Correctness

52 Weeks of Steiner – Week 22  (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)

If I furnish a child with a concept that is to remain “correct” (where “correctness” is of course all that matters!), a concept to be retained throughout life, it is just as though I bought the child a pair of shoes at the age of three, and each successive year had shoes made of the same size.”

Rudolf Steiner
Kingdom of Childhood, Lecture 1

Would you buy your three year old shoes and expect them to wear the same size through to age 18?

No.

This is one of those quotes that really highlights for me the benefit of a Steiner inspired education.

When we create a fixed world for children, a world where there is only one correct answer or one correct way, we create a hardness, a lack of expansion. But when we leave ideas open to exploration open to growth, we allow children to grow with the ideas.

Steiner goes on to say:

The child will grow out of the shoes. This however is something that people notice, and it would be considered brutal to try and keep the child’s feet small enough to go on wearing the same sized shoes! Yet this is what is being done with the soul when I furnish the child with ideas that do not grow with the person. I am constantly squeezing the soul into the ideas I give the child when I give concepts that are intended to be permanent; when I worry the child with fixed, unchangeable concepts, instead of giving the child concepts capable of expansion.”

We would notice someone trying to keep a child’s feet from growing, but have we noticed the effect of an education that doesn’t take the soul into account?

I think we have, we just haven’t connected the dots yet. Or we haven’t wanted to connect the dots.

So what can we do to keep space for expansion in what we bring to our children?

It’s a big question. When I think of the question, these things come to mind.

• ask fewer questions, really just talk less overall
• answer fewer questions, bounce questions back to children to hear their take (it is often not what we expect!)
• reflect on how you present ideas or material to your children; is it rigid or flexible
• honour the phases of development we go through in childhood; keep critical thinking topics until highschool, teach to the heart in elementary and focus on healthy play and movement from birth to age seven.
• remember that “truth” depends on where you stand

We live in a world that is increasingly black and white, one side or the other, us against them. Let’s make sure our children can experience all the shades of grey between the poles. It might be uncomfortable for us, but uncomfortable moments are where the growth lies.

Until next time,
Marina