From playing to thinking: how the kindergarten provides a foundation for scientific understanding

This paper draws upon Rudolf Steiner's understanding of child development to show how the Waldorf kindergarten (for children up to age 6) creates a space in which, through play and natural day-to-day activities, the necessary foundations are laid for future (more cognitive) learning. In this holistic ontology, the children's kindergarten experiences, on the somatic level, percolate through the life of their feelings for seven or eight years and are then ready to ‘bubble up’ in the form of thoughts in seventh grade. The archetypal movements and rhythms that underlying activities like sweeping, stirring, kneading and washing – gestures which have formed the bodies and wills of human beings for countless generations – are rapidly disappearing in the lives of modern children. The Waldorf kindergarten fosters an atmosphere akin to that of the ‘home and hearth’, where the child who plays creatively in those formative first seven years of life will have the potential for a far more ‘inner’ and living grasp of (for example) the laws of physics than a child who was little more than a passive observer in that period of life.