A Healing Education

How Can Waldorf Education Meet the Needs of Children? - Five Lectures by Michaela Glockler Given at the West Coast Waldorf Teachers' Conference-February 1998. Doctors, educators, and therapists have a special need to meet the ever increasing illness manifesting on all levels in growing human individuals-be these attention deficit problems, behavior problems, sensory integration problems, psychosomatic disturbances, or genetic disturbances. Whatever the manifestations are, we must understand that underlying them are physiological problems. Dr. Glockler points out that this understanding is fundamental to Waldorf Education. The key task for the educator, therefore, is to insure fore the child a healthy physical development, for this is the basis for a healthy soul-spiritual development.

Lecture titles: 'The Pedagogical Law and its Expression in Karma and Reincarnation,' 'The Image Character and Language of the Physical Body,' 'The Metamorphosis of Growth Forces into Intellectual Forces and the Rhythmic Nature of Astral Activity,' 'The Ego Organization as the Great Integrator'

In the first lecture, Dr. Glockler focuses on the 'pedagogical law' given by Rudolf Steiner in The Curative Education Course (also published as Education for Special Needs). She illumines the comprehensiveness of this law, the insight it offers into the workings of the fourfold human nature, and the karmic effects of this fourfold working from one life to another. She then takes us on a path that starts with the physical body, pointing out some of the wonders of embryological development and then bringing to our consciousness further growth rhythms of the brain and other organs. She demonstrates the difference between human and animal and shows how, in the animal, wisdom and intelligence have formed the physical body and express themselves through instinct. She opens new doors of understanding for the teacher that can lead him or her to grasp more clearly the significance that the releasing of intelligence from the body plays in human development. . . . In the course of these lectures we receive extraordinary help and support to recognize not only the working of the etheric in its transformation into the formative, creative activity of thinking, but we also learn to feel our way into the many wonderful rhythms that the astral forces, the musical forces, use to penetrate the human body. The ego organization then stands before us as the great integrator.

Rudolf Steiner College Press
ISBN 0-945803-48-6
101 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches