Rhythms in the Life of the Child

Recap of a lecture by Eugene Schwartz

January 29, 1988

www.millennialchild.com

"Ears as a Sense Organ"

 Teachers' Study 

West Coast Steiner School

In his lecture on the “Rhythms in the Life of the Child,” Eugene Schwartz likens daily teaching activity to the body’s natural rhythm of inhaling and exhaling; heart pushing blood out; heart  drawing blood in; out putting  and in taking; “opening and closing off” which “is the basis of teaching, the basis of learning.” 

He explains the ear as a sense organ that exhibits this same basic quality of intake and output. Sound comes vibrating in air.  Schwartz explains how the ear drum is a delicate muscle, and he describes:

1. Muscles are as thickened blood, not quite organs but intimately connected to our circulatory system;
2. Therefore what we hear affects us in our circulatory system like a force of will coming into being.
3. Schwartz describes the ear, likening it to a tiny digestive system that regulates sound rather than food.

He describes the ear as an organ of balance which makes it possible for us to hear.  He notes however that listening, unlike hearing is an ‘activity that needs direction.”

So sophisticated, the hearing organ has aspects of a sense organ, a metabolic organ and also a rhythmic organ, therefore making a combination of thinking, feeling and willing, that is moving rhythmically all the time.

Two kinds of pressure bear against an ear drum, one from the ear and one through our mouth; the ear drum serves as a kind of regulator of pressure.

By way of explaining this connection, Schwartz gives an example.  Words I speak enter your ear through the auditory nerve and through to your Eustachian tube setting your larynx vibrating; so as I speak you speak; you are repeating my words.  This highlights the importance of the affect our words have on our own physical structure and the affect our speech and sounds have on others as well.

While adults may have a better capacity to prevent damage from sound, a young child’s organs are still forming.  Between 7 and 14, the larynx is almost beeswax, still soft, in an exceedingly receptive state, and being modeled at every moment.  This is why a child learns the mother and father’s speech so readily. In the beginning, we speak through imitation which sets our larynx aflutter and brings it into beautiful eurhythmic movement when beautiful speech is heard; and inharmonious movement when inharmonious speech is heard.  This holds for all sounds: voice, music, recorded sound, TV, etc.

In a classroom, students are in rhythmic exercise with the teacher, and the larynx of every child forms itself in the image of the speech of the teacher.

As the heart is formed in the fetus according to the rhythmic pulsing of the mother’s blood, the etheric heart is being formed "very, very much in consonance with the speech heard around it."

We know that even the most sheltered child is exposed to sounds "uttered not so much out of love or care but simple, ordinary, rather degenerated speech" of common talk.  This makes it all the more the responsibility of teachers to make their speech worthy of being emulated and also speech that will really form the larynx well.