…the lighting of a fire / by Rudolph Steiner According to Steiner, there are three major
human functions –
willing, feeling and
thinking that evolve consecutively every seven years.
Three stages
Willing is manifested in physical movement and activity and is
centered in the arms and legs.
Feeling is manifested in imagination, in sympathy and antipathy and the range of human emotions. It is centered in the organs that function in a rhythmical way – the heart and lungs.
Thinking involves the use and management of concepts and abstractions and is centered in the brain and nervous system.
willing During the first seven years of life children explore their immediate environment, using only their five senses. Till about the age of three, children remain very instinctive in their behavior. This instinctive willing creates among others, the familiar milestones of turning, sitting, crawling and walking. At this stage, they should have the freedom to indulge the
“natural state of instinct”. This is the
stage when the body is building itself up from within – sculpting bones, musculature, organs etc. Mirroring the internal process, children are constantly exploring the outer world, for example making sandcastles.
feeling stage
The change of teeth signifies the next stage of life. This is also called the feeling stage and creating stage. Hence art, music, handwork and crafts are crucial for balanced development. These activities built critical foundation in the nervous system and brain, which allows for a fuller development of the child’s later intellectual capacities.
Thinking After fourteen years of age, comes the puberty stage where in the child comes to its
“I being”. Thus a young human being starts developing into his own. As new faculties emerge, the
thinking function develops and dominates. The adolescent becomes able to think abstractly, analyze, conceptualize and be highly critical. At this stage of development too, education must appeal to and nurture the special capacities that are emerging.
Without much encouragement for the development of real knowledge and independent, creative thinking, the system for the most part, unknowingly moulds selfish and ambitious consumers rather than caring, engaged world citizens. So in a nutshell, development of a child is not the filling of a
pail but the
lighting of a fire.
More summaries about the The Lighting of a Fire