Phases of childhood - Bernard Lievegoed

-- How can education work in harmony with a child's developing relationship with the world around?-- 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.

Bernard Lievegoed was a paediatrician, educationalist and management consultant. He was founder of the NPI which pioneered new approaches to business management internationally. He died in 1992.

'This book was written after the Second World War by a physician steeped in the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. As such, it gives equal weight to the different realms of development within the overall concept of humans as souls. The phyiscal aspect is covered in great detail through to puberty, then the development of the self, and finally more specifically of thinking, feeling and willing. A thoughtful and informative book.'-- Scientific & Medical Network Review, December 2005