Download the article: On Earth as It Is in Heaven: The Tasks of the College of Teachers in Light of the Founding Impulse of Waldorf Education
Introduction
At the center of the Waldorf school stands the College of Teachers.1 What is the College? What are its tasks? Who serves on the College? Why is it important for a Waldorf school to have a College? The answers to these questions will help us understand the mission and tasks of the Waldorf school.
In this work, I will address these fundamental questions about the College in light of the founding of the first Waldorf school in 1919. I will also share some ideas about the College that I have developed in nearly three decades of working with Colleges. I hope that my work will inspire others to delve deeply into these questions and to develop their own perspectives.
What is the College of Teachers and what are its tasks?
A Waldorf school is more than just another independent school that provides a developmental education. It is an organization that seeks to allow the spiritual impulses of our time to manifest on earth in order to transform society. The group that is primarily responsible for recognizing and realizing this mission is the College of Teachers. The College does so by working in two realms: the material and the spiritual. This essential feature was revealed during the preparatory course for the founding of the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart, Germany. By examining what Rudolf Steiner presented in The Opening Address and The College Founding, we will begin to sense how the College can bridge and balance the worlds of matter and spirit. (These texts are included in the Appendix.)
The Opening Address and The College Founding
The Opening Address was given by Rudolf Steiner on the evening of August 20, 1919, prior to the preparatory course for the teachers of the first Waldorf school. In The Opening Address, Rudolf Steiner identified two major goals for the school:
(1) to achieve a renewal of modern spiritual life by reforming and revolutionizing the educational system, and
(2) to demonstrate the effectiveness of anthroposophy through a new art of education.
The Opening Address also described how teachers could work towards these goals individually and collectively in a “teachers’ republic.”
The College Founding was given the following morning as the opening to the first lecture in the series now known as the Study of Man.2 There Rudolf Steiner spoke again about the goals of the Waldorf school and the tasks of the teachers, highlighting the cosmic importance of the school’s founding. At the center of The College Founding, Rudolf Steiner presented The College Imagination, which shows the teachers how to work with the beings of the Third Hierarchy: the Angels, the Archangels, and the Archai.
With these two addresses Rudolf Steiner established the College as the place in the school where teachers work on earthly and spiritual tasks. The Opening Address deals with the earthly aspects. These include the societal context, the need to make anthroposophy practical, the compromises that will be needed, and the school’s administration. The College Founding deals with the spiritual aspects. These include the cosmic context, our relationship to one another, and how we can work with spiritual beings.
In these addresses Rudolf Steiner presented the teachers with two sides of their work together. The Opening Address poses a set of earthly questions and challenges and The College Founding provides a way of looking at these from a spiritual perspective. Here are some examples:
The Opening Address: How will we renew spiritual life by reforming and revolutionizing the educational system?
The College Founding: We will see our work not as simply a matter of intellect or feeling, but, in the highest sense, as a moral, spiritual task.
The Opening Address: How will The Waldorf School serve as living proof of the effectiveness of the anthroposophical orientation toward life?
The College Founding: We will create, from the very beginning, a connection between our activity and the spiritual worlds.
The Opening Address: How will we deal with the state’s goals and standards and make the necessary compromises?
The College Founding: We will not view the founding of this school as an everyday occurrence, but as a ceremony held within the Cosmic Order.
Both of these addresses have a similar structure; each is like a triptych. The beginning and ending sections of each address mirror each other, describing the context, the tasks, and the qualities that will be needed to perform these tasks. These outer sections frame the most important question for the College: How can these important tasks be performed? Like a triptych, whose middle section carries the central image, the middle sections of the two addresses show how teachers can work together on the earthly and spiritual planes. From the chart below we can see that The College Founding considers the points in The Opening Address from a spiritual perspective.
From The Opening Address:
1.Each teacher needs to work in full responsibility.
2.We will work together in a “teachers’ republic.”
3.We will develop a spirit of unity by our work with the preparatory course.
From The College Founding:
1.Our Angel gives us strength for our individual work.
2.The Archangels give us courage for our collective work.
3.The Archai give us light; we work with the Spirit of the Times.
At the very beginning of the founding of The Waldorf School, Rudolf Steiner already established the task of the College: to bridge and balance the earthly and spiritual realities in the service of the school and the education of the students.
