Fashioning appropriate remedies for students presenting with various learning challenges - insights from Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner of Waldorf education saw the complex nature of human being beyond just our pure physical sense and it is this insight that captured his study and observation his entire life. Understanding his distinctions gives us deeper insights into the nature of life. For example, the physical senses comprise our ability to see, hear, touch, and taste—what is the physical tangible world before us. It is our mineral and chemical aspects of being human; the part we share with plants and animals in the physical plane. But we are more than just bones and sinew as nearly anyone alive will testify.


We also have ideas and feelings about what we experience. This is one element living in us that is unseen to the naked eye, although it is alive in us, as distinguished from our composition of minerals and chemistry. This is sometimes referred to as our LIFE FORCE, or what Steiner called the ETHERIC: our thinking, feeling pain, guilt, or heat, for example. A plant may respond to daylight or water and an animal may feel pain or fear ; this is in common with being human. However, only humans have moral choice. This is unique about being human and this choice is part of our etheric body.

Still, beyond the etheric body, there is more to human being that Steiner experienced and articulated, as for example, the Astral body. Our Astral body is that part of us connected with all parts of the universe, the I AM, for example. The Astral body connects through our thinking and meditation to an inner vision about that aspect of life beyond our strict individual being and links us together with the entire cosmos of BEING. We see, understand, intuit and know this aspect through our breath, in our dreams, through our inner vision of truth and the expansion of our own individual soul lives. Through Steiner’s instruction we learn about a hierarchy of human being that eventually leads to consciousness soul or man spirit.

Our EGO is instrumental in helping us ascertain the existence and experience of these higher planes of being. Steiner’s ego had a completely different orientation then Freud’s and the two are not to be confused. To Steiner the ‘I’ is an uniquely human quality within us capable of discerning all aspects of being, which we can achieve through consistent discipline, practice and commitment to truth and love of the universal ‘I.’ As human beings in physical plane existence, getting our heads and hearts around these greater aspects of self, is a first step toward ‘liberty of thinking.’ Just the thought of a higher self that is connected with all other Being, immediately releases fear and builds trust.



From this understanding of human life, we can gain more immediate insight into EXTRA LESSON recommendations in working with children who present with various learning challenges. These aspects of being human interplay and influence one another. It is our discernment about these various aspects that can help us help a child most appropriately. We can strive to consider more than just physical attributes to determine whether and how etheric, astral or Ego aspects of self are also influencing the manifestation of learning we observe.

I find this deeper knowing helps me articulate to parents what I see and supports them in allowing their child to manifest as he/s is in the moment without undue criticism or pressure to be different. Having this knowledge also helps me design methods for recovery of unexpressed, injured or inharmonious parts of self.

A child who is disrupted in his etheric, for example, may seem distractible, stressed or anxious. There may be guilt, pain, anger or something else occurring in the moment. Often more than not, I simply see highly sensitive children almost unable to be in the physical plane with all its seeming death, war and injury to life. With such children, my job, in part, is to help them strengthen their protective shields, grow in working with the light and otherwise fortify them for being in the world.

On the other hand, in working with a student who is dreamy, unfocused and withdrawn, I may experience a hesitation within the child from his/h Astral sphere. I may intuit some kind of broken knowledge that I AM a part of something greater than myself and I am here now to experience this physical plane. This leads me to physical stomping, clapping, crawling, putting feet in dirt, and writing in clay or sand: i.e. kinesthetic activities that give the student a growing sense of self in his/h physical body.

Sometimes in primary school, I can run across children who hit, resist sharing and otherwise seem overly self absorbed. Here I suspect a need to strengthen the child’s will, an antidote that seems odd when at first glimpse he/s seems overly willful. Yet, here again, Steiner also informs me, the ‘will’ under developed is that part of self related to the I AM, the Astral plane that connects me with all others. This is the will to choose morally for the greater good of all. I might help a student strengthen his/h will through reading stories of saints and heroes who beat odds, turned around, changed from dark to light and experienced the cathartic revelation of being One with all there is. This approach keeps a child’s natural strength in place and focuses it toward the common whole.


While still paying attention to direct and explicit teachings in maths and literacy, these deeper insights inform and enrich my practice, enabling me to better serve those who come within my sphere.