-- How can education work in harmony with a child's developing
relationship with the world around it?
-- How can education take account of body, soul, and spirit?
Bernard Lievegoed takes a child's full humanity -- body, soul and spirit
-- as his starting point. From this, a philosophy and pedagogy emerge in
which, he argues, children can become happy, wise and skilled adults
only when education takes the development of these three aspects into
account from the very beginning.
Drawing on the educational ideas of Rudolf Steiner, and on a
philosophical tradition going back to Goethe and Schiller, Lievegoed
turns away from the materialist nineteenth-century notion of 'knowledge
is power' which still pervades mainstream education today. He describes
the three main stages of child development -- pre-school, schoolchild
and teenager -- in a clear and concise way. Lievegoed shows that each
stage of roughly seven years has its own character, and its own genetic
and biographical potential.
The author goes on to explore the practical application of these
insights as an education method in harmony with the child's developing
relationship with the world around them.