We know that in the first seven years the young child, mostly head, devotes most of its forces to forming its physical body, the instrument though which she will fulfill her life. The young child primarily lives into the world through reaching, playing, working, running in the world, through action, through willful limb activity. We know that in the second stage of life, between the change of teeth and puberty, the growing child develops especially the heart and lungs, breathes in from and out into the world, learning, one might say, especially through the rhythmic system. The child is artfully forming the ways, the rhythms, the habits which will enable him to experience life, forming, one might say, one’s life-body, (or etheric body) while learning primarily though feeling. Only in the third stage, adolescence does the metabolic system fully come into its own; only then does the youth become capable of reproduction. Only then do legs and arms extend into their final fullness. And yet in terms of soul faculties, only after puberty does thinking rightfully, naturally, organically emerge, flower in its own right as a new capacity. Perhaps the essential question of Waldorf High School education is: How can this new “soul-body” (or astral body) be helped to emerge in adolescence as harmoniously as possible in relation to the physical and life bodies on the one hand, and serving as artfully as possible on the other hand the imminent emergence of the individuality, the “I AM”? How can the Waldorf high school curriculum respond to this question? One way is by striving to teach in the ninth grade in ways which help the newly born thinking faculties to be grounded as well as possible in the laws and realities of the physical world, in ways recapitulating the first seven years of development. Then in tenth grade the teachers try to help the soul-body’s thinking develop further, through teaching in ways which guide the student into understanding how things work, how poetry works, short stories, epics, mechanics, Euclidean geometry, physiology, etc., in a way becoming conscious of the world as the life body experiences it. Then in eleventh grade the thinking comes most purely into its own, no longer recapitulating earlier stages of development, but becoming able to think conceptually in its own right. And in twelfth grade the curriculum artfully imagines ahead, to something actually experienced at the end of adolescence, at the beginning of adulthood, the emergence of the I AM. More ...
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