True education, leading forth into knowledge, is leading forth into life itself and that includes spirit. What we have is conditioning, conformity, comparison, judgment and obedience training. Waldorf education encompasses culture, is based on the arts, creativity and honors the child’s spirit along with his or her intellect. 

Well an education that addresses spirit starts at conception practically.  It’s an automatic part of life itself. We speak of education is leading forth into knowledge.  Knowledge of what? Of life itself.  Everything in the child drives them toward that.  They’re driven by this huge force to interact with the living world and build what Piaget calls the “construction of knowledge,” the neural imprint of that world.  They can interact with it on a relationship, in a relational way, and there’s this enormous force that drives the child to do that.  Just like the same force that drives them to play, the same force that drives them toward imagination, moving into their inner world of creative play and so on.  Why it is they want to play all the time, of course that’s the way they can interact and learn in this world and relate to it and so forth.  All that bubbles up from inside the child expressing outwardly.  That’s education.  

Anything that blocks that, any negative that comes along, is in effect a restraint and I would call it, like William Blake would call it an evil force.  The child comes in assuming, comes into the world assuming, that the world welcomes him or her and that it’s the right place to be and that it’s their possession.  The world is their playground and they move out with this assumption that the world welcomes their interaction with it and learning of it, and so on.  And they’re hit on every hand with obstacles to that.  And being hit by obstacles through it such as the constant negation of the world, everything is out of reach of the child.  You can’t do this, you can’t do that.  No, don’t” every few minutes from everybody. And then the fact that the failure to meet the child’s needs as they move out into the world, what we call the bonding process and so on, the failure to meet those needs is in effect a great negation from the world.  So the world is responding to the child’s great affirmation and embrace with the negation and they’re shutting off.  This in effect kills the spirit of a child eventually.  

So for us to sit around talking about soul in this case, leaves me kind of cold because I don’t know what the soul would be unless you want to relate it to mine, just the awareness of self, but the child coming into the world comes in with the assumption that this whole thing is their playground and they’re driven with this great force.  Again that force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives that child to embrace the world.And then he hits the great negative force of culture and something in that child dies at that point.  

So education would be not how we can engineer the child’s life or anything like that, not a curriculum that’s going to do that.  The true education would simply be to keep that affirmative state open in the child’s mind at all times and never let them be driven into a negation, into a negative constraint, but to keep them open and moving and embracing their world.