The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In my first lecture, I drew your attention to the essence of anthroposophical spiritual science. I mentioned how methods have been sought in spiritual science that enable the spiritual investigator to penetrate a supersensible world with the same clarity as natural science penetrates the outer, sense-perceptible world with the sense organs and the intellect, which systematizes and interprets the results of sensory impressions. I described these methods in my last lecture. And I emphasized that, in addition to today’s ordinary science, another science exists. This uses spiritual methods and, by its path of research and the inner experiences unfolding along it, furnishes full proof of our being surrounded by a supersensible world, just as, in the ordinary state of consciousness, we are surrounded by the sense world. I would now like to return to a prior point, elaborated during the last lecture, that, at least to a certain extent, will form the basis of what I have to say today.

The anthroposophical science of the spirit, referred to here, is not at all opposed to what has become—over the last three or four centuries—the natural-scientific world-view. As I already pointed out, this spiritual science is opposed only to viewpoints that do not take into account the results of modern natural science and thereby become more or less dilettantish. Spiritual science wishes to be an extension or continuation of natural-scientific thinking. Only, this spiritual-scientific continuation allows a person to acquire the kind of knowledge that can answer the deepest longings in the minds and the souls of modern human beings. Thus, through spiritual science, one really comes to know human beings.

Not so long ago, modern science, in a way fully recognized by spiritual science, gave us a wonderful survey of the gradual development of living organisms right up to human beings. And yet, when all is said and done, the human being stands there only as the end product of evolution.

Biology speaks of certain muscles that are found both in human beings and in various animal species. We also know that a human being has a certain number of bones and that this number corresponds with the bones of the higher animals. Altogether, we have grown accustomed to explaining the emergence of the entire bone structure of higher animals and human beings as a development from a lower stage to a higher one. But we have no idea of the essential characteristics that are uniquely and exclusively human. Anyone willing to look at the situation without prejudice has to admit the fact that we are ignorant of what constitutes a human being. In general, natural phenomena and all living organisms are scrupulously investigated up to and including homo sapiens, and the conclusion is then drawn that human beings are encompassed by what is to be found in external nature. But, generally, there is no really adequate idea of what is essentially human.

In ordinary, practical life, we find a similar situation, very much as a result of natural-scientific thinking and knowledge. We find its effects overshadowing modern life, causing a great deal of perplexity and distress. The consequence of not knowing the essential nature of human beings becomes all too obvious in what is usually referred to as the social question. Millions of people who belong to what is called the proletariat, whom the traditional religions and confessions have abandoned, believe that reality is no longer to be found in the human soul, but only in the material aspects of life, in the processes of production within the outer economic sphere. Morality, religion, science, and art, as cultivated by humanity throughout the ages, are regarded as nothing more than a kind of ideological superstructure, built on a solid material or even economic material substructure. The moral and cultural aspects of life appear almost as a kind of vapor, rising from the only reality—material reality. Here, again, what is truly the human soul and spirit—what is psychical-spiritual in human beings—has been eliminated.

Not to be able to reach knowledge of the human being and, consequently, to be debarred from beholding and experiencing the truth of human nature, and from bringing down human ideals into will impulses in the social sphere—these seem to be the characteristic features of modern times.

Anthroposophical spiritual science, on the other hand, is only too aware of what needs to be accomplished in this direction for the sake of the deepest, yet often unconscious, longing of the souls of some of the best of our contemporaries. It is to be accomplished, first, by true knowledge of the human being and, second, by an inner sense of fulfillment strong enough to enable one to carry into public life truly social impulses arising in the soul. For, without these impulses arising from the depths of our humanity, even the best of outer practical arrangements will not lead to what in the widest circles is regarded as unrealizable, but toward which many people are striving nevertheless, namely to a dignified human existence.

The path leading into the spiritual world as I described it here a few days ago could easily be understood as something that estranges one from life rather than leading one to the two weighty questions that I have put before you once again today. For this reason, it was of paramount importance that anthroposophical spiritual science be practiced in the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. Despite the unfinished state of the building, spiritual science has the possibility of pursuing practical activities there, demonstrating how knowledge of human nature and human faculties can enter into the practical sphere of life.

One of the most important practical activities is surely education of the young.

Those who work in the field of educating children are basically dealing with what will enter the world with the next generation, and this means a very great deal. Raising and educating children are a direct way to work into the near future. In its quest for a method of understanding human nature, anthroposophical spiritual science finds itself able to understand the human being in its becoming—the child—in a wide, comprehensive manner. From such comprehensive knowledge of the growing child, spiritual science seeks to create a real art of education. For what spiritual science can provide in understanding and penetration of human nature does not end in abstractions or theories, but eventually develops into an artistic comprehension, first of the human form and then of the potential of the human soul and spirit. It is all very well to maintain that science demands what is often called a sober working with objective concepts. But, ladies and gentlemen, what if the whole world, if nature, did not work with such concepts at all? What if it were to scorn our wish to restrict its creativity to the kind of natural law into which we try to confine it? What if the creativity of the world were to elude our sober, merely external grasp and our rather lightweight logical concepts? We can certainly make our demands, but whether by doing so we will attain real knowledge depends on whether nature works and creates according to them.

At any rate, more recent scientific attitudes have failed to recognize the essence of human nature because they have failed to consider the following. In her upward climb, at each successive step of the evolutionary ladder—from the mineral kingdom, through the plant and animal kingdoms, to the human kingdom—nature’s creativity increasingly escapes our intellectual grasp and sober logic, forcing us to approach her workings more and more artistically. What ultimately lives in a human being is open to many interpretations and shows manifold aspects. And because spiritual science, in its own way, seeks the inner harmony between knowledge, religious depth, and artistic creativity, it is in a position to survey rightly—that is, spiritually—the enigmatic, admirable creation that is a human being and how it is placed in the world.

Last time, I spoke of how it is possible to look with scientific accuracy into the world where human beings live before they descend into physical existence at conception or birth. I indicated how, with mathematical clarity, the human spirit and soul, descending from the spiritual worlds, place themselves before the spiritual eyes of the anthroposophical investigator, showing themselves to be at work on the interior of the future earthly body and drawing only material substances from the stream of heredity bequeathed by previous generations.

Anyone who talks about such things today is quickly judged inconsistent. And yet the methods pursued by spiritual science are much the same as those employed by natural science. The main difference is that the work entailed in the various branches of natural science is done in the appropriate laboratories, clinics, or astronomical observatories, whereas the science of the spirit approaches human nature directly in order to observe it as methodically as a natural scientist observes whatever might belong to his or her particular field of study. In the latter case, however, the situation is more straightforward for it is easier to make one’s observations and to search for underlying laws in natural science than in spiritual science.

As a first step, I would like to draw your attention to what one can observe in a growing human being in a truly natural-scientific way. Of course, in the case of spiritual science, we must include in our observations the gradual development of the human being through several different life periods. One of those periods extends from birth to the change of the teeth; that is, until about the seventh year. To recognize a kind of nodal point around the seventh year might easily create the impression of an inclination toward mysticism which is not, however, the case. The following observations have as little to do with mysticism as the distinction between the seven colors of the rainbow has. They are simply an outcome of objective, scientific observation of the growing child. Even from a physical point of view, it is evident that a powerful change occurs when, in about a child’s seventh year, forces from within drive the second teeth out of the organism. This event does not recur, indicating that some kind of conclusion has been reached.

What is going on becomes clearer when we do not restrict our observations to the physical or change-of-teeth aspect of this seventh year, but extend them to parallel developments occurring alongside the physical changes. In this case, if we are capable of observing at all, we will see how a child’s entire soul life undergoes a gradual change during this period. We can observe how the child, who previously could form only blurred and indistinct concepts, now begins to form more sharply contoured concepts—how it is only now in fact that the child begins to form proper concepts at all. Furthermore, we notice how quite a different kind of memory is now unfolding. Formerly, when younger, the child might often have displayed signs of an excellent memory. That memory, however, was entirely natural and instinctive. Whereas there was before no need for any special effort in the act of remembering, the child who has passed this watershed must now make a mental effort to remember past events clearly. In short, it becomes obvious that, with the change of teeth around the seventh year, a child begins to be active in the realm of mental imagery, in forming simple thoughts, and in the sphere of conscious will activity.

But what is actually happening here? Where had this force been that we can now observe in the child’s soul and spirit, forming more clearly-defined mental images and thoughts? Where was that force before the child’s milk teeth were shed? This is the kind of question that remains unasked by our contemporary theorizing psychologists.

When physicists observe in a physical process an increase of warmth that is not due to external causes, they explain this phenomenon by the concept of “latent heat becoming liberated.” This implies that the heat that emerges must have existed previously within the substance itself. A similar kind of thinking must also be applied in the case of human life. Where were those forces of soul and spirit before they emerged in the child after the seventh year? They were latent in the child’s physical organism. They were active in its organic growth, in its organic structuring, until, with the pushing out of the second teeth, a kind of climax was reached, indicating the conclusion of this first period of growth, so particularly active during the child’s early years. Psychology today is quite abstract. People cogitate on the relationship of soul to body, and devise the most remarkable and grandiloquent hypotheses. Empty phrases, however, will not lead to an art of education. Spiritual science, for its part, shows that what we see emerging cognitively in a child after the seventh year was actively engaged in its inner organism before the second dentition. It shows that what appears in a child’s soul after the change of teeth was active before as an organic force that has now become liberated.

In a similar way, a true spiritual researcher observes in a concrete manner—not abstractly—the entire course of human life. To illustrate that concrete manner of observation, let us now consider a well-known and specific childhood phenomenon. Let us look at children at play, at children’s games. If we can do so without preconception and with dedicated interest in the growing human being, we know—although every game has a certain form and shares common, characteristic features—that, whatever the game, each child will play it with his or her own individual style. Now those who raise or educate young children can, to a certain extent, influence or guide how a child plays according to the child’s own nature. Also, depending on our pedagogical skills, we can try to steer our children’s play into more purposeful directions. And, if we pay attention to all this, we can clearly discriminate between the various individual styles of playing until the child reaches an age when they are no longer so clearly identifiable. Once a child enters school and other interests are crowding in, however, it becomes more difficult to see the future consequences of his or her characteristic style of playing. Nevertheless, if we do not observe superficially and, realizing that the course of life represents a whole, extend the range of our observations to span the entire earthly life, we might discover the following.

Around twenty-four or twenty-five—that is, when young adults must find their links with the outer world, and when they must fit themselves into the social fabric of the wider community—there will be those who prove themselves more skillful than others in dealing with all aspects and details of their tasks. Now, careful observation will reveal that the way in which people in their twenties adapt themselves to outer conditions of life, with greater or lesser skill, is a direct consequence of their play activity during early childhood.

Certain rivers, whose sources may be clearly traced, disappear below the earth’s surface during their course, only to resurface at a later stage. We can compare this phenomenon with certain faculties in human life. The faculty of playing, so prominent in a young child, is particularly well developed during the first years of life. It then vanishes into the deeper regions of the soul to resurface during the twenties, transmuted into an aptitude for finding one’s way in the world. Just think: by guiding the play of young children, we, as educators, are directly intervening in the happiness or unhappiness, the future destiny, of young people in their twenties!

Such insights greatly sharpen our sense of responsibility as educators. They also stimulate the desire to work toward a genuine art of education. Tight-fitting, narrow concepts cannot reach the core of human nature. To do so, a wide and comprehensive view is needed. Such a view can be gained if we recognize that such interconnections as I have mentioned affect human life. It will also make us realize that we must distinguish between definite life periods in human development, the first of which extends from birth to the change of teeth and has a character all its own.

At this point, I should mention that those who choose to become teachers or educators through anthroposophical spiritual science are filled with the consciousness that a message from the spiritual world is actually present in what they meet in such enigmatic and wondrous ways in the developing human being, the child. Such teachers observe the child with its initially indeterminate features, noticing how they gradually assume more definite forms. They see how children’s movements and life stirrings are undefined to begin with and how directness and purpose then increasingly enter their actions from the depths of their souls. Those who have prepared themselves to become teachers and educators through anthroposophical spiritual science are aware that something actually descending from the spiritual worlds lives in the way the features of a child’s face change from day to day, week to week, and year to year, gradually evolving into a distinct physiognomy. And they know too that something spiritual is descending in what is working through the lively movements of a child’s hands and in what, quite magically, enters into a child’s way of speaking.

To learn to recognize this activity of the spiritual world, which is so different from that of the physical world; to meet the child as an educator with such an inner attitude and mood as I have described: this means that we see in the vocation of teaching a source of healing. This vocation could be expressed as follows: The spiritual worlds have entrusted a human soul into my care. I have been called upon to assist in solving the riddles that this child poses. By means of a deepened knowledge of the human being—transformed into a real art, the art of education—it is my task to show this child the way into life.

Such deepened knowledge of human nature reveals that, in the first period of life, a child is what I would like to call an “imitating” being. (You will find a more detailed account of this characteristic feature in my booklet The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy.) Descending from the spiritual world, the child brings to outer expression—like an echo from the spiritual world—the last experiences undergone there. As anthroposophists, when we educate our children, we are aware that the way in which children imitate their surroundings is childish and primitive. They copy what is done before them with their movements. They learn to speak entirely and only through imitation. And, until they lose their milk teeth, they also imitate what happens morally in their environment.

What lies behind all of this can be rightly understood only with the help of spiritual science. Before conception or birth, a child lives in the spiritual world, the same spiritual world that can be known and consciously experienced if we strengthen the power of memory and develop the power of love in the ways I described during our last meeting. In that spiritual world, the relationship of one being to another is not one in which they confront one another outwardly; rather, each being is capable of living right into another—objectively, yet full of love. Children then bring this relationship of spiritual beings to one another down to earth. It is like a resonant echo of the spiritual world. We can observe here how children become creatures of imitation, how everything they learn and make their own during these first seven years, they learn through imitation. Any genuine art of education must fully respect this principle of imitation—otherwise, it is all too easy to misjudge our children’s behavior.

To illustrate this point, let me give you an example, just one of hundreds that could be chosen. The father of a boy, aged about five, once came to me and told me that a very sad thing had happened; namely, that his boy had been stealing. I suggested that we begin by carefully examining whether in fact the child had really stolen. The father told me that the boy had taken money from the drawer where his wife kept it and had then bought candy with it, which he shared with other children in the street. I asked the father what usually happened with the money kept in the drawer. He replied that the boy’s mother took the amount of money needed for the household that day out of her drawer every morning. Hearing this, I could reassure him that his boy had not stolen at all. I said, “The child is five years old. This means that he is still fully in the stage of imitation. Therefore, it is only good and proper that he should do what he sees done in his environment. His mother takes money out of the drawer every day, and so he naturally copies her. This is not stealing but merely behavior appropriate to the fundamental principle of a child’s development during the first seven-year period.”

A real teacher must know these things. During the first seven years of life, one cannot guide and direct a child by reprimands, nor by moral commands. During this period, one must guide a child by one’s own deeds and by setting an example. But there are of course imponderables to be reckoned with in human as in outer nature. We guide a child not only with external deeds, but also with inner thoughts and feelings. If children enjoy the company of grown-ups who never allow unworthy thoughts or feelings to enter into their lives, something noble and good could become of them. On the other hand, if adults allow themselves mean, ignoble thoughts or feelings when they are around young people, believing that such thoughts or feelings do not matter since everyone is safely ensheathed within an individual bodily structure, they are mistaken, for such things do work on children. Imponderables are at work.

Such imponderables also manifest themselves in the second period of life, which begins after the change of teeth—when the child enters school—and lasts until the age of puberty, around fourteen. When we were working out the fundamentals of a truly spiritual-scientific, spiritually artistic pedagogy for the Waldorf school in Stuttgart—founded by Emil Molt and directed by myself—we had to make a special study of this transition from the first life period, that of imitation, to the second period, from the change of teeth to puberty. For all teaching, education, and upbringing at the Waldorf School is to be based entirely upon anthroposophical insight into human nature. And because children change from the stage of imitation into quite a different stage—I shall say more about this presently—we had to make a special effort to study this time of transition.

During the second period, leading up to puberty, imitation alone no longer suffices to form the faculties, the child’s whole being. A new impulse now emerges from the depths of the child’s soul. The child now wishes to regard the teacher as a figure of undisputed authority. Today, when everything goes under the banner of democracy, the demand is easily made that schools, too, should be “democratized.” There are even those who would do away with the distinction between teacher and pupil altogether, advocating “community schools,” or whatever name these bright ideas are given. Such ideas are a consequence of party-political attitudes, not knowledge of human nature. But educational questions should not be judged from partisan positions; they should be judged only on their own merits. And, if you do this, you will find that, between second dentition and puberty, a child is no longer obliged to imitate, but now has a deep desire to learn what is right or wrong, good or evil, from a beloved and naturally respected authority figure.

Happy are those who throughout their lives can remember such childhood authorities and can say of themselves, “I had a teacher. When I went to visit her, opening the door to her room, I already felt full of awe. To me, it was perfectly natural that my teacher was the source of everything good and true.” Such things are not subject to argument on social or any other grounds. What is important is to gain the insight into human nature so that one can say, “Just as a young child’s urge to play, which manifests in individually different ways, resurfaces as more or less skill in fitting into life when the young person is in his or her twenties, so another, similar transformation also occurs regarding a child’s reverence for the teacher as a figure of authority. That is, only if faith in the authority of the adults in charge develops fully between the ages of approximately seven and fifteen will the right sense of freedom develop later, when the feeling for freedom must be the basis for all social life.”

People cannot become free as adults unless they found as children support in the natural authority of adults. Likewise, only those who during the first period of life are allowed to pass through the process of adjusting themselves to their environment through the inborn desire to imitate can be motivated as adults to take a loving interest in the social sphere. This ability to adjust based on imitation does not last; what is needed in later life is a social awareness, the development of which depends on how far educators of children under seven can become worthy models of imitation. We need people today who are able to place themselves into life with a genuine sense of freedom. They are those who were able to look up to their educators and teachers as persons of authority during the time between their second dentition and puberty.

If one has stated publicly—as I already did in my book Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, published in 1892—that the sense of freedom and the feeling for freedom are the basic facts of social life, one is hardly likely to speak against freedom and democracy. But, just because of this positive attitude towards freedom, one must also acknowledge that the practice of education as an art depends on the sense of authority, developed by the child during the second period of life. During this same period, the child also has to make a gradual transition from living in mental images—or pictures—to a more intellectual approach, a process that moves through and beyond another important turning point.

A true art of education must be able to penetrate such important issues.

The turning point to be discussed now occurs around a child’s ninth year—but sometimes not before the tenth or even the eleventh year. When our teachers recognize that a child is passing this point, they accompany the change with an appropriate change in pedagogy. In early childhood, a child learns to speak, gradually learning to refer to itself as “I”. Up to the ninth year, however, the distinction between the child’s “I” and the surrounding world is still rather undefined. Those who can observe things carefully recognize that the period when a child learns to differentiate between self and surroundings—approximately between the ninth and the eleventh years—is critical. It is a time when the child is actually crossing a Rubicon. The way in which the teachers respond to this change is of greatest importance for a child’s future life. Teachers must have the right feeling for what is happening. They must realize that the child no longer experiences itself as an organic part of its environment—as a finger might experience itself as a part of the body if it had its own consciousness—but as a separate, independent entity. If they do so and respond in the right way as teachers, they can create a source of lasting joy and vitality in life. But if they fail to respond rightly, they open the way to barren and weary lives for their pupils later on. It is important to realize that, prior to this significant change, the child still lives in a world of pictures so closely related to its own nature that, unable to appreciate the difference between self and environment, it merges into its surroundings. Therefore, in assisting a child to establish its relationship to the world at this stage, a teacher must use a pictorial approach.

We receive the children into our school from their parental homes. Today, we live in an age when writing and reading have produced conventional symbols no longer bearing any direct inner relationship to the human being. Compare the abstract letters of our alphabet with the picture writing used in ages past. What was fixed into written forms in ancient times still bore a resemblance to people’s mental images. But writing nowadays has become quite abstract. If we introduce children directly to these abstract letters in reading and writing lessons, we introduce them to something alien to their nature, or at least something inappropriate for six-, seven-, or eight-year olds. For this reason, we use a different method in our Waldorf school.

Instead of beginning with the letters of the alphabet, we engage our young pupils in artistic activity by letting them paint and draw; that is, work with colors and forms. In this activity, not only the head is engaged—which would have a very harmful effect—but the child’s entire being is involved. We then let the actual letters emerge out of these color-filled forms. This is how our Waldorf pupils learn writing. They learn writing first. And only afterward do they learn to read, for printed letters are even more abstract than our handwritten ones. In other words, only gradually do we develop the abstract element, so necessary today, from the artistic element which is more closely allied to life. We proceed similarly in other subjects, too. And we work in this way toward a living, artistic pedagogy that makes it possible to reach the very soul of the child. As for the nature of what we usually think of as plant, mineral, and so forth, this can be fruitfully taught only after the child has passed the turning point just characterized and can differentiate itself from its surroundings.

Working along these lines, it might well happen that some of our pupils learn to read and write later than pupils in other schools. But this is no drawback. On the contrary, it is even an advantage. Of course, it is quite possible to teach young children reading and writing by rote and get them to rattle off what is put before their eyes, but it is also possible to deaden something in them by doing this, and anything killed during childhood remains dead for the rest of one’s life. The opposite is equally true. What we allow to live and what we wake into life is the very stuff that will blossom and give life vitality. To nurture this process, surely, is the task of a real educator.

You will doubtless have heard of those educational ideas already published during the nineteenth century that emphasize the importance of activating a child’s individuality. We are told that, instead of cramming children with knowledge, we should bring out their inherent gifts and abilities. Certainly, no one would wish to denigrate such great geniuses of education. Important things have certainly been said by the science of education. On the other hand, though one can listen carefully to its abstract demands, such as that the individuality of the child should be developed, positive results will be achieved only if one is able to observe, day by day, how a child’s individuality actually unfolds. One must know how, during the first seven years, the principle of imitation rules the day; how, during the following period from the seventh to the fourteenth year, the principle of authority predominates; and how this latter principle is twinned with the child’s gradual transition from mental imagery—which is essentially of a pictorial or symbolic nature and based on memory—to the forming of concepts by the awakening intellect: a process that begins in the eleventh to twelfth year. If we can observe all of this and learn from a spiritual-scientific and artistic way of observing how to respond as a teacher, we shall achieve much more than if we attempt to follow an abstract aim, such as educating a child out of its individuality. Spiritual science does not create abstractions, it does not make fixed demands; rather, it looks toward what can be developed into an art through spiritual perceptiveness and a comprehensive, sharpened sense of observation.

Last time, I was able to describe only briefly the kind of knowledge of the human being given by spiritual science that can form a basis for dealing with such practical matters as education. The pressing demands of society show clearly enough the need for such knowledge today. By complementing the outer, material aspects of life with supersensible and spiritual insights, spiritual science or anthroposophy leads us from a generally unreal, abstract concept of life to a concrete practical reality. According to this view, human beings occupy a central position in the universe. Such realistic understanding of human nature and human activities is what is needed today. Let me reinforce this point with a characteristic example.

Imagine that we wanted to convey a simple religious concept—for instance, the concept of the immortality of the human soul—to a class of young children. If we approach the subject pictorially, we can do this before a child’s ninth year. For example, we can say, “Look at the butterfly’s chrysalis. Its hard shell cracks open and the butterfly flutters out into the air. A similar thing happens when a human being dies. The immortal soul dwells in the body. But, when death breaks it open, just as the butterfly flies from the chrysalis into the air, so the soul flies away from the dead body into the heavenly world, only the human soul remains invisible.”

When we study such an example from the point of view of a living art of education, we come face to face with life’s imponderables. A teacher might have chosen such a comparison by reasoning somewhat as follows: “I am the one who knows, for I am much older than the child. I have thought out this picture of the caterpillar and the butterfly because of the child’s ignorance and immaturity. As someone of superior intelligence, I have made the child believe something in which I myself do not believe. In fact, from my own point of view, it was only a silly little story, invented solely for the purpose of getting the child to understand the concept of the immortality of the soul.” If this is a teacher’s attitude, he or she will achieve but little. Although to say this might sound paradoxical in our materialistic age, it is nevertheless true: if teachers are insincere, their words do not carry much weight.

To return to our example. If Waldorf teachers had chosen this comparison for their classes, the situation, though outwardly similar, would have been very different. For they would not have used it—nor, for that matter, any other picture or simile—unless they were convinced of its inherent truth. A Waldorf teacher, an anthroposophically oriented spiritual researcher, would not feel, “I am the intelligent adult who makes up a story for the children’s benefit,” but rather: “The eternal beings and powers, acting as the spiritual in nature, have placed before my eyes a picture of the immortal human soul, objectively, in the form of the emerging butterfly. Believing in the truth of this picture with every fibre of my being, and bringing it to my pupils through my own conviction, I will awaken in them a truly religious concept. What matters is not so much what I, as teacher, say to the child, but what I am and what my heartfelt attitude is.” These are the kinds of things that must be taken more and more seriously in the art of education.

You will also understand when I tell you that visitors to our Waldorf school, who come to see the school in action and to observe lessons, cannot see the whole. It is almost as if, for instance, you cut a small piece out of a Rembrandt painting, believing that you could gain an overall impression of the whole picture through it. Such a thing is not possible when an impulse is conceived and practiced as a comprehensive whole—as the Waldorf school is—and when it is rooted in the totality of anthroposophical spiritual science.

You might have been wondering which kind of people would make good teachers in such a school. They are people whose entire lives have been molded by the spiritual knowledge of which I spoke last time. The best way of learning to know the Waldorf school and of becoming familiar with its underlying principles is by gaining knowledge of anthroposophical spiritual science itself at least as a first step. A few short visits in order to observe lessons will hardly convey an adequate impression of Waldorf pedagogy.

Plain speaking in such matters is essential, because it points toward the character of the new spirit that, flowing from the High School of Spiritual Science centered in Dornach, is to enter all practical spheres of life—social, artistic, educational, and so forth.

