the material we are to present in education so that it acts not against initiative in the will, but strengthens it.

Rudolf Steiner
Renewal of Education, Lecture Six

I hear from friends who work with teens and young adults that there is a general lack of initiative and motivation within this group. Yes, you will always have those who are go-getters and are driven by their own will. But I’ve seen it too, in the youth at my work outside the home. There seems to be a general lack of spark in their will forces.

I believe an education rooted in Steiner’s indications can change that.

Many people first coming to Waldorf question the level of artistic representation in the early years of subjects that are typically brought to children in a very factual and head-on way. They wonder if it will really prepare children for higher education, even just higher elementary grades. They don’t understand the purpose.

This is the purpose. To develop in children a sense of initiative in the will. We are not just teaching to the intellect of the child, we are teaching the whole child. That requires a different approach to education. It requires reaching children on a different level through different means.

It requires educators who are willing to also build their own body soul and spirit so they too may work out of initiative for the children in front of them. It requires educators who are able to see the big picture, the coming years, the benefit of tomorrow, and not just the present moment. All of this takes will. It takes our own initiative.

Do you work out of your own initiative or do you spend much of your time looking to others for answers and direction? Ask yourself this question, without judgement! We all need to continue working on building our own drive for acting out of our own initiative. I encourage all the families I work with in homeschool mentorship to take up artistic activities to build up the will forces. Pairing artistic work with the inner work of Steiner’s daily exercises is another step in building the will.

When we can step into this artistic work, we can see how beneficial it is for our unfolding children to be brought to intellect through artistic imaging. And it helps us to better connect with this type of education and to create lessons that will speak to our child’s whole body, and not just their brain.

Until next time,
Marina