The Waldorf Kindergarten and the Kindergarten Child (Abridged)
Written by Christof Wiechert
There are few words in the global world that have been adopted across all language barriers as literally as the typically German word kindergarten. People from many countries and continents can all be heard trying to pronounce the word kindergarten.
The kindergarten, a “garden for children” where children from age 3 to 6 can play, develop, and learn in a protected environment, is an invention of the German educator Friedrich Fröbel (1782-1852), who opened the first kindergarten in Bad Blankenburg in 1832.
It is fair to say that the so-called normal teaching in primary schools at that time was not very child-friendly. Primary school was generally a difficult time for children, and adults had (and sometimes still have) the idea that learning means suffering.
He sought an education that was appropriate for children. An education in which children were not forced or beaten, in which they grew up in an environment where they could learn through practical experience and where they were allowed to play.
He envisioned a holistic education, not only an intellectual education, but also an emotional and physical education, and above all, an education in which children are allowed to play!
Today, this sounds obvious, but at that time it was by no means so. If we look at our present-day situation, we see that even at a time when the United Nations has declared play a children’s right, in large parts of the world, due to war, hardship, poverty, and child labor, children are deprived of the protection that Friedrich Fröbel once envisioned for children in his gardens.
What does this look like today? What is extraordinary about our current situation is that the direction taken by the humanities, in slavish obedience to the natural sciences, has led to a situation in education in which the child we found or invented in the 18th and 19th centuries is in danger of being lost again. Education is geared towards performance, results, tenths of a point in high school exams, rather than content, and towards uniformity of performance rather than the development and unfolding of personality.
An interesting book, Het Onderwijsuragenboek, has been published in the Netherlands, which argues that all forms of modern teaching originate from industry and not from the humanities. If we also consider the impact that the computerization of teaching with the help of artificial intelligence will soon have on young children, then we can safely say that we do not need to abolish kindergarten – as has happened in the Netherlands, for example, where kindergarten has been absorbed into primary school – but rather to rebirth it.
We need a place where children can be children, where living conditions allow them to flourish, where there is time, no pressure, no rush, no fear. All this is not for sentimental reasons, but for the sake of strengthening health. It is not widely recognized, but the health of young people is a major concern, certainly in the Western world. This applies to both physical and mental health. Our world not only has an outer, environmental problem, but also, to a large extent, an inner-world problem.
In many families, parents are conditioned by the prevailing system of rational, explanatory pedagogy as an outgrowth of an omnipresent positive-rational materialistic attitude toward life. It is therefore easy to understand why many children experience a style of upbringing that is not very constructive, but highly critical. A critical attitude promotes distance instead of closeness, and young children need closeness to the world and to their fellow human beings.
In a course for young doctors, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) described the following: When moral impulses arise in human beings, the temperature of the warmth body increases and other subtle physiological processes take place in the body, all of them constructive in nature.
Theoretical thoughts, on the other hand, kill all this, but generate consciousness. In this sense, we may recall Novalis’s statement in his fragments that consciousness is the strongest poison. This effect can be observed in people who have been educated in a one-sidedly rational manner; this style of education does not build up, but weakens.
These thoughts sum up what is at stake in a simple formula. If thinking has no emotional or moral connection, consciousness is awakened, but at the expense of the human being itself.
If we educate rationally and offer young children explanation after explanation after explanation, as was done in the 16th century, consciousness is awakened, but because the child is a child, they cannot grasp this. The rightful task of education up to about the age of twelve is not to awaken the powers of consciousness, but to ensure the foundations of life, growth, health, attention, learning ability, mobility, language ability, and the like. If consciousness is awakened prematurely, these abilities melt away, just as snow melts in the sun.
Today, the most urgent task of kindergartens is to develop the foundations of life for children and to help parents acquire the appropriate educational skills to support their children so that they feel at home in kindergarten as well as at home.
This task will become increasingly urgent. Only when parents and educators work together as partners – in the spirit of an educational partnership – will something beneficial for children emerge.
One could argue that partnership-based cooperation is most effective during the kindergarten years. Today, there is so much medical evidence about the health effects of harmful parenting that it would be unprofessional to ignore it. A task for the future will be to establish more connections with the results of research in education and medicine. In my opinion, it is precisely educators who should become knowledgeable in this field: what is pedagogically healthy and what is harmful? If educators can provide parents with such expertise, this will represent a new quality feature of the kindergarten movement.
In many ways, Rudolf Steiner was, whether you like it or not, far ahead of his time.
-Christof Wiechert
Taken from:
Göbel, N. (2026). 100 Founders, 100 Years of Steiner/Waldorf Early Childhood Education. (J.-K. Saltet, Trans.) Spring Valley, USA: Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America.
Read more about our Waldorf Pre-School which offers Baby Care, Play Group, Nursery School and Grade R in Bryanston: https://www.michaelmount.co.za/preschool/