Finding the Balance
A College of Teachers has earthly tasks and spiritual tasks, and the College in each school must find the proper balance between them. This balance will change as the school’s circumstances change. It may even change during the course of the school year. At every meeting, the College must find the balance between its earthly focus—administration, personnel, facilities, finances, and so forth— and its spiritual focus—anthroposophy, child development, the curriculum, methodology, and so forth. Whether a College focuses more on earthly matters or spiritual matters depends on the needs of the school. What is most important is that earthly matters be informed from the point of view of the spirit and that spiritual matters be informed by down-to-earth practicality.
The word “balance” comes from the Latin name for scale. It is derived from the words bi and lanx, which mean “two dishes” or “trays.” The trays of a scale hold what is to be weighed. Unequal weights cause the dishes to move vertically, with the heavier dish ending up lower than the lighter. Equal weights result in the trays’ reaching the horizontal, the balance point.
The scale also has a bar that links the trays. This connecting bar pivots around a central fulcrum, mediating the polarity of the trays. When the trays are “in balance,” the opposites are held in dynamic equilibrium, and activity ceases. To achieve balance we need polarity but we also need something that mediates the polarity.
We have seen that The Opening Address and The College Founding have similar structures. We can imagine this structure as a scale with two trays containing the tasks of the individual teachers and of the school. Between them is the connecting bar—the collective work that we must do. We can also imagine those two addresses together on a scale, with The Opening Address on one side and The College Founding on the other. This scale balances the earthly tasks of the College with its spiritual tasks. The connecting bar is the collegial work of the teachers and their work with the spiritual worlds.
The image of the balance finds its correspondence in the structure of the first Goetheanum with its great hall composed of two intersecting domes. As Henry Barnes pointed out in The Third Space, the structure of the first Goetheanum expressed the polarity between the earthly and the cosmic, the sensible and the supersensible, the exoteric and the esoteric. Between the spaces of the hall and the stage was a “Third Space” created by the intersection of the two domes.
In that space the earthly and the spiritual found their balance. Beyond that space, at the back of the stage, was to stand the statue of the Christ, the Representative of Humanity, who helps us achieve cosmic and earthly balance.
In the constellation Libra, Astraea, the goddess of earthly justice, holds the scales. So too the College of Teachers holds the scales by which the earthly and spiritual tasks of the school are balanced. As members of the College we need to be the balance in the school, but even more than that, we need to transform the word balance from noun into verb and thereby find the dynamic equilibrium between our tasks.
Our tasks in light of the tasks of the original College of Teachers
I think that the original group of teachers serves as the prototype for any College of Teachers. Their tasks are our tasks, and we can view our work in light of what Rudolf Steiner presented in The Opening Address and in The College Founding.
Goals: In The Opening Address Rudolf Steiner presented the original College of Teachers with three goals: to achieve a renewal of modern spiritual life; to reform and revolutionize the educational system; and to accomplish a great cultural deed. In The College Founding he also presented the teachers with three goals: to view their task as a moral spiritual task; to recognize the importance of their work; and to be conscious that this school fulfills something special.
These goals are just as apt today as they were in 1919. We are still trying to renew education. In order to do that we still need to recognize how special a Waldorf school is and to recognize the importance of our work. The College in every school needs to hold such goals in order to help its school and the Waldorf movement as a whole accomplish a great cultural deed: the renewal of modern spiritual life. How we go about this depends on the time and place in which we live and work. It is up to each College to try to read the signs of the times and the needs of its community and the wider culture to determine how the school can serve its lofty goals.
Anthroposophy: In The Opening Address Rudolf Steiner spoke about the relationship of anthroposophy to The Waldorf School. He told the teachers that The Waldorf School would be living proof of the effectiveness of the anthroposophical orientation toward life. It would accomplish this by being a unified school3 that considered how to teach only in the way required by the human being.
In The College Founding Steiner revealed how anthroposophy can be brought to earth: by creating a connection between our activity and the activity of spiritual beings. He encouraged teachers to be conscious that they do not work only in the physical plane of living human beings, and he characterized the founding of The Waldorf School as a ceremony held within the Cosmic Order.