If you consider thoroughly all that I have been telling you, you will no longer think it strange that those who enter more deeply into the spirit underlying this art of education find it absolutely essential to place themselves firmly upon the ground of a free spiritual life. Because education has become dependent on the state on the one hand and on the economic sphere on the other, there is a tendency for it to become abstract and programmatic. Those who believe in the anthroposophical way of life must insist on a free and independent cultural-spiritual life. This represents one of the three branches of the threefold social order about which I wrote in my book The Threefold Commonwealth.

One of the demands that must be made for spiritual life—something that is not at all utopian, that may be begun any day—is that those actively engaged in spiritual life (and this means, above all, those involved in its most important public domain; namely, education) should also be entrusted with all administrative matters, and this in a broad and comprehensive way.

The maximum number of lessons to be taught—plus the hours spent on other educational commitments—should allow teachers sufficient time for regular meetings, in both smaller and larger groups, to deal with administrative matters. However, only practicing teachers—not former teachers now holding state positions or retired teachers—should be called on to care for this side of education. For what has to be administered in each particular school—as in all institutions belonging to the spiritual-cultural life—should be only a continuation of what is being taught, of what forms the content of every word spoken and every deed performed in the classroom. Rules and regulations must not be imposed from outside the school. In spiritual life, autonomy, self-administration, is essential.

I am well aware that people who like to form logical “quickly tailored” concepts, as well as others who, somewhat superficially, favor a more historical perspective, will readily object to these ideas. But in order to recognize the necessity of making spiritual- cultural life into a free and independent member of the social organism, one really must be acquainted with its inherent nature. Anyone who has been a teacher at a working-class adult education center for several years—as I was in the school founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht, thereby gaining first-hand experience of the social question—knows only too well that this is not merely a matter of improving external arrangements or of dealing with dissatisfaction caused by unjust outer conditions. As I say, if one has taught in such circles, one knows that one word comes up repeatedly in proletarian circles, but extends far beyond proletarian life, namely, the word “ideology,” the meaning of which is set out in the first chapter of The Threefold Commonwealth. Now, what is hidden behind this?

Long ago, in the ancient East, people spoke of the great illusion or “maya.” According to this view—already decadent today and hence unsuited to our Western ways—maya refers to the external sensory world which offers us only semblance or outer appearance. To ancient sages, true reality of being—the reality that sustained human beings—lived and grew in the soul. All else, all that the outer senses beheld, was only maya.

We live today in an age that expresses—especially in its most radical philosophies—a total reversal of this ancient view. For most people today true reality resides in outer, physical nature and in the processes of production, while what can be found inwardly in the human soul as morality, art, religion, knowledge is maya, illusion. If we want to translate the word maya correctly, we must translate it as “ideology.” For modern humanity, all other translations fail. But ideology refers to exactly the opposite of what maya was for the ancient oriental. The widest circles of the population today call maya what the ancient oriental called the sole reality. And this reversal of the word’s meaning is of great significance for life today.

I have known people of the leading classes who lived under the influence of the philosophy that gave rise to ideology. I have learned to know the perplexity of people who reasoned thus: if we trust what natural science tells us, the entire origin of the cosmos can be traced to a primeval nebula. According to these theories, all of the different species of nature began during this stage. At that time, too, human beings densified out of the nebula. And, while this process continued, something not unlike soap bubbles unfolded in the human soul. According to natural science, what rises in the human soul as ethics, religion, science or art, does not represent reality. Indeed, if we look toward the end of earthly evolution as it is presented by science, all that is offered is the prospect of an immense cemetery. On earth, death would follow, due either to general glaciation, or to total annihilation by heat. In either case, the result would be a great cemetery for all human ideals—for everything considered to be the essence of human values and the most important aspect of human existence. If we are honest in accepting what natural science tells us—such people had to conclude—then all that remains is only a final extinction of all forms of existence.

I have witnessed the sense of tragedy and the deep-seated pain in the souls of such materialistically minded members of today’s leading circles, who could not escape the logical conclusions of the natural-scientific outlook and who were consequently forced to look on all that is most precious in the human beings as mere illusion. In many people, I have seen this pessimism, which was a result of their honest pursuit of the natural-scientific conception of the world.

This attitude took a special form in the materialism of the working class. There, everything of a spiritual nature is generally looked upon as a kind of a superstructure, as mere smoke or fog; in a word, as “ideology”. And what enters and affects the soul condition of modern people in this way is the actual source of the contemporary anti-social sentiment—however many other reasons might be constantly invented and published. They amount only to a form of self deception. It is the influence of this attitude which is the real origin of the dreadful catastrophes that are dawning—undreamt of by most people—in the whole East. So far, they have started in Russia, where they have already assumed devastating proportions. They will assume even greater dimensions unless steps are taken to replace an ideology by a living grasp of the spirit.

Anthroposophical spiritual science gives us not only ideas and concepts of something real but also ideas and concepts by which we know that we are not just thinking about something filled with spirit. Spiritual science gives us the living spirit itself, not just spirit in the form of thoughts. It shows human beings as beings filled with living spirit—just like the ancient religions. Like the ancient religions, the message of spiritual science is not just “you will know something,” but “you will know something, and divine wisdom will thereby live in you. As blood pulses in you, so by true knowing will divine powers too pulse in you.” Spiritual science, as represented in Dornach, wishes to bring to humanity precisely such knowledge and spiritual life.

To do so, we need the support of our contemporaries. Working in small ways will not lead to appropriate achievements. What is needed is work on a large scale. Spiritual science is free from sectarianism. It has the will to carry out the great tasks of our times, including those in the practical spheres of life. But to bring this about, spiritual science must be understood in a living way by contemporary society. It is not enough to open a few schools here and there, modeled on the Waldorf school, as some people wish. This is not the way forward, for it will not lead to greater freedom in spiritual life.

Often, I have had to suffer the painful experience of witnessing the conduct of certain people who, because of their distrust in orthodox, materialistic medicine, approached me, trying to tempt me into quackery. They wanted to be cured by creeping through the back door, as it were. I have experienced it to the point of revulsion. There was, for instance, a Prussian government official, who publicly supported materialistic medicine in parliament, granting it sole rights, only to enter by the back door to be treated by the very people whom he had opposed most violently in parliament.

The Anthroposophical Society—which could, from a certain point of view, be justly described as willing to make sacrifices and whose members have dedicated themselves to the cultivation of anthroposophical spiritual science—seeks a powerful impetus, capable of affecting and working into the world at large. What is at issue today is nothing less than the following—that a true spiritual life, such as our present society needs, can be created only by those interested in it, which fundamentally includes everyone, many of whom have children, and that these must bring about the right conditions in which children can mature into free human beings so that those children, in turn, can create an existence worthy of humanity. As far as spiritual- cultural life is concerned, everyone is an interested party and should do his or her share to work for what the future will provide in the form of spiritual-cultural life.

Thus, what I would like to call “a world school movement,” based on the ideas I have put forward today, should meet with approval in the widest quarters. What really ought to happen is that all those who can clearly see the need for a free spiritual-cultural life should unite to form an international world school movement. An association of that kind would offer a stronger and more-living impetus for uniting nations than many other associations being founded these days on the basis of old and abstract principles. Such a union of nations, spiritually implied in a world school movement, could be instrumental in uniting peoples all over the globe by their participation in this great task. The modern state school system superseded the old denominational schools relatively recently. It was good and right that this happened. And yet, what was a blessing at the time when the state took this step would cease to be one if state-controlled education were to become permanent; for then, inevitably, education would become the servant of the state. The state can train theologians, lawyers, or other professionals to become its civil servants, but if the spiritual life is to be granted full independence, all persons in a teaching capacity must be responsible solely to the spiritual world, to which they can look up in the light of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

A world school movement, as I envisage it, would have to be founded on an entirely international basis by all who understand the meaning of a truly free spiritual life and what our human future demands in social questions. Gradually, such a world school movement would give birth to the general opinion that schools must be granted independence from the state and that the teachers in each school must be given the freedom to deal with that school’s own administration. We must not be narrow minded or pedantic in these matters, as many are who doubt that enough parents would send their children to such schools. That is the wrong kind of thinking. One must be clear that freedom from state interference in education will be the call of the future. Even if there are objections from some parents, ways and means will have to be found for getting children to attend school without coercion by the state. Instead of opposing the founding of independent schools because of dissenting parents, ways and means will have to be found of helping free schools to come into existence despite possible opposition or criticisms—which must then be overcome in an appropriate way. I am convinced that the founding of a world school movement is of the greatest importance for the social development of humanity. Far and wide, it will awaken a sense for a real and practical free spiritual life. Once such a mood becomes universal, there will be no need to open Waldorf schools tucked away in obscure corners and existing at the mercy of governments, but governments will be forced into recognizing them fully and refraining from any interference, as long as these schools are truly founded in a free spiritual life.

What I have said so far about freedom in the cultural-spiritual sphere of life—namely that it has to create its own forms of existence—applies equally to the social sphere known by spiritual science as the sphere of economic life. Just as the sphere of cultural spiritual life must be formed on the basis of the capacities of every individual, so too must economic life be formed on the basis of its own principles, different though these are. Fundamentally, such economic principles derive from the fact that, in economics, a judgment made by an individual cannot be translated directly into deeds, into economic actions. In the cultural-spiritual sphere, we recognize that human souls strive for wholeness, for inner harmony. Teachers and educators must take that wholeness into account. They approach a child with that wholeness as their aim. In the economic sphere, on the other hand, we can be competent in a professional sense only in narrower, more specialized areas. In economics, therefore, it is only when we join together with people working in other areas that something fruitful may be achieved. In other words, just as free spiritual-cultural life emerged as one member of the threefold social organism, so likewise must economic life, based upon the associative principle, arise as another, independent member of this same threefold organism. In the future, economic life will be run on a basis quite different from what we are used to out of the past.

Economic life today is organized entirely according to past practices, for there is no other yardstick for earnings and profits. Indeed, people are not yet ready to contemplate a change in the economic system which is still entirely motivated by profit. I would like to clarify this by an example that, though perhaps not yet representing purely and simply the economic sphere, nevertheless has its economic aspects. It shows how the associative principle can be put into practice in the material realm.

There is, as you know, the Anthroposophical Society. It might well be that there are many people who are not particularly fond of it and regard it as sectarian, which it certainly is not. Or they may be under the impression that it dabbles in nebulous mysticism, which again is not the case. Rather, it devotes itself to the cultivation of anthroposophical spiritual science. Many years ago, this Society founded the Philosophic- Anthroposophic Publishing Company in Berlin. To be exact, two people who were in harmony with the Anthroposophical Society’s mode of thinking founded it. This publishing company, however, does not work as other profit-making companies, which are the offspring of modern economic thinking, do. And how do these profit-making enterprises work? They print books. This means that so and so many people have to be employed for processing paper; so and so many compositors, printers, bookbinders; and so on. But now I ask you to look at those strange and peculiar products that make their appearance every year and which are called “crabs” in the book trade. These are newly printed books, which have not been purchased by the book sellers and which, consequently, at the next Easter Fair wander back to the publishers to be pulped. Here we have a case where wares have been put on the market, the production of which had occupied a whole host of workers, but all to no avail.

Such unnecessary and purposeless expenditure of labor represents one important aspect of the social question. Nowadays, because one prefers to live with phrases rather than an objective understanding, there is too much talk about “unearned income.” It would be better to look at the situation more realistically, for similar situations arise in all branches of our external, material life. Until now, the Philosophic-Anthroposophic Publishing Company has not printed one single copy in vain. At most, there are a few books that were printed out of courtesy to our members. That was our conscious motive; they were printed as a kind of offering to those members. Otherwise there was always a demand for whatever we printed. Our books always sold out quickly and nothing was printed unnecessarily. Not a single worker’s time was wasted and no useless labor was performed within the social framework. A similar situation could be achieved in the whole economic sphere if one organized cooperation between consumers who have an understanding of needs and demands in a particular domain, traders who trade in certain products, and last, the actual producers. Consumers, traders, and producers would form an association whose main task would be the fixing of prices. Such associations would have to determine their own size; if they grew too large, they would no longer be cost effective. Such associations could then unite to form larger associations. They could expand into what might be called global or world-economic associations—for the characteristic feature of recent economics is its expansion of economies into a world economy.

A great deal more would have to be said to give an adequate account of what I can indicate here only in principle. I must, however, say that the concept of associative life implies nothing organizational. In fact, although I come from Germany (and have lived there frequently even though my main sphere of activity is now Dornach, Switzerland) the mere word “organization” produces a thoroughly distasteful effect in me. “Organization” implies an ordering from above, from a center. This is something that economic life cannot tolerate. Because the Middle-European states, penned in between the West and the East, were trying to plan their economies, they were actually working against a healthy form of economic life. The associative principle which must be striven for in economics leaves industry, as also industrial cooperatives, to their own devices. It only links them together according to levels of production and consumption regulated by the activity of the administrators of the various associations. This is done through free agreements among single individuals or various associations.

A more detailed description of this subject can be found in my book The Threefold Commonwealth, or in other of my writings, such as The Renewal of the Social Organism, which is supplementary to The Threefold Commonwealth.

Thus, in order to meet the needs of our times, anthroposophical spiritual science, based on practical life experience, calls for two independent members of the social organism—a free spiritual life and an associative economic life. Those two are essential in the eyes of anyone seriously and honestly concerned about one of the fundamental longings in the hearts of our contemporaries; namely, the longing for democracy.

Dear friends, I spent the first half of my life in Austria—thirty years—and have seen with my own eyes what it means not to take seriously society’s heartfelt demand for democracy. In the 1860s, the call for parliamentarianism was heard in Austria, too. But because it could not bring about the right social conditions, this land of political experimentation was the first to go under in the last great World War. A parliament was formed. But how was it constituted? It was composed of four assemblies: landowners, the chamber of commerce, the department of towns, markets and industrial areas, and, finally, the assembly of country parishes. In other words, only economic interests were represented. There were thus four departments, each dealing with various aspects of the national economy. Together, they constituted the Austrian Parliament, where they were supposed to come to decisions regarding political and legal matters as well as matters pertaining to general affairs of the state. This means that all decisions, reached by majority vote, represented only economic interests. Such majorities, however, can never make fruitful contributions to the social development of humanity. Nor are they the outcome of any expert knowledge. Truly, the call for democracy, for human freedom, demands honesty.

At the same time, however, one must also be clear that only certain issues are suitable for parliamentary procedures, and that democracy is appropriate only when the issues treated lie within the areas of responsibility of each person of voting age. Thus, between free spiritual life on one side and associative economic life on the other, the sphere of democracy becomes the third member of the threefold social organism. This democratic sphere represents the political sphere of rights within the social organism. Here each individual meets the other on equal terms. For instance, in such questions as the number of working hours and the rights of workers in general, each person of age must be considered competent to judge.

Let us move toward a future in which questions of cultural and spiritual life are decided freely and entirely within their own sphere, a future in which freedom in education is striven for so that schools can work out of the spirit and, consequently, produce skillful, practical people. Then, practical schools, too, will develop from such a free spiritual life. Let us move toward a future in which spiritual life is allowed to work within its own sphere and in which the powers of the state are limited to what lies within the areas of responsibility of each person of voting age; a future in which economic life is structured according to the principle of associations, where judgments are made collectively on the strength of the various members’ expertise and where agreements are made with others who are experts in their fields. If we approach the future with these aims in mind, we shall move toward a situation that will be very different from what many people, unable to adapt themselves to new conditions, imagine today.

There will be many who believe that a nebulous kind of cultural spiritual life, alienated from ordinary life, emanates from Dornach. But such is not the case at all. However absurd it may sound, according to the spirit prevailing in Dornach, no one can be a proper philosopher who does not also know how to chop wood or dig potatoes. In short, according to this spirit, one cannot be a philosopher if one cannot turn a hand to tasks requiring at least a modicum of practical skill. Spiritual science does not estrange people from practical life; on the contrary, it helps them develop skills in coping with life. It is not abstract. It is a reality, penetrating human beings with real strength. It therefore not only increases people’s thinking activity, it also makes them generally more skillful. At the same time, spiritual science is intimately connected to a sense of inner dignity and morality; that is, to morality, religion, and art. Visitors to the Goetheanum can convince themselves of this—although the building is not finished yet by any means. Indeed, in order to bring it even into its present state, people with an understanding for the impulse it embodies have already made many sacrifices. The Goetheanum is not a result of our employing the services of an architect and a builder to erect a building in a more or less conventional style—be it in Gothic, Renaissance, or any other style. The living quality of the science of the spirit spoken of here could not have tolerated that. Spiritual science had to evolve its own style in keeping with its own nature. This manifests in the various artistic forms. Just as the same growth forces that produce a nut’s kernel also form its shell—for the shell can be formed only by the same principle as also works in the kernel—so the outer shell of our building, the center of what is being willed in Dornach, can arise only from the same spiritual sources from which all of the teaching and researching in Dornach also flows. The words spoken there and the results of research conducted there all proceed from the same sources as the artistic forms of the building’s pillars and the paintings inside the cupolas. All of the sculpture, architectural design, and painting—and these are not empty symbolism or allegories—arise from the same spiritual impulses that underlie all of the teaching and researching. And, because all this is part of the one cultural-spiritual life that we hope to quicken in the human being, the third, religious element, is closely linked to the arts and to science, forming a unity with them.

In other words, what we are striving for as spiritual science—as it enters into the practical spheres of life as the “threefolding” (or tripartition) of the social organism—brings to realization the three great ideals that resound from the eighteenth century in such a heart-rending, spirit-awakening way. I refer to the threefold call to humanity: freedom, equality, brotherhood. Learned people in the nineteenth century pointed out repeatedly that it was impossible for those three ideals to be put into practice simultaneously under any one state or government. Such was their considered opinion and, from their point of view, justifiably so. But the apparent incongruity rests on false premises. Freedom, equality, and brotherhood do resound to us from the eighteenth century as the three great and justly-claimed ideals. The source of misunderstanding is the tacit assumption that the state must be given sole prerogative in matters pertaining to all three spheres of society. The thought never occurred that, in accord with its own nature, such a monolithic state should be membered into three social organisms: the free spiritual organism; the organism representing the sphere of politics and rights, built on equality; and the organism of the economic sphere, built on the principle of association.

Objections have been raised against these views by people who expect to be taken seriously in social questions and who maintain that, by demanding a tripartition of society, I seek to destroy its unity. But the unity of the human organism is not destroyed because it naturally consists of three parts. Nor is the unity of the human being disturbed because the blood, as it circulates rhythmically through the body, is sustained by a part of the organism different from the one in which the nerves are centered. Likewise, the unity of the social organism is enhanced rather than disturbed by recognition of its threefold nature (if the human head, apart from sending forth the nerves, would also have to produce the blood, then the unity of the human organism would certainly be destroyed). All of this is explained in much greater detail in my book Riddles of the Soul.

I would like to conclude these considerations about spiritual science and its practical application in social life by pointing out that, although the three great ideals of humanity—liberty, equality, fraternity—are not realizable within the framework of an all-powerful state monopoly—where any attempted implementation would be founded upon illusion—they can nevertheless penetrate human life in the form of a threefold ordering of society. Here, the following order would prevail: full freedom in the cultural-spiritual sphere; equality in the realm where each person of voting age shares in democratic rights and responsibilities on equal terms with fellow citizens of voting age; and brotherhood in the economic sphere which will be realized by means of the principle of associations. Unity will not be destroyed by this ordering, for every human being stands in all three spheres, forming a living link toward unity.

Basically, one may consider the meaning of world evolution to reside in the fact that the particular ways of its working and its underlying forces culminate in the human being as the apex of the entire world organism. Just as the forces of nature and the entire cosmos—the macrocosm—are to be found again on a minute scale in the microcosm, in the threefold human being, so the great ideals—liberty, equality, and fraternity—must come together again in the social organism. But this must not be brought about by external or abstract means: it must proceed in accordance with reality, so that these three ideals can work in harmony with the human nature in its integral unity. As free individuals, every human being can share in the free spiritual life to which all belong. Sharing equal rights with our fellow citizens, we can all participate in the democratic life of the state, based on the principle of equality. Finally, by participating in economic life, we share in the brotherhood of all human beings.

Liberty in the cultural spiritual sphere; equality in political life and the sphere of rights; fraternity in economic life. These three working together harmoniously will lead to the healing and further evolution of humanity—to new resources in the struggle against the forces of decline.

A combination of these three in a genuine social organism, a concurrence of freedom, equality, and brotherhood in integral human nature—this appears to be the magical password for the future of humanity.

QUESTIONER I:
Gifted educators and teachers have an instinctive feeling for what needs to be done with a child upon reaching school age, both in and out of school. But it is not clear to me what the relationship of anthroposophically-based education is toward such instinctive responses to children. I would therefore like to ask whether such pedagogical instincts are frowned on in the Waldorf school or whether, in fact, they have their place within the framework of anthroposophical pedagogy.

QUESTIONER II:
I would like to ask how we are to understand children’s illnesses as you have spoken of them. By “illness,” do you mean a condition that orthodox medicine would call a state of illness, or an abnormality of the child’s physical constitution, or perhaps ill humor, grumpiness, or similar disturbances?

RUDOLF STEINER:
Regarding the relationship between pedagogical instincts and what I said today, I would like to make the following observations. In general, the two approaches need not be considered contradictory, but one must be clear about the whole process of human evolution. The farther back we go in human evolution, the more consciousness decreases, until we come to what corresponds to the entirely instinctive mode of behavior of the animal world. The natural course of development in human evolution is a gradual lessening of instinctual life and a gradual supplementing of instinctive behavior by a healthy, conscious grasp of life’s realities. We can see how important it is to bring about this transformation in the right way when we observe how, precisely in our times, previously healthy instincts have to a large extent fallen into disorder. For instance, while we can see quite clearly that children living in the country will grow up harmoniously even without a great deal of schooling, we can also see clearly that if we let city children depend on their instincts or—as has happened—if we seek to guide those instincts according to current pedagogical ideas, we can cause a great deal of harm. Unless, therefore, guided by our inner being, we are moved once more in a safe direction, we will not be able to foster wholesome and healthy conditions simply by calling abstractly for more instinctive ways of living—ways of living that in fact must today be replaced by powers of reasoning and intellect. Certainly, instinctive life still plays its part, but it is more and more on the wane.

To give a striking example, I can recall something that once happened in my presence. This is the kind of situation often encountered nowadays. It certainly took me by surprise. I was invited by a good friend whom, from earlier days of friendship, I knew to be quite a healthy eater—a person who also knew when to stop eating. Once, after an interval of several years, I was invited to his house again. And there, on the table, to my great surprise, I saw a pair of scales, complete with weights, on which he weighed every piece of food that he ate. This was surely clear evidence that, in his case at least, healthy instincts had greatly decreased!

Similar symptoms can also be observed in other life situations—for instance, if one studies the current curricula in our schools. We do not find in our schools the kind of teaching material that, if healthy instincts were working, would be found appropriate for, say, children in their eighth or ninth year. The curriculum is handled there according to quite different criteria—such as abstract rules regarding human and non-human matters. But curriculum—how we plan and work out our ways of education today—has a grave consequence for our children’s health. We must find our way back to a concrete grasp of the interweaving of health-giving and illness-inducing tendencies in the human being. What I mean by health-giving or illness-inducing will become clear in a moment.

Words, such as “ill-humor” and “grumpiness” were mentioned in this regard. Such words land us immediately amid abstractions. This is certainly not what I mean, for we would then be judging a child’s whole soul being abstractly. This is the very thing that a healthy, anthroposophically-based education must overcome. An anthroposophically-based education would make us realize, for example, that when a child suffers from mood disturbances, we are to watch for irregular glandular secretions. The glandular secretions are of far greater significance to us than the outer symptoms of ill humor, which will disappear when we tackle the problem at the source; that is, in the child’s physical organism. What we must do is to look far more deeply into the whole relationship between the child’s soul and spirit on one side and its physical and bodily existence on the other.

As educators dealing with children, teachers are naturally dealing only with inherent tendencies, with nascent states of unhealthy conditions. Teachers deal with subtle, rather than cruder, symptoms. And when such symptoms become pathological, they must be dealt with appropriately. I think it clear from what I have said that, in education, we deal with tendencies toward extremes and with finding ways and means of balancing them.

QUESTIONER:
We have heard that, during puberty, the adolescent is to be brought into contact with the affairs of the world and away from his or her individual spiritual self. What does this mean in concrete terms? What are the teachers supposed to do about it?

RUDOLF STEINER:
I did not say “away from his or her spiritual self.” I weigh my words carefully and what I say surely has a clear meaning. I did not say “away from his or her spiritual self” but simply away from himself or herself; that is, adolescents must be prevented from pressing the spiritual element too strongly into their inner being and thereby experiencing a kind of inner pleasure. At the onset of puberty, we must try to awaken the students’ interest for what is happening in the world. This is a fundamental objective in our curriculum for adolescents. We must awaken a particular interest in such subjects as geography and history—subjects that lead students away from themselves and out into the world. Adolescents need subjects that, because they are totally unconnected with any form of inner brooding, will counteract any too strong preoccupation that they might have with their inner life. It all depends on working out an appropriate curriculum in concrete detail.

RUDOLF STEINER:
(in answer to a further question): I have already indicated that teachers preparing their lessons should seek to work with their pupils’ natural and healthy forces of organic growth. If we know how to study the healthy growth of the human organism, we also know that implicit in different physical forms is a constant inner striving toward movement. For instance, if we look at the human hand without preconceptions, we can see that its form really makes little sense in the state of rest. Each finger is living proof of the hand’s inherent desire to move. And, conversely, such latent movement also seeks an appropriate form for the state of rest. This is an indication of something that is outwardly apparent. But such organismic tendencies can also be followed into the innermost organization of the human being. So that, if I am familiar with living anatomy, living physiology, then I also know what harmonizes with inner potentialities in the realm of movement.

From this point of view, it certainly does not correspond to the nature of children when a teacher makes a child scratch a copper-plate Gothic style letter “a” as is popular today. This is a form for which there is really no justification. There is no inner connection between the way the fingers want to move and the form of the letter that finally evolves after having gone through many intermediary stages.

