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Education
GA 307

10 August 1923, Ilkley

VI. Walking, Speaking, Thinking

The previous lectures have indeed in no way attempted to formulate new educational theories, but rather to create a true feeling for education. My aim has been to speak to the human heart rather than to the intellect. This is most essential for the teacher because, as we have seen, the art of education must develop from a deeper knowledge of man's whole being.

For a long time now it has been usual to hear in educational circles that this or that method should be used in teaching. Very frequently the training of teachers consists in little besides the assimilation of certain rules and theories as to the treatment of the child. This, however, will never make the teacher fully aware of the greatness of a task which he cannot approach with true devotion unless he has a deep insight into the whole nature of man as body, soul and spirit. A living conception of the human being develops into pure will in the teacher when, from hour to hour, he has learned to give really practical answers to the eager questions of the child he has to instruct. The first essential is that he himself shall understand the child, and this he can only do in the truest sense if he has a real and concrete knowledge of man in body, soul and spirit.

It is for this reason difficult to describe the education given at the Waldorf School. It is not a thing that can be ‘learnt’ or discussed; it is purely and simply a matter of practice, and one can only give examples of a practical way of dealing with the needs of particular cases. Such practice must be the outcome of actual experience and it is always essential that the requisite knowledge of the human being should be available. But education is a social concern in the widest sense for it begins immediately after birth. It is the concern of the whole of mankind, of each individual family, of each community. This is most significantly brought home to us by a knowledge of the child's nature before the change of teeth at about the seventh year. A German writer, Jean Friedrich Richter, spoke words of great truth v/hen he said that in the first three years of life man learns more than in all his subsequent student years. In his time there were only three academic years.

The first three years, and from then onwards to the seventh year, are much the most important in the whole development of a man, for the child is not at all the same being as in later life. In his earliest years the child is one great sense-organ. The scope of this truth is not generally understood; indeed it is a question of using very emphatic words if the whole truth is to be expressed.

In later years, for instance, man tastes his food in his mouth, tongue and palate. The sense of taste is, as it were, localized in the head. But with the child, and especially so during these early years, this is not the case. Taste then works throughout the whole organism; the child tastes its mother's milk and first food right down into its very limbs. The processes that in later life are localized in the tongue, extend over the whole organism in the young child who lives, as it were, in this sense of taste. There is a strong element of animality here, but we must never compare this element in the child with the ordinary animal nature. The animality of the child exists on a higher level. The human being is never an animal, not even in the embryonic state—in fact, at that period least of all. A comparison may help to make this clearer.

Those who have a true insight into the processes of nature may have the following impression of these processes in the animal, if they look at a herd of cows grazing in a meadow. As each cow lies down to digest its food, it gives itself up in a most wonderful way to the Cosmos. It is as though cosmic forces were active in the digesting animal, inducing the most marvellous visions. The digesting process in the animal is a mighty act of wisdom. While the cow digests it is given up to the Cosmos in an imaginative, dreamlike existence. This may seem an extravagant statement, yet strange to say it is absolutely true.

If we now raise this process one stage higher, we can understand how the child experiences the functions of its bodily organism. All these physical functions are accompanied by a kind of tasting, and, moreover, the other processes that in later life are localized in eye and ear, also extend over the whole organism of the child. Think of the wonder of the eye, of how the eye takes in colour from outside and makes an inner picture. This process is localized, separated off from our conscious experience of life as a whole. The intellect takes hold of what the eye forms in so wonderful a way and makes of it a shadowy, mental image. Equally wonderful are those processes which, in the adult, are localized in the ear. But all that is localized in the several senses of the adult is spread out over the whole organism in the child. In the child there is no separation between spirit, soul and body. Everything from without is mirrored in his inner being. He imitates his whole environment. And now, bearing this in mind, we must observe how three faculties, conditioning the whole of life, are acquired by the child during his earliest years—the faculties of walking, speaking, and thinking.

‘To walk’ is but the limited expression for something far, far greater. We say that the child learns to walk because this is the most evident feature of the process. But this learning to walk is in reality the bringing of man into a right equilibrium in the world of space. The child strives for the upright posture, he strives to relate his legs to the law of gravity in a way that will give balance. He does the same with the arms and hands. The whole organism finds its orientation. Learning to walk means to set the whole organism in a right orientation with the directions of space.

Now it is important to perceive in the right way that the child is an imitative being, for during the first years of life everything must be learnt from imitation of the environment. Now it is evident that the forces of orientation must inhere in the organism itself; the organism is adapted from the very beginning to attain the vertical and not to remain in the horizontal position. The arms must also find their right relation to the laws of space. All this inheres in the very nature of the child and is brought about by the impulses of the organism itself.

If in education we coerce the impulses of human nature, if we do not know how to leave this nature free, and to act only as helpers, then we injure the organism of the child for the whole of its later earthly life. If we wrongly force the child to walk by external methods, if we do not merely help but urge him to walk or to stand, we do the child an injury which lasts till death and is especially harmful in advanced age. In true methods of education it can never be a question of considering the child as it is at a given moment, but the whole of its journey through life from birth to death must be taken into account, for the whole earthly life is already present from the first.

Now because the child is a most delicately balanced organ of sense, he is not only sensitive to the physical influences of his surroundings, but also to the moral influences, especially of those of thought. However far-fetched it may appear to the modern materialistic mind, the child does, nevertheless, sense all that those in his environment are thinking. As parents or teachers we must not only refrain from actions that are outwardly unseemly, but we must be inwardly true, inwardly moral in our thought and feeling, for the child senses our moods and absorbs them. He does not merely shape his nature according to our words and actions, but in accordance with our whole attitude of heart and mind. The environment, then, is the most important thing of all in the first period of the child's education, up to the seventh year.

And now the question will arise: ‘What kind of help are we to give in this process of orientation and learning to walk?’ Here it must be remembered that the connections of life can be observed by a science that is spiritual in character, but not by a science that is materialistic and dead.

Let us take a child who has been forced on to walk and to adjust himself in space by all kinds of coercive measures, and then look at him in his fiftieth year, or between the fifties and sixties. If nothing else has intervened, we shall find him suffering from all manner of metabolic diseases which he cannot throw off, from rheumatism, gout, and so on. Everything of the nature of soul and spirit that we do to the child—for we are exercising forces of the soul and spirit if we urge him to adopt the vertical position, or to walk—everything comes to the stage where the spiritual works right down into the physical. For the forces that have been called into play by the use of highly questionable methods remain for the whole of the earthly life, and reappear later in the form of bodily diseases.

As a matter of fact, all education of the child is at the same time physical education. We cannot speak of a specifically physical training of the child, for soul and spirit are always at work upon his bodily nature. We observe how the child's organism adjusts itself to attain the upright position, and to walk, and we lovingly watch this wonderful mystery enacted by the human organism as it passes from the horizontal to the vertical position. Piety and reverence must pervade us as we observe how the divine powers of creation are adapting the child to the laws of space, and then we must lovingly help him to walk and to acquire balance. If with inner devotion we observe every expression of human nature in the child and hold out a helping hand, we generate health-bringing forces which can then re-appear as healthy metabolic activities between the ages of fifty and sixty, a time of life when we especially need control of the processes of the metabolism.

Herein lies truly the mystery of human evolution: All that is of the nature of soul and spirit at one stage of life becomes physical, manifests itself physically in later life. Years later it makes itself evident in the physical body.

So much then as regards learning to walk. A child who is lovingly guided to walk develops into a healthy man, and to apply this love in the process of learning to walk is to add much to the healthy education of the body.

Now from this process of orientation in space there develops speech. Modern physiology knows something of this, but not very much. It knows that the movements of the right hand correspond to a certain activity of the left side of the brain, which is related to speech. Physiology admits the connection between the movements of the right hand and the so-called convolutions of Broca at the left side of the brain. As the hand moves and makes gestures, forces pour into it; all this motive force passes into the brain, where it becomes the impulse of speech. Science knows only a fragment of the process, for the truth is this: Speech does not arise merely because a movement of the right hand coincides with a convolution in the left portion of the brain; speech arises from the entire motor-organism of the human being. How the child learns to walk, to orientate himself in space, to transform the first erratic and uncontrolled movements of the arms into gestures definitely related to the outer world, all this is carried over by the mysterious processes of the human organism to the head, and appears as speech.

Anyone who is able to understand these things realizes that children who shuffle their feet as they walk pronounce every sound, and especially the palatal sounds, quite differently from those whose gait is firm. Every nuance of speech is bound up with organic movement; life to begin with is ail gesture and gesture is inwardly transformed into speech.

Speaking, then, is an outcome of walking, that is to say, of the power to orientate the being in space. And the degree to which the child is able to control speech will depend very largely upon whether we give him really wise, loving help while he is learning to walk.

These are some of the finer connections revealed by a true knowledge of man. Not without reason have I described in detail the process of guiding the spirit to the human organism. With every step that is taken, the body follows the spirit, if the spirit is brought into the child in the right way.

Again, it is a fact that to begin with the whole organism is active when the child is learning to speak. First there are the outer movements, the movements of the legs corresponding to the strong contours of speech; die more delicate movements of the arms and hands correspond to the inflection and plastic form of the words. In short, outer movements are transformed into the inner movements of speech.

Just as the element of love should pervade the help we give to the child as he learns to walk, so while we help him to speak we must be inwardly true. The strongest tendencies to untruthfulness in after life are generated during the time when a child is learning to speak, for in those years the element of truth in speech is taken into the whole bodily organism. A child whose teachers are filled with inner truthfulness will, as he imitates his environment, so learn to speak that the subtle activity constantly generated in the organism by the processes of in-breathing and out-breathing will be strengthened. Naturally, these things must be understood in a delicate and not in a crude sense. The processes are highly rarefied but are nevertheless revealed in every manifestation of life. We breathe in oxygen and exhale carbonic acid. Oxygen has to be changed into carbonic acid in the body by the breathing process. We receive oxygen from the cosmos, and give back carbonic acid. Truth or untruth in those around us while we are learning to speak determines whether, in the more subtle functions of life, we are able to change the oxygen within us into carbonic acid in the right way. This process consists in a complete transformation of the spiritual into the physical.

One of the most common and untruthful influences brought to the child is the use of “baby-language.” Unconsciously the child does not like this; he wants to listen to true speech, the speech of grown men and women. We should speak in ordinary language to the child and avoid the use of this “baby-language.” At first the child will naturally only babble in imitation of words, but we ourselves must not copy this babbling. To use the babbling, imperfect speech of the child to him is to injure his digestive organs. Once more the spiritual becomes physical, and works directly into the bodily organs. And everything that we do spiritually for the child constitutes a physical training, for the child is not all individual. Many later defects in the digestive system are caused by a child's having learnt to speak in a wrong way.

And just as speech arises from walking and grasping, in short from movement, so thought develops from speech. Just as in helping the child as he learns to walk we must be pervaded by love, so in helping the child to gain the power of speech we must be absolutely truthful; and since the child is one great sense organ and his inner physical functions are also a copy of the spiritual, our own thinking must be clear if right thinking is to develop in the child from out the forces of speech.

No greater harm can be done to the child than by the giving of orders and then causing confusion by reversing them. Confusion set up in the child's surroundings as the result of inconsequent thinking is the actual root of the many so-called nervous diseases prevalent in our modern civilization.

Why have so many people ‘nerves’ to-day? Simply because in childhood there was no clarity and precision of thought around them during the time when they were learning to think after having learned to speak. The physical condition of the next generation, as evinced by its gravest defects, is a faithful copy of the preceding generation. When we observe the faults in our children which develop in later life, we should gain self-knowledge. All that happens in the child's environment expresses itself in the physical organism—though in a subtle and delicate way. Loving treatment while the child is learning to walk, truthfulness while he learns to speak, clarity and precision as he begins to be able to think, all these qualities become a part of the bodily constitution. The vascular system and organs develop after the models of love, truth and clarity in the environment. Diseases of the metabolic system are the result of coercive treatment while the child is learning to walk. Digestive disturbances may arise from untruthful actions during the time at which the child is beginning to speak. Nerve trouble is the outcome of confused thinking in the child's environment.

When we see the prevalence of nervous disease in this third decade of the twentieth century, we cannot but conclude that there must have been much confused thinking on the part of the teachers about the beginning of the century. Many diseases of the nerves to-day are really due to confused thinking, and again the nerve troubles from which people suffered at the beginning of the century were equally the result of the confused thought of the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

Now these matters can be handled in such a way that physiology, hygiene, and psychology no longer need to remain shut off from each other as specialized branches of knowledge, so that to-day the teacher must call in the doctor the moment any question of health arises. Physiological education, school hygiene and the like can be united in such a way that the teacher's work will come to include an understanding of the activity of the soul and spirit in the physical organism. But since everyone has in a certain sense to train children from birth up to the seventh year, a social task stands before us, inasmuch as a true knowledge of man is absolutely necessary if humanity is to follow an ascending, and not a descending, path.


Quite rightly has our “humane” age attempted to do away with a certain educational measure very frequently applied in earlier days, I mean the habit of caning. The last thing I wish to do is to speak in favour of such punishment, but this I must say, that the reason why our age has made some attempt to get rid of corporal punishment is because it very well knows the evil results of this; the moral consequences of injury to the physical body are very evident. But, my dear friends, one terrible form of punishment has crept into the educational methods of to-day, when all eyes are so concentrated on the physical and material and there is so little comprehension of the soul and spirit. I am here referring to a form of punishment that is never realized as such because men's minds are not directed to the spiritual.

Parents often think it desirable to give their little girl a beautiful doll as a plaything. This ‘beautiful’ doll is a fearful production because for one thing it is so utterly inartistic, in spite of its ‘real’ hair, painted cheeks and eyes which close when it is laid down or open when it is lifted up! We often give our children toys that are dreadfully inartistic copies of life. The doll is merely one example. All modern toys are of the same type and they constitute a form of cruel punishment to the child's inner nature. Children often behave well in the presence of others merely from a fear of conventional punishments; equally they do not always express aversion from toys like the ‘beautiful doll,’ although this dislike is deeply rooted in their souls. However strongly we may suggest to children that they ought to love such toys, the forces of their unconscious and subconscious life are stronger, and the children have an intense antipathy to anything resembling the beautiful doll. For, as I will now show you, such toys really amount to an inner punishment.

Suppose that in the making of our toys we were to take into consideration what the child has actually experienced in his infant thought up to the age of six or seven in the processes of learning to walk after learning to stand upright and then we were to make a doll out of a handkerchief, for instance, showing a head at the top with two ink-spots for eyes. The child can understand and, moreover, really love such a doll. Primitively this doll possesses all the qualities of the human form, in so far at any rate as the child is capable of observing them at this early age. A child knows no more about the human being than that he stands upright, that there is an ‘upper’ and a ‘lower’ part of his being, that he has a head and a pair of eyes. As for the mouth, you will often find it on the forehead in a child's drawings! There is as yet no clear consciousness of the exact position of the mouth. What a child actually experiences is all contained in a doll made from a handkerchief with ink-spots for eyes. An inner, plastic force is at work in the child. All that comes to him from his environment passes over into his being and becomes there an inner formative power, a power that also builds up the organs of the body.

If the child has a father who is constantly ill-tempered and irritable, and the child as a result of this lives in an environment of perpetual shocks and unreasonableness, all this turmoil expresses itself in his breathing and the circulation of the blood. The lungs, heart and the whole venal system are affected by such a condition. Throughout the whole of his life the child bears within him the inner effects upon the organs of his father's ill-temper.

This is merely an example to show you that the child possesses a wonderful plastic power and is perpetually at work as a kind of inner sculptor upon his own being. If we give the child the kind of doll made from a handkerchief, these plastic, creative forces that arise in the human organism from the rhythmic system of the breathing and blood circulation and build up the brain, flow gently upwards. They mould the brain like a sculptor who works upon his material with a fine and supple hand, a hand permeated with the forces of the soul and spirit. In the child's perception of the handkerchief-doll these plastically creative elements are called upon and healthy forces are generated which then flow upwards from the rhythmic system and work upon the structure of the brain.

If, on the contrary, we give the child one of the so-called ‘beautiful’ dolls, with moving eyes and painted cheeks, real hair and so on—a hideous, ghostly production from the artistic point of view—then the plastic, brain-building forces that are generated in the rhythmic system have the effect of the constant lashing of a whip. All that the child cannot as yet understand works upon the brain like the lashings of a whip. The whole brain is lashed to its very foundations in a terrible way.

Such is the secret of the ‘beautiful’ doll, and it can be applied to many of the playthings given to the child to-day.

If we would give loving help to the child at play we must realize how many inner, formative forces are active in his being. In this respect our whole civilization is on the wrong road. For instance, modern culture has evolved the concept of ‘Animism.’ A child bumps against the table and strikes it in anger. We say to-day that the child imagines the table to be a living thing, he endows it with imaginary life and strikes it. Now this is not true. The child does not imaginatively endow the table with life, or with anything at all, but feels as though the living were lifeless. When he hurts himself, a kind of reflex movement makes him strike the table. He does not think of the table as living, for everything is as yet lifeless for him; he treats the living and the lifeless exactly in the same way.

These false ideas show that our civilization does not know how to approach the child. The first great essential is to learn to deal with children wisely and lovingly and give them what their own being needs. We should not inflict inner punishment by giving the child toys of the type of the beautiful doll. Rather should we be able to throw ourselves into the child's inner life and give him such toys as he can himself inwardly understand.

Thus play also is something that calls for true insight into the nature of the child. If we prattle like a little child and think to bring our speech down to his level, if we model our words falsely, we bring an untruthful influence to bear upon him. On the other hand, however, we must be able to descend to the stage of the child's development in everything that has to do with the will-nature in play. We shall then realize that intellectuality, a quality so much admired in this age, simply does not exist in the child's organic nature, and should therefore have no place in his play.

The child at play will naturally imitate what is going on in his surroundings, but it will seldom happen that a child of four expresses a wish to be a philologist, let us say, although he may say he would like to be a chauffeur! Why? Because everything about a chauffeur makes an immediate sense-impression. It is different with a philologist, for what he does makes no impression on the senses; it simply passes unnoticed by the child. Everything intellectual leaves the child unaffected, he passes it by. What, then, must we do if we are to help the child to the right kind of play?

Now when we plough, or make hats, or sew clothes, and so on, all these things are done with a certain purpose and have a certain intellectual quality. But everything in life, no matter whether it be ploughing, building carriages, shoeing horses, or the like, besides having a definite purpose, contains another element in outward appearance. At the sight of a man guiding his plough over the field one can feel, apart from the object of ploughing, the plastic quality of the picture; it is a picture which arises. If we can feel this pictorial element quite apart from its purpose (and it is the aesthetic sense that enables us to do this) then we can begin to make toys that really appeal to the child. We shall not aim at intellectual beauty as in the modern doll, but at something expressed in the whole content, in the whole feeling of the human being. Then, instead of the beautiful doll, we shall produce for the older children a primitive, really enchanting doll something like this one. [Dr. Steiner here showed a doll made by pupils of the Waldorf School]

In true education therefore the essential thing is to be able to bring an artistic element into our work and to apply it in the making of toys, for then we begin to satisfy the needs of the child's own nature.

Our civilization has made us almost exclusively utilitarian, intellectualistic, and we offer even our children the result of what we have ‘thought out’ with our brains. But we ought not to give them what adult life has ‘thought out,’ but what our maturer life feels and perceives. This is the quality the toy ought to exhibit. If we give a child a toy plough, the essential thing is that it should express the aesthetic quality of form and movement in the plough, for this will help to unfold the natural forces in the child.

Certain Kindergarten systems, in other ways worthy of all respect, have made great mistakes in this direction. Froebel's system, as also others, have arisen from a true inner love for children, but they have failed to realize that although imitation is a part of the very nature of the child, he can only imitate that which is not yet permeated by an intellectual quality. We must therefore not introduce into the Kindergarten such various forms of handiwork as have been ingeniously ‘thought out.’ The stick-laying, plaiting, and so on, that often play so large a part in modern Kindergarten methods, have all been ingeniously thought out. Kindergarten work ought rather to be so arranged that it contains an actual picture of what older people do, and not mere inventions. A sense of tragedy will often arise in one possessed of a true knowledge of man when he goes into these modern Kindergartens, for they are so full of good intentions and the work has been so conscientiously thought out. They are based on infinite goodwill and a sincere love of children, yet on the other hand it has not been realized that all intellectualism ought to be eliminated. Kindergarten work should consist simply and solely of imitative pictures of what grown-up people do.

A child whose intellectual faculties are developed before the fourth or fifth year bears a dreadful heritage into later life. He is being educated for materialism. To the extent that an intellectual education is given to the child before the fourth or fifth year, will he become materialistic in later life. The brain can either develop in such a way that the spirit dwells within it and gives birth to intuition, or on the other hand the whole nature can tend towards materialism if at this early age the child's brain is intellectually forced.

If we would so train the child that as man he may comprehend the spirit, we must delay as long as possible the giving of mental concepts in a purely intellectual form. Although it is highly necessary, in view of the nature of our modern civilization, that a man should be fully awake in later life, the child must be allowed to remain as long as possible in the peaceful, dreamlike condition of pictorial imagination in which his early years are passed. For if we allow his organism to grow strong in this way, he will develop in later life the intellectuality needed in the world to-day.

If the child's brain has been punished in the way I have described, permanent injury is done to the soul. The use of ‘baby-language’ injuriously affects the digestion; unloving, mistaken coercion in the process of learning to walk has an unfavourable effect upon the metabolic system in later life. Soul and body alike suffer if the inner being of the child is injured in these ways, and it must be the first aim of education to do away with such inner punishments as are represented, for instance, by toys like the beautiful doll. These do not only lacerate the soul of the child, but also harm his bodily constitution, for in childhood body, soul and spirit are one. The essential thing, therefore, is to raise the games and play of children to their true level.

In these lectures I have tried to indicate how false forms of spirituality must be avoided when we are dealing with the child, so that a true spirituality, in short, the whole individuality, may come to full expression in later life.

Sechster Vortrag

Aus der bisher gegebenen Darstellung sollte sich nicht etwa bloß eine Theorie über die Notwendigkeit einer neuen Erziehungsgestaltung ergeben, sondern es sollte aus dem Gesprochenen so etwas wie eine Art Erziehungsgesinnung hervorgehen. Ich wollte in den vorangehenden Vorträgen weniger zu dem Verstande sprechen, als vielmehr zu den menschlichen Herzen. Und dies ist gerade für den Erzieher, für den Unterrichtenden das Allerwichtigste, das Wesentlichste. Denn wie wir ja gesehen haben, Erziehungskunst muß aufgebaut sein auf durchdringender Menschenerkenntnis.

Man kann seit langer Zeit, wenn von Erziehungskunst die Rede ist, hören, das oder jenes habe man mit dem Kinde zu tun. Es besteht sehr häufig die pädagogische Anweisung in solchen Geboten, gewissermaßen theoretischen Befehlen, was man mit dem Kinde zu tun habe.

Auf diese Art würde aber niemals die volle Hingabe des Unterrichtenden und Erziehenden an seinen Beruf hervorgebracht, sondern allein dadurch, daß der Unterrichtende und Erziehende die Möglichkeit hat, in die ganze menschliche Wesenheit nach Leib, Seele und Geist wirklich einzudringen.

Wer in dieser Art lebendige Ideen hat über den Menschen, bei dem werden diese lebendigen Ideen dann, wenn er vor seinen Beruf hingestellt ist, unmittelbarer Wille. Er lernt von Stunde zu Stunde praktisch eine gewichtige Frage sich beantworten.

Wer stellt diese Frage? Das Kind selber stellt diese Frage. Und so ist das Wichtigste, in dem Kinde lesen zu lernen. Und eine wirkliche, praktische, nach Körper, Seele und Geist orientierte Menschenerkenntnis leitet dazu an, in dem Kinde wirklich lesen zu lernen.

Daher ist es so schwierig, über die sogenannte Waldorfschul-Pädagogik zu sprechen. Denn Waldorfschul-Pädagogik ist nicht eigentlich etwas, das man lernen kann, über das man diskutieren kann, sondern Waldorfschul-Pädagogik ist eine reine Praxis, und man kann eigentlich nur beispielhaft erzählen, wie in diesem oder jenem Falle, für dieses oder jenes Bedürfnis die Praxis ausgeübt wird. Die Praxis selber ergibt sich durchaus aus der unmittelbaren Erfahrung. Denn das ist immer die Bedingung, daß die entsprechende Menschenerkenntnis vorhanden ist, wenn man von dieser Gesinnung ausgeht. Dann aber ist Pädagogik und Didaktik in gewisser Beziehung schon eine ganz allgemeine soziale Frage; denn die Erziehung des Kindes muß doch eigentlich unmittelbar nach der Geburt beginnen. Das heißt aber nichts anderes, als daß Erziehung eine Angelegenheit der ganzen Menschheit, jeder Familie, jeder Menschengemeinschaft ist. Aber gerade dieses lehrt uns am allerintensivsten die Erkenntnis der kindlichen Wesenheit selber, bevor der Zahnwechsel um das siebente Jahr eingetreten ist. Ein deutscher Schriftsteller, Jean Paul, Friedrich Richter, hat ein wunderbares Wort gesprochen, indem er sagte: In den ersten drei Lebensjahren lernt der Mensch für das Leben viel mehr als in allen - damals gab es nur drei -, als in allen drei akademischen Jahren.

In der Tat, vor allen Dingen die drei ersten Lebensjahre, dann aber auch die Lebensjahre bis zum siebenten hin, sind für die Gesamtentwickelung des Menschen die allerwichtigsten, denn da ist das Kind als Mensch etwas ganz anderes als später. Das Kind ist in den ersten Jahren eigentlich ganz Sinnesorgan. Nur stellt man sich den Umfang dieser Idee: das Kind ist in den ersten Jahren ganz Sinnesorgan - gewöhnlich gar nicht intensiv genug vor. Man muß schon zu recht drastischen Aussagen gehen, wenn man diese ganze Wahrheit eigentlich enthüllen will.

Im späteren Leben hat der Mensch einen Geschmack von den aufgenommenen Speisen im Munde, im Gaumen, auf der Zunge. Der Geschmack ist sozusagen im Kopfe lokalisiert. Beim Kinde, insbesondere in den ersten Lebensjahren, ist das nicht der Fall, sondern der Geschmack wirkt durch den ganzen Organismus hindurch. Das Kind schmeckt bis in seine Gliedmaßen hinein die Muttermilch und die erste Nahrung. Was im späteren Lebensalter auf der Zunge vor sich geht, das geht bei dem Kinde im ganzen Organismus vor sich. Das Kind lebt sozusagen, indem es alles, was es aufnimmt, schmeckt. In dieser Beziehung lebt da etwas stark Animalisches. Aber wir dürfen niemals das Animalische, das in dem Kinde ist, vorstellen gleich dem Animalischen, das in dem Tiere ist. Es ist immer das Animalische bei dem Kinde sozusagen auf ein höheres Niveau heraufgehoben. Der Mensch ist nie Tier, niemals, auch nicht als Embryo, da am allerwenigsten. Aber man kann sozusagen die Ideen deutlich machen, wenn man sie so gestaltet, sie mit etwas vergleicht.

Wer jemals mit einem wirklichen Blick für die Naturvorgänge eine Herde gesehen hat, die eben auf einer Wiese, auf dem Felde ihre Nahrung abgegrast hat und dann daliegt, sagen wir eine Herde von Kühen im Grase, jede einzelne Kuh hingegeben in einer wunderbaren Weise der ganzen Welt, das Verdauungsgeschäft besorgend, der bekommt einen Eindruck von dem, was da eigentlich in dem Tiere vor sich geht. Eine ganze Welt, ein ganzer Extrakt des kosmischen Geschehens geht da in dem Tier vor sich, und das Tier erlebt, während es verdaut, die wunderbarsten Visionen. Das Verdauungsgeschäft ist das allerwichtigste Erkenntnisgeschäft beim Tiere. Und während das Tier verdaut, ist es in einer träumerisch-imaginativen Art an die ganze Welt hingegeben.

Das sieht übertrieben aus, allein das Merkwürdige dabei ist, daß es gar nicht übertrieben ist, daß es durchaus der Wahrheit entspricht. Und wenn wir das um eine Stufe heraufheben, dann bekommen wir das Erlebnis des Kindes bei seinen physischen Funktionen. Alle physischen Funktionen begleitet der Geschmack. Ebenso wie der Geschmack alle physischen Funktionen begleitet, so ist etwas, was sonst nur in Auge und Ohr lokalisiert ist, in dem ganzen Organismus des Kindes.

Stellen Sie sich das Wunderbare eines Auges vor, wie das Auge das Farbige geformt von außen aufnimmt, innerlich ein Bild macht, wodurch wir sehen. Das ist lokalisiert, das ist abgesondert von unserem Gesamterleben. Und wir ergreifen dann dasjenige, was das Auge in wunderbarer Weise formt, mit dem Verstande, in einem Schattenbilde des Verstandes, das davon gemacht wird.

Ebenso wunderbar sind die Vorgänge, die im Ohre lokalisiert sind beim erwachsenen Menschen. Aber das, was beim erwachsenen Menschen in den Sinnen lokalisiert ist, ist ausgebreitet über den ganzen Organismus beim Kinde. Daher gibt es beim Kinde keine Trennung zwischen Geist, Seele, Körper, sondern alles dasjenige, was von außen wirkt, wird innerlich nachgebildet. Das Kind bildet nachahmend die ganze Umgebung nach.

Und nun müssen wir, indem wir diesen Gesichtspunkt gewonnen haben, hinschauen darauf, wie drei für das ganze Leben maßgebende Tätigkeiten von dem Kinde in den ersten Lebensjahren erworben werden: Gehen, Sprechen, Denken. Diese drei Fähigkeiten, die werden maßgeblich für das ganze Leben in den ersten Lebensjahren von dem Kinde erworben.

Gehen, ja, das ist, ich möchte sagen, eine Abbreviatur, ein verkürzter Ausdruck für etwas viel Umfassenderes. Weil es am meisten auffällt, daß wir gehen lernen, sagen wir: das Kind lernt gehen. Aber dieses Gehenlernen, das ist ja verbunden mit einem Sich-Hineinversetzen in eine Gleichgewichtslage gegenüber der ganzen Raumeswelt. Wir suchen als Kind die aufrechte Lage, wir suchen als Kind die Beine in ein solches Verhältnis zur Schwerkraft zu bringen, daß wir das Gleichgewicht haben. Wir versuchen dasselbe aber auch mit den Armen und Händen. Der ganze Organismus wird orientiert. Gehenlernen bedeutet, die Raumrichtungen der Welt finden, den eigenen Organismus in die Raumrichtungen der Welt hineinzustellen.

Hier handelt es sich darum, daß wir in richtiger Weise hinschauen darauf, wie das Kind ein nachahmendes Sinneswesen ist. Denn alles muß in den ersten Lebensjahren durch Nachahmung gelernt werden, aufgenommen werden durch Nachahmung aus der Umgebung.

Nun wird doch jedem auffallen, wie der Organismus aus sich selber die orientierenden Kräfte heraustreibt, wie der Organismus des Menschen daraufhin veranlagt ist, sich in die vertikale Lage zu bringen, nicht wie beim Kriechen bei der horizontalen Lage zu bleiben, die Arme in entsprechender Weise im Gleichgewicht gegenüber der Raumeswelt zu gebrauchen. Das alles ist eine Veranlagung des Kindes, geht sozusagen aus den eigenen Impulsen der Organisation hervor.

Wenn wir nun anfangen, als Erziehende in das, was da die eigene Menschennatur will, den geringsten Zwang hineinzubringen, wenn wir nicht verstehen, frei die Menschennatur sich selbst zu überlassen und nur die Hilfeleister zu bilden, dann verderben wir die menschliche Organisation für das ganze Erdenleben.

Wenn wir daher das Kind durch äußere Handhabungen in unrichtiger Weise veranlassen zu gehen, wenn wir ihm nicht bloß helfen, sondern wenn wir durch Zwang das Gehen, das Stehen herbeiführen wollen, dann verderben wir dem Kinde das Leben bis zum Tode hin. Insbesondere verderben wir ihm das höchste Alter. Denn es handelt sich bei einer wirklichen Erziehung immer darum, nicht bloß auf die Gegenwart des Kindes zu schauen, sondern auf das ganze menschliche Leben zu schauen bis zum Tode hin. Wir müssen wissen, daß in dem kindlichen Alter im Keime das ganze menschliche Erdenleben steckt.

Nun ist das Kind, weil es ein außerordentlich fein organisiertes Sinnesorgan ist, empfänglich eben nicht nur für die physischen Einflüsse seiner Umgebung, sondern empfänglich für die moralischen Einflüsse, namentlich für die gedanklichen Einflüsse. So paradox das dem heutigen, materialistisch denkenden Menschen erscheint, das Kind empfinder das, was wir in seiner Umgebung denken. Und es ist nicht nur wichtig, daß wir uns in der Umgebung des Kindes, wenn wir Eltern oder Erzieher sind, nicht bloß nicht gestatten, äußerlich sichtbar ungehörige Dinge zu tun, sondern wir müssen auch in unseren Gedanken und Empfindungen, die das Kind fühlt, aufnimmt, innerlich wahr, innerlich moraldurchdrungen sein. Denn das Kind gestaltet sein Wesen nicht bloß nach unseren Worten oder nach unseren Handlungen, sondern das Kind gestaltet sein Wesen nach unserer Gesinnung, nach unserer Gedankenhaltung, Gefühlshaltung. Und für die erste Zeit der kindlichen Erziehung bis zum siebenten Jahre hin, ist das Allerwichtigste dieses, wie die Umgebung ist.

Nun entsteht die Frage: Was können wir hineinmischen in dasjenige, was wir als Anleitung, als Hilfeleistung geben beim Gehen, beim Sich-Orientierenlernen? Hier handelt es sich darum, daß man mit einer spirituellen Wissenschaft die Lebenszusammenhänge überschaut, mit einer toten, unspirituellen Wissenschaft die Lebenszusammenhänge nicht überschaut.

Nehmen wir ein Kind, das durch allerlei äußere Zwangsmittel, weil man dieses für richtig hielt, zum Gehen, zum Orientieren im Raume angehalten worden ist, und nun betrachten wir dieses Kind dann wieder in seinem fünfzigsten Lebensjahre, zwischen dem fünfzigsten und sechzigsten Lebensjahre, und wir werden unter Umständen, wenn nichts anderes im Leben dagegen gewirkt hat, dieses Kind, wenn es das fünfzigste, das sechzigste Jahr erreicht hat, mit allen möglichen Stoffwechselkrankheiten, die es nicht beherrschen kann, behaftet sehen, mit Rheumatismus, mit Gichterscheinungen und so weiter.

Bis zu diesem Grade geht es, daß alles Seelisch-Geistige, das wir beim Kinde ausüben — denn es ist ja ein Seelisch-Geistiges, wenn wir es durch Zwang in die vertikale Lage, in das Gehen hineinbringen, selbst wenn wir mit gleichgültigem Herzen dabei sind -, bis zu diesem Grade geht es, daß das Geistige beim Kinde in das Physische hineinwirkt. Und die Kräfte bleiben. Die Kräfte, die wir da durch Maßnahmen höchst fragwürdiger Art erzeugen, diese Kräfte bleiben das ganze menschliche Leben hindurch, und später zeigen sie sich, wenn sie nicht richtig waren, in physischen Krankheiten.

Alle Erziehung ist gerade beim Kinde auch eine physische Erziehung. Sie können gar nicht das Kind abgesondert physisch erziehen, denn alle seelisch-geistige Erziehung, alle Erziehung ist beim Kinde zugleich auf die Physis wirkend, ist physische Erziehung. Wenn Sie an einem Kinde sehen: der Organismus orientiert sich dahin, aufrecht zu stehen, zu gehen, wenn Sie mit einer innigen Liebe auf dieses wunderbare Geheimnis des Menschenorganismus hinsehen, der aus der horizontalen Lage in die vertikale übergehen kann, wenn Sie das religiöse Gefühl haben, in scheuer Ehrfurcht den schaffenden Götterkräften gegenüberzustehen, die hier das Kind hinorientieren in den Raum, wenn Sie, mit anderen Worten, als der Hilfeleister beim Gehen, beim Orientierenlernen dastehen als derjenige, der die menschliche Natur in dem Kinde innig liebt, indem er jede Äußerung dieser menschlichen Natur mit Liebe als der Hilfeleister verfolgt: dann erzeugen Sie in dem Kinde gesundende Kräfte, die sich gerade in einem gesunden Stoffwechsel noch zwischen dem fünfzigsten und sechzigsten Jahre zeigen, wo man nötig hat, diesen Stoffwechsel zu beherrschen.

Denn das ist das Geheimnis der Menschenentwickelung: Was auf einer bestimmten Stufe des Lebens geistig-seelisch ist, wird später physisch, offenbart sich physisch; nach Jahren offenbart es sich physisch. So viel über das Gehenlernen. Ein in Liebe zum Gehen angeleitetes Kind wird zum gesunden Menschen erzogen. Und die Liebe beim Gehenlernen anzuwenden, ist ein gut Stück einfach körperlich-gesundheitlicher Erziehung des Kindes.

Das Sprechen entwickelt sich ja heraus aus dem Orientieren im Raume. Die heutige physiologische Wissenschaft weiß davon nicht viel; aber sie weiß schon doch ein Stück. Sie weiß, daß, während wir mit der rechten Hand unsere Verrichtungen im Leben vollziehen, eine gewisse Windung auf der linken Seite des Gehirns den Motor des Sprechens darstellt. Diese physiologische Wissenschaft stellt schon dar eine Korrespondenz zwischen der Bewegung der rechten Hand und dem sogenannten Brocaschen Organ in der linken Gehirnhälfte. Wie die Hand sich bewegt, wie die Hand Gesten macht, wie die Kraft in die Hand hineinergossen wird, das geht in das Gehirn und bildet den Motor für das Sprechen. Es ist ein kleines Stück von dem, was man über die Sache wissenschaftlich weiß. Denn die Wahrheit ist diese: Das Sprechen geht nicht nur aus der Bewegung der rechten Hand hervor, die mit der linken Stirnwindung korrespondiert, sondern das Sprechen geht aus dem ganzen motorischen Organismus des Menschen hervor. Wie das Kind gehen lernt, sich orientieren lernt im Raume, wie es die ersten zappelnden, unbestimmten Bewegungen der Arme verwandeln lernt in zweckentsprechende Bewegungen, die mit der Außenwelt in Verbindung stehen, das überträgt sich durch die geheimnisvolle innere Organisation des Menschen auf die Kopforganisation. Das kommt im Sprechen zum Vorschein.

Wer diese Dinge richtig beurteilen kann, der weiß, wie jeder Laut, namentlich jeder Gaumenlaut anders tönt bei einem Kinde, das beim Gehen mit den Füßen schlenkert, als bei demjenigen Kinde, das fest auftritt. Die ganze Nuancierung der Sprache ist im Bewegungsorganismus gegeben. Das Leben ist zuerst Geste, und die Geste verwandelt sich innerlich in das Motorische des Sprechens. So daß das Sprechen ein Ergebnis des Gehens, das heißt, des Orientierens im Raume ist. Und davon, daß wir liebevoll das Kind zum Gehen veranlassen, wird viel abhängen, wie es dann die Sprache beherrschen wird.

Das sind die feineren Zusammenhänge, die eine wirkliche Menschenerkenntnis gibt. Ich habe wirklich in den vorangehenden Tagen nicht umsonst ausführlich dieses Herantragen des Geistes an die menschliche Organisation besprochen. So trägt man den Geist heran an den Körper. Denn der Körper folgt bei jedem Schritte dem Geist, wenn der Geist in der richtigen Weise herangebracht wird.

Nun ist es wieder so, daß das Kind das Sprechen zunächst lernt durch seinen ganzen Organismus. Wenn Sie so die Sache überblicken, so haben wir zuerst das äußerliche Bewegen, das Bewegen der Beine, was das starke Konturieren hervorruft; das Artikulieren mit Armen und Händen, was das Biegen der Worte, das Gestalten der Worte hervorruft. Wir sehen, wie innerlich beim Kinde die äußerliche Bewegung in die Bewegung der Sprache umgesetzt wird.

Und wenn wir als Hilfeleister beim Gehenlernen jede Anleitung, die wir geben, in Liebe tauchen sollen, dann ist weiter notwendig, daß wir im Sprechenlehren, in der Hilfeleistung, die wir beim Sprechenlernen leisten, innerlich ganz wahr sind. Die größten Unwahrhaftigkeiten des Lebens werden erzeugt während des Sprechenlernens des Kindes; denn da wird die Wahrhaftigkeit des Sprechens durch den physischen Organismus, durch die physische Organisation aufgenommen.

Ein Kind, dem gegenüber man als Erziehender, Unterrichtender immer wahrhaftig sich als Mensch äußert, ein solches Kind wird, seine Umgebung nachahmend, die Sprache so erlernen, daß sich jene feinere Tätigkeit in ihm festigt, die fortwährend im Organismus vor sich gehen muß, indem wir einatmen und ausatmen.

Diese Dinge sind natürlich alle nicht im Groben, sondern im Feineren vorzustellen. Aber im Feineren bestehen sie und zeigen sich im ganzen Leben. Wir atmen Sauerstoff ein, wir atmen Kohlensäure aus. In unserem Organismus muß durch den Atmungsprozeß Sauerstoff in Kohlensäure verwandelt werden. Die Welt gibt uns den Sauerstoff; sie nimmt die Kohlensäure von uns hin. Ob wir in der richtigen Weise im feineren, intimeren Menschenleben den Sauerstoff in uns selber in Kohlensäure verwandeln, das hängt davon ab, ob wir durch unsere Umgebung beim Sprechenlernen wahrhaftig oder unwahrhaftig behandelt werden. Das Geistige verwandelt sich da ganz in ein Physisches.

Und eine der Unwahrhaftigkeiten besteht darin, daß wir in der Umgebung des Kindes sehr häufig glauben, dem Kinde etwas Gutes zu tun, wenn wir uns im Sprechen auf die Stufe des Kindes herabsetzen. Das Kind will aber in seinem Unbewußten nicht eine kindlich zugerichtete Sprache haben, sondern es will die Sprache hören, welche die wahrhaftige Sprache des Erwachsenen ist. Wir wollen daher zum Kinde so sprechen, wie wir gewohnt sind im Leben zu sprechen, und wollen nicht eine besonders zugerichtete Kindessprache haben.

Das Kind wird zunächst wegen seines Unvermögens dasjenige lallend nachsagen, was man ihm vorsagt; aber wir sollen nicht selber lallend werden. Denn das ist die größte Unvollkommenheit. Und wenn wir das Lallen des Kindes, die unvollkommene Sprache des Kindes glauben anwenden zu müssen, so verderben wir dem Kinde die Verdauungsorgane. Denn alles Geistige wird physisch, geht hinein gestaltend in die physische Organisation. Und alles, was wir geistig tun beim Kinde, ist — weil das Kind gar nichts selber ist — auch noch eine physische Trainierung. Manche verdorbenen Verdauungsorgane des späteren Lebens rühren vom falschen Sprechenlernen her.

Geradeso wie das Sprechen aus dem Gehen, aus dem Greifen, aus der Bewegung des Menschen entsteht, so entsteht wiederum das Denken aus dem Sprechen. Und haben wir nötig, bei der Hilfeleistung, die wir beim Gehen anzuwenden haben, alles in Liebe zu tauchen; haben wir nötig — weil das Kind innerlich das nachbildet, was in seiner Umgebung sich realisiert —, beim Sprechenlernen der gediegensten Wahrhaftigkeit uns zu befleißigen, so haben wir nötig, damit das Kind, das ganz Sinnesorgan ist und auch das Geistige innerlich physisch nachbildet, damit es aus dem Sprechen das richtige Denken herausholt, in unserem Denken in der Umgebung des Kindes Klarheit walten zu lassen.

Es ist das Schlimmste, was wir dem Kinde antun können, wenn wir in der Umgebung des Kindes irgendeine Anordnung geben, hinterher wieder zurücknehmen, etwas anderes sagen, wodurch die Dinge verwirrt werden. Verwirrung hervorzurufen durch Denken in der Umgebung des Kindes, das ist der eigentliche Urheber desjenigen, was wir in der heutigen Zivilisation die Nervosität des Menschen nennen.

Warum sind so viele Menschen in unserem Zeitalter nervös? Nur aus dem Grunde, weil die Menschen nicht klar, präzise in der Umgebung gedacht haben, während das Kind, nachdem es sprechen gelernt hat, auch denken lernt.

