ABSTRACT
This chapter draws upon Rudolf Steiner's understanding of child development to show how the Waldorf Kindergarten (for children up to age 6) creates a space in which, through play and natural day-to-day activities, the necessary foundations are laid for future (more cognitive) learning. The paradigm of education that has developed in the course of the past hundred years is intellectual and didactic. In this model, the teacher, and, especially in the last few years, the parent as well, is always supposed to be imparting information to the child. Much of this imparting is actually 'correcting', adjusting the child's imperfect understanding of the world in the light of modern knowledge, and particularly modern scientific knowledge. The importance of play as an element in scientific understanding—indeed, as an essential part of scientific discovery—is powerfully illustrated by an incident in the life of the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman.