During earlier phases of human evolution, quite different signs were painted to represent a form of writing which was still in harmony with the human organization. Today, the forms of our conventional letters no longer have any direct relation to the inner organization of human beings and that is why we must draw out of the child what is akin to its inner organization before introducing it to the present form of our alphabet. But, if you bring this to the attention of educational authorities, they become quite alarmed, wondering how on earth they are to know what the human organism is demanding, how they could possibly expect teaching to be done in an artistic style when pupils are aged six, and so on (this may be rather different in the case of practicing teachers who are often very open to these ideas because they can see new perspectives being opened up by them).

There is but one answer to all this—one must learn to do it! It is something that must be brought to the notice of anyone interested in education. It is not the task of anthroposophy to spread an abstract conception of the world that might satisfy people who like to rehash what they have heard, or who enjoy telling themselves what they must do for their own advancement. Anthroposophy is broadly based and has many ramifications that can lead us to the most intimate knowledge of human nature. One can truly say that anthroposophy offers an opportunity of fructifying the various sciences, especially in areas that, today, are not generally accessible to them.

And so we can say that we have to get to know the human being thoroughly so that, when we receive the child into primary education, we know from its whole organism how it should move its fingers and hands when learning to write, and also how it should learn to think.

The other day, I had the opportunity to take a visitor into a first grade writing and reading lesson. This subject can be taught in a hundred different ways. In the Waldorf school, teachers are given absolute freedom in their application of basic principles. Education is an altogether free art. The subjects might remain the same, but teachers may present their content in their own individual ways and according to the specific character of their pupils. People sometimes cannot see how these two aspects are related to each other.

How was this lesson given after the young pupils had been in the first grade for only a few months? A child was called out and told to run in a circle in a given number of steps. Immediately afterward, the teacher drew a circle on the blackboard to show how the movement experienced by the child while running looked when seen with the eyes.

Then, a second child was called out and asked to run in a much smaller circle inside the first circle, using only two steps. A third child had to run yet another circle, this time using three steps. All of the children were thoroughly involved in what was going on and they transposed what they had experienced with their whole being into what became visible on the blackboard. Their interest was directed not only to what the eye could see, but to what they experienced with their whole being. So there were three circles. When yet another one was run, the children noticed that, because of the size, the fourth circle intersected the smaller ones within the first large circle. And so it went on. This is how children were given the opportunity of gaining an experience out of their whole being that they could then transfer to the visual sphere. If, on the other hand, children are told to draw forms immediately, it is their heads that are mainly engaged—which amounts to a one-sided occupation. Everything that pupils do at this stage should come out of their whole being, writing included.

But this does not mean that every teacher is now supposed to follow the same example! I merely gave an example here to show how one teacher undertook the task of applying underlying principles in the classroom. What I introduced in the Teacher Training Course, prior to the opening of the Waldorf school in Stuttgart, was not meant to be copied pedantically by teachers in their actual teaching. It was presented as living substance so that the school could become a living organism. As for rules and regulations, they can of course always be put together. If three people—or thirty, or perhaps only twelve—sit together in order to work out what, according to their lights, are the necessary conditions for creating a model school—committing to paper every rule in order of priority and with the appropriate paragraphs—they can of course produce wonderful schemes, even if they themselves are not graced with outstanding intelligence, even if they are only of ordinary or possibly even below average intelligence. The relevant points can be discussed in detail until impressive rules and regulations are finally agreed upon. But these are not likely to be of any use at all when it comes to the actual teaching. What always matters most is how things work out in practice.

QUESTIONER:
How should one proceed when educating a nervous child?

RUDOLF STEINER:
The expression “a nervous child” is extremely ambiguous. Thus, it is impossible to give definite directives. One must have a clear description of the child’s symptoms and one needs to know the age of the child. In such a case, one really must be able to consider all the relevant factors within the general context. For instance, it might happen that one is shown a child, let us say, three or four years old, who is extremely fidgety and likely to romp about wildly. There are such children. They throw themselves to the ground and go into terrible tantrums. Their behavior is distinctly discomfiting for the parents who may thereby suffer a great deal of unhappiness. Then they ask what they could possibly do with such a child. Often, though by no means in every case, one would like to ask them to do nothing at all, for the worst thing in such a situation is to suppress the symptoms. Such a child simply has to get rid of an overabundance of energy so that, later on, it may develop normally—as one might put it. It is sometimes necessary to point out that it is better not to meddle with a child’s development by taking pedagogical measures. The important thing is to find out from the child’s overall constitution what is or is not beneficial in each individual case. The same thing applies when one considers conditions of health or illness. How often does one hear these or similar remarks from persons with fixed ideas of what is normal, “If someone’s pulse beat is irregular, one has to cure it by this or the other means.” That might be perfectly correct in many instances but is by no means so in every case. Some people, due to their general constitution, actually need a slightly abnormal pulse! And so also in this case. One must know the overall constitution of a child before one can make definite statements. As always, anthroposophy aims to free people from living with abstract ideas. Such a question as “How should one deal with a nervous child?” is an abstraction. One is never confronted by a general situation, but always by a particular child who needs to be dealt with individually.

QUESTIONER:
How can anthroposophy give a lead with regard to pupils’ finding their future careers?

RUDOLF STEINER:
I really do not know what is meant by this question! If I were to answer it in the abstract, I would have to say that an anthroposophical environment would in itself engender in a young person the right inclination to finding an appropriate vocation. In general, the choice of a career is dealt with far too schematically. As a rule such a choice is already linked to a person’s destiny. People are sometimes insufficiently flexible—they believe that only a particular profession can bring them inner satisfaction. That might well be so in cases where professions have a markedly individualistic stamp, but to look for a lead to finding the right career in what anthroposophy has to say on the subject sounds to me removed from the realities of life. I cannot really see the meaning of the question.

The chairman asked whether there were any further questions. There were none.

RUDOLF STEINER:
I hope that this talk, given in all brevity and presented as a mere outline of our broadly based but specific theme, has contributed something toward a better understanding of the aims of anthroposophy. These aims are never intended to be isolated from actual life situations. When the essence of anthroposophy is fully grasped, it will always lead into the realities of life, into life itself.

QUESTIONER:
Dr. Steiner has spoken to us about the importance of authority in education, but this is something with which our young people want nothing to do. Every teacher, not to mention every priest, experiences it. Various currents run through our younger generation and one can certainly notice an aloofness on their part toward anything connected with the question of authority, be the authority in the parental home or authority regarding spiritual matters. Parents sometimes have the feeling that they no longer have any say in anything and that one must simply let these young people go their own way. On the other hand, one sometimes also witnesses the disillusionment of such an attitude and it is then painful to see young people not finding what they were seeking. There is something in the air that simply seems to forbid a respectful attitude toward older people, something that is like a deep-seated sting, ever ready to strike against authority in whatever form. Perhaps Dr. Steiner would be kind enough to tell us something about the reasons for this strange ferment among the younger generation. Why are they not happy? Why do they take special pleasure in complaining? It saddens us that we are no longer able to reach them. I have sought help by studying books dealing with this problem, but I have so far not found a single one that could show me the way forward. I would therefore be very happy if Dr. Steiner could say something to give us insight into the soul of a young person.

RUDOLF STEINER:
This is, of course, a subject that, unfortunately, were I were to deal with it in any depth, would require a whole lecture of at least the same length as the one I have just given you—I say unfortunately because you would have to listen to me for such a long time! I would, however, like to say at least a few words in response to the previous speaker’s remarks.

During my life, which by now can no longer be described as short, I have tried to follow up various life situations related to this question. On one hand, I have really experienced what it means to hear, in one’s childhood, a great deal of talk about a highly esteemed and respected relative whom one had not yet met in person. I have known what it is to become thoroughly familiar with the reverence toward such a person that is shared by all members of the household, by one’s parents as well as by others connected with one’s upbringing. I have experienced what it means to be led for the first time to the room of such a person, to hold the door handle in my hand, feeling full of awe and reverence. To have undergone such an experience is of lasting importance for the whole of one’s life. There can be no genuine feeling for freedom, consistent with human dignity, that does not have its roots in the experience of reverence and veneration such as one can feel deeply in one’s childhood days.

On the other hand, I have also witnessed something rather different. In Berlin, I made the acquaintance of a well-known woman socialist, who often made public speeches. One day I read, in an otherwise quite respectable newspaper, an article of hers entitled, “The Revolution of our Children.” In it, in true socialist style, she developed the theme of how, after the older generation had fought—or at least talked about—the revolution, it was now the children’s turn to act. It was not even clear whether children of preschool age were to be included in that revolution. This is a different example of how the question of authority has been dealt with during the last decades.

As a third example, I would like to quote a proposal, made in all seriousness by an educationalist who recommended that a special book be kept at school in which at the end of each week—it may have been at the end of each month—the pupils were to enter what they thought about their teachers. The idea behind this proposal was to prepare them for a time in the near future when teachers would no longer give report “marks” to their pupils but pupils would give grades to their teachers.

None of these examples can be judged rightly unless they are seen against the background of life as a whole. This will perhaps appear paradoxical to you, but I do believe that this whole question can be answered only within a wider context. As a consequence of our otherwise magnificent scientific and technical culture—which, in keeping with its own character, is bound to foster the intellect—the human soul has gradually become less and less permeated by living spirit. Today, when people imagine what the spirit is like, they usually reach only concepts and ideas about it. Those are only mental images of something vaguely spiritual. This, at any rate, is how the most influential philosophers of our time speak about the spiritual worlds as they elaborate their conceptual theories of education. This “conceptuality” is, of course, the very thing that anthroposophical spiritual science seeks to overcome. Spiritual science does not want its adherents merely to talk about the spirit or to bring it down into concepts and ideas; it wants human beings to imbue themselves with living spirit. If this actually happens to people, they very soon begin to realize that we have gradually lost touch with the living spirit. They recognize that it is essential that we find our way back to the living spirit. So-called intellectually enlightened people in particular have lost the inner experience of living spirit. At best, they turn into agnostics, who maintain that natural science can reach only a certain level of knowledge and that that level represents the ultimate limit of what can in fact be known. The fact that the real struggle for knowledge only begins at this point, and that it leads to a living experience of the spiritual world—of this, generally speaking, our educated society has very little awareness.

And what was the result, or rather what was the cause, of our having lost the spirit in our spoken words? Today, you will find that what you read in innumerable articles and books basically consists of words spilling more or less automatically from the human soul. If one is open-minded and conversant with the current situation, one often needs to read no more than the first few lines or pages of an article or book in order to know what the author is thinking about the various points in question. The rest follows almost automatically out of the words themselves. Once the spirit has gone out of life, the result is an empty phrase-bound, cliché-ridden language, and this is what so often happens in today’s cultural life. When people speak about cultural or spiritual matters or when they wish to participate in the cultural spiritual sphere of life, it is often no longer the living spirit that speaks through their being. It is clichés that dominate their language. This is true not only of how individuals express themselves. We find it above all in our “glorious” state education. Only think for a moment of how little of real substance is to be found in one or another political party that offers the most persuasive slogans or “party-phrases.” People become intoxicated by these clichés. Slogans might to some degree satisfy the intellect, but party phrases will not grasp real life. And so it must be said that what we find when we reach the heights of agnosticism—which has already penetrated deeply into our society—is richly saturated with empty phrases. Living so closely with such clichés, we no longer feel a need for what is truly living in language. Words no longer rise from profound enough depths of the human soul. Change will occur only if we permeate ourselves with the spirit once more. Two weeks ago, I wrote an article for The Goetheanum under the heading, “Spiritual Life Is Buried Alive.” In it, I drew attention to the sublime quality of the writing that can still be found among authors who wrote around the middle of the nineteenth century. Only very few people are aware of this. I showed several people some of these books that looked as if they had been read almost continually for about a decade, after which they seemed to have been consigned to dust. Full of surprise, they asked me, “Where did you find those books?” I explained that I am in the habit, now and then, of poring over old books in second-hand bookshops. In those bookshops, I consult the appropriate catalogs and ask for certain chosen books to be delivered to wherever I am staying. In that way I manage to find totally forgotten books of all kinds, books that will never be reprinted but that give clear evidence of how the spirit has been “buried alive” in our times, at least to a certain extent.

Natural science is protected from falling into such clichés simply because of its close ties to experimentation and observation. When making experiments, one is dealing with actual spiritual facts that have their place in the general ordering of natural laws. But, excepting science, we have been gradually sliding into a life heavily influenced by clichés and phrases, by-products of the overspecialization of the scientific, technological development of our times. Apart from many other unhappy circumstances of our age, it is to living in such a phrase-ridden, clichéd language that we must attribute the problem raised by the previous speaker. For a child’s relationship to an adult is an altogether imponderable one. The phrase might well flourish in adult conversations, and particularly so in party-political meetings, but if one speaks to children in mere phrases, clichés, they cannot make anything of them. And what happens when we speak in clichés—no matter whether the subject is religious, scientific, or unconventionally open-minded? The child’s soul does not receive the necessary sustenance, for empty phrases cannot offer proper nourishment to the soul. This, in turn, lets loose the lower instincts. You can see it happening in the social life of Eastern Europe, where, through Leninism and Trotskyism, an attempt was made to establish the rule of the phrase. This, of course, can never work creatively and in Soviet Russia, therefore, the worst instincts have risen from the lower regions. For the same reason, instincts have risen up and come to the fore in our own younger generation. Such instincts are not even unhealthy in every respect, but they show that the older generation has been unable to endow language with the necessary soul qualities. Basically, the problems presented by our young are consequences of problems within the adult world; at least when regarded in a certain light, they are parents’ problems. When meeting the young, we create all too easily an impression of being frightfully clever, making them feel frightfully stupid, whereas those who are able to learn from children are mostly the wisest people. If one does not approach the young with empty phrases, one meets them in a totally different way. The relationship between the younger generation and the adult world reflects our not having given it sufficient warmth of soul. This has contributed to their present character. That we must not blame everything that has gone wrong entirely on the younger generation becomes clearly evident, dear friends, by their response to what is being done for our young people in the Waldorf school, even during the short time of its existence.

As you have seen already, Waldorf education is primarily a question of finding the right teachers. I must confess that whenever I come to Stuttgart to visit and assist in the guidance of the Waldorf school—which unfortunately happens only seldom—I ask the same question in each class, naturally within the appropriate context and avoiding any possible tedium, “Children, do you love your teachers?” You should hear and witness the enthusiasm with which they call out in chorus, “Yes!” This call to the teachers to engender love within their pupils is all part of the question of how the older generation should relate to the young. In this context, it seems appropriate to mention that we decided from the beginning to open a complete primary school, comprising all eight classes in order to cover the entire age range of an elementary school. And sometimes, when entering the school building, one could feel quite alarmed at the apparent lack of discipline, especially during break times. Those who jump to judgment too quickly said, “You see what a free Waldorf school is like! The pupils lose all sense of discipline.” What they did not realize was that the pupils who had come to us from other schools had been brought up under so-called “iron discipline.” Actually, they have already calmed down considerably but, when they first arrived under the influence of their previous “iron discipline,” they were real scamps. The only ones who were moderately well-behaved were the first graders who had come directly from their parental homes—and even then, this was not always the case. Nevertheless, whenever I visit the Waldorf school, I notice a distinct improvement in discipline. And now, after a little more than two years of existence, one can see a great change. Our pupils certainly won’t turn into “apple-polishers” but they know that, if something goes wrong, they can always approach their teachers and trust them to enter into the matter sympathetically. This makes the pupils ready to confide. They may be noisy and full of boisterous energy—they certainly are not inhibited—but they are changing, and what can be expected in matters of discipline is gradually evolving. What I called in my lecture a natural sense of authority is also steadily growing.

For example, it is truly reassuring to hear the following report. A pupil entered the Waldorf school. He was already fourteen years old and was therefore placed into our top class. When he arrived, he was a thoroughly discontented boy who had lost all faith in his previous school. Obviously, a new school cannot offer a panacea to such a boy in the first few days. The Waldorf school must be viewed as a whole—if you were to cut a small piece from a painting, you could hardly give a sound judgment on the whole painting. There are people, for instance, who believe that they know all about the Waldorf school after having visited it for only one or two days. This is nonsense. One cannot become fully acquainted with the methods of anthroposophy merely by sampling a few of them. One must experience the spirit pervading the whole work. And so it was for the disgruntled boy who entered our school so late in the day. Naturally, what he encountered there during the first few days could hardly give him the inner peace and satisfaction for which he was hoping. After some time, however, he approached his history teacher, who had made a deep impression on him. The boy wanted to speak with this teacher, to whom he felt he could open his heart and tell of his troubles. This conversation brought about a complete change in the boy. Such a thing is only possible through the inner sense of authority of which I have spoken. These things become clear when this matter-of-fact authority has arisen by virtue of the quality of the teachers and their teaching. I don’t think that I am being premature in saying that the young people who are now passing through the Waldorf school are hardly likely to exhibit the spirit of non-cooperation with the older generation of which the previous speaker spoke. It is really up to the teachers to play their parts in directing the negative aspects of the “storm and stress” fermenting in our youth into the right channels.

In the Waldorf school, we hold regular teacher meetings that differ substantially from those in other schools. During those meetings, each child is considered in turn and is discussed from a psychological point of view. All of us have learned a very great deal during these two years of practicing Waldorf pedagogy. This way of educating the young has truly grown into one organic whole.

We would not have been able to found our Waldorf school if we had not been prepared to make certain compromises. Right at the beginning, I drafted a memorandum that was sent to the education authorities. In it, we pledged to bring our pupils in their ninth year up to the generally accepted standards of learning, thus enabling them to enter another school if they so desired. The same generally accepted levels of achievement were to be reached in their twelfth and again in their fourteenth year. But, regarding our methods of teaching, we requested full freedom for the intervening years. This does constitute a compromise, but one must work within the given situation. It gave us the possibility of putting into practice what we considered to be essential for a healthy and right way of teaching. As an example, consider the case of school reports. From my childhood reports I recall certain phrases, such as “almost praiseworthy,” “hardly satisfactory” and so on. But I never succeeded in discovering the wisdom behind my teachers’ distinction of a “hardly satisfactory” from an “almost satisfactory” mark. You must bear with me, but this is exactly how it was. In the Waldorf school, instead of such stereotyped phrases or numerical marks, we write reports in which teachers express in their own style how each pupil has fared during the year. Our reports do not contain abstract remarks that must seem like mere empty phrases to the child. For, if something makes no sense, it is a mere phrase. As each child gradually grows up into life, the teachers write in their school reports what each pupil needs to know about him- or herself. Each report thus contains its own individual message, representing a kind of biography of the pupil’s life at school during the previous school year. Furthermore, we end our reports with a little verse, specially composed for each child, epitomizing the year’s progress. Naturally, writing this kind of report demands a great deal of time. But the child receives a kind of mirror of itself. So far, I have not come across a single student who did not show genuine interest in his or her report, even if it contained some real home truths. Especially the aptly chosen verse at the end is something that can become of real educational value to the child. One must make use of all means possible to call forth in the children the feeling that their guides and educators have taken the task of writing these reports very seriously, and that they have done so not in a onesided manner, but from a direct and genuine interest in their charges. A great deal depends on our freeing ourselves from the cliché-ridden cultivation of the phrase so characteristic of our times, and on our showing the right kind of understanding for the younger generation. I am well aware that this is also connected with psychological predispositions of a more national character, and to gain mastery over these is an even more difficult task.

It might surprise you to hear that in none of the various anthroposophical conferences that we have held during the past few months was there any lack of younger members. They were always there and I never minced my words when speaking to them. But they soon realized that I was not addressing them with clichés or empty phrases. Even if they heard something very different from what they had expected, they could feel that what I said came straight from the heart, as all words of real value do. During our last conference in Stuttgart in particular, a number of young persons representing the youth movement were again present and, after a conversation with them lasting some one-and-a-half or two hours, it was unanimously decided to actually found an anthroposophical youth group, and this despite the fact that young people do not usually value anything even vaguely connected with authority, for they believe that everything has to grow from within, out of themselves, a principle that they were certainly not prepared to abandon.

What really matters is how the adults meet the young, how they approach them. From experience—many times confirmed—I can only point out that this whole question of the younger generation is often a question of the older generation. As such, it can perhaps be best answered by looking a little less at the younger generation and looking a little more deeply into ourselves.

A PERSON FROM THE AUDIENCE:
Perhaps, at this point, a member of the younger generation might be allowed to speak up. Please forgive my speaking plainly, but the truth is that we younger people have lost all respect for authority, for older people. Why? because our parents, too, have lost it. When talking to them or to other adults, we find that all that they can do is to criticize all kinds of unimportant, niggling things in others—thus showing their own generation in a bad light. We young people sometimes feel that those who are trying to educate us have become walking compromises, incapable of making up their minds on which side they stand, unable to state from the fullness of their hearts what their opinions are, unable to stand up for what they believe in. And we all the time have the feeling that our parents and educators do not in fact want to learn what we young are really like. Instead, they keep criticizing and condemning us. I need only to think of how we in our youth circle work together and what kind of things we study. For instance, we have read and discussed together Blüchner and Morgenstern. Just imagine those two polar opposites! This sort of thing happens with us all the time. Events in the world buffet us and nowhere can we find a center to give us a firm grasp. Nowhere can we find a really living person who can stand above it all with a comprehensive viewpoint—not even a person who can do so conceptually. How is it possible to teach unless behind everything that is taught there is a real living human being, whom one can feel coming through his or her teaching? . . . If that were to happen, it would rouse our enthusiasm. But, as long as our teachers do not approach us as human beings, as long as they are afraid even, sometimes, to laugh at themselves, we simply cannot feel the necessary confidence in them. I can say with complete conviction that we young people are really seeking adults to whom we can look up as authorities. We are looking for a center, for a firm grip with which we can pull ourselves up and that would enable us to grow into the kind of life that has an inner reality. That is why we throw ourselves into everything new that appears on the horizon: we always hope to discover something that could have a real meaning for us. But whenever this happens, we find nothing but a confusion of opinions and attitudes. We find judgments that are not real judgments at all, but are at best only criticisms.

If I may say something to the first speaker, who asked for a book to explain why young people behave as they do, I say: Don’t read a book. To find an answer, read us young people! If you want to talk to the younger generation, you must approach them as living human beings. You must be ready to open yourself to them. Young people will then do the same and young and old will become clear about what each is looking for.

QUESTIONER:
As a teacher, I would like to ask Dr. Steiner whether he himself does not believe what the first speaker in today’s discussion brought up; namely, that a quite new mood and spirit are stirring among young people today. This might perhaps be more evident in the larger cities, where even teachers with a deeply human attitude are no longer able to cope with difficulties as they were able to some fifty years ago. The source of the problem has been rightly sought in the older generation. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that today’s youth, under the influence of social-democratic ideas, is pervaded by skepticism to the extent that a teacher of Dr. Steiner’s persuasion might not be able to imagine the kind of insolence and arrogance with which we have to put up. Socialistic contradictions are rife among the young, creating a false urge for independence in them that makes the teachers’ tasks far more difficult than they were some time ago. Indeed, our job is now often almost impossible. What Dr. Steiner said gave the impression that the behavior of our youth merely reflects the shortcomings of their teachers. Certainly, teachers must take their share of the blame, but is it all the teachers’ fault? Are all teachers to blame? That is the question. Is it not the case that the few good teachers, who are not to blame, nevertheless bluntly state that a new and different kind of youth has appeared and that lack of faith and skepticism among them makes the teacher’s task far more difficult?

RUDOLF STEINER:
Well, if you put the question in this way, it is impossible to move forward. Putting it thus will not produce anything fruitful. It is the wrong way to begin. To declare that young people have changed and that it might have been easier to deal with them fifty years ago is not the point at all; the crux of the matter is to find ways and means of coping with the problem. After all, the younger generation is there, growing up in our midst. Nor is it productive to speak of our youth as being led into skepticism by social-democratic prejudices. That is as futile as if one were to criticize something in nature because it was growing in an undesirable way—and that is what is happening with the young. They are growing up among us like products of nature. Rather than stating the fact that the young have changed, and that perhaps it was easier to deal with them fifty years ago, the only way forward is to find ways and means of enabling the older generation to cooperate with the young again. We shall find no answer if we merely point out that today’s youth is different from what it was fifty years ago, as if this were something to be accepted more or less fatalistically. That kind of attitude will never lead us to find an answer to this problem. Of course, the young have changed! And, if we observe life, we can see that the change has its positive aspects, too—that we could speak of it as a change toward something greater. Let me remind you, for instance, of the generational conflicts that we find expressed in literature. You can read them or see them performed on the stage. You still sometimes come across performances of plays from the late 1880s when the relationship between the younger and older generation was vividly portrayed. You will see that what we are discussing is an age-old problem. It has been regarded for centuries as a kind of catastrophe. By comparison, what is happening today is mere child’s play! But, as I said before, merely to state facts will not lead us further.

The question everywhere is how to regain the lost respect for authority in individual human beings that will enable you as teachers and educators to find the right relationship to the young. That it is generally correct to state that young people do not find the necessary conditions for such a respect and sense of authority in the older generation and that they find among its members an attitude of compromise is in itself, in my opinion, no evidence against what I have said. This striving for compromise can be found on a much wider scale even in world events, so that the question of how to regain respect for human authority and dignity could be extended to a worldwide level. I would like to add that—of course—I realize that there exist good and devoted teachers as described by the last speaker. But the pupils usually behave differently when taught by those good teachers. If one discriminates, one can observe that the young respond quite differently in their company.

We must not let ourselves be led into an attitude of complaining and doubting by judgments that are too strongly colored by our own hypotheses, but must be clear that ultimately the way in which the younger generation behaves is, in general, conditioned by the older generation. My observations were not meant to imply that teachers were to be held solely responsible for the faults of the young. At this point, I feel rather tempted to point to how lack of respect for authority is revealed in its worst light when we look at some of the events of recent history. Only remember certain moments during the last, catastrophic war. There was a need to replace older, leading personalities. What kind of person was chosen? In France, Clemenceau, in Germany, Hertling—all old men of the most ancient kind who carried a certain authority only because they had once been important personalities. But they were no longer the kind of person who could take his or her stance from a direct grasp of the then current situation. And what is happening now? Only recently the prime ministers of three leading countries found their positions seriously jeopardized. Yet all three are still in office, simply because no other candidate could be found who carried sufficient weight of authority! That was the only reason for their survival as prime ministers. And so we find that, in important world happenings, too, a general sense of authority has been undermined, even in leading figures. You can hardly blame the younger generation for that! But these symptoms have a shattering effect on the young who witness them.