Die nächste Generation, wenn sie gerade ihre großen Fehler zeigt, ist in ihrem physischen Verhalten einfach ein getreues Abbild der vorhergehenden Generation. Und wenn man Kinder, die man hat, im späteren Leben beobachtet, wie sie gewisse Untugenden haben, dann sollte das Beobachten dieser Untugenden eigentlich ein bißchen Veranlassung zur Selbsterkenntnis sein. Denn es ist ein ganz intimer Vorgang, wie alles dasjenige, was in der Umgebung des Kindes geschieht, sich in der physischen Organisation ausdrückt. Für dieses Kindesalter wird Liebe in der Behandlung des Gehenlernens, Wahrhaftigkeit in der Behandlung des Sprechenlernens, Klarheit, Bestimmtheit bei der Umgebung während des Denkenlernens des Kindes zur physischen Organisation. So bauen sich die Gefäße auf, so bauen sich die Organe auf, wie sich Liebe, Wahrhaftigkeit, Klarheit in der Umgebung entwickelt.

Stoffwechselkrankheiten sind die Folge unliebsamen Gehenlernens. Verdauungsstörungen können Folge sein unwahrhaftigen Behandelns, während das Kind zum Sprechen kommt. Nervosität ist die Folge im Leben von verwirrtem Denken in der Umgebung des Kindes.

Wenn man darauf hinsieht, wie heute im dritten Jahrzehnt des 20. Jahrhunderts die Nervosität herrscht, dann muß man daraus den Schluß ziehen, eine wie starke Verwirrung bei den Erziehenden so ungefähr um den Beginn des Jahrhunderts geherrscht haben muß. Denn alles das, was da Verwirrung war im Benehmen durch das Denken, das ist die heutige Nervosität. Und die Nervosität wiederum, die die Leute gehabt haben um die Wende des Jahrhunderts, die ist nichts anderes als das Bild der Verwirrung ungefähr um 1870. Diese Dinge können ja so betrachtet werden, daß nicht Physiologie und Hygiene und psychologische Pädagogik dasteht und bei jeder Gelegenheit der Lehrer nötig hat, wenn es sich um irgend etwas Gesundheitliches handelt, den Arzt zu rufen, sondern diese Dinge können ja so behandelt werden, da physiologische Pädagogik und Schulhygiene, Schulphysiologie, ein Ganzes sind, daß der Lehrer auch dasjenige in seine Mission, in seine Aufgaben aufnimmt, was das geistige Wirken im physisch-sinnlichen Organismus ist.

Aber da eigentlich alle Menschen Erzieher sind für das Lebensalter zwischen der Geburt und dem siebenten Lebensjahre, stehen wir einfach auch vor der sozialen Aufgabe, daß eine wirkliche Menschenerkenntnis überhaupt notwendig ist, wenn die Menschheit nicht einem Niedergang, sondern einem Aufgang entgegengehen soll.


Unser humanes Zeitalter hat, mit Recht selbstverständlich, ein sehr gebräuchliches Erziehungsmittel der früheren Zeiten abgeschafft: das Prügeln, das Schlagen. Aber unsere Zeit — es soll mir niemand den Vorwurf machen, daß ich etwa für die Prügelstrafe in diesem Vortrage eintrete —, unsere Zeit hat gerade deshalb das große Talent gehabt, die Prügelstrafe im Unterrichtswesen zu entfernen, weil ja dieses Zeitalter auf Äußerlichkeiten gut eingestellt ist, weil dieses Zeitalter die Schädlichkeiten der Schläge für den physischen Organismus und die moralischen Konsequenzen, die aus dieser Schädigung des physischen Organismus beim Prügeln hervorgehen, ganz gut einsehen kann.

Aber in der Kindererziehung ist gerade in diesem Zeitalter, das so sehr orientiert ist auf das Physische, Sinnliche und wenig orientiert ist auf das Geistige und Seelische, eine furchtbare Prügelei eingezogen, eine Prügelei, von der man sich allerdings keine Vorstellung macht, weil man heute eben allzuwenig auf den Geist hin orientiert ist.

Unsere Mütter, bisweilen unsere Väter auch, finden es in einer außerordentlich starken Weise notwendig, zum Beispiel dem kleinen Mädchen eine sehr schöne Puppe zu schenken, damit das kleine Mädchen im Spielalter nun mit der schönen Puppe spielen kann. Diese «schöne Puppe» ist ja trotzdem immer scheußlich, weil sie unkünstlerisch ist; aber sie ist, wie man bisweilen meint, eine schöne Puppe, die «richtige» Haare hat, die auch richtig angemalt ist, die sogar bewegliche Augen hat — wenn man sie niederlegt, schließt sie die Augen, verdreht sie, wenn man sie aufhebt, schaut sie einen an -, bewegliche Puppen sind sogar entstanden; kurz, es sind Spielzeuge in die Spielweisen der Kinder eingezogen, die in einer merkwürdigen, unkünstlerischen, aber vermeintlich das Leben nachahmenden Weise nun an das Kind herangebracht werden sollen. Die Puppe ist bloß ein charakteristisches Beispiel; wir formen ja alle unsere Spielzeuge nach und nach aus unserer Zivilisation heraus in einer solchen Weise. Diese Spielzeuge sind die furchtbarste innere Prügelei der Kinder. Und wie sich Kinder innerhalb der Familie, der Gemeinschaft ja auch wacker artig zeigen, wenn man sie verprügelt, wie das also durch Konventionelles hervorgerufen werden kann, so drücken auch die Kinder dasjenige aus Artigkeit nicht aus, was eigentlich tief im Grunde ihrer Seele wurzelt: die Antipathie gegen diese schöne Puppe. Wir bringen mit aller Gewalt dem Kinde bei, daß ihm das sympathisch sein soll, aber die unbewußten, unterbewußten Kräfte im Kinde spielen stark, und denen ist eigentlich all das, was in dem Stil der «schönen Puppe» ist, tief unsympathisch; denn es ist, wie ich gleich zeigen werde, eine innerliche Prügelei des Kindes.

Geht man aber so vor, daß dasjenige in Betracht gezogen wird, was das Kind in seinem einfachen Denken bis zum vierten, fünften Jahre, ja noch bis zum sechsten, siebenten Jahre hin, schon innerlich erfahren hat beim Aufrichten, beim Vertikalrichten, beim Spüren des Gehens, dann bekommt man eine Puppe, die man aus einem Taschentuch formt, oben den Kopf, ein Paar Tintenkleckse für die Augen allenfalls, und dann hat man in dieser Puppe all dasjenige, was das Kind verstehen kann, was das Kind auch lieben kann. Da sind in einer primitiven Weise die Eigenschaften der menschlichen Gestalt vorhanden, soweit sie das Kind einzig und allein in seinem Kindesalter überschauen kann.

Das Kind weiß nicht mehr vom Menschen, als daß der Mensch aufrecht ist, daß er ein Unten und ein Oben hat, daß da oben ein Kopf ist, und daß ein Paar Augen da sind; den Mund -— das werden Sie bei kindlichen Zeichnungen finden -, den zeichnen sie manchmal auf die Stirne hinauf. Die Lage des Mundes ist noch nicht einmal klar. Dasjenige, was das Kind wirklich erlebt, ist aus der Puppe, die aus dem Taschentuch geformt und mit ein paar Tintenklecksen versehen ist, zu ersehen. Im Kinde arbeitet eine innerliche plastische Kraft. All dasjenige, was aus der Umgebung des Kindes an das Kind herankommt, geht über in ein inneres Bilden, auch in das Organbilden.

Wenn das Kind, sagen wir, einen Vater neben sich hat, der sich alle Augenblicke in Jähzorn äußert, wo also alle Augenblicke im unmittelbar äußerlichen Erlebnisse etwas vorkommt, was Schock bewirkt, ein Unmotiviertes ist, dann erlebt das Kind dies mit; das Kind erlebt dies so mit, daß es sich ausdrückt in seinem Atem und seiner Blutzirkulation. Indem es sich aber ausdrückt in der Atmung und Blutzirkulation, gestaltet es Lunge, gestaltet es Herz, gestaltet es das ganze Gefäßsystem; und das Kind trägt dasjenige plastisch gestaltet innerlich sein ganzes Leben hindurch mit, was es durch den Anblick der Taten eines jähzornigen Vaters in sich plastisch ausgebildet hat.

Damit will ich nur andeuten, wie das Kind eine innerlich wunderbar wirkende plastische Kraft hat, wie das Kind fortwährend innerlich als Bildhauer an sich arbeitet. Und wenn Sie dem Kinde die Puppe aus dem Taschentuch geben, dann gehen die Kräfte, die aus dem menschlichen Organismus plastisch bildend in das Gehirn heraufgehen, die namentlich aus dem rhythmischen System, aus Atmung und Blutzirkulation das Gehirn ausbilden, sanft in das Gehirn. Sie bilden das kindliche Gehirn so, wie ein Bildhauer arbeitet, der mit biegsamer, leicht beweglicher, durchgeistigter, beseelter Hand den bildhauerischen Stoff bearbeitet: da geht alles in Bildsamkeit und in organischer Entwickelung vor sich. Das Kind schaut sich dieses zur Puppe geformte Taschentuch an, und das wird im Menschen Bildekraft, richtige Bildekraft, die aus dem rhythmischen System heraus sich gestaltet in das Gehirnsystem.

Wenn Sie dem Kinde eine sogenannte schöne Puppe geben - die Puppe, die sich sogar bewegen kann, die Augen bewegen kann, die angestrichen ist, schöne Haare hat -, wenn Sie dem Kind dieses künstlerisch angeschaut, furchtbar scheußliche Gespenst übergeben, dann wirken die Kräfte aus dem rhythmischen System herauf, diese plastischen Kräfte, die vom Atmungs- und Blutsystem das Gehirnsystem gestalten, fortwährend wie Peitschenhiebe: das alles, was das Kind noch nicht verstehen kann, das peitscht herauf in das Gehirn. Das Gehirn wird gründlich durchgepeitscht, durchgeprügelt in einer furchtbaren Art. Das ist das Geheimnis der schönen Puppe. Das ist aber auch das Geheimnis des kindlichen Spiellebens in vieler Beziehung.

Man muß sich klar sein darüber, wenn man nun liebevoll das Kind zum Spiel anleiten will, wieviel von innerlich bauenden Kräften beim Kind zum Vorschein kommt. In dieser Beziehung sieht ja unsere ganze Zivilisation falsch. Unsere Zivilisation hat zum Beispiel den sogenannten Animismus erfunden. Das Kind, das sich an dem Tisch stößt, schlägt die Tischecke. Da sagt unsere Zeit: das Kind belebt den Tisch, stellt den Tisch vor, wie wenn er leben würde, wie ein Lebewesen, träumt das Leben in den Tisch hinein, schlägt den Tisch.

Das ist ja gar nicht wahr. Das Kind träumt gar nichts in den Tisch hinein, sondern aus den Lebewesen, aus den Wesen, die wirklich leben, träumt es das Leben heraus. Nicht daß es in den Tisch das Leben hineinträumt, sondern aus den wirklichen Lebewesen träumt es das Leben heraus. Und wenn es sich verletzt hat, so schlägt es aus einer Art Reflexbewegung; und da alles noch unbelebt ist für das Kind - es träumt nicht das Leben in den Tisch hinein -, verhält es sich gegen das Belebte und Unbelebte gleich.

