| From Making Believe to Making Sense / The Role of Imagination in the Development of Thinking by Dorit Winter, Director of the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training The first thing we want to clarify is the Waldorf meaning of imagination. There are many words which mean something else when they're used by Waldorf people. That's because the Waldorf dimension usually expands the conventional meaning. When we use the word imagination, we are leaning on the IMAGE part of the word. And we really mean the activity involved in being able to picture something inside of ourselves. Visualization is what we really mean. The German word, Einbildungskraft, relates the word more to the doing of it, which is what I want to emphasize today. It takes Kraft (strength, power) to imagine. It takes activity. It's an activity for which contemporary civilization no longer has adequate strength. Instead of true pictures we get fantastic shreds. There was a time in human history when pictures were the way people learned. They called the pictures stories. A story is, after all, a sequence of pictures. Pictures in movement. Pictures come to life. We know that fundamentally films and cartoons are a sequence of stills, but when we listen to a story, the pictures are in our heads and they move by our own inner activity, our own imagination. I recently heard a Waldorf anecdote from my colleague, Susan Goldstein, about a boy in her most recent 7th grade who said he was not going to see the Harry Potter movie because he already knew what Harry Potter looked like. He didn't want to ruin the experience. His picture making ability was intact. Legends, myths, fables, fairy tales - these are all pictures and they are indigenous to all cultures. For example, I remember the myth of Prometheus, a Greek god, from the time I heard it first as a 10th grader at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City. This story is the picture of how man received "fire." What impressed me so much in the 10th grade was that I understood that "fire" was not just the thing that blazes when you light a match to kindling. I understood that the danger to Zeus was the "fire" of thinking. Had I had the opportunity of being in the 5th grade at the Steiner School, I might have heard that myth then. Perhaps I would have understood the picture, perhaps not. In our education the picture comes first. The understanding comes later. In the next two sessions, we'll go into more detail about how myths, legends, fairy tales and fables relate to our curriculum, and not just our history curriculum. And we'll talk more about how the activity of picturing inwardly leads to the activity of thinking clearly. For now, let's just grasp this main idea: we teach through these pictures. We start with fairy tales in the kindergarten. Those are the most generic, and also, often, very dramatic stories. The prince is rarely defined by looks or character in detail. Perhaps he is good. Perhaps the youngest brother is "dim" or the princess is "happy." We tellthe story, puppets show the story, the children act the stories, they live into the stories. It is the kindergarten teacher's task to keep the children as much as possible in the mood of the story, "in the picture." Young children naturally live in that realm. They need explanations of things only because they quickly realize that grown-ups feel good when asked those questions. I have often observed children, especially boys of five or so, ask questions about how things work. They rarely listen to the explanations. It is a rare parent who answers in an age-appropriate way, which is to say, in the way of a story or fairy tale. That is all the young child wants or needs. This because the child's imagination is by nature so very vivid. The child can surround himself with make believe. Isn't that a wonderful expression? The child can "make [things] believable." Premature explanations are not required. In fact, as we'll see later, they are obstacles to the capacity for understanding which we adults so often want the child to have too soon. As the child goes through the grades, the stories get more and more specific. So by 6th or 6th or 8th grade, the story is based on documented research, but the details are still imagined. The teacher's imagination fills in the details, and the child's imagination grasps them. The child grasps them because a picture is something you can remember better than a phrase. The reason for that is that the imagined picture is something that touches our feelings. Any picture we experience inwardly has a kind of magical power. It stays with us. We might say that the morality of those pictures is something the Waldorf teacher is continually working with. "Is this picture one that I want the children to dwell in?" Through an understanding of the picture, comprehension is built up. The Waldorf child expects the pictures to be worth remembering. Later s/he will find the pictures making sense. From making believe to making sense. That would have been a good title for these talks. The child pictures, the child feels, the child grasps and then, the child remembers. In 1921, when the first Waldorf School was two years old and the oldest students were entering 10th grade, Rudol Steiner chided the teachers for the fact that the children were not remembering enough. He gave an entire course of lectures (unfortunately now titled Waldorf Education for Adolescence - only one of the lectures is about adolescence), in which one of the main themes was memory. In essence, he explained, memory is an inner picturing. When the child can summon up the picture it received earlier, it remembers. This summoning up requires inner activity. It is this inner activity which, in adolescence, can be transformed into clear thinking. The common key is inner activity. College admissions officers have recognized this connection. They know that Waldorf graduates are creative thinkers. Four of last year's graduates from the San Francisco Waldorf High School are now at Oberlin College. Oberlin College values the imaginative thinking of our graduates. So, the path is: from picture, through feeling, to memory and later, the same activity enables clear thinking. As the children get older, the teacher is challenged not to shortchange the picture, not to lean too strongly and too soon on the threatening flood of information. Even high school science teaching in a Waldorf school uses this basic pattern. When students are asked to remember their physics experiment from the previous morning, they have to work with the same imagination which the 4th or 7th grader needs when reviewing yesterday's legend or biography. Perhaps this is what Albert Einstein also knew when he said: "Imagination is more important that knowledge." One of the greatest treasures a Waldorf education can bestow on a child is an undestroyed imagination. This requires support from the parents as well. We live in an age that corrupts the imagination with static, sterile images, and our children are targets of strategists whose every intention is to stultify the inner activity which imagining requires. Passive consumers, that's what the strategists want to produce. Waldorf education wants to preserve the active imagination. Of course the quality of that inner activity changes as the child matures. A high school student reading Dostoevsky is engaged in a different sort of picturing from a five-year-old watching a puppet play. But that high school student will have a truer, more personal, more creative experience if as a five-year-old s/he did not have to endure premature explanations or hardened images. Watching a puppet play of Rose Red engages the same inner faculties as the keen observation of a high school physics experiment, but the inner faculties are transformed. If cultivated and protected early in life, they will blossom into self-confident clarity later. High school students who write well can imagine well, and usually they also reason well. "Reason," said Rudolf Steiner, "is sifted imagination." How that happens will be the subject of our next meeting. |
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