We really have to tackle this whole question at a deeper level and, above all, in a more positive light. We must be clear that, instead of complaining about the ways in which the young confront their elders, we should be thinking of how we can improve our own attitude toward young. To continue telling them how wrong they are and that it is no longer possible to cooperate with them can never lead to progress. In order to work toward a more fruitful future, we must look for what the spiritual cultural sphere, and life in general, can offer to help us regain respect and trust in the older generation. Those who know the young know that they are only too happy when they can have faith in their elders again. This is really true. Their skepticism ceases as soon as they can find something of real value, something in which they can believe. Generally speaking, we cannot yet say that life is ruled by what is right. But, if we offer our youth something true, they will feel attracted to it. If we no longer believe this to be the case, if all that we do is moan and groan about youth’s failings, then we shall achieve nothing at all.

First, I would like to thank the Vice Chancellor of this University, and you yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, for your friendly welcome. I hope that I can make myself understood, despite my inability to speak your language. Indeed, I apologize for my lack in that respect.

The theme that I shall present tonight and tomorrow night is the educational principles and methods based on anthroposophy. And so, here, right at the beginning, I must ask you not to look on the aims of anthroposophy as wishing to be in any way subversive or revolutionary—with respect either to scientific matters or any of the other many aspects of life where anthroposophy seeks to be productive.

On the contrary, anthroposophy seeks only to deepen and develop what has already been prepared by the recent spiritual culture of humanity. However, because of anthroposophy’s deepened insight into human life and knowledge of the universe, it necessarily looks for a corresponding deepening and insight in contemporary scientific thinking. Likewise, it also looks for different ways of working practically in life—different from more accustomed and conventional ways.

Because of this, anthroposophy has found itself opposed by representatives of the spirit of the day. But it does not want to become involved in hostilities of this kind, nor does it wish to engage in controversy. Rather, it aims to guide the fundamental achievements of modern civilization toward a fruitful goal. This is the case, above all, in the field of education. Apart from my small publication, The Education of the Child from the Viewpoint of Spiritual Science, published several years ago, I had no particular reason to publish a more detailed account of our educational views until, with the help of Emil Molt, the Waldorf school in Stuttgart was founded.

With the founding of the Waldorf school, anthroposophy’s contribution to the field of education entered the public domain. The Free Waldorf school itself is the outcome of longings that made themselves felt in many different parts of Central Europe after the end of the last, catastrophic war. One of the many topics discussed during that time was the realization that perhaps the most important of all social questions was about education. And, prompted by purely practical considerations, Emil Molt founded the Free Waldorf school, originally for the children of the employees of his Waldorf Astoria Factory. At first, therefore, we only had children whose parents were directly connected with Molt’s factory. During the last two years, however, children from different backgrounds have also entered the school. Hence, the Waldorf school in Stuttgart today educates children from a wide range of backgrounds and classes. All of these children can benefit from an education based on anthroposophy. In education, above all, anthroposophy does not wish to introduce revolutionary ideas, but seeks only to extend and supplement already existing achievements. To appreciate those, one need only draw attention to the contribution of the great educators of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anyone with education at heart can feel only enthusiasm for their comprehensive ideas and powerful principles. Yet, despite all of this, there remain urgent problems in our present education. As a result, not a year passes in which a longing for the renewal of education does not make itself felt in society.

Why should it be that, on one hand, we can be enthusiastic about the convincing educational ideas expressed by the great educators of our times, while, on the other, we experience a certain disenchantment and dissatisfaction in how education is carried out?

Let me give just one example. Pestalozzi has become world famous. He certainly belongs among the great educators of our time. Nevertheless, thinkers of Herbert Spencer’s caliber have pointed out in the strongest terms that, although one might be in full agreement with Pestalozzi’s educational principles, one cannot help realizing that the great expectations raised by them have not been fulfilled with their practical application. Decades ago, Spencer already concluded that despite Pestalozzi’s sound and even excellent pedagogical ideas, we are unable at present to apply his general principles in practical classroom situations. I wish to repeat, ladies and gentlemen, that it is not new ideas that anthroposophy wants to introduce. Anthroposophy is mainly concerned with actual teaching practice.

Just as the Waldorf school in Stuttgart grew out of the immediate needs of a given life situation, what exists today as anthroposophical pedagogy and the anthroposophical method of education is not a product of theories or abstract principles but grows out of the need to deal practically with human affairs. Anthroposophy feels confident of being able to offer specific contributions for solution of human problems, particularly in the realm of education. What, then, are the fundamentals of this anthroposophy?

Anthroposophy has frequently drawn hostility and opposition, not because of an understanding of what it seeks to accomplish for the world, but rather because of misconceptions regarding it. Those within anthroposophy fully understand such hostility. For, on the basis of natural science and the cultural achievements of our times, modern humanity generally believes itself to have found a unified conception of the world. Anthroposophy then steps in with a call to our contemporaries to think about themselves and the world in an apparently quite different way. The contradiction, however, is only apparent. But people think initially that the insights provided by anthroposophy cannot be reconciled with the claims made by natural science.

Today, the human physical and bodily constitution is being thoroughly studied, on solid grounds, following the admirable and exact methods of modern natural science. And, as far as the human soul is concerned, its existence is no longer generally denied. On the contrary, the number of those who deny the existence of the soul and speak of “human psychology without a soul,” as many did for a time, has already dwindled. Yet the soul itself is only observed by means of research into its physical aspects and by guesswork done on the basis of physical manifestations. Under such conditions, it is impossible to derive an educational practice, even with the best of theories and premises.

Thus, Herbert Spencer profoundly regrets the lack of a proper psychology for modern educational principles. But a true child psychology cannot possibly grow from the modern natural-scientific view of life. Anthroposophy, on the other had, believes that it is able to offer the basis for a true psychology, for real care of the human soul. However, it is a psychology, a care of the soul, that admittedly requires an approach very different from that of other contemporary psychological investigations.

It is all too easy to poke fun at anthroposophists who speak of other supersensible bodies, or sheaths, in addition to the physical body. It is often said that anthroposophy, when it speaks of the etheric body, which I also call the “body of formative forces,” has invented or built up some strange fantasy, vision, or illusion. What anthroposophy says, however, is simply that a human being possesses not only a sense-perceptible, physical body (that can be examined according to established medical practice and whose underlying natural laws can be grasped by our intellectual capacity to systematize manifold phenomena) but also an etheric body, or a body of formative forces, that is of a more refined nature than the physical body and—apart from the etheric body—a still higher and more refined member of the human being, called the astral body. In anthroposophy, furthermore, we also speak of a very special aspect of the human being, which is summarized only by each individual’s own self-awareness and is expressed by the word “I.”

At first, there seems to be little justification for speaking of these higher aspects of the human being. By way of introduction, however, I would like to show how in actual and practical life situations—which are the basis of our educational views—anthroposophy speaks about, for example, the human etheric body.

This etheric body is not a nebulous cloud that is somehow membered into the physical body and perhaps extends a little beyond it here and there. Initially, of course, it is possible to imagine it like this but in reality it appears quite differently to anyone using anthroposophical methods of observation. The etheric body, in fact, is primarily a kind of regulatory agency and points to something that belongs, not so much to the human spatial organization, but to something of the nature of a “time organism.”

When we study the human physical body, according to present day natural-scientific methods, we know that we can do so by studying its various organic parts—such as the liver, the stomach, or the heart—as separate entities. But we can also study those same organs from the viewpoint of their various functions and interrelationships within the whole human organism. We cannot understand certain areas of the human brain, for example, without knowing how they affect other organs, such as the liver, the stomach, and so on, effects that are instrumental in regulating the nourishment of those organs. We thus look upon the spatial, physical organism as having its own specific interrelationships. We see the physical organism as something in which single members affect each other in definite and determined ways.

Anthroposophy sees what it calls the human etheric body in the same way. It assigns to it an existence in time, but not in space as in the case of the physical body. What we call the human etheric body manifests itself at birth or, rather, conception and continues to develop through life until the point of death.

Disregarding the fact that a person can die before his or her natural life span has been reached, let us for the moment consider the normal course of a human life—in which case we may say that the etheric body continues its development through old age until the moment of death.

In what develops in this way, anthroposophical investigation sees an organic wholeness. Indeed, as the human spatial body is composed of various members—such as the head as the carrier of the brain, the chest organs as carriers of speech and breathing, and so on—so what manifests as the human etheric organization is likewise composed of various life periods, one following the other in the flow of time. We thus distinguish between the various component parts of the etheric body—which, as already stated, must be observed as existing in time and as consisting of spatially separated parts—by first considering the period from approximately a child’s birth to its change of teeth. We can see an important part of the etheric body in this life period, just as we can see the head or the lungs in the physical body. Thereafter, we see its second member lasting from the second dentition until puberty and, though less clearly differentiated, we can also distinguish further life periods during the subsequent course of life. Thus, for instance, at the twentieth year, a completely new quality in a person’s psychic and physical life begins to manifest. But, just as, for example, the cause of certain headaches can be traced to malfunctioning of the stomach or the liver, so can certain processes undergone in one’s twenties or even during later life be traced back to definite happenings during the time between birth and the change of teeth. Just as it is possible to see processes of digestion affecting processes occurring in the brain, so is it possible to see the effects of what happened during a child’s first seven years of life up, to the second dentition, expressed in the latest period of adult life.

When studying psychology, we generally find that only the present situation of a person’s soul life is observed. Characteristics of a child’s capacity of comprehension, memory, and so on are observed. Without wishing to neglect those aspects, students of anthroposophy must also ask themselves the following kind of question. If a child becomes subject to certain influences, say in the ninth year, how does that affect the deeper regions of his or her etheric psychic life and in what form will it re-emerge later on? I would like to illustrate this in more detail by giving you a practical example.

By means of our pedagogical approach, we can convey to a child still at a tender age a feeling of reverence and respect for what is sublime in the world. We can enhance that feeling into a religious mood through which a child can learn how to pray. I am purposely choosing a somewhat radical example of a moral nature. Thus, let us suppose that we guide a child so that it can let such a mood of soul flow into a sincere prayer. This mood will take possession of the child, entering the deeper regions of its consciousness. And, if we observe not only the present state of a person’s soul life but his or her whole psychic constitution as it develops up to the moment of death, we will find that what came into existence through the reverence felt by the praying child goes “underground” to be transmuted in the depths of the soul. At a certain point, perhaps not before the person’s thirties or forties, what was present in the devotional attitude of a praying child resurfaces as a power of blessing, emanating from the words spoken by such a person—especially when he or she addresses children.

In this way, we can study the whole human being in relation to his or her soul development. As we relate the physical to the spatial—for example, the stomach to the head—so can we relate and study through the course of a life what the power of prayer might have planted in a child, perhaps in the eighth or ninth year. We may see it re-emerge in older age as the power to bless, as a force of blessing, particularly when meeting the young. One could put this into the following words—unless one has learned to pray in childhood in a true and honest manner, one cannot spread an air of blessing in one’s forties or fifties.

I have purposely chosen this somewhat radical example and those among you who are not of a religious disposition will have to take it more in its formal meaning. Namely, what I wanted to point out was that, according to anthroposophical pedagogy, it is not just the present situation of a child’s soul life that must be considered; rather, the entire course of a human life must be included in one’s considerations. How such an attitude affects one’s pedagogical work will become plainly visible. Whatever a teacher or educator might be planning or preparing regarding any educational activity, there will always be the question in mind, what will be the consequences in later life of what I am doing now with the child? Such an attitude will stimulate an organic, that is, a living pedagogy.

It is so easy to feel tempted to teach children clearly defined and sharply contoured concepts representing strict and fixed definitions. If one does so, it is as if one were putting a young child’s arms or legs, which are destined to continue their growth freely until a certain age, into rigid fetters. Apart from looking after a child’s other physical needs, we must also ensure that its limbs grow naturally, unconstricted, especially while it is still at the growing stage. Similarly, we must plant into a child’s soul only concepts, ideas, feelings, and will impulses that, because they are not fixed into sharp and final contours, are capable of further development. Rigid concepts would have the effect of fettering a child’s soul life instead of allowing it to evolve freely and flexibly. Only by avoiding rigidity can we hope that what we plant into a child’s heart will emerge during later life in the right way.

What, then, are the essentials of an anthroposophically based education? They have to do with real insight into human nature. This is something that has become almost impossible on the basis of contemporary natural science and the scientific conception of the world. In saying this, I do not wish to imply any disregard for the achievements of psychology and pedagogy. These sciences are the necessary outcome of the spirit of our times. Within certain limits, they have their blessings. Anthroposophy has no wish to become embroiled in controversy here either. It seeks only to further the benefits that these sciences have created. On the other hand, we must also ask what the longing for scientific experimentation with children means. What does one seek to discover through experiments in children’s powers of comprehension, receptivity to sense impressions, memory, and even will? All of this shows only that, in our present civilization, the direct and elementary relationship of one soul to another has been weakened. For we resort today increasingly to external physical experimentation rather than to a natural and immediate rapport with the child, as was the case in earlier times. To counterbalance such experimental studies, we must create new awareness and knowledge of the child’s soul. This must be the basis of a healthy pedagogy. But, to do so, we must become thoroughly familiar with what I have already said about the course of an individual’s life. This means that we must have a clear perception of the first life period, which begins at birth or conception, and reaches a certain conclusion when the child exchanges its milk teeth.

To anyone with an unbiased sense of observation, a child appears completely changed at the time of the change of teeth—the child appears different, another being. Only if we can observe such a phenomenon, however, can we reach a real knowledge of human beings.

Our understanding of the higher principles of the world has not kept pace with what natural science demands of our understanding of the lower principles. I need only remind you of what science says about “latent heat.” This is heat contained by a physical substance without being outwardly detectable. But, when such a substance is subjected to certain outer conditions, the heat radiates outward, emitting what is then called “liberated heat.” Science today speaks of forces and interrelationships of substances in the inorganic realm, but scientists do not yet dare to use such exact methods to deal with phenomena in the human realm. Consequently, what is said of body, soul, and spirit remains abstract and leaves those three aspects of the human being standing beside one another, as it were, with no real interconnection. We can observe the child growing up until the change of teeth and, if we do so without preconceptions, we can detect how, just after this event, the child’s memory assumes a different character; how certain faculties and abilities of thinking begin to manifest; how memory works through more sharply delineated concepts, and so on. We can observe that the inner soul condition of the child undergoes a definite change after the second dentition. But what exactly happened in the child?

Today, I can only point in certain directions. Further details can be found with the help of natural science. When observing a child growing up from the earliest stage until the second teeth appear, one can discern the gradual manifestation of an inner quality, emerging from the depths and surfacing in the outer organization. One can see above all how, during those years, the head system develops. If we observe this development without preconceptions, we can detect a current flowing through the child, from below upward. At first, a young baby, in a state of helplessness, is unable to walk. It has to lie all the time and be carried everywhere. Then, as months pass, we observe a strong force of will, expressed in uncoordinated, jerky movements of the limbs, that gradually leads to the faculty of walking. That powerful force, working upward from the limb system, also works back upon the entire organization of the child.

And, if we make a proper investigation of the metamorphosis of the head, from the stage when the child has to lie all the time and be carried everywhere to the time when it is able to stand on its own legs and walk—which contemporary science also clearly shows us and is obvious physiologically, if we learn to look in the right direction—then we find how what manifests in the child’s limb system as the impulse for walking is related to the area of the brain that represents the will organization. We can put this into words as follows. As young children are learning to walk, they are developing in their brains—from below upward, from the lower limbs and in a certain way from the periphery toward the center—their will organization.

In other words: when learning to walk, a child develops the will organization of the brain through the will activity of its lower limbs.

If we now continue our observation of the growing child, we see the next important phase occur in the strengthening of the breathing organization. The breathing assumes what I should like to call a more individual constitution, just as the limb system did through the activity of walking. And this transformation and strengthening of the breathing—which one can observe physiologically—is expressed in the whole activity of speaking.

In this instance, there is again a streaming in the human organization from below upward. We can follow quite clearly what a young person integrates into the nervous system by means of language. We can see how, in learning to speak, ever greater inwardness of feeling begins to radiate outward. As a human being, learning to walk becomes integrated into the will sphere of the nervous system, so, in learning to speak, the child’s feeling life likewise becomes integrated.

A last stage can be seen in an occurrence that is least observable outwardly and that happens during the second dentition. Certain forces that had been active in the child’s organism, indwelling it, come to completion, for the child will not have another change of teeth. The coming of the second teeth reveals that forces that have been at work in the entire organism have come to the end of their task. And so, just as we see that a child’s will life is inwardly established through the ability to walk, and that a child’s feeling life is inwardly established by its learning to speak so, at the time of the change of teeth, around the seventh year, we see the faculty of mental picturing or thinking develop in a more or less individualized form that is no longer bound to the entire bodily organization, as previously.

These are interesting interrelationships that need to be studied more closely. They show how what I earlier called the etheric body works back into the physical body. What happens is that, with the change of teeth, a child integrates the rest of its organization into the head and the nerves.

We can talk about these things theoretically, but nothing is gained by that. Lately, we have become too accustomed to a kind of intellectualism, to certain forces of abstraction, when talking about scientific matters. What I described just now helps you to look at the growing human being not just intellectually: I have been trying to guide you to a more artistic way of observing growing human beings. This involves experiencing how every movement of a child’s limbs is integrated into its will organization and how feeling is integrated as the child learns to speak. It is wonderful to see, for example, what happens when someone—perhaps the mother or another—is with the child when it learns to speak the vowels. A quality corresponding to the soul being of the adult who is in the child’s presence flows into the child’s feeling through these vowels. On the other hand, everything that stimulates the child to perform its own movements in relation to the external world—such as finding the right relationship to warmth or coldness—leads to the speaking of consonants. It is wonderful to see how one part of the human organism, say moving of limbs or language, works back into another part. As teachers, we meet a child of school age when his or her second teeth are gradually appearing. Just at this time we can see how a force (not unlike latent heat) is liberated from the general growth process of the organism: what previously was at work within the organism is now active in the child’s soul life. When we experience all of this, we cannot but feel inspired by what is happening before our eyes.

But these things must not be grasped with the intellect; they must be absorbed with one’s whole being. If we do this, then a concrete, artistic sense will pervade our observations of the growing child. Anthroposophy offers practical guidance in recognizing the spirit as it manifests in outer, material processes. Anthroposophy does not want to lead people into any kind of mystical “cloud cuckoo land.” It wants to follow the spirit working in matter. In order to be able to do this—to follow the spirit in its creativity, its effectiveness—anthroposophy must stand on firm ground and requires the involvement of whole human beings. In bringing anthroposophy into the field of education, we do not wish to be dogmatic. The Waldorf school is not meant to be an ideological school. It is meant to be a school where what we can gain through anthroposophy with living inwardness can flow into practical teaching methods and actual teaching skills.

What anthroposophy gives as a conception of the world and an understanding of life assigns a special role to the teachers and educators in our school.

Here and there, a certain faith in life beyond death has remained alive in our present culture and civilization. On the other hand, knowledge of human life beyond death up to a new birth on earth has become completely lost.

Anthroposophical research makes it clear that we must speak of human pre-existence, of a soul-spiritual existence before birth. It shows how this can rightly illumine embryology. Today, one considers embryology as if what a human being brought with him into earthly life were merely a matter of heredity, of the physical effects of forces stemming from the child’s ancestors. This is quite understandable and we do not wish to remonstrate against such an attitude. In accordance with accepted modern methods, research is done into how the human germ develops in the maternal body. Researchers try to trace in the bodies of the mother and the father, in the parents’ bodies, the forces that manifest in the child and so on. But things are just not like that. What is actually happening in the parents’ bodies is not a process of construction but, to begin with, one of destruction. Initially, there is a return of the material processes to a state of chaos. And what plays into the body of an expectant mother is the entire cosmos itself.

If one has the necessary basis of observation, one can perceive how the embryo, especially during the first months of pregnancy, is formed not only by the forces of heredity, but by the entire cosmos. The maternal body is in truth the matrix for what is formed through cosmic forces, out of a state of chaos, into the human embryo.

It is quite possible to study these things on the basis of the existing knowledge in physiology, but we will in time regard them from an entirely different viewpoint. We would consider it sheer folly if a physicist claimed, “Here is a magnetic needle, one end of which points north while the opposite end points south: we must look for the force activating the needle within the space of the compass needle itself.” That would be considered nonsense in physics. To explain the phenomenon, we must consider the whole earth. We say that the whole earth acts as a kind of magnet, attracting one end of the needle from its north pole and the other from its south pole. In the direction seeking of the compass needle, we observe only one part of a whole complex phenomenon; to understand the whole phenomenon, we must go far beyond the physical boundary of the needle itself. The exact sciences have not yet shown a similar attitude in their investigations of human beings. When studying a most important process, such as the formation of the embryo, the attitude is as limited as if one were to seek the motivating force of a compass needle within the needle itself. That would be considered folly in physics. When we try to discover the forces forming the embryo within the physical boundaries of human beings, we behave just as if we were trying to find the forces moving a compass needle within the physical needle itself. To find the forces forming the human embryo, we must look into the entire cosmos. What works in this way into the embryo is directly linked to the soul-spiritual being of the one to be born as it descends from the soul-spiritual worlds into physical existence.

Here, anthroposophy shows us—however paradoxical it might sound—that, at first, the soul-spiritual part of the human being has least connection with the organization of the head. As a baby begins its earthly existence, its prenatal spirit and soul are linked to the rest of the organism excluding the head. The head is a kind of picture of the cosmos but, at the same time, it is the most material part of the body. One could say that at the beginning of human life, the head is least the carrier of the prenatal soul-spiritual life that has come down to begin life on earth.

Those who observe what takes place in a growing child from an anthroposophical point of view see that soul-spiritual qualities, at first concealed in the child, come to the surface in every facial expression, in the entire physiognomy, and in the expression of the child’s eyes. They also see how those soul-spiritual elements manifest initially in the development of the limb movements—from crawling to the child’s free walking—and next in the impulse to speak, which is closely connected with the respiratory system. They then see how these elements work in the child’s organism to bring forth the second teeth. They see, too, how the forces of spirit and soul work upward from below, importing from the outer world what must be taken in unconsciously at first, in order to integrate it then into the most material part of the human being—the organization of the head in thinking, feeling, and willing.

To observe the growing human being in this way, with a scientific artistic eye, indicates the kind of relationship to children that is required if we, their teachers, are to fulfill our tasks adequately as full human beings. A very special inner feeling is engendered when teachers believe that their task is to assist in charming from the child what divine and spiritual beings have sent down from the spiritual world. This task is indeed something that can be brought to new life through anthroposophy.

In our languages, we have a word, an important word, closely allied to the hopes and longings of many people. The word is “immortality.” But we will see human life in the right way only after we have a word as fitting for life’s beginning as we have for its ending—a word that can become as generally accepted and as commonly used as the word “immortality” (undyingness)—perhaps something like “unbornness.” Only if we have such a word will we be able to grasp the full, eternal nature of the human being. Only then will we experience a holy awe and reverence for what lives in the child through the ever creating and working spirit, streaming from below upward. During the first seven years, from birth to the second dentition, the child’s soul, together with the spiritual counterpart received from the life before birth, shapes and develops the physical body. At this time, too, the child is most directly linked to its environment.

There is only one word that adequately conveys the mutual relationship of the child to its surroundings at this delicate time of life when thinking, feeling and willing become integrated into the organs—and that word is: imitation. During the first period of life, a human being is an imitator par excellence. With regard to a child’s upbringing, this calls forth one all-important principle: when you are around a child, only behave in ways that that child can safely imitate. The impulse to imitate depends on the child’s close relationship to its surroundings in which imponderables of soul and spirit play their part.

One cannot communicate with children during these first seven years with admonitions or reprimands. A child of that age cannot learn simply on the authority of a grownup. It learns through imitation. Only if we understand that can we understand a child properly.

Strange things happen—of which I shall give an example that I have given before—when one does not understand this. One day, a father comes saying, “I am so unhappy. My boy, who was always such a good boy, has committed a theft.” How should such a case be considered? One asks the worried parent, “How old is your boy and what has he stolen?” The answer comes, “Oh, he is five years old. Until now, he has been such a good child, but yesterday he stole money from his mother. He took it out of the cupboard and bought sweets with it. He did not even eat them himself, but shared them with other boys and girls in the street.”

In a case like this, one’s response should probably go as follows. “Your boy has not stolen. Most likely, what happened was that he saw his mother every morning taking money from her cupboard to do the shopping for the household. The child’s nature is to imitate others, and so the boy did what he had seen his mother do. The concept of stealing is not appropriate in this case. What is appropriate is that—whenever we are in the presence of our children—we do only what they can safely imitate (whether in deeds, gestures, language, or even thought).”

If one knows how to observe such things, one knows that a child imitates in the most subtle, intimate ways. Anyone who acts pedagogically in the manner I have indicated discovers that whatever a child of that age does is based on imitation—even facial expressions. Such imitation continues until a child sheds its milk teeth. Until then, a child’s relationship to the surrounding world is extremely direct and real. Children of this age are not yet capable of perceiving with their senses and then judging their perceptions. All of this still remains an undifferentiated process. The child perceives with its senses and, simultaneously, this perception becomes a judgment; and the judgment simultaneously passes into a feeling and a will impulse. They are all one and the same process.

In other words, the child is entirely immersed in the currents of life and has not yet extracted itself from them.

The shedding of the milk teeth marks the first occurrence of this. The forces that had been active in the lower regions of the organism and—following the appearance of the second teeth—are no longer needed there, then manifest as forces in the child’s soul-spiritual sphere. At this point, the child enters the second period of life, which begins with the second dentition and ends in puberty. During this second period, the soul and spiritual life of the child becomes liberated, as—under given outer conditions previously cited—latent warmth is liberated. Before this period, we must look in the inner organism, in the organic forming of the physical organism, for the child’s soul and spirit.

