The Seven-Year Cycles of Child Development

Childhood, in anthroposophy, has three phases of about seven years each, and each phase ends with the birth of one member of the human being. At physical birth the physical body is set free from the mother's body. At the change of teeth, around seven, the etheric body, the life body, is born. At puberty, around fourteen, the astral body, the bearer of feeling and desire, is born. At about twenty-one the I is born, and the person becomes, in the full sense, the author of their own life. Each birth releases a faculty, and the education fitted to a child is the one that works with the faculty that has just been freed, and does not call on the one still enclosed. Steiner set this out in The Education of the Child in 1907 and built the Waldorf curriculum on it in the Stuttgart courses of 1919.

Birth to seven: imitation

Until the change of teeth the etheric body is wholly occupied in building the organs, and the tradition's finding is that this work is disturbed by any demand on the child's forces for memory or abstraction. The child of these years is, in Steiner's phrase, wholly a sense organ: it takes in everything around it and reproduces it in its own gesture, speech, and, finally, in the forming of the body itself. The child learns through imitation and nothing else. It does not learn to speak from instruction but from being spoken to; it learns to work from adults working in its presence.

The right of these years is that the world is good. The child needs a surrounding that is worth imitating, real activity rather than explanation, rhythm rather than rules, and play with things that leave the imagination something to complete. Formal reading, writing, and arithmetic wait, and the Waldorf kindergarten, to age six or seven, holds them back on purpose.

Seven to fourteen: authority and picture

The change of teeth marks the completion of the etheric body's work on the organs; the second teeth are the last thing it forms in that capacity. A part of its forces is now free and turns into the forces of memory, of rhythm, and of the inner picture, and the child can be taught. The teaching that fits these years is pictorial and rhythmic: letters drawn from images, arithmetic in movement and verse, history and nature told as living pictures. The child's relation to the adult changes from imitation to authority, the loving authority of a person the child can trust to be the world's spokesman. The Waldorf class teacher, who stays with a class through these years, exists for this.

The right of these years is that the world is beautiful. Within them the tradition marks the nine-year change, the Rubicon, at which the child first experiences itself as separate from the world and from its parents and needs the adult to remain steady; and the change at about twelve, when the skeleton comes into its own, the sense of causality awakens, and the sciences can begin.

Fourteen to twenty-one: judgment

Puberty is the birth of the astral body. The feelings, desires, and opinions the young person has been living in under the shelter of the adults become their own, and with them the capacity for independent judgment. Now the teaching can be conceptual, argued, and open to question; the high school teacher is a specialist, not an authority, and the aim is that the student think for themselves. The right of these years is that the world is true. Idealism, the search for a person to admire and a cause to serve, is the proper form of these years, and the tradition's practice is to give it real material.

After twenty-one

The birth of the I at about twenty-one does not end the sevens. Steiner's picture continues: from twenty-one to twenty-eight the sentient soul is developed, from twenty-eight to thirty-five the intellectual soul, from thirty-five to forty-two the consciousness soul, and thereafter the spiritual members begin to be worked on out of the person's own effort rather than given by nature. Bernard Lievegoed's Phases develops the adult sevens, and the tradition's biography work reads a life by them.

What the cycles govern

The sevens govern when the Waldorf school does what: kindergarten until the change of teeth, the class teacher's years to fourteen, the high school to eighteen. They govern the temperament's reading, since childhood is sanguine, youth choleric, and a temperament is read against the age. They govern the school's position on screens and on early academics. And they govern anthroposophic medicine's reading of the illnesses of childhood, which it reads as the members finding their way into the body. The ages are typical, not exact; a child's own teeth and own puberty are the measure, and the tradition treats the visible sign, not the birthday, as the marker.