Head, heart and hands

In 1919, in the ruins of the First World War, the owner of a cigarette factory in Stuttgart asked a philosopher named Rudolf Steiner to build a school for his workers' children. Steiner built one on a simple picture of a human being: head, heart and hands. Thinking, feeling and doing, developed together, in that order of emphasis as the child grows. The Waldorf school. There are now more than a thousand of them on every continent.

Its ideas are specific. Children develop in stages of roughly seven years, and the teaching should fit the stage: play and imitation in the first, imagination and story in the second, judgment and abstraction in the third. The arts aren't a subject; they're woven through everything, so a child learns fractions by cutting a cake and history by acting it. The same teacher stays with a class for years. No screens in the early grades. Hands as important as head.

I hold Steiner's larger philosophy, which is esoteric and not for everyone, apart from the school, which has been studied and works well for many children. What I keep for this chamber is the picture: head, heart and hands.

Most adult learning is all head. We read, we listen, we think we understand. Steiner's claim is that nothing is learned until it's felt and done. That's Wang Yangming from day ninety-eight, applied to a classroom. And it's the structure of every key in this year: a read for the head, a letter meant to move the heart, and one small action for the hands. We didn't invent that. Steiner did, for seven-year-olds, and it turns out adults are built the same way.

The month of Meaning will ask you to make things. Steiner would say meaning lives in the hands.