On reflection: Each child not only perceives, but draws, creates and constructs. A child’s perception of the world is a unique form of artistic creation. The image perceived and, at the same time, created by the child is charged with striking emotional colouring. Children experience an elemental joy when they perceive an object from the surrounding world and add something to it from their imagination.

Children will trust you when they feel in their hearts that you under- stand this simplest, and at the same time wisest, of truths. A child is a child. Not all moral and political ideas comprehensible to a young man or woman, or even to an adolescent, are comprehensible to a young child. We should not rush to explain truths which, by virtue of a child’s age, are incomprehensible. xvi.

Without idealising children, without attributing miraculous properties to them, a genuine educator cannot but take account of the fact that a child’s perception of the world, and a child’s emotional and moral reaction to the reality that surrounds them, are distinguished by a certain clarity, sensitivity and immediacy. p. 5.

I become more and more convinced that the emotional feeling in a group—the collective joy and enthusiasm—is a significant spiritual force, capable of uniting children and awakening interest in what the group is doing, even in previously indifferent hearts.

Learn to expose children to some single phenomenon in the natural world, but in such a way that this little part of the world comes to life with all the colours of the rainbow. Always leave something unsaid, so that children want to return again and again to what they have learnt. pp. 70

Rudolph Steiner, who promoted a phenomenological approach to the instruction and education of children, more specifically: living experience, observation, description, reflection, work of an investigative nature, the use of stories as a vital and graphic way of coming to know the world, and the view of a teacher as a spiritual mentor. xiii

The world surrounding a child is first and foremost the world of nature, with its limitless abundance of phenomena, with its inexhaustible beauty. Here, in nature, is the eternal source of children’s thought, speech and ideas. And at the same time, with each year there is a growth in the role of those ele- ments of the environment that are connected with the social relations between people, and with work. pp.13

In the preschool and early school years a person’s character, way of thinking, and speech are formed. Perhaps everything that enters the minds and hearts of children from a book, only enters because alongside the book is the surrounding world: nature, fields and meadows, the blue sky and the misty haze on the horizon, the song of the lark, the opening petals of a snowdrop and because around them are the good and evil that little people see in the surrounding world. pp. 10.

When I am little again, that nobody knows whether a student receives more when he looks at the blackboard or when an irresistible force (the force of the sun, turning the head of a sunflower) compels him to look out the window. What is more beneficial and important for him at that moment: the logical world, compressed to fit on the classroom blackboard, or the world sailing by on the other side of the window panes? p. 8