Aus solchen ganz verkehrten Ideen sieht man, wie unsere Zivilisation gar nicht in der Lage ist, an das Kind heranzukommen. Und so handelt es sich darum, daß wir uns wirklich liebevoll dem Kinde gegenüber verhalten können, daß wir dasjenige, was es selber will, nur liebevoll anleiten. Und so sollen wir es nicht innerlich verprügeln durch schöne Puppen, so sollen wir mit ihm leben können und die Puppe gestalten, die es innerlich selber erlebt.

Und so mit Bezug auf das ganze Spielwesen. Das Spielwesen fordert in der Tat ein wirkliches Durchschauen des kindlichen Wesens. — Wenn wir so lallen wie das kleine Kind, wenn wir die Sprache herunterbilden bis zum Kinde, wenn wir nicht wahrhaftig so sprechen, wie das Kind es hören muß als wahrhaft aus unserem Wesen herauskommend, so kommen wir mit Unwahrhaftigkeit dem Kinde entgegen. Während wir aber da uns nicht in Unwahrhaftigkeit hineinversetzen sollen, müssen wir uns in das, was willensartig ist, was ins Spielwesen hineingeht, gerade auf die kindliche Stufe versetzen können. Dann wird es uns klar sein, daß das Kind ganz und gar nicht in seinem organischen Wesen dasjenige hat, was heute in unserer Zivilisation ganz besonders beliebt ist: die Intellektualität. Wir dürfen daher auch in das kindliche Spiel nichts hineinbringen, was irgendwie intellektuell beherrscht ist.

Nun wird das Kind auf naturgemäße Weise ja auch im Spiel Nachahmer in bezug auf dasjenige, was in der Umgebung sich abspielt; aber man wird wenig erlebt haben, daß jemals ein Kind ein, sagen wir, Philologe hat werden wollen. Selten wird man erleben bei einem vierjährigen Kind, daß es ein Philologe werden will; aber ein Chauffeur zum Beispiel will es unter Umständen werden. Warum? Weil man alles dasjenige sieht, was am Chauffeur sich offenbart. Das sieht man, das macht einen unmittelbaren Bildeindruck. Was der Philologe tut, das macht keinen Bildeindruck. Das ist unbildlich, das geht überhaupt vor dem Leben des Kindes vorüber. Wir sollen aber ins Spiel nur dasjenige hineinbringen, was an dem Kinde nicht vorübergeht. Alles Intellektuelle geht aber noch am Leben des Kindes vorüber. Was haben wir daher nötig, damit wir in der richtigen Weise das kindliche Spiel anzuleiten vermögen als Erwachsene? Wir pflügen, wir bereiten Hüte, wir nähen Kleider und so weiter. Darinnen liegt überall die Hinorientierung auf das Zweckmäßige, und in dieser Hinorientierung auf das Zweckmäßige liegt das Intellektualistische. Wovon man den Zweck einsieht im Leben, das hat man intellektualistisch durchdrungen.

Nun hat aber alles dasjenige, was im Leben drinnensteht, ob es Pflügen ist, ob es irgend etwas anderes ist, Wagenbauen, Pferde beschlagen lassen, außer dem, daß es nach einem Zweck orientiert ist, etwas, was in seiner äußeren Gestaltung lebt, in der bloßen äußeren Gestaltung. Man kann, wenn man einen Landmann ansieht, der den Pflug über die Furchen führt — ganz abgesehen von dem, was der Zweck dieser Tätigkeit ist —, fühlen und empfinden, wenn ich mich so ausdrücken darf, das Gestaltende desjenigen, was im Bilde lebt, was zum Bilde wird. Wenn man nur als Mensch sich durchringt - und es ist der ästhetische Sinn, der es dazu bringt -, überall das vom Zweck noch absehende Gestaltende aufzufassen, dann bekommt man dasjenige, was in den Spieldingen wirklich an das Kind herankommen kann. Man wird gerade dadurch, daß man nicht auf jenes Schöne geht was ja auch durch und durch ein Intellektualistisches ist —, das man bei den heutigen «schönen Puppen» anstrebt, sondern auf dasjenige geht, was sich in der Haltung, in der ganzen Empfindung des Menschen ausspricht, hingeleitet zu der primitiven, zu der wirklich entzückenden Puppe, die dann mehr so ausschaut (eine von Waldorfschülern geschnitzte Puppe wird gezeigt), nicht wie die sogenannte «schöne» Puppe. Aber das ist schon für ältere Kinder!

Es handelt sich also darum, daß wir, um Erzieher zu werden, dieses Ästhetische der Arbeit in der Arbeit schauen können, damit wir das Ästhetische der Arbeit heranbringen an die Ausarbeitung des Spielzeuges. Wenn wir das Ästhetische der Arbeit an die Ausarbeitung des Spielzeuges heranbringen, dann nähern wir uns dem, was das Kind aus sich selber heraus will. Wir sind in unserer Zivilisation fast ausschließlich Nützlichkeitsmenschen, das heißt, intellektualistische Menschen geworden, bringen daher auch schon an das Kind alles mögliche Ausgedachte heran. Aber es handelt sich darum, daß wir an das Kind nicht dasjenige vom späteren Leben heranbringen, was gedacht ist, sondern was am späteren Leben gefühlt, empfunden werden kann. Das muß im Spielzeug drinnen sein. Wir mögen dem Knaben einen Pflug geben, aber es handelt sich darum, daß wir ihm das Gestaltende, das Ästhetische des Pflügens in das Spielzeug hineinlegen. Das ist dasjenige, was die Vollkraft des Menschen zur Entwickelung bringen kann.

Darin haben die ja sonst in vieler Beziehung außerordentlich anerkennenswerten Kindergärten große Fehler gemacht. Der Kindergarten, der von Fröbel und anderen mit einer wirklich innigen Kindesliebe eingerichtet worden ist, muß sich klar sein darüber, daß das Kind ein nachahmendes Wesen ist, aber nachahmen nur dasjenige kann, was noch nicht intellektualistisch ist. So dürfen wir nicht allerlei Kinderarbeiten in den Kindergarten hineinbringen, die ausgedacht sind. Alles Stäbchenlegen, alles Flechten und dergleichen, was im Kindergarten vielfach eine so große Rolle spielt, ist ausgedacht. Wir dürfen in dem Kindergarten nur dasjenige im Bilde haben, was die großen Leute auch machen, nicht was im besonderen ausgedacht ist. Den Menschenkenner beschleicht oftmals ein tragisches Gefühl, wenn er in diese gutgemeinten Kindergärten hineinkommt, wo so schön ausgedachte Arbeiten darin sind. Denn auf der einen Seite gehen diese Kindergärten aus einem so unendlich guten Willen hervor, aus so viel Kinderliebe, und auf der anderen Seite wird nicht beachtet, daß alles inhaltlich Intellektualistische, alles dasjenige, was ausgedacht ist an Kinderarbeiten, vom Kindergarten ausgeschlossen sein muß, daß es nur die äußere Nachahmung des äußeren Bildes der Erwachsenentätigkeit sein darf, die im Kindergarten entfaltet werden kann.

Ein Kind, das vor dem vierten, fünften Jahre innerlich intellektualistisch trainiert wird, das nimmt etwas Furchtbares ins Leben mit, das wird geradezu zum Materialisten erzogen. Je intellektualistischgeistiger Sie ein Kind bis zum vierten, fünften Jahre erziehen, einen desto größeren Materialisten erzeugen Sie von ihm im Leben. Denn es wird das Gehirn auf der einen Seite so bearbeitet, daß der Geist schon in den Formen des Gehirns lebt und innerlich der Mensch die Intuition bekommt: alles ist nur materiell, weil sein Gehirn so früh vom Intellektualistisch-Geistigen ergriffen worden ist.

Wollen Sie den Menschen zum Verstehen des Spirituellen erziehen, dann müssen Sie das sogenannte äußere Geistige in seiner intellektualistischen Form so spät als möglich an ihn heranbringen, dann müssen Sie, obzwar es eine große Notwendigkeit ist, daß gerade in der heutigen Zivilisation der Mensch im späteren Leben zum vollen Erwachen kommt, das Kind in jenem sanften, bildträumerischen Erleben, in dem es hereinwächst in das Leben, möglichst lange lassen, möglichst lange bei der Imagination, bei der Bildhaftigkeit, bei der Unintellektualität lassen. Denn wenn Sie erstarken lassen seinen Organismus an dem Unintellektualistischen, dann wird es auf richtige Weise später in das der heutigen Zivilisation notwendige Intellektualistische hineinwachsen.

Peitschen Sie sein Gehirn in der Weise, wie angedeutet, dann verderben Sie die Seele des Menschen für das ganze Leben. So wie Sie durch Lallen die Verdauung verderben, wie Sie durch ein falsches liebloses Gehenlernen den Stoffwechsel für das spätere Leben verderben, so verderben Sie die Seele, wenn Sie in dieser Weise von innen das Kind peitschen. Und so muß es ein Ideal unserer Erziehung werden, vor allen Dingen die seelischen, aber doch dadurch, daß das Kind ganz physisch-seelisch-geistiges Wesen ist, auch physisch-inneren Prügelstrafen - das heißt die «schöne Puppe» — abzuschaffen, um vor allen Dingen das Spiel auf das richtige Niveau zu bringen.

Heute möchte ich diese Betrachtungen damit abschließen, daß ich hingewiesen habe, wie man gerade das falsche Geistige vermeiden muß, damit das richtige Geistige, der ganze Mensch überhaupt, im späteren Lebensalter zum Vorschein kommt.

Sixth Lecture

The presentation given so far should not merely result in a theory about the necessity of a new form of education, but rather something like a kind of educational philosophy should emerge from what has been said. In the previous lectures, I wanted to speak less to the intellect and more to the human heart. And this is precisely the most important, the most essential thing for the educator, for the teacher. For, as we have seen, the art of education must be based on a thorough understanding of human nature.

For a long time now, when people talk about the art of education, they have been saying that one must do this or that with children. Very often, pedagogical instruction consists of such commandments, theoretical orders, so to speak, about what one must do with children.

However, this approach would never bring about the full dedication of the teacher and educator to their profession. Rather, it is only when the teacher and educator has the opportunity to truly penetrate the whole human being – body, soul, and spirit – that this dedication can be achieved.

Those who have such living ideas about human beings will find that these living ideas become their immediate will when they are faced with their profession. Hour by hour, they learn to answer an important question in a practical way.

Who asks this question? The child itself asks this question. And so the most important thing is to learn to read in the child. And a real, practical knowledge of human beings, oriented toward body, soul, and spirit, leads to truly learning to read in the child.

That is why it is so difficult to talk about so-called Waldorf school education. For Waldorf education is not really something that can be learned or discussed; Waldorf education is purely practical, and one can really only give examples of how it is practiced in this or that case, for this or that need. The practice itself arises entirely from direct experience. For it is always a prerequisite that the corresponding knowledge of human nature is available when one starts from this attitude. But then, in a certain sense, pedagogy and didactics are already a very general social question, for the education of the child must actually begin immediately after birth. This means nothing other than that education is a matter for the whole of humanity, for every family, for every human community. But it is precisely this that teaches us most intensely about the nature of children themselves, before they reach the age of seven and their teeth begin to change. A German writer, Jean Paul, Friedrich Richter, said something wonderful when he said: In the first three years of life, a person learns much more for life than in all – at that time there were only three – than in all three academic years.

