Eternal Curriculum for Wisdom Children

Book excerpt: At the heart of Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf curriculum is the belief that a child from age seven to fourteen recapitulates the intellectual and cultural development that humanity as a whole passes through over time. Until now, the exact scheme of how the Waldorf literature curriculum, grades one through eight, follow the model of collective humanity's evolution was not clear, even though the effectiveness of the curriculum could be observed. After three decades of being a Waldorf teacher and teacher trainer, the author discovered a comprehensive and practical scheme of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny while drawing the standard charts and diagrams that formerly had been used in attempts to explain this foundational concept of Rudolf Steiner's pedagogy. It became quite clear that since we teach the "etheric body" of the child from grades one to eight, teachers need to understand what the etheric body is and what it is composed of, and why the curriculum's literature and cultural studies needed to be presented in a specific order that is not historically chronological. The first book of this set, The Eternal Ethers, was written to unveil the mysterious etheric body. Once the etheric body is understood, we need to comprehend why we teach each specific grade content and how it effects the developing child. This book, Eternal Curriculum for Wisdom Children, was created to give ideas and suggestions of what literature is appropriate for students and teachers at each grade level, and why we teach a curriculum that is timeless. Once this is accomplished, we can teach an Eternal Curriculum to the etheric body of the child that matches the development of humanity and offers education that nourishes theWisdom Child in both teacher and student.