What is Beautiful?

52 Weeks of Steiner – Week 15  (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)

“The time then comes for you [the teacher] to say [to the children] ‘I am going to tell you something that you will not yet understand very well, but one day you will understand it quite well.  What we did at the top, where we put blue next to the yellow, is more beautiful than what we did at the bottom, where we put green next to the yellow.’  This will sink deeply into the children’s souls.  It will be necessary to return to this thought several times, but they will also puzzle away at it themselves.  They will not be entirely indifferent to it, but will learn to understand quite well from simple, naïve examples of how to feel the difference between something beautiful and something less beautiful.”

Rudolf Steiner
Practical Advice to Teachers – Lecture Four

I am currently enrolled in a two year Handwork Teacher Training program and part of the work is to read an article each month. This month’s article was Bernard Graves’ The Relevance of Handwork and Craft. Within the article was this sentence: “The handwork teacher then gradually leads the child to the awareness of colour and form in order to create artistic forms, to have a sense for what is beautiful.”

It reminded me of the quote from Steiner above, where he gives a script to teachers that tells children which experience is more beautiful. This script has never sat well.

What is beautiful? Who are we to judge what is beautiful for someone else?

I think Steiner’s goal, when looking at the big picture, is to build an understanding of colour theory, the moods that colour carries and how certain colours work together on the soul. He did often say we are not teaching the children right now, we are teaching for the children of the future. Big Picture thinking and all that.

BUT, I believe, with experience children grow to see which colours are more beautiful together as they grow themselves. Experience is a wonderful teacher. Do we need to be telling them which is more beautiful? Can we not just lay the two paintings beside each other and let the colours do the work?

As a side note, Painting at School by Dick Bruin and Attie Lichthart discusses this very passage and provides alternates to “this is more beautiful”. But it still feels like we are bringing the experience to an intellectual place instead of a feeling place.

Something to ponder, even after all these years.

Until next time,
Marina