Strengthening the anthroposophical foundations of Waldorf education remains as important today as it was when the first Waldorf school was founded. The College must serve as the font of inspiration for the processes by which teachers can learn how to “transform what is gained through anthroposophy into truly practical instruction.” It must support these processes through study, through artistic activity, and through the opportunities and means for anthroposophical professional development.
Steiner described the founding of The Waldorf School as a ceremony within the Cosmic Order. I think that the founding of every subsequent Waldorf school also has cosmic significance. Just as we celebrate the birth of a child because a soul-spiritual being has chosen to enter the earthly realm, we may celebrate the founding of a Waldorf school because it strives to bring the soul-spiritual into the realm ofhuman life. This feeling of celebration should also permeate the founding of the College, and it can extend to each College meeting because during our meetings we can experience ourselves as working within the Cosmic Order to midwife the birth of spirit into matter.
Context: In The Opening Address Steiner described the difficult social and educational context in which The Waldorf School was being founded:
The state imposes terrible learning goals and terrible standards, the worst imaginable, but people will imagine them to be the best. Today’s policies and political activity treat people like pawns. More than ever before, attempts will be made to use people like cogs in a wheel. People will be handled like puppets on a string, and everyone will think that this reflects the greatest progress imaginable. Things like institutions of learning will be created incompetently and with the greatest arrogance.
Much of this description still holds true today. Although most Waldorf schools are ostensibly free from “terrible learning goals and terrible standards,” these goals and standards permeate our culture. They establish expectations among the parents and the community and often become the standard against which Waldorf teachers are measured and against which they judge themselves. Standardized educational materials and the behavioral methods that are almost universally applied in other schools find their ways into our schools too.
As Waldorf teachers, we need to be informed about and to understand the prevailing view of the human being. We must be careful, however, not to allow that view to erode our recognition that the child is a spiritual being who has come to earth to do what it was not possible to do in the spiritual world. The College is the place where this view of the human being is broadened and deepened. The College strives to serve as the source of the strength and inspiration for teachers who are trying to “teach in the way required by the human being.” By keeping the school’s focus on the becoming human being, the College remains true to its intention.
Compromises: Steiner told the original teachers that they would have to make compromises. They would have to know their ideals and have the flexibility to conform to what lies far from those ideals. This remains true for us today as well. Every Waldorf school exists in a context—a community, a state, a country, a contemporary society—and it must adapt to that context through positive, creative, realistic means. It behooves us to emulate Steiner’s calm, objective attitude towards this challenge. Rather than bemoan our situation, Waldorf teachers and Waldorf schools must embrace the opportunities and challenges of our time. We must love the age in which we and our students have incarnated because it presents us with exactly what we came to meet on earth.
The College should be the place in the school where a sense of contemporaneity is cultivated, where teachers are helped to become true citizens of the time and place into which they have incarnated.
The challenges posed to us by the parents, our communities, and our culture provide us with the opportunities to develop the flexibility and strength that we need to create a truly modern art of education. If the College can stay true to its vision while adapting to its challenges, it will serve as a model that students will emulate in their adult lives.
Qualities: In The Opening Address and at the end of the preparatory course, Rudolf Steiner described the qualities and attitudes that Waldorf teachers should cultivate. Imagination, courage for the truth, responsibility ofsoul, initiative, interest in the world, integrity, and freshness of soul—these are the seven “virtues” that the Waldorf teacher strives to practice.4
Waldorf teachers practice these virtues in and out of the classroom in the service of their students. They practice these virtues in the College in service to each other and to the school. They are helped to do so by the Angels, Archangels, and Archai, who grant them the strength, courage, and light to do their work. By creating a true “Philadelphia,” a city of brotherly love, in their meetings, members of the College further the work of the Good Spirit of the Time and of the Spirit of the Waldorf School.
The tasks of the original College of The Waldorf School of 1919 remain relevant for every College in every school today and into the future. During the two weeks ofthe preparatory course, Rudolf Steiner helped the teachers recognize and embrace these tasks. In our Colleges throughout the years, we have the honor of continuing to work on these tasks.
The Teachers’ Republic
In the middle section of The Opening Address, Rudolf Steiner spoke about how The Waldorf School would be organized and administered, and what the teachers could do to develop a spirit of unity:
Therefore, we will organize the school not bureaucratically, but collegially, and will administer it in a republican way. In a true teachers’ republic we will not have the comfort of receiving directions from the Board of Education. Rather, we must bring to our work what gives each of us the possibility and the full responsibility for what we have to do. Each one of us must be completely responsible.
