Phases of Childhood

How can education work in harmony with a child's developing relationship with the surrounding world? Can education consider the child's body, soul, and spirit?

Bernard Lievegoed takes a child's full humanity—body, soul, and spirit—as his starting point. From this, the philosophy and pedagogy emerge whereby, he insists, children can become happy, wise, and skilled adults if education considers the development of these three aspects from the beginning.

Drawing on the educational ideas of Rudolf Steiner and on a philosophical tradition going back to Goethe and Schiller, Lievegoed rejects the materialist nineteenth-century notion that “knowledge is power,” which continues to pervade mainstream education today. He describes the three fundamental stages of child development—preschool, schoolchild, and teenager—in a clear and concise way. Lievegoed shows how each stage of roughly seven years has its own characteristics and its own genetic and biographical potential.

Lievegoed also explores the practical application of these insights as an educational method that is in harmony with children's developing relationship to the world around them.