This is the right way to explore the relationship between body and soul. Principles and relationships of all kinds are being expounded today in theory. According to one, the soul affects the body; according to another, everything that happens in the soul is only an effect of the body. The most frequently held opinion is so-called “psychophysical parallelism,” meaning that both types of process—soul-spiritual as well as physical-bodily ones—may be observed side by side. We can speculate at length about the relationship of spirit to body and body to spirit but, if we only speculate and do not engage in careful observation, we will not get beyond mere abstractions. We must not limit our observations to present conditions alone. We must say to ourselves, the forces that we witness as the child’s soul spiritual element during the period from the seventh to about the fourteenth year are the same ones that worked before in the lower organism in a hidden or latent way. We must seek in the child’s soul and spirit what is at work in the child from birth to the change of teeth and between the change of teeth and puberty. If we do this, we will gain a realistic idea of the relationship between soul and spirit on one side and the physical-bodily processes on the other.

Observe physical processes up to the second dentition and you will find the effects of soul and spirit. But, if you wish to observe the soul and spirit in its own right, then observe a child from the change of teeth until the coming of puberty. Do not proceed by saying, “Here is the body and the soul is somewhere within it; now I wish to find its effects.” No, we must now leave the spatial element altogether and enter the dimension of time. If we do so, we shall find a true, realistic relationship between body and soul, a relationship that leads to fruitful ideas for life. We shall learn, from a deeper point of view, how to care for a child’s physical health before the change of teeth, so that the child’s psychic and spiritual health can manifest appropriately afterward, during the second life period, from the change of teeth to puberty. Similarly, the health of the stomach reveals itself—in the time organism; that is, the etheric or body of formative forces—in the healthy condition of the head. That is the point.

And, if we want to study how to deal with the forces that are released from the physical organism between the change of teeth and puberty—and we are here dealing with one of the most important periods of a child’s life, let us call it the time of school duties—I must say, first of all, that they are formative forces, liberated formative forces, that have been building up the human organism, plastically and musically. We must treat them accordingly. Hence, initially, we must not treat them intellectually. To treat the formerly formative forces, which are now soul-spiritual forces, artistically, not intellectually, is the basic demand of anthroposophical pedagogy.

The essence of Waldorf education is to make education into an art—the art of the right treatment of children, if I may use the expression. A teacher must be an artist, for it is the teacher’s task to deal in the right way with the forces that previously shaped the child’s organism. Such forces need to be treated artistically—no matter which subject the teacher is to introduce to children entering the Waldorf school. Practically, this means that we begin not with reading but with writing—but learning to write must in no way be an intellectual pursuit. We begin by letting our young pupils draw and paint patterns and forms that are attuned to their will lives. Indeed, watching these lessons, many people would feel them to be rather a strange approach to this fundamental subject!

Each teacher is given complete freedom. We do not insist on a fixed pedagogical dogma but, instead, we introduce our teachers to the whole spirit of anthroposophical pedagogical principles and methods. For instance, if you were to enter a first grade class, you might see how one teacher has his or her pupils move their arms in the air to given rhythms. Eventually each pupil will then draw these on paper in the simplest form. Hence, out of the configuration of the physical organism—that is, out of the sphere of the children’s will—we elicit something that quite naturally assumes an artistic form and we gradually transform such patterns into the forms of letters. In this way, learning to write avoids all abstraction. Rather, writing arises in the same way as it originally entered human evolution. First, there was picture-writing, which was a direct result of outer reality. Then, gradually, this changed into our written symbols, which have become completely abstract. Thus, beginning with a pictorial element, we lead into the modern alphabet, which speaks to the intellect. Only after having first taught writing out of such artistic activities do we introduce reading. If teachers approach writing and reading in this way, working from an artistic realm and meeting the child with artistic intentions, they are able to appeal above all to a child’s forces of will. It is out of the will forces that, fundamentally speaking, all psychological and intellectual development must unfold. But, moving from writing to reading, a teacher is aware of moving from what is primarily a willing activity to one that has more of a feeling quality. The children’s thinking, for its part, can be trained by dealing with numbers in arithmetic.

If teachers are able to follow a child’s whole soul-spiritual configuration in detail as each child first draws single figures, which leads to formation of letters and then to writing words that are also read—and if they are able to pursue this whole process with anthroposophical insight and observation of growing human beings—then a true practice of teaching will emerge.

Only now can we see the importance of applying an artistic approach during the first years of school. Everything that is brought to a child through music in a sensible and appropriate way will show itself later as initiative. If we restrict a child’s assimilation of the musical element appropriate to the seventh to eighth year, we are laming the development of that child’s initiative, especially in later life. A true teacher of our time must never lose sight of the whole complex of such interconnections. There are many other things—we shall have to say more about them later—that must be observed not only year by year but week by week during the life period from the change of teeth to puberty.

There is one moment of special importance, approximately halfway through the second life period; that is, roughly between the ninth and tenth years. This is a point in a child’s development that teachers need to observe particularly carefully. If one has attained real insight into human development and is able to observe the time organism or etheric body, as I have described it, throughout the course of human life, one knows how, in old age, when a person is inclined to look back over his or her life down to early childhood days, among the many memory pictures that emerge, there emerge particularly vividly the pictures of teachers and other influential figures of the ninth and tenth years.

These more intimate details of life tend to be overlooked by natural-scientific methods of research that concentrate on more external phenomena. Unfortunately, not much attention is paid to what happens to a child—earlier in one child, later in another—approximately between the ninth and tenth years. What enters a child’s unconscious then emerges again vividly in old age, creating either happiness or pain, and generating either an enlivening or a deadening effect. This is an exact observation. It is neither fantasy nor mere theory. It is a realization that is of immense importance for the teacher. At this age, a child has specific needs that, if heeded, help bring about a definite relationship between the pupil and the teacher.

A teacher simply has to observe the child at this age to sense how a more or less innate and unspoken question lives in the child’s soul at this time, a question that can never be put into actual words. And so, if the child cannot ask the question directly, it is up to the teacher to bring about suitable conditions for a constructive resolution of this situation.

What is actually happening here?

One would hardly expect a person who, in the 1890’s [1894], wrote a book entitled The Philosophy of Freedom to advocate the principle of authority on any conservative or reactionary grounds. Yet, from the standpoint of child development alone, it must be said that, just as up to the change of teeth a child is a being who imitates, so, after this event, a child needs naturally to look up to the authority of the teacher and educator. This requires of the teacher the ability to command natural respect, so that a pupil accepts truths coming from the teacher simply because of the child’s loving respect, not on the strength of the child’s own judgments. A great deal depends on that.

Again, this is a case in which we need to have had personal experience. We must know from experience what it means for a child’s whole life—and for the constitution of a person’s soul—when children hear people talk of a highly respected member of their family, whom they have not yet met, but about whom all members of the household speak in hushed reverential tones as a wise, good, or for any other reason highly esteemed family member. The moment then arrives when the child is to be introduced to such a person for the first time. The child feels overcome by deep awe. He or she hardly dares open the door to enter into the presence of such a personality. Such a child feels too shy to touch the person’s hand. If we have lived through such an experience, if our souls have been deepened in childhood in this way, then we know that this event created a lasting impression and entered the very depths of our consciousness, to resurface at a later age. This kind of experience must become the keynote of the relationship between the teacher and the child. Between the change of teeth and puberty, a child should willingly accept whatever the teacher says on the strength of such a natural sense of authority.

An understanding of this direct elemental relationship can help a teacher become a real artist in the sense that I have already indicated.

During this same period, however, another feeling also lives in the child, often only dimly and vaguely felt. This is the feeling that those who are the objects of such authority must themselves also look up to something higher. A natural outcome of this direct, tangible relationship between the teacher and the child is the child’s awareness of the teacher’s own religious feelings and of the way in which the teacher relates to the metaphysical world-all. Such imponderables must not be overlooked in teaching and education. People of materialistic outlook usually believe that whatever affects children reaches them only through words or outer actions. Little do they know that quite other forces are at work in children!

Let us consider something which occasionally happens. Let us assume that a teacher thinks “I—as teacher—am an intelligent person, but my pupils are very ignorant. If I want to communicate a feeling for the immortality of the human soul to my students, I can think, for instance, of what happens when a butterfly emerges from a chrysalis. I can compare this event, this picture, with what happens when a person dies. Thus I can say to my children, ‘Just as the butterfly flies out of the chrysalis, so, after death, the immortal soul leaves the physical body.’ Such a comparison, I am certain, offers a useful simile for the child’s benefit.”

But if the picture—the simile—is chosen with an attitude of mental superiority on the part of the teacher, we find that it does not touch the pupils at all and, soon after hearing it, they forget all about it, because the teacher did not believe in the truth of his simile.

Anthroposophy teaches us to believe in such a picture and I can assure you that, for me, the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis is not a simile that I have invented. For me, the butterfly emerging out of the chrysalis is a revelation on a lower plane of what on a higher level represents the immortality of the human soul. As far as I am concerned, it is not I who created this picture out of my own reasoning; rather, it is the world itself that reveals the processes of nature in the emergence of a butterfly. That is what this picture means to me. I believe with every fibre of my soul that it represents a truth placed by the gods themselves before our eyes. I do not imagine that, compared with the child, I am wiser and the chid more foolish. I believe in the truth of this picture with the same earnestness that I wish to awaken in the child. If a teacher teaches with such an attitude, the child will remember it for the rest of his or her life.

Unseen supersensible—or shall we say imponderable—forces are at work here. It is not the words that we speak to children that matter, but what we ourselves are—and above all what we are when we are dealing with our children. This is especially important during the period between the ninth and tenth years, for it is during this time that the child feels the underlying background out of which a teacher’s words are spoken. Goethe said: “Consider well the what, but consider more the how.” A child can see whether an adult’s words express a genuine relationship with the supersensible world or whether they are spoken with a materialistic attitude—the words have a different “ring.” The child experiences a difference of quality between the two approaches. During this period between the ninth and tenth years, children need to feel, if only subconsciously, that as they look up to the authority of their teachers, their teacher likewise looks up to what no longer is outwardly visible. Then, through the relationship of teacher to child, a feeling for other people becomes transformed into a religious experience.

This, in turn, is linked to other matters—for example, the child’s ability to differentiate itself from its surroundings. This too is an inner change, requiring a change of approach toward the subjects taught. We shall speak of that tomorrow. In the meantime, one can see how important it is that certain moods of soul—certain soul conditions—form an intimate part of the theory and the practice of education.

When the plans for founding the Waldorf school in Stuttgart were nearing realization, the question of how to form the hearts and the souls of teachers so that they entered their classrooms and greeted their children in the right spirit was considered most important. I value my task of having to guide this school enormously. I also value the fact that, when I have been able to be there in person, the attitude about which I have been speaking has been much in evidence among the teaching staff, however varied the individual form of expression. Having heard what I have had to tell you, you now will realize the significance of a question that I always ask, not in the same words but in different ways each time, either during festive school occasions or when visiting different classes. The question is, “Children, do you love your teachers?” And the children respond “Yes!” in chorus with a sincere enthusiasm that reveals the truth of their answer. Breathing through all of those children’s souls, one can feel the existence of a bond of deep inner affection between teachers and pupils and that the children’s feeling for the authority of the teacher has become a matter of course. Such natural authority is meant to form the essence of our educational practice during these years of childhood.

Waldorf pedagogy is thus built not only upon principles and educational axioms—of which, thanks to the work of the great pedagogues, there are plenty in existence already—but, above all, upon the pedagogical skills in practical classroom situations, that is, the way each individual teacher handles his or her class. Such skill is made possible by what anthroposophy unfolds in the human soul and in the human heart. What we strive for is a pedagogy that is truly an art, an art arising from educational methods and principles founded on anthroposophy.

Of course, with such aims today, one must be prepared to make certain compromises. Hence, when the Waldorf school was opened, I had to come to the following arrangement with the school authorities. In a memorandum, worked out when the school was founded, I stipulated that our pupils should attain standards of learning comparable to those reached in other schools by the age of nine, so that, if they wanted, they would be able to transfer into the same class in another school. But, during the intervening years—that is, from when they entered school around six to the age of nine—I asserted our complete freedom to use teaching time according to our own methods and pedagogical point of view. The same arrangement was offered to pupils who stayed in the school through the age of twelve. Because they had reached the standards of learning generally expected at that age, they were again given the possibility of entering the appropriate classes in other schools.

The same thing happens again when our pupils reach puberty; that is, when they reach school-leaving age. But what happens in between is left entirely to our discretion. Hence we are able to ensure that it unfolds out of our anthroposophical understanding of human beings, just as our curriculum and educational aims do, which are likewise created entirely out of the child’s nature. And we try of course to realize these aims while leaving scope for individual differences. Even in comparatively large classes, the individuality of each single pupil is still allowed to play its proper part.

Tomorrow, we shall see what an incisive point of time the twelfth year is.

There is obviously a certain kind of perfection in education that will be attained only when we are no longer restricted by such compromises—when we are given complete freedom to deal with pupils all of the way from the change of teeth to puberty. Tomorrow, I shall indicate how this could be done. All the same, since life itself offered us the opportunity to do so, an attempt had to be made. Anthroposophy never seeks to demonstrate a theory—this always tends toward intellectuality—but seeks to engage directly in the fullness of practical life. It seeks to reveal something that will expand the scope of human beings and call into play the full potential of each individual. Certainly, in general terms, such demands have been made before. The what is known; with the help of anthroposophy, we must find the how. Today, I was able to give you a few indications regarding children up to the ninth year or so. When we meet again tomorrow, I shall speak in greater detail about the education of our children during the succeeding years.

In connection with the first lecture, further clarification was sought in relation to raising the question of immortality with children aged nine to ten.

RUDOLF STEINER:
We are not dealing here with the question of immortality per se in an explicit sense. But I would like to say that this question is part of the complex life situation for children of that age. I don’t think that I expressed myself unclearly when I said that at this age the child experiences a new form, a metamorphosis, in relation to the authority-based relationship of teacher to child. Previously, the child simply looked up to the teacher. This must be judged not on the basis of any party-political attitudes but on the basis of the child’s development. Between the second dentition and puberty, a child can only feel, what my teacher says is what my soul must believe; what my teacher does is a commandment for me. After that period, when children see an example to be followed in their teachers, they become aware that their teacher, too, looks up to a higher authority. They feel dimly that authority is no longer to be found in this world, but has withdrawn into the divine-spiritual world. In short, what lives in the teacher’s relationship to the supersensible world should not enter the feeling life of the child.

It is unlikely that a child will question the teacher regarding immortality in so many words. But the whole conduct of the child shows its dependence on the teacher’s realizing that, through the authority that she or he wields, the child wishes to be brought into a relationship with the supersensible. How that is done depends on each individual case. One case hardly ever resembles another. For instance, it might happen that a child, after previously having been its usual cheerful self, enters school in a moody and morose condition that lasts for several days. If one has the necessary experience, one knows that such a brooding state is an outcome of the situation we have been discussing. Sometimes, there is no need for an explicit conversation about the reasons for the change in the child. The mere way in which the teacher relates to the child, the understanding way in which she or he talks lovingly to the child during such days of brooding, could itself lead the child across a certain abyss. It is not an abyss in an intellectual sense, but one connected with the general constitution of the child’s soul. You will find the question of immortality there, not explicitly but implied. It is a question concerning the whole of life, one that will rise up in the child so that she or he can learn to feel, my teacher is not only an ordinary human being but one in whom the human relationship to the supersensible world is expressed. This is what I wished to add.

RUDOLF STEINER:
I have been given another question in writing which I should like to answer briefly. The question is: “Is it possible to follow the seven-year rhythms throughout the whole of life and what form do the various metamorphoses take?”

It is a fact that for those who are able to observe the more intimate changes of life, these rhythms are clearly identifiable during the early years of life; i.e., during the change of teeth and the onset of puberty. It is also easy to see that physical changes occur, paralleling those of soul and spirit. Such changing life-periods also exist in later life. They are less conspicuous and, strangely enough, become less distinctive as humanity progresses. I could also say that they become more inward. In view of our contemporary, more external ways of looking at history, it might not be inappropriate to mention that, in earlier stages of human evolution, such life periods were also clearly identifiable in later life. This is because human beings had different soul conditions in the past into which anthroposophy can look. I must add that anthroposophy is not dependent on documentary evidence as is modern historical research in our intellectual age. I am not blaming; I am merely describing. For instance, when we go back into earlier times, we notice how human beings looked forward to the coming of old age with a certain anticipation, simply on account of what they had experienced when they met other old people. This is a trait that one can discern if one looks back into human development without prejudice. Nowadays, people do not look forward to old age as a time when life will reveal certain things for which one is ready only then. That is because the clear distinctions between the various life periods have gradually been blurred. If we observe things without prejudice, we can perceive that we can today barely distinguish such development in most people beyond the ages of twenty-eight or thirty. After this period, in the majority of our contemporaries, the developmental periods become very indistinct. During the period called the Age of the Patriarchs, a time when people still looked up to old age, one knew that this period of ebbing life forces could still offer unique experiences to the human being. Although the body was becoming increasingly sclerotic, the soul was freeing itself more and more from the body. Very different indeed are the intimate experiences of the soul during the time of the body’s ascending life forces from those undergone at the other end of life.

But this growing young once more in a body that is physically hardening, of which I spoke in the lecture, also gives old age a certain strength. And, if we look back to ancient times, we find this strength there. I believe that it was not for nothing that the ancient Greeks saw, in Homer above all but also in other poets, people who were creative at the time when their souls were freer from the physical body which was deteriorating. (I am not now speaking about whether there ever was such a person on earth as the one we call Homer.) Much of what we have of oriental wisdom, in the Vedas and, above all, in the philosophy of the Vedanta, has grown out of souls who were becoming younger in old age.

Naturally, progress with regard to human freedom would not be possible if distinctions between the different life periods did not become blurred. Yet, in a more intimate way, they do still exist today. And those who have achieved a certain selfknowledge know well how what someone might have experienced in their thirties, appears strangely metamorphosed in their fifties. Even though it still belongs to the same soul, it nevertheless appears in different nuances. Such nuances might not have a great deal of meaning for us today because we have become so abstract and do not perceive, by means of a more refined and intimate observation of life, what is spiritually real. Yet these metamorphoses, following each other, do exist nevertheless. Even if there seems little time for these intimate matters in our age with its social upheavals, a time will come when human beings will be observed adequately once more, for humanity would otherwise move towards its downfall and decay.

Why should the wish to advance to real observation of human beings be lacking? We have made very great progress indeed with regard to the observation of external nature. And whoever knows how plant and animal species have been explored in greatest detail and how thoroughly external facts are being observed will not think it impossible that the immense efforts and the enormously penetrating observations that have been showered upon the study of external nature will not one day be applied equally to the study of the human being. When and how this might eventually happen will have to be left open for the time being. In any case, it is correct to say that the art of education will advance to the extent to which a thorough observation of human beings and the metamorphoses of the various life periods in later life are being undertaken.

I would like to go back once more to what I said yesterday; namely, that whoever has not learned to pray in childhood is not in a position to bless in old age, for more than a picture was implied. Respect and devotion engendered in childhood are transmuted at a much later age into a force that has a healing effect on human environment—especially upon children—so that we can call it a force of blessing. A picture, such as that of folded hands, given in the ninth or tenth year of life, will turn into hands raised in blessing during the fiftieth or fifty-fifth year—such a truth is more than a mere picture: it shows the inner organic interrelationships during the course of a human life, which reveal themselves in such metamorphoses.

As I said before, these phases do become more blurred in later life. However, although they are less discernible, they do nevertheless exist, and they need to be studied, especially in the art of education.

I) It is an art of education, based on anthroposophy. It is different from other contemporary currents and world-views.

II) It depends on perceptions that can be developed.

Education : The free individuality of the child is not to be disturbed. We are to give the young human being an organism for life, which he or she can use properly. The soul will develop if we meet it with the right kind of human understanding. The spirit will find its way into the spiritual world. But the physical body is in need of education.

0–7th years. The human being develops from the head; the young child is entirely a sense organ and a sculptor.

The child under seven. Baby: sleeps a great deal because its whole body is like a sense organ—and every sense organ sleeps during the state of perceiving. The senses are awake when the human being is asleep. The secrets of the world lie in the senses; the secrets of the solar system lie in the chest organs. The senses are not predisposed for perceiving, but for plastically forming the organism.

7th–14th years. Human beings develop from the breathing and circulatory systems. A child is wholly a listener and a musician.

Learning to write—not too early—afterward learning to read—arithmetic—as analysis.

9th–10th years. Turning point. One can begin to talk about the outer world as the outer world—but through descriptions—this will harmonize the tendencies of growth.

In children, the soul exerts an immeasurably strong influence on the body.

14th–21st years. The human becomes a being of fantasy and of judgment. After the twelfth year, he or she can grow into the dramatic element. Something then remains for the rest of life. Before this time, a splitting of the personality is not good.

The question of “Drama and Education” has been raised in history through Goethe’s relationship to Shakespeare.

1) The question of the relationship between drama and education will be answered by: What drew Goethe to Shakespeare?

2) Goethe mentions three teachers: Linnaeus, Spinoza, and Shakespeare. From the beginning, he stood in opposition to the first two. But he remained faithful to Shakespeare, although Goethe himself, in his dramatic works, comes to a different way of creating.

3) What attracted Goethe to Shakespeare was what escapes logical reasoning in Shakespeare. If one wanted to explain a Shakespeare play logically, one would be in the same position as someone wanting to explain dreams logically.

4) When is it right to introduce this element into education?

5) The Waldorf school is built on the artistic element. But teachers and educators arein a position different from other artists. They are not working with material that they can permanently shape; they are working with human beings.

6) The method of the Waldorf school is built on anthroposophy. Exact clairvoyance. Exercises in thinking and willing. Through these to recognize: the child—as sense organ and sculptor—and subsequently musician and listener to music.

7) Drama: the old Aristotelian definition: Fear and sympathy in tragedy. A human being facing something higher than the self. Satisfaction and gloating over other people’s misfortunes. A human being facing a state of subordination.

8) In school, drama is to be introduced only at the time of puberty. But all teaching must pay attention to the dramatic element. The dramatic element escapes the intellect. Hence, it is employed as a counterbalance to the training of the pupils’ intellectual powers.

Lyric poetry strengthens feeling—
epic poetry modifies thinking.

Consequently, a child’s words become inward through lyricism. They become worldly through epic poetry.

Tragedy awakens mixed feelings: fear and sympathy.
Comedy awakens self-satisfaction and gloating over other people’s misfortunes.

Comedy: The human being approaches the soul within.
Tragedy: The human being approaches the physical within.

Tasso and Iphigenia: are solutions to artistic problems
Faust: represents the problem of humanity

Shakespeare’s characters are the creations of a theatrical pragmatist, created by someone who was in close and intimate contact with the audience. Goethe studies the problem of humanity in the single human being. Shakespeare embodies a certain kind of dreaming.

The impossibility for Sh. to find support in the outer arrangements of the stage. Hence, the interest is centered in the characters themselves.

In order to fully enjoy Shakespeare, Goethe outwardly contrives conditions bordering on dream conditions.

People always try to look for the logic in Shakespeare’s plays.
However, they are guided not by logic but by the pictorial element.

From the announcement of the theme of today’s lecture “Shakespeare and the New Ideals,” it might be expected that I would speak, above all, about new ideals. But I am convinced that it is not so necessary to speak of new ideals today as it is to speak of a wider question, namely the following: How are men and women of our time to regain the power to follow ideals? After all, no great power is required to speak about ideals; indeed, it is often the case that those who speak most about these great questions, expanding beautiful ideals in abstract words out of their intellect, are those who lack the very power to put ideals into practice. Sometimes, speaking of ideals amounts to no more than holding onto illusions in the mind in order to pass over life’s realities.

At this festival, however, we have every cause to speak of what is spiritual as a reality. For this festival commemorates Shakespeare, and Shakespeare lives in what is spiritual in all that he created; he lives in it as in a real world. Receiving Shakespeare into our minds and souls might therefore be the very stimulus to give us men and women of today the power, the inner impulse to follow ideals, to follow real, spiritual ideals. We shall see our true ideals aright if we bear in mind how transitory many modern ideals have been and are, and how magnificently firm are many old ideals that still hold their own in the world by their effectiveness. Do we not see wide circles of believers in this or that religion, who base their innermost spiritual life and their inner mobility of spirit on something of the past, and gain from it the power of spiritual upliftment? And so we ask how is it that many modern ideals, beautiful as they are, and held for a while with great enthusiasm by large numbers of people, before long vanish as into a cloud, whereas religious or artistic ideals of old carry their full force into humanity not just through centuries but even through millennia?

If we ask this question, we are brought back repeatedly to the fact that, whereas our modern ideals are generally no more than shadow pictures of the intellect, the old ideals were garnered from real spiritual life, from a definite spirituality inherent in the humanity of the time. The intellect can never give human beings real power from the depths of their being. And, because this is so, many modern ideals vanish and fade away long before what speaks to us, through the old religious faiths, or through the old styles of art, from hoary antiquity. Returning to Shakespeare with these thoughts in mind, we know that a power lives in his dramatic work that not only always gives us fresh enthusiasm but also kindles within us—in our imaginations, in our spiritual natures—our own creative powers. Shakespeare has a wonderfully timeless power and, in this power, he is modern, as modern as can be.

Here, from the point of view of the connection between human ideals and Shakespeare, I might perhaps call to mind what I mentioned last Wednesday, namely Shakespeare’s deeply significant influence on Goethe. Countless books and treatises have been written on Shakespeare out of academic cleverness—exceptional cleverness. Taking all of the learned works on Hamlet alone, I think that one could fill library shelves that would cover this wall. But, when we seek to find what it was in Shakespeare that worked on such a man as Goethe, we finally come to the conclusion that absolutely nothing relating to that is contained in all that has been written in these books. They could have remained unwritten. All of the effort that has been brought to bear on Shakespeare stems from the world of the human intellect, which is certainly good for understanding facts of natural science and for giving such an explanation of external nature as we need to found for our modern technical achievements, but which can never penetrate what stands livingly and movingly before us in Shakespeare’s plays.

Indeed, I could go further. Goethe, too, from this standpoint of intellectual understanding, wrote many things on Shakespeare’s plays by way of explanation—on Hamlet, for example—and all of this, too, that Goethe wrote, is, in the main, one-sided and barren. However, what matters is not what Goethe said about Shakespeare, but what he meant when he spoke from his inmost experience, for example, when he said, “These are no mere poems! It is as though the great leaves of fate were opened and the storm-wind of life were blowing through them, turning them quickly to and fro.” These words are no explanation, but voice the devotion of his spirit. Spoken from his own humanity, they are very different from what he himself wrote by way of explanation about Hamlet.

