The 'Feeling' Curriculum in Steiner Education - Schools

Stronger, Brighter, Deeper: The “Feeling” Curriculum in Steiner Education

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning the skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
Ursula K. Le Guin

Artificial Intelligence will challenge the very nature of humanity. By separating out our intelligence from our emotional life, we risk losing that which makes us human at all. Our feelings give us our sense of meaning and to Rudolf Steiner, our highest endeavour is to help young men and women find meaning and direction out of themselves. Our feeling lives are the key to finding meaning. But like intelligence, our feelings need schooling to become rich and mature and then they can guide us from within as an inner understanding. Steiner education has the unique task of growing this new form of feeling cognition, an intelligence wedded to feeling, a heart thinking.

How do teachers do this? As the great fiction writer Ursula Le Guin puts it, Steiner teachers are like good writers who care about words, and how they shape the inner lives of their growing students. They embed creativity into the learning process, and imbue formal learning with a powerful artistry that helps the intellect to sing, and the heart to understand.

This talk will explore the building of “cognitive feeling’ or heart thinking as it grows through the curriculum from Kindergarten to Year 12: essentially the “feeling” curriculum of Steiner education, preparing a sense of meaning in our students’ lives, and making them stronger, brighter, deeper