During the first year of the first Waldorf school, Rudolf Steiner agreed to give a science course to the teachers, which was to be on the nature of light. At the last minute, he was asked to give an additional course on language, which he improvised. "The Genius of Language" is the result.

Steiner demonstrates how history and psychology together form the different languages and how ideas, images, and vocabulary travel through time within various cultural streams. He describes how the power to form language has declined, but that we can still recover the seed of language, the penetration...

5 lectures, Bern, April 13-17, 1924 (CW 309)

These lectures on Waldorf education were given as a course during Easter week, 1924, in Bern. Although these talks were given more than eighty years ago, they remain remarkably contemporary. Every word still resonates with passion and dedication to the human adventure.

"We must develop an art of education that can lead us out of the social chaos into which we have fallen during the last few years and decades.... There is no escaping this chaos unless we can find a way to bring spirituality into human souls through education, so that human...

Lectures and addresses, 1919-1924 (CW 298)

This book contains all of the more-or-less informal talks given by Steiner in the Stuttgart school from 1919 to 1924. Included are speeches given by him at various school assemblies, parents' evenings, and other meetings. Steiner spoke here with spontaneity, warmth, and enthusiasm.

Readers will find a unique glimpse of the real Steiner and how he viewed the school and the educational philosophy he brought into being.

German source: Rudolf Steiner in der Waldorfschule, Vortage und Ansprachen, Stuttgart, 1919-1924 (GA 298).

14 lectures, Basel, April 20-May 16, 1920 (CW 301)

Following a lecture of November 27, 1919 requested by the Basel Department of Education, sixty members of the audience invited Rudolf Steiner to return and deliver a complete lecture course on his approach to education. These lectures are the result.

Rudolf Steiner begins by outlining the gradual development of the child with the help of spiritual forces and enlightened educational practices, which form the basis for Steiner's approach to education. He describes the problems that modern educators face and provides practical solutions....

11 lectures, Stuttgart and Dornach, Dec. 23, 1919 - Aug. 8, 1921 (CW 320)

Rudolf Steiner's course on light, which includes explorations of color, sound, mass, electricity and magnetism, presages the dawn of a new worldview in the natural sciences that will stand our notion of the physical world on its head.

This "first course" in natural science, given to the teachers of the new Stuttgart Waldorf school as an inspiration for developing the physics curriculum, is based on Goethe's phenomenological approach to the study of nature. Acknowledging that modern physicists had come to...

These talks were given in 1923--three and a half years after the founding of the first Waldorf school--to an audience of Swiss school teachers, most of whom have little knowledge of anthroposophy. This is the context of these lectures, among Steiner's most accessible on education.

A teacher who attended the lectures wrote in the Berne School Paper:

Every morning, as we listened anew to Dr. Steiner, we felt we had come closer to him and understood better what he had to say and how he had to say it. Daily, we newcomers gathered, asking ourselves, "Why are more of our colleagues...