Now, we might ask, why is it that Shakespeare is so difficult to approach intellectually? I shall try to give an answer in a picture. Someone has a vivid dream in which the characters enact a whole incident before the dreamer. Looking back on it later with the intellect, she or he might say that this or that figure in the dream acted wrongly; here is an action without motive or continuity, here are contradictions. But the dream cares little for such criticism. Just as little will the poet care how we criticize with our intellect and whether we find actions contradictory or inconsistent. I once knew a pedantic critic who found it strange that Hamlet, having only just seen the ghost of his father before him, should speak the monologue, “To be or not to be,” saying in it that “no traveller returns” from the land of death. This, the man of learning thought, was really absurd! I do not mean to say that Shakespeare’s dramatic scenes are dream scenes. Shakespeare experiences his scenes in full, living consciousness. They are as conscious as can be. But he uses the intellect only insofar as it serves him to develop his characters, to unfold them, to give form to action. He does not make his intellect master of what is to happen in his scenes.

I speak here from the anthroposophical view of the world. This view I believe, does contain the great ideals of humanity. Perhaps, therefore, I may mention at this point a significant experience that explains fully—by means of “artistic seership”—something that was first known through feeling. I have already had occasion to speak about the way in which “exact clairvoyance” is being cultivated at the Goetheanum, the school of spiritual science in Dornach, Switzerland. I have described the paths to this exact clairvoyance in the books translated into English as How to Know Higher Worlds, Theosophy, and An Outline of Occult Science. By means of certain exercises, carried out no less precisely than in the learning of mathematics, we can strengthen our soul faculties. Gradually, we can so develop our powers of thought, feeling, and will that we are able to live with our souls consciously—not in the unconsciousness of sleep or in dreams—outside the body. We become able to leave behind the physical body with its intellectualistic thought—for this remains with the physical body—in full consciousness. Then we have “imaginations,” by which I do not mean such fanciful imaginings as are justified in artistic work, but I mean true imaginations, true pictures of the spiritual world surrounding us. Through what I have called “imagination,” “inspiration,” and “intuition,” we learn to perceive in the spiritual world. Just as we consciously perceive this physical world and, through our senses, learn to build an understanding of it as a totality from the single sensory impressions of sound and color, so from the spiritual perceptions of exact clairvoyance we learn to build up an understanding of the spiritual world as a totality. Exact clairvoyance has nothing to do with hallucinations and illusions that enter a human being pathologically, always clouding and decreasing consciousness. In exact clairvoyance, we come to know the spiritual world in full consciousness, as clearly and as exactly as when we do mathematical work. Transferring ourselves into high spiritual regions, we experience pictures comparable, not with what are ordinarily known as visions, but rather with memory pictures. But these are pictures of an absolutely real spiritual world.

All of the original ideals of humanity in science, art, and religion were derived from the spiritual world. That is why the old ideals have a greater, more impelling power than modern intellectual ideals. The old ideals were seen in the spiritual world through clairvoyance, a clairvoyance that was at that time more instinctive and dreamlike. They were derived and taken from a spiritual source. By all means let us recognize quite clearly that certain contents of religious faith are no longer suited to our time. They have been handed down from ancient times. We need once more wide-open doors to look into the spiritual world and to take thence, not such abstract ideals as are spoken of on every side, but the power to follow the ideal and the spiritual in science, in art, and in religion.

If we approach Shakespeare with such powers of seeing into the spiritual world, we shall experience something quite specific, and it is of this that I wish to speak. Shakespeare can be understood with true and artistic feeling; exact clairvoyance is, of course, not necessary to have a full experience of his power. But exact clairvoyance can show us something most significant, which will explain why it is that Shakespeare can never let us feel he has left us, why it is that he is forever giving us fresh force and impulse. It is this: whoever has attained exact clairvoyance by developing the powers of thought, feeling, and will can carry over into the spiritual world what we have experienced here of Shakespeare. This is possible. What we have experienced here in the physical body—let us say that we have been entering deeply into the character of Hamlet or Macbeth—we can take this experience over into the spiritual world. We can see what lived in Shakespeare’s deep inner life only when we compare it with the impressions that we are able to take over into the spiritual world from poets of more modern times. I do not wish to mention any particular poet by name—I know that everyone has his or her favorite poets—but any one of the naturalistic poets, particularly of recent years, could be mentioned. If we compare what we take over from Shakespeare with what we have in the spiritual world from these poets, we discover the remarkable fact that Shakespeare’s characters live! When we take them over into the spiritual world, they act. They act differently, but they bring their life here into the spiritual world. Whereas, if we take over the characters created by a modern naturalistic poet into the spiritual world, they really behave more like dolls than human beings! They have no life in them at all, no movement! Shakespeare’s men and women keep their life and character. But the characters of many other poets, derived from naturalism, are just like wooden dolls in the spiritual world! They go through a kind of freezing process! Indeed, we ourselves are chilled by contact with such modern poetry in the spiritual world.

I am not saying this out of any kind of emotion, but as a matter of experience. With this experience in mind, we may ask again: what was it that Goethe felt? “It is as though the great book of fate is opened in Shakespeare, and life’s stormy wind is turning its pages quickly to and fro.” Goethe knew and felt how Shakespeare created from the full depths of the spiritual world. This has given Shakespeare his real immortality: this makes him ever new. We can go through a play of Shakespeare’s and experience it ten, twenty, a hundred times!

Ladies and gentlemen, you have had before you within the last few days the scene from Much Ado about Nothing where the Friar kneels down beside the fallen heroine and utters his conviction of her innocence. It is something unspeakably deep and true, and there is hardly anything in modern literature to be compared with it. Indeed, it is most often the intimate touches in Shakespeare that work with such power and reveal his inner life and vitality.

Or again, in As You Like It, where the Duke stands before the trees and all of the life of nature in the Forest of Arden, and says that they are better counselors than those at court, for they tell him something of what he is as a human being. What a wonderful perception of nature speaks from the whole of this well known passage! “. . . tongues in trees, books in the running brooks. . . .” Here is an understanding of nature, here is a reading of nature! It is true that the more modern poets can also indicate such things, but we often feel that in them it is something second-hand. In Shakespeare, we feel that he is himself everything. Even when they both say the same, it is altogether different whether Shakespeare says it or some other poet.

Thus the great question comes before us: how is it that, in Shakespeare, there is this living quality that is so intimately related to the supersensible? Whence comes the life in Shakespeare’s dramas? This question leads us to see how Shakespeare, working as he did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was able to create something that still had living connections with the life of the most ancient drama. And this most ancient drama, as it speaks to us from Aeschylus, from Sophocles, is in turn a product of the mysteries, those ancient cultic, artistic actions that derive from the most ancient, instinctive, inner spiritual knowledge. We can understand what inspires us so in true art, if we seek the origin of art in the mysteries.

If I now make some brief remarks on the ancient mysteries as the source of the artistic sense and artistic creative power, the objection can of course very easily be made that what is said on this subject from the standpoint of exact clairvoyance is unsupported by sufficient proof. Exact clairvoyance, however, brings us into touch not only with what surrounds us at the present day but also, most empathically, with the world of history, with the historical evolution of humanity, and of the universe. Those who follow the method that I have described in my books can themselves investigate what exact clairvoyance has to say upon the subject of the mysteries.

When speaking of the mysteries, we are looking back into very ancient times in human evolution, times when religion, art, and science did not yet stand separately, side by side, as they do today. Generally, people are insufficiently aware of the changes—the metamorphoses—that art, religion, and science have undergone before reaching the separation and differentiation that they experience today. I will mention only one thing to indicate how, to some extent, modern anthroposophical knowledge brings us into contact again with older forms of true artistic life.

Across the centuries, the works of earlier painters—those, say, before the end of the thirteenth and during the fourteenth centuries—come down to us. We need only think of Cimabue. Thereafter, something that has rightly held sway in modern painting enters into painting. This is what we call perspective. In the paintings in the dome of the Goetheanum in Switzerland, you can see how we are returning once again to the perspective which lies in the colors themselves—where we have a different feeling in the blue, the red, and the yellow. It is as though we were leaving the ordinary physical world: the third dimension of space ceases to have significance, and we work in two dimensions only.

Thus, a painter can return to a connection with the ancient instinctive spiritual experience of humanity. It is this possibility that modern anthroposophy seeks to give through all that I have said concerning exact clairvoyance.

Looking back at the life of ancient, instinctive clairvoyance, we find it connected equally with the artistic, the religious, and the scientific; that is, with the whole of the ancient form of knowledge. There was always an understanding for the union of religion, art, and science—which in those days meant a revelation of divine cosmic forces—in the mystery cults. Insofar as they were a manifestation of divine forces, the mystery cults entered deeply into humanity’s religious feelings; insofar as they were already what we call today artistic—what we cultivate in art—they were the works of art for the people of that time. And, insofar as those ancient peoples were aware that true knowledge is gained, not by seeking it one-sidedly through the head, but through the experience of the whole being, the ancient mysteries in their development were also mediators for human knowledge as it then was. Today, on the other hand, according to the modern view, knowledge can be acquired simply by taking ordinary consciousness—remaining as we are—and observing nature, forming concepts from the facts of nature.

Our modern way of approaching the world in order to gain knowledge of it is not the same as it was in ancient times. In the old way, to look into the spiritual world, one had to lift oneself to a higher level of one’s humanity. Of course, this ancient way of knowing was not the same as our present exact clairvoyance. Nevertheless, the human being did see into the spiritual world. The mystery rites were enacted, not to display something for the outer eye, but to awaken inner experience in the whole human being. Mighty destinies formed the subject of these mystery rites. Through them, human beings were brought to forget their ordinary selves. They were lifted out of ordinary life. Although in a dream and not as clearly as is required today, they entered the state of living outside their bodies. That was the purpose of the mysteries. By the witness of deeply-moving scenes and actions, the mysteries sought to bring the neophyte to the point of living and experiencing outside the physical body.

There are certain fundamental experiences characteristic of life outside the body. One great experience is the following. In the physical body, our ordinary life of feeling is interwoven with the organic processes in our own body. But when we are outside the body, our feeling encompasses everything that surrounds us. We experience in feeling all of the life around us. Imagine that a person is outside the physical body with his or her soul and spiritual life and experiences spiritually—not with the intellect’s ice-cold forces, but with the forces of the soul, with feeling and emotion. Imagine what it feels like to experience outside the body in this way. It is a great sympathy with all things—with thunder and lightning, with the rippling of the stream, the welling forth of the river spring, the sighing of the wind—and a feeling of togetherness also with other human beings, as well as with the spiritual entities of the world. Outside the body, one learns to know this great empathy.

Now, united with this great feeling of empathy, another fundamental feeling also comes over the human being in the face of what is at first unknown. I refer to a certain sense of fear. These two feelings—the feeling of empathy with all the world, and the feeling of fear—played a great part in the ancient mysteries. When the pupils had strengthened themselves in their inner lives so that they were able, without turning away and without losing their inner control, to bear both the living empathy with the world and the fear, then they were ripe enough and sufficiently evolved really to see into the spiritual worlds. They were then ready to live and experience the spiritual world. And they were ready, too, to communicate to their fellow human beings knowledge drawn from spiritual worlds. With their feeling, they could work down from the spiritual worlds into this world, and a new poetic power was revealed in their speech. Their hands became skilled to work in colors; they were able to command the inner rhythm of their organism so that they could become musicians for the benefit of other human beings. In this way, they became artists. They could hand down from the mysteries what the primeval religions gave to humanity. Anyone who looks into the Catholic Mass with inner spiritual knowledge knows that it is the last shadow-like reflection of what was living in the mysteries.

At first, what was living in the mysteries had its artistic and its religious side. Afterward, these two separated. In Aeschylus and in Sophocles we already see the artistic element, as it were, lifted out of the mysteries. There is the divine hero, Prometheus. In Prometheus, the human being comes to know something of the deeply-moving, terrifying experiences, the inner fear of the mysteries. What was living in the mysteries, in which the neophytes were initiated into a higher stage of life, becomes in Prometheus a picture, though permeated with living dramatic power. Thus drama became an image of the deepest human experiences. Aristotle, who was already, in a sense, an intellectual, still lived in some of the old traditions. He knew and experienced how drama was a kind of echo of the ancient mysteries. For this reason, Aristotle said, putting into words what was an echo of the ancient mysteries living on in Aeschylus and Sophocles, what has been dismissed by learned men again and again in their books: “Drama is the representation of a scene calling forth sympathy and fear, in order that human beings may be purified of physical passions, that they may undergo catharsis.” We cannot understand what this catharsis, or purification, means unless we look back into the ancient mysteries and see how people were purified of what is physical and lived through mighty experiences in the supersensible, outside their physical bodies. Aristotle describes what had already become a picture in Greek drama. Afterward, this passed over to later dramatists, and we see in Corneille and Racine something that is a fulfillment of Aristotle’s words. We see characters clothed, as it were, in fear and compassion—compassion that is none other than the ancient sympathy and experience with all the world that the human being experienced outside the body. The fear is always there when the human being faces the unknown. The supersensible is always, in a sense, the unknown.

Shakespeare entered into the evolution of drama in his time. He entered into a world that was seeking a new dramatic element. Something transcending ordinary human life lives in drama. Shakespeare entered deeply into this. He was inspired by that ancient dramatic power which, to a certain extent, was still felt by his contemporaries. And he worked in such a way that we feel in Shakespeare that more than a single human personality is at work: the spirit of his century is at work and, with it, the spirit of the whole of human evolution. Shakespeare still lived in that ancient feeling, and so he called something to life in himself that enabled him to form his dramatic characters and human figures, not in any intellectual way, but by living right within them himself. The characters of Shakespeare’s plays come, not from human intellect, but from a power kindled and fired in the human being. It is this power that we must seek again if we would develop the true ideal of humanity.

Let us come back to the unification of art, science, and religion. This is our aim at the Goetheanum in Dornach. By the development of exact clairvoyance, we come to understand what was at work in the ancient mysteries. The element that the mystery dramatists placed, as yet externally, before their audiences was still at work in Shakespeare who recreated it in a wonderfully inward way.

It is no mere outer feature of Shakespeare’s plays that we find in them about a hundred and fifty names of different plants and about a hundred names of birds, everywhere intimately, lovingly interwoven with human life. All of this is part of the single whole in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare took the continuous current that flows through human evolution from the ancient Mysteries—their cults and rites—wholly into his inner life. He took this impulse of the ancient mysteries and his plays come forth like dreams that are awake and real. The intellect with its explanations, its consistencies and inconsistencies, cannot approach them. As little as we can apply intellectual standards to a Prometheus or an Oedipus, just so little can we apply them to Shakespeare’s plays.

Thus, in a wonderful way, we see in Shakespeare’s own person a development that we can call a mystery development. Shakespeare comes to London where he draws on historical traditions for his material. In his plays, he is still dependent on others. We see then how, from about 1598 onward, a certain inner life awakens. Shakespeare’s own artistic imagination comes to life. He is able to stamp his characters with the very interior of his being. Sometime later, when he has created Hamlet, a kind of bitterness toward the external physical world comes over him. We feel as though he were living in other worlds and judging the physical world differently—as though he were looking down from the point of view of other worlds. We then see him emerge from this inner deepening of experience with all of its inner tragedy. First, Shakespeare learns the external dramatic medium. Next, he goes through deepest inwardness—what I would call the meeting with the World Spirit, of which Goethe spoke so beautifully. Then he re-enters life with a certain humor, and his work carries with it the loftiest spirituality joined with the highest dramatic power. Here, I am thinking, for example, of The Tempest, one of the most wonderful creations of all humankind, one of the richest products of the evolution of dramatic art. In it, Shakespeare, in a living, human way, is able to lay his ripe philosophy of life into every character and figure.

So, having seen the art of drama derive from the ancient mysteries whose purpose was the living evolution of humanity, we can understand how it is that such an educational power goes out from Shakespeare’s plays. We can see how Shakespeare’s work, which arose out of a kind of self education given by nature herself, which he then lifted to the highest spirituality, can work in our schools and penetrate the living education of our youth. Once we have thus experienced their full cosmic spirituality, Shakespeare’s dramas must be livingly present with us when we consider the great educational questions of the day. But we must be active with all of the means at our disposal, for only by the deepest spirituality shall we find in Shakespeare the answer to these questions.

Such are the ideals that humanity needs so sorely. We have a wonderful natural science in our time, but it places a world that is dense and material before us. It can teach us nothing else than the final end of it all in a kind of universal death. And, when we consider natural evolution, as it is given to us in the thoughts of the last centuries, it seems like something strange and foreign when we look up to our spiritual ideals. So we ask whether the religious ideal has a real force, adequate to the needs of the civilized world today. But it has not. We must regain this real force by rising to the spiritual world. Only then, by spiritual knowledge and not by mere belief, shall we find the strength in our ideals to overcome all material aspects in the cosmos. We must be able to lift ourselves up to the power that creates from truly religious ideals, the power to overcome the world of matter in the universe.

We can do this only if we yield ourselves to the spiritual conception of the world and, for this, Shakespeare can be a great leader. Moreover, it is an intense social need that there be a spiritual conception of the world working in our time. Do not think that I am speaking out of egotism when I refer once again to Dornach in Switzerland, where we are cultivating what can lead humanity once more into the reality of the spiritual, into the true spiritual nature of the world. Only because of this were we able to overcome many of those contending interests working in people today and so sadly splitting them into parties and differing sections in every sphere of life. I could mention that, from 1913 until now, almost without a break, through the whole period of the war, while nearby the thunder of the cannon was heard, members of no less than seventeen nations have been working together in Dornach. That seventeen nations could work together peacefully during the greatest of all wars, this, too, seems to me a great ideal in education. What is possible on a small scale should be possible on a large scale, and human progress—human civilization—needs it. And, precisely because we favor an international advance in human civilization, I point to Shakespeare as a figure who worked in all humanity. He gave all humanity a great inspiration for new human ideals, ideals that have a meaning for international, universal humanity.

Therefore, let me close on this festival day with these words of Goethe, words that Goethe was impelled to speak when he felt the fullness of the spirituality in Shakespeare. There then arose from his heart a saying that, I think, must set its stamp on all our understanding of the great poet, who will remain an eternal source of inspiration to all. Conscious of this, Goethe uttered these words on Shakespeare with which we may close our thoughts today: “It is the nature of spirit to inspire spirit eternally.” Hence, we may rightly say, “Shakespeare for ever and without end!”

Today is the time of intellectualism. The intellect is the faculty of soul, in the exercise of which our inner being participates least. We speak with some justification of the coldness of intellect, and we need only consider its effect on artistic perception or works of art. The intellect destroys or hinders. Artists dread the possibility that their creations might be conceptually or symbolically explained by clever reasoning. They would like their work to be understood with feeling, not with understanding. The soul warmth that gave their creations life disappears in such clarity; it no longer is communicated to the beholder. This warmth is repelled by an intellectual explanation.

In social life, intellectualism separates people from one another. We cannot work rightly within the community unless we are able to imbue our deeds, which always involve the weal or woe of our fellow human beings with a soul quality. Deeds alone, lacking soul, are not enough. In a deed springing from intellectualism, we withhold our soul nature, preventing it from flowing over to our neighbor.

It has often been said that intellectualism has a crippling effect in the teaching and training of children. In saying this, one is thinking, in the first place, only of the child’s intelligence, not the teacher’s. One would like to fashion the methods of teaching in such a way that not only the child’s cold powers of reasoning are developed, but that warmth of heart may be engendered in the child as well.

The anthroposophical world-view is in full agreement with this. It accepts fully the excellent educational principles that have grown from this demand. But it realizes that warmth can be imparted only from soul to soul. Hence, it is of the opinion that, above all, pedagogy itself must become ensouled and thereby the teacher’s whole activity too.

In recent times, indirectly influenced by modern science, teacher training has been strongly permeated by intellectualism. Parents have allowed science to dictate what is beneficial for a child’s body, soul, and spirit; and so teachers, during their training, have received from science the spirit of their educational methods.

But science has achieved its triumphs precisely through intellectualism. It tries to keep its thoughts free from anything emanating from human soul life. Everything must come from sensory observation and experimentation. Such science could amass the excellent knowledge of nature in our times, but it cannot found a true pedagogy.

A true pedagogy must be based on a knowledge comprising the human body, soul, and spirit. Intellectualism grasps only the physical aspect of the human being, for only what is physical is revealed to observation and experiments. True knowledge of human beings is necessary before a true pedagogy can be founded. This is what anthroposophy seeks to attain.

One cannot come to knowledge of human beings by first forming an idea of the bodily nature with the help of a science founded merely on what can be grasped by the senses, and then asking whether that bodily nature is ensouled, and whether a spiritual element is active within it. In dealing with a child, such an attitude is harmful; for here, far more than in the adult, body, soul, and spirit form a unity. One cannot care first for the health of a child from the point of view of a merely natural science, and then want to give to the healthy organism what one regards as proper from the point of view of soul and spirit. In all that one does to and with the child, one either benefits or injures his bodily life. In earthly life, the human soul and spirit express themselves through the body. A bodily process is a revelation of soul and spirit.

Material science is necessarily concerned with the body as a physical organism. It does not reach an understanding of whole human beings. Many people feel the truth of this but, in regard to pedagogy, they fail to see what is actually needed today. They do not say: pedagogy cannot thrive on material science; let us therefore found our teaching methods on pedagogical instincts, not on material science. But they are half-consciously of this opinion.

We can admit this in theory but, in practice, because modern humanity has mostly lost the spontaneity of the life of instinct, it leads to nothing. It would be groping in the dark to try to construct a pedagogy on instincts that are no longer present in humanity in their original force. We come to see this through anthroposophical knowledge. We learn to know that the intellectualistic trend in science owes its existence to a necessary phase in the evolution of humanity. In recent times, people passed beyond the period of instinctive life. The intellect then became of predominant significance. Human beings had to advance along the evolutionary path in the right way. Just as an individual must acquire particular capabilities at a particular period of life, the evolutionary path led human beings to the level of consciousness that had to be attained in a certain epoch. The instincts are now crippled under the influence of the intellect, and yet one cannot try to return to the instinctive life without working against human evolution. We must accept the significance of the enhanced consciousness we attained through intellectualism, and give human beings—in full consciousness—what instinctive life can no longer give them.

To this end, knowledge of soul and spirit is needed, founded as firmly on spiritual reality as material, intellectualistic science is founded on physical reality. Anthroposophy strives for just this, yet it is just this that many people shrink from accepting. They learn to know how modern science tries to understand human nature. They feel that the modern scientific way is impossible, but they will not accept that, in order to attain knowledge of soul and spirit, it is possible to cultivate a new mode of cognition that is as clear in consciousness as that with which we penetrate physical phenomena. This being so, they want to return to the instincts as a way of understanding and training children.

But we must move forward; and there is no other way than to extend anthropology by knowledge of anthroposophy—to extend sensory knowledge by acquiring spiritual knowledge. We must learn all over again. People are terrified at the complete change of thought required for this. Out of unconscious fear, they attack anthroposophy as fantastic, yet anthroposophy wants only to proceed in the spiritual domain as soberly and as carefully as material science does in the physical.

Let us consider the child. At about the seventh year of life, a child develops his or her second teeth. This is not merely the work of the period of time immediately preceding this change. It is a process that begins with embryonic development and only concludes with the second teeth. These forces, which produce the second teeth at a certain stage of development, were always active in the child’s organism. But they do not reveal themselves in this way in subsequent periods of life. Further tooth formations do not occur. And yet the forces concerned have not been lost, they continue to work, they have merely been transformed. They have undergone a metamorphosis (there are other forces, too, in the child’s organism that undergo a similar metamorphosis).

If we study the development of the child’s organism in this way, we discover how these forces (leading to the change of teeth) were previously active in the processes of nourishment and growth. They lived in undivided unity with the child’s body, freeing themselves from it only around the seventh year. After the change of teeth, then, they live on as soul forces, active in older children in feeling and thinking.

Anthroposophy reveals that an etheric organism permeates the physical organism of the human being. Up to the age of seven, the whole of this etheric organism is active in the physical body. But a portion of it is now freed from direct activity in the physical body and acquires a certain independence as a vehicle for a soul life that is relatively free of the physical organism.

In earthly life, however, soul experience can develop only with the help of the etheric organism. Before the age of seven years, the soul is quite embedded in the physical body and expresses itself actively only through the body. The child can enter into relationship with the outer world only when this relationship takes the form of a stimulus that runs its course within the body. This can happen only when the child imitates. Before the change of teeth, the child is, in the widest sense, a purely imitative being. The aim of education at this stage can therefore be expressed thus: the conduct of those around the child should be worthy of imitation.

A child’s educators should experience within themselves what it is to have the whole etheric organism within the physical. This gives them knowledge of the child. One can do nothing with abstract principles alone. Educational practice requires an anthroposophical art of education to work out in detail how, through childhood, a human being gradually emerges. Just as the etheric organism is embedded in the physical organism until the change of teeth, so, from the change of teeth until puberty, a soul organism, called by anthroposophy the astral organism, is embedded in the physical and etheric organism. As a result, the child develops a life that no longer expends itself in imitation. However, children of this age cannot govern their relation to others in accordance with fully conscious thoughts, regulated by intellectual judgment. This becomes possible only when, at puberty, a part of the soul organism frees itself from the corresponding part of the etheric organism. From the age of seven to the age of fourteen, the child’s relationship is not determined by independent judgment. It is the relationship effected through authority that is important now.

This means that, during these years, children should look up to someone whose authority they can accept as a matter of course. The whole education must be fashioned with reference to this. One cannot build on children’s powers of intellectual judgment at this age. One should perceive clearly that children want to accept what is put before them as true, good, and beautiful because their teachers, whom they take as their models, regard it as true, good, and beautiful.

Moreover, teachers must work in such a way that they do not merely put before the child the true, the good, and the beautiful, but, in a sense, they themselves must be these. Not so much what they teach but what the teachers are is what passes over into the children. Everything that is taught should be presented to the children not as a matter of theory but as a realizable ideal, as a work of art.