We can create a replacement for the supervision of the School Board as we form this preparatory course, and, through the work, receive what unifies the school. We can achieve that sense of unity through this course if we work with all diligence.5
These important passages have been repeatedly analyzed over the years, and the many forms of administration and governance in Waldorf schools show that there are many ways to interpret them. I will examine these passages in terms of the work of the College of Teachers, but I believe that it is the responsibility of each College to understand and apply Rudolf Steiner’s ideas as they pertain to its school. To me, the four essential ideas contained in these passages are:
1. The teachers are integral to the organization and administration of the school.
2. Each person needs to act with full responsibility.
3. We can create a replacement for direction or supervision from educational authorities.
4. We can work together in a way that unifies the school.
Let us examine each of these ideas.
1.The teachers are integral to the organization and administration of the school. Rudolf Steiner saw schools as organizations in the cultural sphere, which should be as free as possible from political control and economic constraints. Schools’ top priority should be the educational process, and they should be organized and governed accordingly. In 1919 Steiner developed these ideas in Basic Issues of the Social Question. In the Preface he summarized the role of the teachers in administration:
The administration of education, from which all culture develops, must be turned over to the educators.
Economic and political considerations should be entirely excluded from this administration. Teachers should arrange their time so that they can also be administrators in their field. They should be just as much at home attending to administrative matters as they are in the classroom. No one should make decisions that is not directly engaged in the educational process. No parliament or congress, nor any individual who was perhaps once an educator, is to have anything to say. What is experienced in the teaching process would then flow naturally into the administration. By its very nature such a system would engender competence and objectivity.6
According to Steiner, schools must not lose sight of their most important function: education. To serve that function, a school’s organization and administration need to be informed by those closest to the educational process. This will allow what is experienced in teaching to flow into administration. In my opinion, whether or not teachers should participate directly in administration needs to be determined by each school according to its circumstances. But having teachers who are as much at home tending to administrative matters as to teaching in the classroom helps keep a school focused on its mission of educating children. The College in every school needs to find the proper balance between the educational and administrative realms.
If the College views these as two faces of the same coin, then the school’s operations will be illuminated by pedagogical insight and the work of the teachers will be enhanced by practical, effective administration and management.
2.Each person needs to act in full responsibility. In order to act with full responsibility, we need to identify to whom we are responsible. I think that those of us who work in a Waldorf school are responsible to many: to ourselves, to the students and their families, to our colleagues, to the school and its community, and to the spiritual beings who are involved in our school. In a larger sense, I think we are also responsible to the nation in which we live, to the needs of our times, and to the earth and the spiritual worlds. If everyone who works in a Waldorf school recognizes and accepts this, then working in full responsibility means being aware of our own place in the cosmos as agents for the course of earth evolution.
The College needs to support this view of concentric circles of responsibility and help its members shoulder those responsibilities according to their abilities. This means that the College has to determine how much its members can or should do and how much needs to be delegated. Delegation does not mean, however, that we are no longer fully responsible; rather, it means that we are not necessarily responsible for the execution of a task. When individuals or groups act on behalf of the College or the school, they need to know that the College bears the ultimate responsibility for what they do. Because so much of what happens in a Waldorf school is done on behalf of the College, the processes of delegating and sharing responsibility are among the College’s most important tasks.
3.We can create a replacement for direction or supervision from educational authorities. In educational systems that have a School Board or Board of Education, the Board establishes the school’s educational goals and determines the staffing, facilities, and programs by which these goals can be achieved. In The Waldorf School, these responsibilities were put into the hands of the individual teachers and the “teachers’ republic.” Through the preparatory course Rudolf Steiner planned to lay the foundation for the teachers’ understanding of the nature of the human being and the needs of the developing child, and he intended to outline the curriculum and the methods that would best serve the educational process. He did this not only to prepare the teachers for their pedagogical tasks but also to help them to become co-creative and co-responsible for the education and for the school.