In fact, the first three years of life, but also the years up to the age of seven, are the most important for the overall development of the human being, because during this time the child is something completely different as a human being than later on. In the first years, the child is actually entirely sensory organ. But we don't usually imagine the scope of this idea – that the child is entirely sensory organ in the first years – intensely enough. One has to resort to quite drastic statements if one really wants to reveal this whole truth.

In later life, humans taste the food they eat in their mouths, on their palates, on their tongues. Taste is, so to speak, localized in the head. This is not the case with children, especially in the first years of life; instead, taste affects the entire organism. The child tastes its mother's milk and its first food right down to its limbs. What happens on the tongue in later life happens throughout the child's entire organism. The child lives, so to speak, by tasting everything it takes in. In this respect, there is something strongly animalistic about it. But we must never imagine the animalistic nature in the child to be the same as the animalistic nature in animals. The animalistic nature in the child is always elevated to a higher level, so to speak. The human being is never an animal, never, not even as an embryo, least of all then. But one can make the ideas clear, so to speak, by shaping them in such a way that they can be compared with something else.

Anyone who has ever seen a herd grazing on a meadow or in a field with a real eye for the processes of nature, and then lying there, let's say a herd of cows in the grass, each individual cow devoted in a wonderful way to the whole world, performing the business of digestion, one gets an impression of what is actually going on inside the animal. A whole world, a whole extract of cosmic events is going on inside the animal, and while it digests, the animal experiences the most wonderful visions. The digestive process is the most important cognitive activity in animals. And while the animal digests, it is devoted to the whole world in a dreamy, imaginative way.

This may seem exaggerated, but the strange thing is that it is not exaggerated at all, that it is absolutely true. And if we take this up a notch, we get the experience of the child during its physical functions. All physical functions are accompanied by taste. Just as taste accompanies all physical functions, something that is otherwise only located in the eye and ear is present in the child's entire organism.

Imagine the wonder of an eye, how the eye takes in color formed from the outside, creates an image internally, through which we see. This is localized, it is separate from our overall experience. And we then grasp what the eye forms in a wonderful way with the mind, in a shadow image of the mind that is made of it.

Equally wonderful are the processes that are localized in the ear in adult humans. But what is localized in the senses in adult humans is spread throughout the entire organism in children. Therefore, in children there is no separation between mind, soul, and body, but everything that acts from the outside is reproduced internally. The child imitatively reproduces its entire environment.

And now, having gained this perspective, we must look at how three activities that are decisive for the whole of life are acquired by the child in the first years of life: walking, speaking, thinking. These three abilities, which are decisive for the whole of life, are acquired by the child in the first years of life.

Walking, yes, that is, I would say, an abbreviation, a shortened expression for something much more comprehensive. Because it is most noticeable that we learn to walk, we say: the child learns to walk. But this learning to walk is connected with putting oneself in a position of equilibrium in relation to the whole spatial world. As children, we seek an upright position; as children, we seek to bring our legs into such a relationship with gravity that we have balance. But we also try to do the same with our arms and hands. The whole organism is oriented. Learning to walk means finding the spatial directions of the world, placing one's own organism in the spatial directions of the world.

The point here is that we look correctly at how the child is an imitative sensory being. For everything must be learned through imitation in the first years of life, absorbed through imitation from the environment.

Now everyone will notice how the organism drives out the orienting forces from within itself, how the human organism is predisposed to bring itself into a vertical position, not to remain in a horizontal position as when crawling, and to use its arms in a balanced way in relation to the spatial world. All of this is an innate predisposition of the child, arising, so to speak, from the organism's own impulses.

If we as educators begin to exert the slightest coercion on what human nature itself wants, if we do not understand how to leave human nature free to itself and only act as helpers, then we spoil the human organism for the whole of earthly life.

Therefore, if we cause the child to walk in the wrong way through external manipulation, if we do not merely help him, but if we want to bring about walking and standing through coercion, then we spoil the child's life until death. In particular, we ruin their old age. For true education is always about looking not only at the child's present, but at their entire human life until death. We must know that the whole of human life on earth is contained in the seed of childhood.

Now, because the child is an extraordinarily finely organized sensory organ, it is receptive not only to the physical influences of its environment, but also to moral influences, namely intellectual influences. As paradoxical as this may seem to today's materialistic-minded people, the child senses what we think in its environment. And it is not only important that we, as parents or educators, do not allow ourselves to do things that are outwardly inappropriate in the child's environment, but we must also be inwardly true and inwardly imbued with morality in our thoughts and feelings, which the child senses and absorbs. For the child shapes its being not only according to our words or our actions, but also according to our attitude, our way of thinking, and our emotional disposition. And for the first period of a child's education, up to the age of seven, the most important thing is the environment.

Now the question arises: What can we contribute to what we give as guidance and assistance in walking and learning to orient oneself? The point here is that with spiritual science one can see the connections in life, but with dead, non-spiritual science one cannot see the connections in life.

Let us take a child who, through all kinds of external coercive measures, because this was considered right, has been encouraged to walk and to orientate itself in space, and now let us look at this child again in its fiftieth year of life, between the ages of fifty and sixty, and we will see, if nothing else in life has counteracted this, that this child, when it reaches the age of fifty or sixty, is afflicted with all kinds of metabolic diseases that it cannot control, with rheumatism, with gout symptoms, and so on.

It goes so far that everything we do to the child in the soul and spirit — for it is indeed something of the soul and spirit when we force it into an upright position, into walking, even if we do so with an indifferent heart — it goes so far that the spirit in the child influences the physical. And the forces remain. The forces that we generate through highly questionable measures remain throughout the whole of human life, and later, if they were not right, they manifest themselves in physical illnesses.

All education, especially in children, is also physical education. You cannot educate the child physically in isolation, because all soul-spiritual education, all education in children, also has an effect on the physical body; it is physical education. When you see in a child that its organism is oriented toward standing upright and walking, when you look with deep love at this wonderful mystery of the human organism, which can move from a horizontal position to a vertical one, when you have the religious feeling of you stand in shy reverence before the creative powers of the gods who orient the child into space, if, in other words, you stand as the helper in walking, in learning to orient oneself, as the one who deeply loves human nature in the child, following every expression of this human nature with love as the helper: then you generate healing forces in the child, which manifest themselves in a healthy metabolism between the ages of fifty and sixty, when it is necessary to control this metabolism.

For this is the secret of human development: What is spiritual and soul-related at a certain stage of life later becomes physical, manifests itself physically; after years, it manifests itself physically. So much for learning to walk. A child guided in love to walk is raised to be a healthy human being. And applying love to learning to walk is a good part of the child's physical health education.

Speech develops from orientation in space. Today's physiological science does not know much about this, but it does know a little. It knows that while we perform our tasks in life with our right hand, a certain winding on the left side of the brain represents the motor of speech. This physiological science already shows a correspondence between the movement of the right hand and the so-called Broca's area in the left hemisphere of the brain. How the hand moves, how the hand makes gestures, how the power is poured into the hand, this goes into the brain and forms the motor for speech. This is a small part of what is scientifically known about the subject. For the truth is this: speech does not arise solely from the movement of the right hand, which corresponds to the left frontal lobe, but from the entire motor organism of the human being. How the child learns to walk, learns to orient itself in space, how it learns to transform the first fidgety, indefinite movements of the arms into purposeful movements that connect with the outside world, this is transferred to the organization of the head through the mysterious inner organization of the human being. This comes to the fore in speech.

Anyone who can judge these things correctly knows how every sound, especially every palatal sound, sounds different in a child who swings their feet when walking than in a child who walks firmly. The whole nuance of language is given in the motor organism. Life is first and foremost gesture, and gesture is transformed internally into the motor skills of speech. So that speech is a result of walking, that is, of orienting oneself in space. And how well a child masters language will depend greatly on whether we lovingly encourage it to walk.

These are the finer connections that give us a real understanding of human beings. It was not for nothing that I discussed this bringing of the spirit to the human organism in detail in the previous days. This is how the spirit is brought to the body. For the body follows the spirit with every step if the spirit is brought in the right way.

Now, it is again the case that the child first learns to speak through its entire organism. If you look at the matter in this way, we first have the external movement, the movement of the legs, which causes the strong contouring; the articulation with arms and hands, which causes the bending of words, the shaping of words. We see how the external movement is internally transformed into the movement of speech in the child.

And if, as helpers in learning to walk, we are to bathe every instruction we give in love, then it is also necessary that we are completely true internally in teaching speech, in the help we give in learning to speak. The greatest untruths of life are created during the child's speech learning, for it is there that the truthfulness of speech is absorbed by the physical organism, by the physical organization.

A child who is always treated truthfully as a human being by their educators and teachers will, by imitating their environment, learn language in such a way that the finer activity that must constantly take place in the organism as we breathe in and out becomes established in them.

Of course, these things are not to be imagined in a crude way, but in a more subtle way. But they exist in a subtle way and manifest themselves throughout life. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. In our organism, oxygen must be converted into carbon dioxide through the process of breathing. The world gives us oxygen; it takes carbon dioxide from us. Whether we transform the oxygen in ourselves into carbon dioxide in the right way in our finer, more intimate human life depends on whether we are treated truthfully or untruthfully by our environment when we learn to speak. The spiritual is then completely transformed into the physical.

And one of the untruths is that we very often believe that we are doing the child good when we lower ourselves to the child's level in our speech. But the child does not want to have a childishly adapted language in its unconscious, it wants to hear the language that is the true language of adults. We should therefore speak to the child as we are accustomed to speaking in life, and not use a specially adapted child language.

At first, because of its inability, the child will babble what is said to it; but we should not babble ourselves. For that is the greatest imperfection. And if we believe we must use the child's babbling, the child's imperfect language, we spoil the child's digestive organs. For everything spiritual becomes physical, enters into the physical organization and shapes it. And everything we do spiritually with the child is — because the child is nothing in itself — also physical training. Some spoiled digestive organs in later life stem from learning to speak incorrectly.

Just as speaking arises from walking, from grasping, from human movement, so thinking arises from speaking. And just as we need to bathe everything in love when helping a child to walk, we need — because the child internally replicates what is happening in its environment — to strive for the utmost truthfulness when teaching it to speak. We also need to ensure clarity in our thinking in the child's environment so that the child, which is entirely sensory and also internally replicates the spiritual, can derive correct thinking from speech.

The worst thing we can do to a child is to give them some instruction in their environment, then take it back again, saying something else, thereby confusing them. Causing confusion by thinking in the child's environment is the real cause of what we call nervousness in people in today's civilization.

Why are so many people nervous in our age? Simply because people have not thought clearly and precisely in the child's environment, while the child, after learning to speak, also learns to think.

The next generation, when it shows its great mistakes, is simply a faithful reflection of the previous generation in its physical behavior. And when you observe your children later in life and see that they have certain bad habits, observing these bad habits should actually be a bit of a catalyst for self-awareness. Because it is a very intimate process, how everything that happens in the child's environment is expressed in their physical organization. For this age group, love in the treatment of learning to walk, truthfulness in the treatment of learning to speak, clarity and certainty in the environment during the child's learning to think become part of the physical organization. This is how the vessels develop, how the organs develop, as love, truthfulness, and clarity develop in the environment.