Anthroposophy, as I have described it for the past two days, is not just a theoretical view intended to help people get past the sorrows, misfortunes, and pains of life, enabling them to escape into a mystical world. Anthroposophy can help people in practical life. It is connected with the practical questions of existence for the simple reason that the knowledge of which I spoke yesterday and the day before is intended to lead to a genuine penetration, to an accurate view, of the spiritual world. That viewpoint does not, in itself, lead to a life cut off from reality, but actually becomes part of all material events. When we look at a living human being, we are faced not only with what we see, what we understand through speech, and perhaps everything else that person’s being expresses that we can perceive with normal consciousness; we also confront the spiritual being living in that person, the spiritual, supersensible being that continually affects that individual’s material body.

We can never comprehend very much of the world through the knowledge we gain through normal sense perceptions and the intellect connected with those perceptions. People delude themselves into thinking that, when we someday perfect conventional science, we will comprehend more of the world through our intelligence, sense perceptions, and experiments. However, those who are able to consider the relationship between the human being and the world as described in my two earlier lectures know that we can understand only the mineral kingdom through sense perception and intellect. Even when we limit ourselves to the plant kingdom, we must understand that our intellect and senses cannot comprehend the very subtle cosmic rhythms and forces that affect the plant kingdom. That is even more true of the animal kingdom and truer still for human beings. The physical constitution of plants (the least so), animals, and human beings is such that the forces active within them act on their substance like ideal magic. People delude themselves when they believe we can perform the same kinds of laboratory experiments on animals or human beings that we perform on minerals. The purely physical processes that occur in animal and human organisms are caught in an ideal magic. We can gain some understanding of human beings if we can penetrate that ideal magic, that is, if we can look at human beings so that we see through material processes into the continuous inner spiritual activity.

We can achieve insight into spiritual magic only through the understanding I spoke of yesterday and the day before. I showed that one of the first stages of understanding human beings indicates that people not only have a relationship to the world in the moment, but that they can move themselves back to any age they have passed through since their earthly birth. You can place yourself back into a time when you were eighteen or fifteen years old and experience what you experienced then. You can experience it not only as shadowy memories, but with the intensity and strength that existed for you at the time it occurred. You thus become fifteen or twelve years old or whatever again. You undergo a spiritual metamorphosis through this process. In doing so, you can perceive a second organism in the human being, a more subtle organism we call etheric because it has neither weight nor spatial dimensions. That more subtle organism is an organism of time. You have before you everything the etheric organism experienced in time. Nevertheless, you can recognize an organism is before you and learn to understand that the human being exists in that more subtle time organism in just the same way he or she exists in the spatial organism.

If you notice someone is suffering a headache, for example, then perhaps you could say a cure could be achieved by acting on some internal physical organ. You would not need to seek the cure by simply treating the head. We might cure it by treating an organ far from the head. In the spatial organism everything we carry with us is interconnected, and the time organism is the same. The time organism is particularly active in early childhood, but is continually active throughout life in much the following way: Suppose someone has an opportunity at age thirty-five to enter a new situation. If that person meets the situation by doing what is right, then such a person may become aware that at around age twelve important things were learned that now make it possible to move quickly into this new situation.

A certain kind of joy occurs at age thirty-five that arises from the interaction that person had as a child with a teacher. What occurred in that etheric body of eight or ten years old, due to the teacher and the instruction given to the child, acts exactly the same way that our treatment of an organ far from the head acts to cure the headache. Thus, the experiences of a young child affect the thirty-five-year-old person later and create a joyful mood or depression. The entire disposition of an adult depends on what the teacher developed in the etheric body of that adult as a child, in just the same way that one organ of the human spatial body depends upon all the others.

If you think about it, you would say that knowledge of how the etheric body develops, about the relationships of its individual aspects, is certainly the proper basis for educating children. If you think it through fully and conclusively, you must admit that, just as a painter or other artist must learn the techniques of their art, teachers must acquire an understanding of the technique of teaching in an ideal sense. A painter must look, not in the way a layman would, at forms, colors, and their harmonies and disharmonies, and the painter must work out the correct way to handle paints and colored pencils from such observations. A painter’s ability to observe properly forms the basis for what must be learned and will permeate his or her entire being. Likewise, a teacher must learn to use the spiritual observation of human beings, to observe what acts on them and unites the entire course of their lives. Teaching cannot be a science, it must be an art. In art, you must first learn a particular capacity for observing, and second learn how to use what you acquire through continuous observation in your continuous struggles with your medium. It is the same with the spiritual science I refer to here, namely, anthroposophical spiritual science that can provide a foundation for a real and true art of education.

Anthroposophy is also basic in another sense. If education is to be truly effective, it must care properly for what will develop from deep within the essence of a young person. Teachers must be able to accept a child as a divine moral task bestowed on them. As teachers, the things that elevate our moral relationship to teaching and permeate our educational activity with a kind of religious meditation, give us the necessary strength to act alongside the children and work with all the inner characteristics that need development. In other words, all educational activities must themselves be moral acts, and they must arise from moral impulses. We must use these moral impulses within the context of the human understanding and human observation just described.

When we consider these things, we will, of course, see how people’s lives clearly progress in developmental stages—much more so than people ordinarily think. People usually observe only superficially, for instance, that children get a second set of teeth when they are about seven years old. People often see the bodily symptoms accompanying that change, but do not look more closely at the transformations occurring in the child during such a change. People who can properly observe a child, before and after the age of seven, can see that, after seven, forces that were previously hidden develop out of the depths of the human being. If we look at things properly, then we must admit that the change of teeth is not simply a one-time, sudden event in human life. The change of teeth at age seven, although we do not repeat it, is something that occurs throughout the period between the time the child receives his or her first teeth until the change of teeth. During that whole time, forces in the human organism are pushing and shoving, and result in the second set of teeth breaking through. The change of teeth simply concludes the processes active during the child’s first period of life. Children do not change teeth ever again, but what does that mean? That means that until age seven, children develop those forces in their physical body that are needed to grow a second set of teeth, but those children will not change teeth again and now no longer need such forces. The question is, what becomes of those forces?

If we look supersensibly at a human being, we can again recognize those forces in the transformed life of the child’s soul between the change of teeth and puberty. The child’s soul is then different. A different capacity for learning has been added to the soul, and the child has a different orientation toward the surroundings. If we see things spiritually and not just physically, then the situation is different. We can then understand that what we can see in the child’s soul from approximately ages seven to fourteen existed previously in the child’s physical organism. Earlier, it was an activity connected with the process inducing the change of teeth, but at age seven it ceases to be physically active and begins to be active in the soul.

Thus, if you want to understand the forces active in the child’s soul between the change of teeth and puberty, you must look at the physical activities between birth until the change of teeth. The forces now active in the child’s soul then acted on the physical body. The result is that when we observe properly, we can see that, in a more subtle sense, the young child is entirely a sense organ. That is true particularly of a baby, but in a certain way still true right until the change of teeth. In a subtle way, a baby is a kind of groping eye. The way the eye looks at things and recreates what exists outside so the child has an inner picture of the external object, gives the child in earliest life a perception, but not a visual picture.

The baby is in its entirety a sense organ, and perhaps I can illustrate this. Let us think of a baby. As adults, we have our sense of taste in the tongue and gums. However, as spiritual science shows us, the baby has a hint of taste throughout the entire body. The baby is an organ of taste throughout. The baby as a whole is also an organ of smell and, more inwardly, an organ of touch. The entire constitution of the baby is sense-like in its nature, and this sense-like nature radiates throughout the whole body. For that reason, until age seven the child tends to recreate inwardly everything happening in the surroundings and to develop accordingly. If you observe children with your more subtle senses and with spiritual-scientific understanding, you will see that they recreate every gesture made in their surroundings, and they attempt to do what people do in their presence. You will thus see that the child is an imitative being until the change of teeth. The most important capacity of the young child becomes apparent from this imitative behavior. The most important capacity is the development of speech. That depends entirely on the fact that children live into what people in their surroundings do and develop speech through imitation—that is, through inwardly conforming to what occurs in their surroundings. Thus, as teachers, when we work with children during their first stage of life, we need to recognize imitation as the most important aspect of teaching. We can teach a very young child only by creating an environment filled with those activities and processes the child should imitate to gain strength in spirit, soul, and body; those things we implant not only in children’s spirits and souls, but also in their bodies, and the way they strengthen the inner organs remain as the children’s constitution throughout life. How I act around a child of four remains with that person into old age. Thus, my behavior determines, in a way, the child’s fate in later life.

That can be illustrated with an example. Sometimes people come to you when you work in this field and say, for example, that their child was always a good child and never did anything wrong, but the child has now done something terrible. If you ask in detail what occurred, you might hear that the child stole some money from the mother. If you are adept at such things, you might ask how old the child is, and receive the reply, “Five.” Thus, such activity is based primarily on imitation. You will then learn that the child had seen the mother take money from the cupboard every day. The child simply imitated and was not concerned with good or evil. The child only imitated what was seen at home. If we believe we can achieve anything by instructing the child about good and evil, we only delude ourselves. We can educate very young children only when we present them with examples they can imitate, including thoughts. A subtle spiritual connection exists between children and those who raise them. When we are with children, we should be careful to harbor only thoughts and feelings they can imitate in their own thoughts and feelings. In their souls, young children are entirely sense receptors and perceive things so subtle that we as adults could not dream they even occur.

After the change of teeth, forces lying deep within the child become forces of the soul. Earlier, children are devoted entirely to their surroundings; but now they can stand as one soul to another and can, compared to their earlier imitative behavior, accept authority as a matter of course. During earliest childhood until the change of teeth, our real desire is to be totally integrated into our surroundings, which is, in a sense, the physical manifestation of religious feeling. Religious feelings are a spiritual devotion to the spirit; the child devotes the physical body to the physical surroundings. That is the physical counterpart of religion.

After the age of seven, children no longer devote the physical body to their physical surroundings; rather, they devote the soul to other souls. A teacher steps forward to help the child, and the child needs to see the teacher as the source of the knowledge of everything good and evil. At this point children are just as devoted to what the teacher says and develops within the children as they were earlier to the gestures and activities around them. Between seven and fourteen years of age, an urge arises within children to devote themselves to natural authority. Children thus want to become what that authority is. The love of that natural authority and a desire to please now become the main principle, just as imitation was earlier.

You would hardly believe that someone like myself, who in the early 1890s wrote The Philosophy of Freedom, would support an unjustified principle of authority. What I mean is something like natural law. From approximately ages seven to fourteen, children view their teacher in such a way that they have no intellectual comprehension of “this is good or true or evil or false or ugly,” but rather, “this is good because the teacher says it is good,” or “this is beautiful because the teacher says it is beautiful.” We must bring all the secrets of the world to the child through the indirect path of the beloved teacher. That is the principle of human development from around the age of seven until fourteen.

We can therefore say that a religious-like devotion toward the physical surroundings fills a child during the first years of life. From the change of teeth until puberty, an esthetic comprehension of the surroundings fills the child, a comprehension permeated with love. Children expect pleasure with everything the teacher presents to them and displeasure from whatever the teacher withholds. Everything that acts educationally during this period should enter the child’s inner perspective. We may conclude that, whereas during the first stage of life the teacher should be an example, during the second period the teacher should be an authority in the most noble sense—a natural authority due to qualities of character. As teachers, we will then have within us what children need, in a sense, to properly educate themselves. The most important aspect of self-education is moral education. I will speak more of that when the first part of my lecture has been translated.

(At this point, Rudolf Steiner paused so that George Adams could deliver the first part of this lecture in English.)

When we say children are entirely sense organs before the age of seven, we must understand that, after the change of teeth, that is, after the age of seven, children’s sense-perceptive capacities have moved more toward the surface of the body and moved away from their inner nature. Children’s sense impressions, however, still cannot effectively enter the sense organs in an organized and regulated way. We see that from the change of teeth until puberty, therefore, the child’s nature is such that the child harbors in the soul a devotion to sense perceptions, but the child’s inner will is incapable of affecting them.

Human intellect creates an inner participation in sense perception, but we are intellectual beings only after puberty. Our relationship to the world is appropriate for judging it intellectually only after puberty. To reason intellectually means to reason from personal inner freedom, but we can do this only after puberty. Thus, from the change of teeth until puberty we should not educate children in an intellectual way, and we should not moralize intellectually. During the first seven years of life, children need what they can imitate in their sense-perceptible reality. After that, children want to hear from their educational authority what they can and cannot do, what they should consider to be true or untrue, just or unjust and so forth.

Something important begins to stir in the child around the age of nine or ten. Teachers who can truly observe children know that, at about the age of nine or ten, children have a particularly strong need. Then, although children do not have intellectualized doubts, they do have a kind of inner unrest; a kind of inner question, a childlike question concerning fate they cannot express and, indeed, do not yet need to express. Children feel this in a kind of half sleep, in an unconscious way. You need only look with the proper eye to see how children develop during this period. I think you know exactly what I am referring to here—namely, that children want something special from the teacher whom they look up to with love. Ordinarily, you cannot answer that desire the way you would answer an intellectually posed question. It is important during this time that you develop an intense and intimate, trusting relationship so that what arises in the children is a feeling that you as teacher particularly care for and love them.

The answer to children’s most important life question lies in their perception of love and their trust in the teacher. What is the actual content of that question? As I said, children do not ask through reasoning, but through feeling, subconsciously. We can formulate things children cannot, and we can say, therefore, that children at that stage are still naïve and accept the authority of the beloved teacher without question. However, now a certain need awakens in the child. The child needs to feel what is good and what is evil differently, as though they exist in the world as forces.

Until this time, children looked up to the teacher, in a sense, but now they want to see the world through the teacher’s eyes. Children not only want to know that the teacher is a human being who says something is good or bad, they also want to feel that the teacher speaks as a messenger of the Spirit, a messenger of God, and knows something from the higher worlds. As I said, children do not say it through reasoning, but they feel it. The particular question arising in the child’s feeling will tell you that a certain thing is appropriate for that child. It will be apparent that your statement that something is good or bad has very deep roots, and, thus, the child will gain renewed trust.

That is also the point in moral education where we can begin to move away from simple imitative behavior or saying something is good or bad. At about the age of nine or ten, we can begin to show morality pictorially, because children are still sense oriented and without reasoning. We should educate children pictorially—that is, through pictures, pictures for all the senses—during the entire period of elementary school, between the change of teeth and puberty. Even though children at that age may not be completely sense oriented, they still live in their senses, which are now more recognizable at the surface of the body.

Tomorrow evening I will discuss how to teach children from the age of six or seven through the time when they learn to read or write. Right now I want to consider only the moral side of education.

When children have reached age nine or ten, we may begin to present pictures that primarily stimulate the imagination. We may present pictures of good people, pictures that awaken a feeling of sympathy for what people do. Please take note that I did not say we should lecture children about moral commandments. I did not say we should approach children’s intellect with moral reasoning. We should approach children through esthetics and imagination. We should awaken a pleasure or displeasure of good and bad things, of just or unjust things, of high ideals, of moral action, and of things that occur in the world to balance incorrect action. Whereas previously we needed to place ourselves before the children as a kind of moral regulator, we now need to provide them with pictures that do no more than affect the imagination living within their sense nature. Before puberty, children should receive morality as a feeling. They should receive a firm feeling that, “Something is good, and I can be sympathetic toward it,” or “I should feel antipathy toward something bad.” Sympathies and antipathies, that is, judgments within feelings, should be the basis of what is moral.

If you recognize, in the way I have presented it, that everything in the human time organism is interconnected, then you will also recognize that it is important for the child that you do the right things at the right time. You cannot get a plant to grow in a way that it immediately flowers; blooming occurs later. First, you must tend the roots. Should you want to make the roots bloom, you would be attempting something ridiculous. Similarly, it would be just as ridiculous to want to present intellectually formulated moral judgments to the child between the change of teeth and puberty. You must first tend the seed and the root—that is, a feeling for morality. When children have a feeling for morality, their intelligence will awaken after puberty. What they have gained in feeling during that period will then continue into an inner development afterward. Moral and intellectual reasoning will awaken on their own. It is important that we base all moral education on that.

You cannot make a plant’s root blossom; you must wait until the root develops into the plant and then the plant blossoms. In the same way, you must, in a sense, tend the moral root in the feeling and develop sympathy for what is moral. You must then allow children to carry that feeling into their intellect through their own forces as human beings. Later in life they will have the deep inner satisfaction of knowing that something more lives within them than just memories of what their teacher said was right or wrong. Instead, an inner joy will fill their entire soul life from the knowledge that moral judgment awoke within them at the proper time. That we do not slavishly educate children in a particular moral direction, rather, we prepare them so that their own free developing souls can grow and blossom in a moral direction, strengthens people not only with a capacity for moral judgment, but also gives them a moral strength. When we want a spiritual foundation for education, this fact reminds us again and again that we must bring everything to developing children in the proper way and at the proper time.

Now you might ask: If one should not provide commandments that appeal to the intellect, what should you appeal to when you want to implant a feeling for moral reasoning in the school-age child? Well, authority in its own right certainly does lead to intangible things in the relationship between the teacher and the child! I would like to illustrate this through an example. I can teach children pictorially—that is, non-intellectually—about the immortality of the human soul. Until the time of puberty, the intellect is actually absent in the child. I must interweave nature and spirit, and thus what I tell the children is fashioned into an artistic picture: “Look at this butterfly’s cocoon. The butterfly crawls out of the cocoon. In just the same way, the soul comes out of the human body when the body dies.” In this way, I can stimulate the children’s imagination and bring a living, moral picture to their souls. I can do that in two ways. I could say to myself: I am a mature teacher and tremendously wise. The children are small and extremely ignorant, and since they have not yet elevated themselves to my stature, I need to create a picture for them. I create a picture for them, even though I know it has little value for myself. If I were to say that to myself, and bring a picture to the children with that attitude, it would not act on their souls. It would just pass quickly through their souls, since intangible relationships exist between the teacher and child. However, I could say to myself: I am really not much wiser than the children, or they are, at least subconsciously, even wiser than I—that is, I could respect the children. Then I could say to myself: I did not create that picture myself; nature gave us the picture of the butterfly creeping from its cocoon. And then, I believe in that picture just as intensely as I want the children to believe. If I have the strength of my own beliefs within me, then the picture remains fixed in the children’s souls, and the things that will live do not lie in the coarseness of the world, but in the subtleties that exist between the teacher and child.

The incomprehensible things that play between teacher and child richly replace everything we could transfer through an intellectual approach. In this manner, children gain an opportunity to freely develop themselves alongside the teacher. The teacher can say: I live in the children’s surroundings and must, therefore, create those opportunities through which they can develop themselves to the greatest possible extent. To do this I must stand next to the children without feeling superior, and recognize that I am only a human being who is a few years older.

In a relative sense we are not always wiser, and we therefore do not always need to feel superior to children. We should be helpers for their development. If you tend plants as a gardener, you certainly do not make the sap move from the root to the flower. Rather, you prepare the plant’s environment so that the flow of sap can develop. As teachers we must be just as selfless so that the child’s inner forces can unfold. Then we will be good teachers, and the children can flourish in the proper way.

(Rudolf Steiner paused again to allow the second part of the lecture to be translated for the audience.)

When we develop morality in the human being in that way, it then develops just as one thing develops from another in the plant. At first, humanly appropriate moral development arises from the imitative desires within the human organism. As I already described, morality gains a certain firmness so that people have the necessary inner strength later in life, a strength anchored in the physical organism, for moral certainty. Otherwise, people may be physically weak and unable to follow their moral impulses, however good they may be. If the moral example acts strongly and intensely on the child during the first period of childhood, then a moral fortitude develops. If children, from the change of teeth until puberty, can properly take hold of the forces of sympathy and antipathy for good and against evil, then later they will have the proper moral stance regarding the uncertainties that might keep them from doing what is morally necessary. Through imitation, children will develop within their organism what their souls need, so that their moral feelings and perceptions, their sympathies and antipathies, can properly develop during the second period of childhood. The capacity for intellectual moral judgment awakens in the third period of the child’s development, which is oriented toward the spirit. This occurs as surely as the plant in the light of the Sun blossoms and fruits. Morality can only take firm root in the spirit if the body and soul have been properly prepared. It can then freely awaken to life, just as the blossom and fruit freely awaken in the plant in the light of the Sun.

When we develop morality in human beings while respecting their inner freedom, then the moral impulse connects with their inner being so that they can truly feel it is something that belongs to them. They feel the same way toward their moral strength and moral actions as they do toward the forces of growth within their body, toward the circulation of their own blood. People will feel about the morality developed within themselves in the proper manner as they feel about the natural forces of life throughout their bodies, that they pulse and strengthen them right up to the surface of the skin.

What happens then? People realize that if they are immoral, they are deformed. They feel disfigured in the same way they would feel if they were physically missing a limb. Through the moral development I have described, people learn. They come to say to themselves that if they are not filled with morality, and if their actions are not permeated with morality, then they are deformed human beings.

The strongest moral motive we can possibly develop within human beings is the feeling that they are disfigured if they are immoral. People only need proper development and then they will be whole. If you help develop people so that they want to be whole human beings, they will of themselves develop an inner tendency toward the spiritual due to this approach to morality. They will then see the good that flows through the world and that it acts within them just as effectively as the forces of nature act within their bodies. To put it pictorially, they will then understand that if they see a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron, someone might then come along and say we could use that horseshoe as a magnet because it has its own inner forces. But, another might say that it is only iron and is unimportant, and would use it to shoe a horse. Someone who sees things in the latter way could not, due to the way their life developed, see that spiritual life exists within the human being. Someone who only sees the superficial, and not how the spirit acts and interacts within the human being, is the kind of person who would shoe a horse with a horseshoe-shaped piece of magnetic iron. In such a case, the person has not been educated to see life properly and to develop the proper strengths. When comprehended spiritually, a proper education, felt and brought to the will, is the strongest motive for social activity.

Today, we are standing under the star of the social problem. This problem exists for a reason, and I would be happy to say more about it, but my time is now coming to an end. However, I would like to mention that the social problems of today have many aspects, and much is needed to approach these questions in all detail. Modern people who look at things objectively want much for the future of humanity and for reforming social life. However, everything we can think of and create in practice for our institutions, everything we can think of in the way of schemes or about the nature of modern social life, demonstrates to those who see morality in the light of spirituality that dealing with today’s social problems without including the question of morality is like hunting for something in a dark room.

We can bring the social question into proper perspective only through a genuine comprehension of morality. Anyone who looks at life with an eye toward the comprehensive connections found there would say that morality is the light that must enlighten social life if we are to see the social questions in a truly human way. Modern people, therefore, need to gain an understanding of the moral question connected with the social question. I believe that it is perhaps possible to show that what I have called spiritual science, or anthroposophy, wants to tackle the great questions of our times, and that it has earnest intentions regarding the questions of morality and developing morality within human beings.

(George Adams completed his English translation of the lecture.)

Rudolf Steiner on “ideal magic,” from lecture of November 17, 1922 (see footnote, page 1):

Along with exact clairvoyance, you must also achieve something I refer to as ideal magic. This is a kind of magic that must be differentiated from the false magic practiced externally, and associated with many charlatans. You must certainly differentiate that from what I mean by ideal magic.

What I mean by ideal magic is the following: when someone looks back over life with ordinary consciousness, one will see how, from year to year and from decade to decade, one has changed in a certain sense. Such a person would see that habits have changed, however slowly. One gains certain capacities while others disappear. If one looks honestly at the capacities that exist during earthly life, one would have to say that, over time, one becomes someone else. Life causes that to happen. We are completely devoted to life and life educates us, trains us and forms the soul.

If, however, people want to enter the spiritual world—in other words, want to attain ideal magic—they must not only intensify inner thinking so that they recognize a second level of existence, as I previously described, but they must also free their will from its connection to the physical body. Ordinarily, we can activate the will only by using the physical body—the legs, arms, or the organs of speech. The physical body is the basis for our will. However, we can do the following: as spiritual researchers we must carry out exercises of the will in a very systematic way to achieve ideal magic along with exact clairvoyance. Such a person must, for example, develop the will so strongly that, at a particular point in life, one recognizes that a specific habit must be broken and replaced with another in the soul.

You will need many years, but if you energetically use your will to transform certain experiences in the way I described, it is nevertheless possible. Thus, you can, as it were, go beyond allowing only the physical body to be your teacher and replace that kind of development with self-discipline.

Through energetic exercise of the will, such as I have described in my books, you will become an initiate in a modern sense, and no longer merely re-experience in sleep what you experience during the day. You will achieve a state that is not sleep, but that can be experienced in complete consciousness. This state provides you with the opportunity to be active while you sleep—that is, the opportunity while you are outside your body to not merely remain passive in the spiritual world, as is normally the case. Rather, you can act in the spirit world; you can be active in the spiritual world. During sleep, people are ordinarily unable to move forward, to progress. However, those who are modern initiates, in the sense I have described, have the capacity to be active as a human being in the life that exists between falling asleep and waking up. If you bring your will into the state in which you live outside your body, then you can develop your consciousness in a much different way. You will be able to develop consciousness in a way that you can see what people experience in the period directly following death. Through this other kind of consciousness, you can experience what occurs during the period after earthly life, just as you will be able to see what occurs in pre-earthly life. You can see how you pass through a life of existence in the spiritual world just as you go through life in the physical world during earthly existence. You recognize yourself as a pure spirit in the spiritual world just as you can recognize yourself as a physical body within the physical world. Thus, you have the opportunity to create a judgment about how long life lasts during what I would refer to as the time of moral evaluation.

Ladies and Gentlemen! From the time of Ancient Greece, a familiar and much discussed phrase has come to us like a warning cry to the depths of the human soul: “Human Being, know yourself!” These words, though rarely heeded as such, call us with power. They can be interpreted as asking us to become aware, not only of our true being in the most important activities of soul and spirit, but also of our significance as human beings in the world order.

Ordinarily, when such a call sounds forth from a culturally significant center at a particular time in history, it does not indicate something easily attainable, but rather to the lack of ability; it points toward something not easily fulfilled.