I believe that Rudolf Steiner intended for teachers—as individuals and as a group—to replace the educational authorities by becoming their own authority. This authority would be born out of proper preparation, continual review and reflection, and a willingness to develop and change in order to meet the needs of the students. If teachers are to be their own authority, they have to demonstrate their competence and be accountable. The College needs to cultivate a school culture that inspires and encourages the teachers’ striving. The College also needs to support this striving by providing the circumstances and means for teacher preparation, effective procedures for review and evaluation, and mentoring or peer supervision at all levels.
Rudolf Steiner said, “We can create a replacement for the supervision of the School Board as we form this preparatory course” (emphasis added). I believe the forming of the preparatory course referred to what he would be presenting in The College Founding. In that presentation, Rudolf Steiner urged teachers to form a connection with the spiritual powers. If we form this connection, we allow the beings of the Third Hierarchy to “direct” and “supervise” us. These beings show us what is needed and they give us what we need to do our work. If we work with our Angel, we are given the strength to perform our tasks and to work on ourselves in service to our students. In our work together with the Archangels, we are given the courage to receive and to give to one another what we have developed in our individual work in service to our school. In our work with the Archai, we are given the light to perceive the needs of our time in service to the world.
4. We can work together in a way that unifies the school. Rudolf Steiner told the participants in the preparatory course that they would receive what would unify the school if they worked with due diligence. What was presented in this course and how does that allow a sense of unity to be achieved?
In the opening morning lectures Rudolf Steiner presented a description of the human being from the psychological, spiritual, and physical perspectives (Study of Man). Later in the morning he gave an overview of the curriculum in the light of child development and described teaching methods for each stage of development (Practical Advice to Teachers).
In the afternoon seminar Rudolf Steiner gave further curricular indications, describing and demonstrating how some of the subjects might be taught (Discussions with Teachers).
The preparatory course was intended to prepare the founding teachers for their pedagogical tasks. Their work with it was intended to engender a sense of unity which would allow the teachers to govern themselves and to guide the school. Here is how I think a spirit of unity can be achieved by the work with the preparatory course: When teachers work individually with the preparatory course, they unite themselves with other teachers who are also working on the course. This creates a community of ideas, of Imaginations. When teachers work as a group with the preparatory course, they unite themselves with all other groups who are working with the course. This creates a community of ideals, of Inspirations. When teachers work with the spiritual beings on the intentions of the preparatory course, they unite themselves with the Good Spirit of the Time to bring Waldorf education into earthly form. This creates a community of moral deeds, of Intuitions. These forms of working together are strengthened by working with The College Imagination, which will be described in a later section. [This section will be published in a future issue of the Research Bulletin— Ed.]
I think that Rudolf Steiner did not elaborate further on the work of the teachers with each other because that kind of work would need to be determined together. It was up to the College to realize (i.e., make real) the ideas and ideals that Rudolf Steiner had shared. Every College has this charge: to figure out how teachers can work in full responsibility and in a way that unifies the school. Like any art, the art of self-governance needs to be practiced to achieve its goal: the administration, management, and leadership of a school that truly serves the education of the child.
Appendix
The Opening Address, given on the eve of the Teachers’ Seminar, Stuttgart, August 20,1919:
This evening I wish to make some preliminary remarks. To achieve a renewal of modern spiritual life, the Waldorf School must be a true cultural deed. We must reckon with change in everything; the ultimate foundation of the whole social movement is in the spiritual realm and the question of education is one of the burning spiritual questions of modern times. We must take advantage of the possibilities presented by the Waldorf School to reform and revolutionize the educational system. The success of this cultural deed is in your hands. Thus, you have much responsibility in working to create an example. So much depends upon the success of this deed. The Waldorf School will be living proof of the effectiveness of the anthroposophical orientation toward life. It will be a unified school in the sense that it only considers how to teach in the way demanded by the human being, by the totality of the human essence. We must put everything at the service of achieving this goal.