Metabolic disorders are the result of unpleasant learning to walk. Digestive disorders can be the result of untruthful treatment while the child is learning to speak. Nervousness is the result of confused thinking in the child's environment.

When we look at how nervousness prevails today in the third decade of the 20th century, we must conclude that there must have been a great deal of confusion among educators around the beginning of the century. For all the confusion that existed in behavior due to thinking is today's nervousness. And the nervousness that people had at the turn of the century is nothing other than the image of the confusion around 1870. These things can be viewed in such a way that physiology, hygiene, and psychological pedagogy are not there, and the teacher does not need to call the doctor at every opportunity when it comes to anything related to health. Instead, these things can be treated in such a way that physiological pedagogy and school hygiene school physiology, form a whole, and that the teacher also includes in his mission, in his tasks, what is the spiritual activity in the physical-sensory organism.

But since all people are actually educators for the age between birth and the age of seven, we are simply faced with the social task that a real knowledge of human beings is necessary if humanity is to move toward an ascent rather than a decline.


Our humane age has, quite rightly of course, abolished a very common educational tool of earlier times: beating, hitting. But our age — let no one accuse me of advocating corporal punishment in this lecture — our age has had the great talent to remove corporal punishment from the education system precisely because this age is well attuned to outward appearances, because this age can clearly see the harmfulness of beatings to the physical organism and the moral consequences that arise from this damage to the physical organism when beaten.

But in the education of children, especially in this age, which is so oriented toward the physical and sensual and so little oriented toward the spiritual and soul, a terrible beating has been introduced, a beating that one cannot imagine, because today we are too little oriented toward the spirit.

Our mothers, and sometimes our fathers too, feel it is extremely important to give a little girl a very beautiful doll, for example, so that the little girl can now play with the beautiful doll at play age. This “beautiful doll” is still hideous because it is inartistic; but it is, as people sometimes think, a beautiful doll that has “real” hair, that is also painted correctly, that even has movable eyes — when you put it down, it closes its eyes, turns them, when you pick it up, it looks at you — movable dolls have even been created; in short, toys have entered into children's play, which are now to be brought to the child in a strange, unartistic, but supposedly life-imitating way. The doll is merely a characteristic example; we all gradually shape our toys in such a way out of our civilization. These toys are the most terrible internal beating of children. And just as children behave well within the family and the community when they are beaten, as this can be brought about by convention, so too do children express politeness that is not rooted deep in their souls: antipathy towards this beautiful doll. We forcefully teach the child that it should like it, but the unconscious, subconscious forces in the child are strong, and they actually find everything in the style of the “beautiful doll” deeply unsympathetic; for, as I will show in a moment, it is an inner beating of the child.

But if we proceed in such a way that we take into account what the child has already experienced internally in its simple thinking up to the age of four or five, or even up to the age of six or seven, when standing up, walking upright, and feeling the sensation of walking, then we end up with a doll that we form from a handkerchief, with a head at the top, a pair of ink blots for eyes at most, and then you have in this doll everything that the child can understand, everything that the child can also love. The characteristics of the human form are present in a primitive way, insofar as the child can comprehend them in its childhood.

The child knows no more about human beings than that they stand upright, that they have a bottom and a top, that there is a head at the top, and that there is a pair of eyes; the mouth — you will find this in children's drawings — they sometimes draw it up on the forehead. The position of the mouth is not even clear. What the child really experiences can be seen in the doll formed from a handkerchief and decorated with a few ink blots. An inner plastic force is at work in the child. Everything that comes to the child from its surroundings is transformed into an inner image, including the formation of organs.

If the child has, say, a father who expresses himself in sudden anger every moment, where every moment in the immediate external experience something happens that causes shock, something that is unmotivated, then the child experiences this; the child experiences this in such a way that it is expressed in its breathing and blood circulation. But by expressing itself in its breathing and blood circulation, it shapes its lungs, it shapes its heart, it shapes its entire vascular system; and the child carries within itself throughout its entire life what it has plastically formed within itself through witnessing the actions of a quick-tempered father.

By this I only mean to suggest how the child has a wonderfully effective plastic force within, how the child is constantly working on itself internally as a sculptor. And when you give the child the doll made from the handkerchief, the forces that rise up into the brain from the human organism in a plastic formative way, namely those from the rhythmic system, from breathing and blood circulation, gently enter the brain. They shape the child's brain in the same way that a sculptor works, shaping the sculptural material with a flexible, easily movable, spiritualized, animated hand: everything takes place in malleability and organic development. The child looks at this handkerchief shaped into a doll, and this becomes the power of imagination in the human being, true power of imagination, which is formed from the rhythmic system into the brain system.

If you give the child a so-called beautiful doll — a doll that can even move, that can move its eyes, that is painted, that has beautiful hair — if you give the child this artistically designed, terribly hideous specter, then the forces from the rhythmic system work upwards, these plastic forces that shape the brain system from the respiratory and blood systems, continuously like lashes of a whip: everything that the child cannot yet understand whips up into the brain. The brain is thoroughly whipped, beaten in a terrible way. That is the secret of the beautiful doll. But it is also the secret of children's play life in many respects.

If you want to lovingly guide a child to play, you must be clear about how much of the child's inner building forces come to the fore. In this respect, our entire civilization is wrong. Our civilization has, for example, invented so-called animism. The child who bumps into the table hits the corner of the table. Our age says: the child animates the table, imagines the table as if it were alive, like a living being, dreams life into the table, hits the table.

That is not true at all. The child does not dream anything into the table, but rather dreams life out of living beings, out of beings that really live. It does not dream life into the table, but rather dreams life out of real living beings. And when it hurts itself, it hits out in a kind of reflex movement; and since everything is still inanimate for the child—it does not dream life into the table—it behaves the same way toward animate and inanimate objects.

From such completely wrong ideas, one can see how our civilization is not at all capable of approaching the child. And so it is a matter of being able to behave really lovingly towards the child, of lovingly guiding it in what it itself wants. And so we should not beat it up inside with beautiful dolls, we should be able to live with it and create the doll that it experiences inside itself.

And so it is with regard to the whole nature of play. Play indeed requires a real understanding of the child's nature. — If we babble like a small child, if we reduce our language to the level of a child, if we do not truly speak in a way that the child must hear as coming truly from our nature, then we are approaching the child with untruthfulness. However, while we should not put ourselves in a position of insincerity, we must be able to put ourselves on the child's level in terms of what is volitional, what enters into playfulness. Then it will become clear to us that the child does not have in its organic nature what is particularly popular in our civilization today: intellectuality. We must therefore not introduce anything into children's play that is in any way intellectually dominated.

Now, in a natural way, children also imitate what is happening in their environment when they play; but one will have rarely experienced a child wanting to become, say, a philologist. It is rare to find a four-year-old child who wants to become a philologist, but a chauffeur, for example, is something they might want to become. Why? Because they see everything that is revealed about the chauffeur. They see it, and it makes an immediate visual impression. What the philologist does does not make a visual impression. It is abstract and passes completely by the child's life. But we should only bring into play what does not pass the child by. Everything intellectual, however, still passes the child's life by. What do we therefore need in order to be able to guide children's play in the right way as adults? We plow, we make hats, we sew clothes, and so on. In all of these things, there is an orientation toward practicality, and in this orientation toward practicality lies intellectualism. Whatever one understands to be the purpose in life, one has penetrated intellectually.

But now everything that is part of life, whether it is plowing, or anything else, building carts, shoeing horses, apart from being oriented toward a purpose, has something that lives in its external form, in its mere external form. When you look at a farmer guiding his plow over the furrows—quite apart from the purpose of this activity—you can feel and sense, if I may express it this way, the formative power of what lives in the image, what becomes the image. If one brings oneself to do so as a human being — and it is the aesthetic sense that brings this about — to perceive everywhere the formative element that is still separate from the purpose, then one obtains that which can really reach the child in the playthings. Precisely by not going for that beauty which is, after all, thoroughly intellectual — which is what today's “beautiful dolls” strive for, but rather what is expressed in the posture, in the whole feeling of the human being, then one is led to the primitive, truly delightful doll, which then looks more like this (a doll carved by Waldorf students is shown), not like the so-called “beautiful” doll. But that is already for older children!

So, in order to become educators, we need to be able to see the aesthetic aspect of work in the work itself, so that we can bring the aesthetic aspect of work to bear on the design of toys. When we bring the aesthetic aspect of work to bear on the design of toys, we come closer to what the child wants from within itself. In our civilization, we have become almost exclusively utilitarian people, that is, intellectual people, and therefore we bring all kinds of intellectual ideas to the child. But the point is that we should not bring to the child what is thought about later life, but what can be felt and sensed in later life. This must be contained in the toy. We may give the boy a plow, but the point is that we put the creative, aesthetic aspect of plowing into the toy. That is what can develop the full power of the human being.

In this respect, kindergartens, which are otherwise highly commendable in many ways, have made serious mistakes. Kindergartens, which were established by Fröbel and others with a truly heartfelt love for children, must be clear about the fact that children are imitative beings, but can only imitate things that are not yet intellectual. So we must not bring all kinds of children's activities into the kindergarten that have been thought up. All the stick laying, braiding, and the like, which often plays such a big role in kindergarten, is contrived. In kindergarten, we should only have in mind what grown-ups do, not what is specially contrived. The connoisseur of human nature is often overcome by a tragic feeling when he enters these well-meaning kindergartens, where there are such beautifully contrived activities. For on the one hand, these kindergartens arise from such infinite goodwill, from so much love for children, and on the other hand, no attention is paid to the fact that everything intellectual in content, everything that is invented in children's work, must be excluded from kindergarten, that only the outward imitation of the outward image of adult activity may be developed in kindergarten.

A child who is trained intellectually before the age of four or five takes something terrible with them into life; they are brought up to be downright materialistic. The more intellectual you educate a child up to the age of four or five, the more materialistic you make them in life. This is because, on the one hand, the brain is processed in such a way that the mind already lives in the forms of the brain and, internally, the person gains the intuition that everything is only material because their brain has been seized by the intellectual so early on.

If you want to educate people to understand the spiritual, then you must introduce them to the so-called external spiritual in its intellectual form as late as possible. then, although it is very necessary, especially in today's civilization, for people to awaken fully in later life, you must allow the child to remain as long as possible in that gentle, dreamlike experience in which it grows into life, allowing it to remain as long as possible in imagination, in imagery, in non-intellectuality. For if you allow its organism to grow strong in the unintellectual, it will later grow into the intellectualism necessary for today's civilization in the right way.

If you whip its brain in the manner suggested, you will spoil the soul of the human being for the rest of its life. Just as you spoil digestion by babbling, just as you spoil the metabolism for later life by teaching it to walk in the wrong, unloving way, so you spoil the soul when you whip the child from within in this way. And so it must become an ideal of our education to abolish, above all, the mental, but also, because the child is a completely physical-mental-spiritual being, the physical-inner corporal punishment — that is, the “beautiful doll” — in order to bring play, above all, to the right level.

Today, I would like to conclude these reflections by pointing out how we must avoid the wrong kind of spirituality so that the right kind of spirituality, the whole human being, can emerge in later life.