Phases of Childhood

True to real life, the author takes a child's full humanity - body, soul and spirit - as his starting point. When education takes the development of these 3 aspects from the very beginning, children can become happy, wise and skilled adults. Lievegoed describes the three main stages of child development - pre-school, schoolchild and teenager (roughly seven years each) and how each have their own character, genetic and biographic potential. Lievegoed turns away from the materialist notion of 'knowledge is power' still pervading mainstream education. He draws on the educational ideas of Rudolf Steiner, and philosophical traditions as far back as Goethe and Schiller. Bernard Lievegoed was a Dutch paediatrician and educationalist. First published in English in 1987 some sections have been rewritten and revised by his daughter.