Development+in+Adolescence

This provides great insights into changing perceptions and brain function during adolescence: Betty Staley - forty years in Steiner Education writes: The astral body contains everything that happens in relationship between myself and others, between myself and myself, and the tensions that occur between people. In our astral body we carry the condensed seed of all of our interpersonal interactions as well as all that happened in past lives. When the astral forces completely penetrate into the organs, that is the ending of childhood. Now we can say puberty is over and there is the beginning of adolescence. The ego is carried through the blood working below the diaphragm in the metabolic/limb system. It is through our limbs that we meet our destiny. The heart becomes the doorway through which we create new karma. The freeing of the astral body around fourteen brings a concentrated seed of past karma and the possibility of stepping into future karma...At this time we can begin to live out our karma. We carry the planetary attitudes from our journey to earth. We can think of the planetary attitude as the personality or character of adolescence. It is a colorful atmosphere of soul that we express in our interactions with others...Rudolf Steiner describes that in the ninth and tenth grades the ego is busy trying to harmonize the physical body, the etheric and astral bodies, and thereis not a lot of energy or ego surplus to deal with self-control or self-discipline. So when we tellninth graders to control themselves, they don't know how to do it. Or the parent says, "What were you thinking when you behaved so thoughtlessly? The reality is that they didn't think. During these early high school years, we need to bring the world to the students, set boundaries and structures from the outside while the ego is busy restructuring these inner relationships. I remember a colleague describing that youngsters during this time should carry a sign that reads, "Closed for Reconstruction." During the transitional period of sixteen-seventeen, the ego is becoming ready and accessible for thinking that goes beyond following rules to evaluating, assessing, and considering situations from the inside out. What has begun as outer structure slowly is internalized and forms inner structure as a vessel for the incoming ego.  For more of this article -http://www.waldorfresearchinstitute.org/pdf/WESpirChangesBStaley.pd **
 * //Puberty as the Gateway to Freedom// by Richard Landl.**
 * http://www.waldorfresearchinstitute.org/pdf/BAPubertyLendl.pdf**

**Some Insights into the Life of the Will during Puberty***
//One is surprised to find how strongly the faculty of thinking, when it awakens in the child at about the age of 13 or 14, is still bound up with the element of feeling. The thinking is permeated with feeling and looks with astonishment and wonder at the world and its laws to which it is now capable of applying the faculty of logical understanding. If, as teachers, we realize this, we know where the correctives in education lie and we can exert a perfectly legitimate influence upon the child’s unfolding life of will. But this again is only possible if we ourselves bring of strong element of feeling to meet the conscious life of soul that is awakening in the child. Education (in the full sense of the word) is not a healthy process if it is achieved in some way apart from the actual teaching. That is why it is soinfinitely tragic in our days to see the art of teaching gradually being lost, especially in the West. Teaching is seldom regarded as an art; indeed it is often considered more valuable if the child 'teaches himself' instead of being taught. It is an illusion to think that it is right to allow the child to apply the faculty of self- instruction at an age when psychical and bodily development is by no means sufficiently mature. The art of education and teaching has as its most significant task of all precisely at the age of physiological maturity, when strong, pure forces of feeling must be brought as a counterbalance and as a means of purification to meet the life of desires arising in the child. Rudolf Steiner once said that a lesson ought never to come to an end without it having been possible for the children to have at least one hearty laugh or also to be really sad. There should be a strong interplay and expansion of feelings. Of outstanding importance is the cultivation of elements of astonishment and wonder for in this way the teacher gives to the soul the food that will ripen it for later knowledge. Things about which the child has at some later time wondered will interest him. Later on he will learn to love them and want to understand them. It is a great mistake to imagine that human beings canknow or understand anything without loving or reverencing it. Something that is known without the element of love entering it can only bring to light partial truth, not the whole truth. What innumerable questions arise in the child when he begins to marvel at all that surrounds him in the world! At the age of thirteen or fourteen the subject matter of the teaching should be handled in such a way that it is constantly arousing fresh wonder and surprise in the children. Very often it is the deepest problems of humanity about which the children are wondering and the answers to which we may have postponed as long as we can. The questions put by children are so interesting! Once the power of thinking is awake it approaches the deepest and most vital problems quite of itself. Children will ask questions such as: Isthe world infinite and without end, can it come to an end. What is there behind the sky, did the world ever have a beginning, can one imagine it ceasing to be? And so on, and so on. Children are always putting such questions, which are really purely philosophical. We may try to protect ourselves from them because we feel incapable of answering. Moreover it would not be right to enter into discussions and arguments. But we can pay attention to such questions and little by little let them be answered by the world that is being revealed to the children, by the art of teaching, and by what great minds have thought about them. It would be of great significance to our civilization if teachers were to think of themselves as artists whose task it is to shape and mold the material of their lessons. This is something that will never be conveyed to a child by books from which he himself has to learn. By the time the dull forces of will have worked themselves out of the form of instinctive impulse to the point where the now gradually awakening forces of thought are leading the human being to knowledge that makes him capable of acting out of free will. His perceptions and experiences lead him to knowledge, which can be transformed, into conscious decisions of the will. The half conscious life of the will gradually combines with the awakening life of thought. We have then the right to educate, for the fusion of thought and will does not come about of itself but only when the human being in his early years has been led in a healthy way through wonder and astonishment to have interest in and love for the world, when the ripened faculty of thought combines with the life of the will. For us, as teachers, it is all essential to bear in mind the free human being of the future, to realize that although the child is not yet free, he is fundamentally and by his very nature destined for freedom. There are aspects of the life of soul in the growing human being to which attention must be paid, namely the religious and essentially ethical life whereby he relates himself to the Divine. What happens here is conditioned by destiny and in destiny it is not for others to intervene.// On the Real Nature of Will in the Child* By CAROLINE VON HEYDEBRAND http://www.waldorflibrary.org/Journal_Articles/willchild.pdf