However, it is necessary that we make compromises, because we are not yet so far developed that we can accomplish a truly free deed. The state imposes terrible learning goals and terrible standards, the worst imaginable, but people will imagine them to be the best. Today’s policies and political activity treat people like pawns. More than ever before, attempts will be made to use people like cogs in a wheel. People will be handled like puppets on a string, and everyone will think that this reflects the greatest progress imaginable. Things like institutions of learning will be created incompetently and with the greatest arrogance. We have a foretaste of this in the design of the Russian Bolshevik schools, which are graves for everything that represents true teaching. We have a difficult struggle ahead of us, but, nevertheless, we must do this cultural deed. We must bring two contradictory forces into harmony. On the one hand, we must know what our ideals are, and, on the other hand, we must have the flexibility to conform to what lies far from our ideals. It will be difficult for each of you to find how to bring these two forces into harmony. This will be possible to achieve only when each of you enters into this work with your full strength. Everyone must use his or her full strength from the very beginning.
Therefore, we will organize the school not bureaucratically, but collegially, and will administer it in a republican way. In a true teachers’ republic we will not have the comfort of receiving directions from the Board of Education. Rather, we must bring to our work what gives each of us the possibility and the full responsibility for what we have to do. Each one of us must be completely responsible.
We can create a replacement for the supervision of the School Board as we form this preparatory course, and, through the work, receive what unifies the school. We can achieve that sense of unity through this course if we work with all diligence. The course will be held as a continuing discussion of general pedagogical questions, as a discussion of the special methods concerning the most important areas of instruction, and as a seminar to practice teaching. We will practice teaching and critique it through discourse.
We will take up the more theoretical aspects in the morning and the seminar in the afternoon on each day. We will begin at 9:00am with general pedagogy, then undertake instruction concerning special methods at 11:30, and in the afternoon do seminar exercises from 3:00 until 6:00.
We must be completely conscious that we have to accomplish a great cultural deed in every sense of the word. Here in the Waldorf School we do not wish to create a parochial school. The WaldorfSchool will not propagate a particular point of view by filling the children with anthroposophical dogma.
We do not wish to teach anthroposophical dogma; anthroposophy is not the content of the instruction. What we want is a practical utilization of anthroposophy. We want to transform what we can gain through anthroposophy into truly practical instruction.
The anthroposophical content of instruction is much less important than the practical utilization of what we can create out of anthroposophy, generally in pedagogy and particularly in the special methods; in other words, how we can bring anthroposophy into teaching practice.
Representatives of the confessions will give religious instruction. We will use anthroposophy only in the method of instruction. Therefore, we will divide the children among the religion teachers according to their confession. This is another part of the compromise. Through justifiable compromises we can accelerate our cultural deed.
We must be conscious of the great tasks before us. We dare not be simply educators; we must be people of culture in the highest sense of the word. We must have a living interest in everything happening today; otherwise we will be bad teachers for this school. We dare not have enthusiasm only for our special tasks. We can be good teachers only when we have a living interest in everything happening in the world. Through that interest in the world we must obtain the enthusiasm that we need for the school and for our tasks. Flexibility of spirit and devotion to our tasks are necessary. Only from that can we draw out what can be achieved today when we devote our interest to the great needs and tasks of the times, both of which are unimaginably large.
The College Founding, given at the beginning of the Preparatory Course Stuttgart, August 21, 1919:
We can accomplish our work only if we do not see it as simply a matter of intellect or feeling, but, in the highest sense, as a moral spiritual task. Therefore, you will understand why, as we begin this work today, we first reflect on the connection we wish to create from the very beginning between our activity and the spiritual worlds. With such a task, we must be conscious that we do not work only in the physical plane of living human beings.
In the last centuries, this way of viewing work has increasingly gained such acceptance that it is virtually the only way people see it. This understanding of tasks has made teaching what it is now and what the work before us should improve. Thus, we wish to begin our preparation by first reflecting upon how we connect with the spiritual powers in whose service and in whose name each one of us must work. I ask you to understand these introductory words as a kind of prayer to those powers who stand behind us with Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as we take up this task.
[The words that follow were not recorded by the stenographer—see Herbert Hahn’s notes below.]