If we look back at earlier historical epochs, not superficially or theoretically but with a real feeling for history, we shall experience how such a call indicates a decrease rather than an increase in the power of human self-knowledge. In previous times of human evolution, religious experience, artistic sense, and the inner comprehension of ideals still worked together in harmony. One can feel how, at that time when religion, art, and science still formed a unity, human beings felt themselves, naturally, to be likenesses or images of the divine spirit, living within and permeating the world. They felt themselves to be God-sent entities on Earth. During those ancient days, it was self-evident that seeking knowledge of the human being was also part of seeking knowledge of the gods—divine knowledge—the spiritual foundations, experienced and thought of as the ground of the world, and felt to be working also in the human being.

In remote times, when human beings spoke the word that would represent the word I in our current language, it expressed for them both the essence of fundamental world forces and their inherent world-being. The word thus indicated that the human self resonated with something much greater than the individual self, something pointing at the creative working in the universe. During the course of evolution, it became more and more difficult to reach what had been accepted naturally at one time, just as perceptible as color is today to our eyes. If these earlier people had heard the call for self-knowledge (which could hardly have come from an earthly being), if they had perceived the call “Know yourself!” as coming from a supersensible being, they may well have answered, “Why is it necessary to make such an effort for self-knowledge?” For human beings saw and felt themselves as reflections of the divine spirit that shines, sounds, warms, and blesses throughout the world. They felt that if one knows what the wind carries through the trees, what the lightning sends through the air, what rolls in the thunder, what constantly changes in the cloud formations, what lives in a blade of grass, what blossoms in the flower, then one also knows the human self.

A time came when such knowledge of the world, which was simultaneously knowledge of the divine spirit, was no longer possible, due to humanity’s increasing spiritual independence; the phrase “Know yourself!” began to be heard in the depths of human consciousness. It indicated something that had been a natural gift until that point, but was now becoming an exertion.

There is an important epoch of human evolution between the earlier admonition “Know yourself!” and another phrase coined much later, in our own times, in the last third of the nineteenth century. The later saying, voiced by the eminent natural scientist Du Bois-Reymond, rang out like a negative answer to the Apollonian call “Know yourself!” with the word Ignorabimus—“we are fated to ignorance.” Ignorabimus expressed Du Bois-Reymond’s opinion that modern knowledge of nature, despite its immense progress, was fated to be arrested at the frontier of natural science. A significant stretch of human soul development exists between these two historically momentous utterances. In the meantime, enough inner human strength survived as a residue of ancient times that, what previously had been a matter of course—that is, to look for the essence of the human being in the outer appearance of divine existence—now meant that, in due time, by strength of inner effort, the human being would gradually attain self-knowledge again. But this force of self-knowledge became increasingly weaker. By the last third of the nineteenth century, it had become so weak that, after the sun of self-knowledge had set, the negative counterpart of the Apollonian positive was heard: “Human being, you will never know yourself.”

For contemporary natural history, attuned to the needs of our time, to confess it impossible to fathom the secrets of consciousness working in matter, amounts to admitting that knowledge of the human being is completely unattainable. At this point something else must be mentioned: When the call “Human Being, know yourself!” was heard, self-knowledge, which in earlier times had also been knowledge of God, was already passing through its twilight stages; and in just that way the renunciation of self-knowledge was in its twilight stages by the time we were told, “Resign yourself! There is no self-knowledge, no knowledge of the human being.”

Again the words indicate not so much what is said directly, as to its opposite, which is what present-day humanity is experiencing. Precisely because the power of self-knowledge has increasingly weakened, the urge for the knowledge of the human being has made itself felt, an urge that comes, not from the intellect, nor from any theoretical ideas, but from the realm of the heart, from the deepest recesses of the soul. It was felt generally that the methods of natural science could not discover humankind’s true nature, despite the brilliant successes of natural-scientific research that had benefited humanity to such a degree. At the same time there was a strong feeling that, somehow, paths must exist.

The birth of this new search for knowledge of the human being, as expressed by natural scientists, included, side by side with other fundamental branches of life, the pedagogical movement, the movement to evolve a proper relationship between the human being and the growing human being—between the adult and the child who needs to be educated and taught. This movement prompted the call most strongly for a renewal of knowledge of the human being, even if outwardly expressed in opposite terms—namely, that such knowledge was beyond human reach. At the very time that these sentiments were being expressed, there was a growing conviction among those who really cared for the education of the young, that intellectualism, knowledge based only on external sense observation and its consequent interpretation, was unsuitable to provide human beings with what they need to teach and educate young people, the growing young men and women. One therefore heard increasingly the call for changing priorities between the training of rational thinking, which has made such precious contributions to the modern world, and the education of the children’s feeling life and of the forces of human will. Children were not to be turned into “know-it-alls,” but overall capacities for practical life were to be nurtured and encouraged.

There is one strange omission in this general demand for a renewal of education, however: the necessity to base educational demands on a clear insight into the evolving human being, into the child, rather than to depend on the teachers’ vague subconscious instincts. The opinion is that, while nature can be known, it is impossible to penetrate human nature in depth and in full consciousness in a way that would help educators. Indeed, one particular trend of modern pedagogy renounces any attempt to develop a conscious, thoughtful understanding of the human being, depending instead on the teachers’ supposed educational instincts. Any unbiased judge of the current situation has to acknowledge the existence (among a wide range of very praiseworthy pedagogical movements) of a strong tendency to build educational aims on elementary and instinctual human nature. One depends on vague, instinctive impulses because of a conviction that it is impossible to gain conscious knowledge of the depths of the human being.

Only when one can see through such an attitude in the contemporary spiritual and cultural life with the human interest it deserves, can one appreciate the aims of the science of the spirit as it applies to the development of pedagogical sense and competence. This science of the spirit does not draw its substance from ancient forms of human knowledge; nevertheless, it offers new possibilities in the praiseworthy natural-scientific urge to penetrate into the depths of human nature, especially in the field of education. Knowledge of the human being can only be attained in full consciousness, for we have definitely passed the stage when human beings lived by instinct. We cannot, of course, jettison instinct or elemental-primeval forces altogether, yet we need to work toward a fully conscious penetration into all the beings that come to meet us in human life.

It may feel nice to hear that we should not depend too much on intellect and reason, and thus we should trust again in the mysterious working of instinctive impulses. But this nice feeling is inappropriate for the current time, because, due to our being human and thus caught in human evolution, we have lost the old certainty of instinctual experience. We need to conquer a new certainty that will be no less primeval and no less elementary than earlier forms of experience, one capable of allowing us to plunge into the sphere of consciousness.

The very people who rush enthusiastically toward knowledge using the approach and methods that are used quite justifiably today to explore nature, will also come to realize that this particular way of using the senses, this way of using instruments in the service of experimental research cannot lead to knowledge of the human being; nor will we find it in a certain way of making rational judgments about sensory knowledge, a particular way of investigating nature. The natural scientists themselves will have to concede that a knowledge of the human being must exist that flows from completely different sources than the ones we tap these days in an attempt to invade the being of external reality.

In my books How to Know Higher Worlds and An Outline of Occult Science, I have described the forces that the human being must extract from the depths of the self. I have shown that it is possible to awaken forces in the human soul so that one can recognize something purely spiritual behind outer appearances, and that, by allowing dormant forces to reveal themselves, one can recognize spirit working in, and permeating, all matter.

Two things must be understood fully about spiritual science: First, it is impossible to fathom the secrets of human nature by knowledge gained exclusively from natural science; second, it is possible to penetrate the spiritual world in the same fully conscious state that so-called empirical research uses in the sense world, and with the same clarity. However, I must quickly add that the importance of what has just been said can be appreciated and confirmed only through personal, practical experience in matters of spiritual knowledge.

People who try—and this has been done again and again—to apply the methods of experimental laboratory research to the investigation of the human being will not succeed, for the essence of human nature must be experienced in one’s own self to be experienced at all in a living way. It is well known that, in the absence of self-knowledge, one remains always at the periphery of the human being, and I would like to make the following paradoxical statement: If a researcher were to apply the natural-scientific research method to the study of the human being, and then to verify the findings, applied them to his or her own being, believing this to really be what true humanity is about, the following would happen. Precisely when such a person felt most enthusiastic, the following realization would jump up in front of the soul: When I experience myself through the natural-scientific method, applying all my senses and all my powers of knowledge, I still feel the way one would feel looking at one’s own skeleton. The experience of such natural- scientific investigation would in fact be devastating. Human beings would “skeletize” themselves. To experience this feeling is to touch on the impulse that gave rise to spiritual science. We must bring the essence of the human being out in ways other than through bringing forth lifeless nature.

What kind of human knowledge will lead to this goal? It certainly cannot be the kind that makes us feel as if in our soul and spirit we were mere skeletons; there must be a way of evoking different images. Let us look at our blood circulation and our breathing. Although we are not generally aware of them in any great detail, they form an essential part of our life. The way we normally experience our blood circulation and our breathing when in good health represents a wholeness, even without our being able to put this perception into so many words. We experience it simply as part of our feeling healthy. Something similar must surely exist with regard to our knowledge of the human being. It must be possible to form ideas and perceptions of the human being that can be worked through inwardly, so that one experiences them as a natural part of the human entity, comparable with experiencing one’s breathing and blood circulation as a natural part of health. But then the question arises: What will lead us to an understanding of the child’s nature, with which we, as educators and teachers, must work?

How do we learn to know external sensory nature? Through our senses. Through our eye we gain knowledge of the multiple world of light and color. In order to make any of the world phenomenon part of our soul content, we must have the appropriate sense experiences, and we need the relevant sense organs for what is to become part of our soul content. If we study the wonderful construction of the human eye and the way it is linked to the brain, we will experience deeply what Goethe felt when he repeated the verse of an ancient mystic:

Were not the eye alike the Sun,
How could we ever see the light?
Lived not in us God’s own great power,
How could the Divine ever bring delight?

This Sun-like element of the eye, working selflessly within the inner human being, enables us to receive the external light.

We must look at the sense organs themselves if we want to understand the human connection with the external world, or if we wish to make any soul experience our own. Now let us look at the specific organ that can lead us to a true knowledge of the human being. Which sense organ would lead us to such a knowledge? We get to know external nature through our eyes, our ears and the other senses. For knowledge of the spiritual world, it is the spiritually enlightened being, which can be attained by following the paths described in How to Know Higher Worlds. In that book I describe two polarities in human striving for knowledge: On the one side is the knowledge resulting from what the physical senses give us; on the other side is the knowledge of the spirit, which pervades and weaves through both outer nature and the inner realm of the human being. This spiritual knowledge can be gained whenever human beings make themselves into spiritual sense organs by somehow transmuting all the forces of their human nature.

The field of knowledge of the human being lies precisely between these two poles. If we restrict ourselves to knowing external nature as transmitted to us through the senses, we cannot reach the essence of the human being for the reasons already stated. If we are cognizant of the spiritual aspects only, we have to transport ourselves to such heights of soul and spirit that the immediacy of the human being standing before us in the world vanishes. (You can read about this aspect in Occult Science and in my other writings dealing with the spiritual science I am speaking of here.) We need something that gives us even more intimate access to the human being than the subtle sense allowing us to see human beings as a part of the spirit nature that permeates the whole world. Just as I need the eye to perceive color, so a particular sense is needed for unmediated perception of the human being. What could such a sense be like at the present stage of human evolution? How can we penetrate the nature of human beings as they exist in the world, in the same way that we can penetrate the multiplicity of colors through the wonderful organization of the eye or the multiplicity of sounds through that of the ear? Where do we find this sense for the perception of the human essence?

It is none other than the sense granted us for the appreciation of art; the artistic sense can transmit to us spirit shining in matter, and revealed as the beauty we appreciate in art. At the present stage of evolution, this artistic sense allows us to apprehend the essence of what is truly human so that it can enter practical spheres of life. I know very well how paradoxical such a statement must sound to the ears of our contemporaries. But if I have the courage to think, to their very end, the concepts and ideas by which we comprehend external nature, and if having felt my way into them with all my humanity, I can say to myself that my ideas, my concepts have really brought me very close to nature, then I will feel that something at that very boundary is pulling me free of the limitations of these concepts and ideas, allowing me to soar up toward an artistic formulation of them.

This was why in 1894 I wrote the following words in the introduction to The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: “To fully understand the human being, an artistic appreciation of ideas is needed, not merely an abstract comprehension of ideas.”3A real enlivening is required to make the leap that transforms the abstraction of concepts we use to understand nature into artistic display. This is possible. It requires that knowledge be allowed to flow into art, which leads to the development of the artistic sense. As long as we remain within the boundaries of natural science, we have to acknowledge that we will never understand how consciousness is connected with matter; but the moment we allow anything to flow naturally from the realm of ideas into an artistic view, the scales fall from our eyes. Everything in the realm of idea and concept is transformed into an artistic seeing, and what we see in this way spreads over the essence of humanity, just as the colors conceived by the eye spread their hues over the outer appearance of plants or other natural phenomena. Just as the physical organ of the eye, in the process of conceiving color, merges with the essence of color phenomena in nature, so the artistic sense grows inwardly in conjunction with the nature of the human being as a whole. We need to have seen colors with our eyes before we can think them. Likewise, only after we have had a vision of the nature of the human being through this artistic sense, can our abstract concepts and ideas fully encompass it.

If science thus becomes an art, then all our knowledge of the human being, and all our deliberations about first forming an artistic picture of the human being, will not turn to a bag of bones in the soul; instead, we will be at one with our own concepts and artistic ideas about the human being, and they will flow into and through the soul just as blood and breath circulate through the body. Something will reside in us that is as full of life as our sensations are when our breathing and blood circulation function normally and give us a sense of health and well being.

A sense of wholeness then embraces the entire nature of the human being, similar to a general feeling of health with regard to our physical organization; this sense will include something that is possible only when the artistic sense has attained the intimate contemplation of the human being living here in the present, not the elevated human being of insufficiently grounded spiritual speculation.

If we consider what such knowledge will eventually yield—knowledge that, like our breathing and blood circulation, continuously and in each of its aspects becomes will and activity—we will find that this extended metaphor helps us even further; for it is more than a mere comparison, and it has not been picked out in the abstract, but grows out of reality itself. What is it that causes our feeling of health, emanating from our entire constitution? What happens in such a general feeling of health, which, by the way, can be a very subtle feeling? It is the recognition that I, the human being, am so organized that I can look at myself as a healthy person standing in the world. What does it mean to be a healthy human being?

The crown of human life, the power of love is expressed in the healthy human being. Ultimately health and all healthy soul forces stream together into a feeling permeated with love, enabling me to acknowledge the person next to me, because I acknowledge the healthy human being in myself. Thus, out of this knowledge of the healthy human being sprouts love for our neighbor, whom we recognize as being like us. Our own self is found in another human being. Such knowledge of human nature does not become the theoretical instruction given to a technician who then applies it mechanically; rather, it becomes a direct inner experience leading immediately into practical life. For in its transformation it flows into the power of love and becomes an active form of human knowledge. If as teacher and educator, I meet a child through my knowledge of what a human being is, then an understanding of the child will blossom within my unfolding soul and spiritual love. I no longer need instructions based on the example of natural science and on theories about child development. All I need is to experience the knowledge of the human being, in the same way that I experience healthy breathing and healthy blood circulation as bases of my general health. Then the proper form of knowledge, correctly stimulated and enlivened, will become a pedagogical art.

What must this knowledge of the human being become? The answer will be found in what has been already said. We must be able to allow this knowledge of the human being to fly out on the wings of love over all our surroundings, and especially upon the children. Our knowledge of the human being must be transformed into an inner attitude where it is alive in the form of love. This is the most important basis for teaching today. Education must be seen as a matter of one’s own inner attitude, not as a matter of thinking up various schemes, such as how to avoid training the child’s intellect exclusively. We could constantly reiterate this tenet, of course, and then go about it in a thoroughly intellectual way, taking it for granted, for example, that teachers should use their intellects to think up ways to protect their pupils from intellectualism! It goes without saying that our work must begin with the teachers. We must encourage them not to fall back entirely on the intellect, which, by itself, never has an artistic nature. Starting with the teachers, we will create the proper conditions for the theory and practice of education, based on our knowledge of the human being and given in a form suitable for nurturing the child. This will establish the necessary contact between teacher and child, and it will turn our knowledge of the human being, through the working of love, into right education and training.

Natural science alone cannot understand how consciousness works in the physical organization. Why is this? Because it cannot comprehend how the artistic experience occurs and how it is formed. Knowledge of the human being makes us realize that consciousness is an artist whose material is the material substance of the human being. As long as knowledge of the human being is not sought with an artistic sense, the state of ignorabimus will hold sway. We must first begin to realize that human consciousness is an artist working creatively with matter itself; if we want to comprehend the true nature of the human being, we must acknowledge the artistic creator in each individual. Only then will we get beyond the stage of ignorabimus. At the same time, knowledge of the human being cannot be theoretical, but must able to enter the sphere of will. It will directly enter the practical sphere of life and feel at home there.

If the evolving child is viewed from this perspective, with insight stemming from an artistic sense and carried on wings of love, we will see and understand very much. I should like to describe just one example: Let us look at the extraordinary phase when the child undergoes the transition from playing to working. All children play. They do so naturally. Adults, on the other hand, have to work to live. They find themselves in a situation that demands it. If we look at social life today, we could characterize the difference between the child at play and the adult at work in the following way: Compared to the activities of the adult, which are dictated by necessity, the child’s play is connected with an inner force of liberation, endowing the playing child with a feeling of well-being and happiness. You need only observe children at play. It is inconceivable that they are not in full inner accord with what they are doing. Why not? Because playing is a liberating experience to children, making them eager to release this activity from the organism. Freeing, joyful, and eager to be released—this is the character of the child’s play.

What about the adult’s work? Why does it often, if not usually, become an oppressive burden? (And this will be even more so in the future.) We could say that the child grows from an experience of liberation while playing into the experience of the oppressive burden of work, dictated to the adult by social conditions. Doesn’t this great contrast beg us to ask: How can we build a bridge from the child’s liberating play activity to the burdensome experience in the sphere of the adult workday?

If we follow the child’s development with the artistic understanding I spoke of just now, we will find such a bridge in the role art plays at school. If applied properly as an educational tool, art will lead from the child’s liberating play activity to the stage of adult work. With the help of art, this work no longer needs be an oppressive burden. Unless we can divest work of its oppressive character, we can never solve the social question. Unless the polarity between the young child’s playing and the adult’s burdensome daily work is balanced by the right education, the problem of labor will reappear again and again in different guises.

What does it mean to introduce the artistic element into education? One could easily form misconceptions about artistic activities, especially at school. Everyone agrees that it is essential to train the child’s intellect. This notion has become so deeply ingrained in modern consciousness that indifference toward training the intellect is very unlikely to spread. Everyone can see also that, without moral education, one cannot do justice to human dignity, and the human being cannot be considered fully developed. In general, there is still a certain feeling that an immoral person is not fully human, but is disabled, at least in regard to the human soul and spirit. And so, on the one hand people assume that the intellect must be trained, and, on the other, that genuine human dignity must also be cultivated at school, including the concepts of a sacred sense of duty and human virtues. But the same attention is not given to what the human being can be presented with in full freedom and love—that is, the artistic element.

The high esteem for what is human and an extraordinary love for the human being are needed during one’s evolving childhood days; this was the case for Schiller, whose (alas!) insufficiently known Letters on the Esthetic Education of the Human Being was based on those qualities. We find in them a genuine appreciation of the artistic element in education, rooted in German culture. We can begin with these letters, and spiritual science will deepen our understanding. Look, for example, at child’s play and how it flows forth simply because it is in a child’s nature to be active. See how children liberate from their organization something that takes the form of play; their humanity consists of something that takes the form of play. Observe how necessity forces us to perform work that does not flow directly from the wholeness of our human nature; it can never express all of our nature. This is how we can begin to understand human development from childhood to adulthood.

There is one thing, however, that we should never lose sight of; usually, when observing children at play, people do so from the perspective of an adult. If this were not so, one would not hear again and again the trifling exhortation that “children should learn through play.” The worst thing you could do is teach children that work is mere play, because when they grow up, they then will look at life as if it were only a game. Anyone who holds such a view must have observed children at play only with an adult’s eyes, believing that children bring the same attitude to play as adults do. Play is fun for an adult, an enjoyment, a pleasure, the spice of life. But for children, play is the very stuff of life. Children are absolutely earnest about play, and the very seriousness of their play is a salient feature of this activity. Only by realizing the earnest nature of child’s play can we understand this activity properly. And by watching how, in play, human nature pours itself in complete seriousness into the treatment of external objects, we can direct the child’s inborn energy, capacity and gift for play into artistic channels. These still permit a freedom of inner activity while at the same time forcing children to struggle with outer materials, as we have to do in adult work. Then we can see how precisely this artistic activity makes it possible to conduct education so that the joy of engaging in artistic activities can be combined with the seriousness of play, contributing in this way to the child’s character.

Particularly after the child enters school, until the ninth or tenth year, one may be in a position to use the artistic element, and this must be more than dallying in fairy tales; rather, whatever subject is being taught, the child’s inherent impulse to play, which is such an intrinsic part of its makeup, can be guided into artistic activities. And when children enter the first or second grade, they are perfectly able to make this transition. However clumsy children of six or seven may be when modeling, painting, or finding their way into music and poetry, if teachers know how to permeate their lessons with artistry, even small children, as miniature sculptors or painters, can begin to have the experience that human nature does not end at the fingertips, that is, at the periphery of the skin, but flows out into the world. The adult human being is growing in children whenever they put their being into handling clay, wood, or paints. In these very interactions with the materials, children grow, learning to perceive how closely the human being is interwoven with the fabric of the world. And when working with musical sounds and colors, or handling wood, children grow outward into the world. If children are introduced to these artistic activities properly—however clumsy their first efforts may appear—they will greatly benefit from what is received in this way from the world. When music and poetry are brought to children, they experience the musical and poetical element in their own being. Then it is as if a heavenly gift had been bestowed on young students, enabling them to experience a second being within. Through sounds of music and poetry, it is as if a grace-filled being were sinking down into us through sounds of music and poetry, making us aware even in childhood, that in each of us something lives, which has come from spiritual heights to take hold of our narrow human nature.

If one lives this way with children, with the eye and mind of an artist and teaching them with a sensitive and artistic touch, their responses will reveal qualities that the teacher must endeavor to cultivate, however clumsy the children’s first efforts may be when working with color, sound, or other artistic media. One learns to know children intimately, both their gifts and limitations; watching the artistic element of the sculpture as it flows from little hands, living in empathy with the child, one learns to recognize the strength with which the child directs every bit of attention and forces toward the spirit worlds, and then brings that back into the physical world of the senses. One learns to know the children’s entire relationship to a higher spiritual world. And if music and poetry are brought to the children, as a teacher, one gains a glimpse of the latent strength in them, ready to develop later in life.

Having brought the children into close contact with the plastic, poetic, and musical arts, and having brought eurythmic movements into their bodies, having awakened to life through eurythmy what would otherwise be the abstract element of language, we create in the human being an inner harmony between the spirit-winged musical and poetic elements, and the spirit-permeated material elements of modeling and painting. Human consciousness, spiritually illumined, weaves soulfully and artistically into the physical corporeal part of the human being. One learns to teach by awakening spirit and soul in children, in such a way that teaching becomes health-permeating, stimulating growth and strength for all of life. This brings to mind a beautiful and deeply meaningful Greek expression. The ancient Greeks spoke of Phidias’s statue of Zeus as “healing magic.” Genuine art will not only take hold of soul and spirit, but it will also enhance health and growth. Genuine art has always had healing powers.

Educators and teachers who have the proper love for art and the necessary respect for human nature will always be in a position to implant the artistic element as a magic healing into all their teaching. Then training the intellect, which is a necessary part of schooling, as well as religious teaching and training the heart forces, will be permeated by an element that is inextricably connected to human freedom and human love. If teachers themselves feel a strong bond with the artistic element and appeal to the artistic appreciation in their pupils, and if they create an artistic atmosphere in the classroom, the proper teaching methods and human influence will stream out into all other aspects of education. Then they will not “save” the artistic element for other subjects, but let it flow and permeate all their teaching. The attitude must not be: Here are the main subjects—this one will train the intellect, this one the feelings and the sense of duty, and over there, separate, more or less on a voluntary basis, is the art lesson. On the contrary, art is in its proper place only when all teaching is arranged so that, at the right moment, the students’ souls feel a need for the artistic; and art itself must be cultivated so that, in the artistic activities themselves, students feel the need for a rational understanding of, and dutiful concentration on, the things they have come to see as beautiful, as truly free, and thus as human. This is intended to indicate how art can pervade the entire field of education, how it can illumine and warm through the entire pedagogical and sermonizing realm of education. Art and the esthetic sense place knowledge of the human being at the meeting of purely spiritual knowledge on the one side, and external sensory knowledge on the other. It also helps lead us most beautifully into the practical aspects of education.

Through an art of teaching such as I have outlined, those who love art and respect humanity will assign art the proper place in the life of a school. They will do so from a feeling for human nature, condensed into a pedagogical attitude and a pedagogical life through daily contact with the students. They will not neglect the spiritual aspects nor those more connected with the physical world. If art occupies the proper place in school life it will also stimulate the correct approach to the students’ physical training, since wherever art is applied in life, it opens a person to the spiritual light necessary for inner development. By its very nature, art can become permeated with the light of the spirit, and when this has happened it retains this light. Then, wherever art radiates, it permeates whatever it touches with the light it received from the spiritual Sun. It also permeates matter with light so that, outwardly radiant and shining with the light of soul, it can express spirit. Art can collect in itself the light of the universe. It can also permeate all earthly and material substance with shining light. This is why art can carry secrets of the spiritual world into the school and give children the light of soul and spirit; the latter will allow children to enter life so that they do not need to experience work as just a negative and oppressive burden, and, in our social life, therefore, work may gradually divest its burdensome load. By bringing art into school properly, social life can become enriched and freed at the same time, although that may sound unbelievable.

I will address other aspects tomorrow, when I speak of the place of morality and ethical attitudes in education. Today I only want to show that the spirit needed in schools can be magically engendered through art. If done properly, this light-filled art can produce a radiance in children that allows the soul to integrate into the physical body, and thus into the world, for the person’s entire future life.