It is our duty to see the importance of our work. We will do this if we know that this school is charged with a particular task. We need to make our thoughts very concrete; we need to form our thoughts so that we can be conscious that this school fulfills something special. We can do this only when we do not view the founding of this school as an everyday occurrence, but instead regard it as a ceremony held within Cosmic Order. In this sense, I wish, in the name of the good spirit whose task it is to lead humanity out of suffering and misery, in the name of this good spirit whose task it is to lead humanity to a higher level of development in education, I wish to give the most heartfelt thanks to this good spirit who has given our dear friend Mr. Molt the good thoughts to do what he has done for the further development of humanity at this time and in this place, and what he has done for the Waldorf School. I know that he is aware that what can be done in this work now can only be done with weakened strength. He sees things in this way. However, because we are united with him in feeling the greatness of the task and of the moment in which it is begun, and in feeling that this is a festive moment in Cosmic Order, he will be able to work in our midst with the necessary strength. We wish to begin our work with this in mind. We wish to see each other as human beings brought together by karma, who will bring about, not something common, but something that, for those doing this work, will include the feeling of a festive Cosmic moment. At the end of our course I will say what I would like to say following today’s festive commencement of our preparation. Then much will have been clarified, and we will be able to stand before our task much more concretely than we can today.
Notes from Herbert Hahn:
In that we actively turn to the pedagogy of this fifth cultural epoch, and in that we wish to be active as teachers, we may carry in consciousness the fact that the Beings of the Third Hierarchy are now moving to connect themselves with our work.
Behind each individual member of the now-forming faculty, we see an Angel standing. He lays both hands upon the head of the earthly being entrusted to him, and in this position and with this gesture allows strength to flow over to the human. It is the strength that provides the Imaginations necessary for the deed to be completed. Creatively Imagining, wakening powerful Imaginations, the Angel thus stands behind each individual. Raising our view higher, we see hovering above the heads of this forming faculty a host of Archangels. Circling again and again, they carry from each of us to the other what results from our spiritual encounter with our own Angel. And they carry it, enriched by the strength of all the others, back to us. In this circle, which acts like an activity of spiritual formation, a vessel is formed above the heads of those united in this common striving. This vessel is formed from a specific substance—Courage. At the same time, these circling, connecting Archangels allow creatively Inspirational forces to enter into their movements. The Archangels open the source for those Inspirations necessary for our work. Raising our view still higher, it rises up to the realm of the Archai. They are not represented in their entirety. However, from their realm, the Realm of Light, they let a drop descend into the vessel of Courage. We feel that this drop of Light is given to us from the good Spirit of our Time, who stands behind the Founder and the Founding of this new school. It is the creative forces of Intuition at work in this drop of Light. The Archai want to awaken the necessary Intuition in those now entering this new pedagogical work. Giving Strength, Courage and Light, beings ofthe Third Hierarchy take part in what is now being founded. Imaginatively, Inspiringly, Intuitively, they wish to connect with our earthly deeds.
Endnotes
1.The “College of Teachers” is the English phrase for the German term Lehrerkollegium. I have preserved the capitalization as a way of honoring this group’s identity. Throughout this article I will use the terms “College” and “College of Teachers” interchangeably in recognition of the fact that many Colleges include non teaching members. In the coming years I hope another name will be found that more accurately expresses the unique nature and work of this group.
2.The German title Allgemeine Menschenkunde has been translated and published as Study of Man and more recently as Foundations of Human Experience (Great Barrington, MA: Steiner Books, 1996).
3.The German term Einheitschule that Rudolf Steiner used in this context had a very specific meaning during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Education and Society in Modern Germany (Routledge, 2003) R.H. Samuel characterized the Einheitschule: “This term denoted coordination of all aspects of education into a unified whole, in such a way that elementary, intermediate and secondary schools would cease to be separate categories, diversely administered and with unrelated curricula, and become integral elements in a harmonious whole.” The Waldorf School was non-traditional in many other respects; it was non-denominational, coeducational, and had a curriculum that combined elements of the classical and technical schools.
4.Christof Wiechert, “The Seven Virtues of the Art of Teaching,” in Education—Health for Life, published by the Medical Section at the Goetheanum, Switzerland, 2006.
5.Rudolf Steiner, Foundations of Human Experience, p. 30.
6.Rudolf Steiner, Towards Social Renewal (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977).
Roberto Trostli has been active in Waldorf education as a class teacher, high school teacher, adult educator, and lecturer for thirty years. He is the author of Physics Is Fun: a Source book for Teachers, numerous articles on Waldorf education, and a dozen plays for children. He edited and introduced Rhythms of Learning and Teaching Language Arts in the Waldorf School. Roberto currently teaches at the Richmond Waldorf School.