The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Address to an Assembly of the Federation for the Tripartite Structure of the Social Organism Protocol Record

[Emil Molt first gives an introduction about the state of the work of establishing works councils, which is not making much progress. Ernst Uehli presents the new weekly newspaper “Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” (Threefolding of the Social Organism).]

Rudolf Steiner: If the threefolding of the social organism is to become what it must become, then it must work as a whole. It will not be possible, for example, to take any part, any link out of the whole structure of the threefold social order. It would not be possible, for example, to realize the economic part of this impulse at some time or other - in about the way it is contained in the so-called “program” - and to introduce it into the world in itself. That would not be possible. It is imperative to strive simultaneously for the three parts of the social organism to develop side by side. Just as in a natural organism one could never speak of creating the head or the chest first and then waiting for the other part to arise from the other limbs, so too can no part of the three-part social organism be tackled on its own. Therefore, just as the seed - which you have heard today has not yet borne very hopeful fruit - had emerged, but as the seed of the economic program through the idea of the works councils had emerged, it had to be borne in mind that the work should not be done only in the economic field in our sense, but that the universality should be taken into account. Therefore, while working for the works councils, the leadership of the Federation for the Tripartite Structure of the Social Organism decided, on the one hand, to gather around them personalities who were believed to be interested in creating and preparing for another link in the social organism: the spiritual link, the cultural link. And we tried to start by setting up a kind of cultural council – or whatever you want to call it. You will find a detailed account of what is actually being sought with this establishment of a cultural council in the call to establish a cultural council, as it has now been provisionally published and as it will probably be in your hands. So I will have little more to say to you about the matter today.

It was really possible to organize a kind of collaboration, a collaboration between a larger number of people. Those interested in the most diverse areas of intellectual life were repeatedly here together, and the ideas of such a cultural council were discussed. But then they also went into the individual work. Everyone tried to contribute, to gather the thoughts that had occurred to them in these smaller meetings – the thoughts that had occurred to the individual about reforms, about the transformation of intellectual life. And from this collaboration, like a final editorial board, the first version of this appeal for the establishment of a cultural council emerged.

The next step was to win over a larger group of people who, out of a sense of the needs of contemporary culture, would have joined in the call: Something must be done in the field of intellectual life in our very difficult times. - We then tried to approach this or that representative of intellectual life. It would be a very sad, indeed a very depressing chapter if one were to describe the details of the negotiations that took place in connection with the first figure of this call. Now, in these difficult times, it should be recognized that, above all, a renewal, a reorganization of intellectual life is necessary in the deepest sense, that is, insofar as it belongs to the social organism. This must be recognized, on the one hand, by the fundamental character that the intellectual life of cultured humanity has gradually taken on. It must be recognized, secondly, by how this intellectual life is administered today. That this intellectual life is the basis of what is actually happening today, which is presenting itself as confusion in the chaos of our culture and our entire civilization – this should actually be recognized.

We should recognize what fruits it has borne that for three to four centuries our intellectual life, especially in the form of schooling and education, has been repeatedly and repeatedly absorbed by the state organization. We should recognize that today we have hardly any sense of the innermost needs of intellectual life, which can only exist in the urge for a free shaping of this life. No feeling has been aroused by the fact that the absorption of spiritual life by the state was a decisive factor not only for the filling of posts and for external administration, but also for the content of this spiritual life itself. This could not be shown as clearly in the past as it is today, at the great turning points in the development of humanity that we are currently facing. Over the past three to four centuries, as important branches of our intellectual life have gradually been absorbed into state life, a form of our intellectual life has developed that is no longer capable of producing ideas that would have been a match for the facts, which are asserting themselves more and more powerfully, more and more extensively.

Thus it has come about that, wherever they were locked out of these or those foundations of intellectual life, thoughts were too short to control the facts, that these facts went their own way, came into their own momentum, and in the end it was the thoughtless facts into which man was no longer able to send thoughts, have brought about our terrible world catastrophe, in which we are still very much involved, and with regard to which we are only now entering decisive points, decisive stages.

Nothing shows the decline of our intellectual life more than the state of the proletariat, which is so significant for the movement of today's people. The leading circles, who have been leading up to now, feel with horror what revelations, what programs, what party maxims are emerging from the proletariat. In my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question', I wanted to point out the crucial point. I wanted to point out that the state of mind of the leading members of the proletariat today is nothing other than the legacy of the intellectual life of the bourgeoisie, of the leading, guiding circles.

Recently, two members of the Federation for the Threefolding of the Social Organism who belong to workers' circles gave a lecture at a public meeting. This was followed by a discussion in which prominent figures of the proletariat, who were far to the left, intervened. I then spoke a few words, which amounted to saying that, in my opinion, these personalities, who were far to the left and belonged to communist circles, had nothing but the worst offshoots of the intellectual heritage of the leading and governing circles – which they were until now – in their speeches. I would like to say that one has never heard such bourgeois talk as was the case with these independent and communist personalities. They have learned this from their bourgeois ancestors. They had to learn it. And anyone who can look more deeply into the official development of our intellectual life, into the administration of our intellectual life, knows that this intellectual life has finally led to the complete withering away of intellectual production and that, where intellectual matters are concerned, nothing is left but empty phrases. We live in a world of empty phrases. There are still people who do not want to see these things. There are still people in Central Europe – it is hard to believe – who do not want to see these things, who still want to indulge in the illusions that have allowed them to numb themselves for so long, about rushing into self-inflicted destruction. Self-inflicted because they do not want to face what is without prejudice, because they only want to hold on to old habits of thinking and feeling.

The aim of a cultural council as it is conceived today must be a complete reorganization of the entire education and teaching system. I would like to say that something like this can be tackled on a small scale. It is to be tackled by setting up the so-called 'Waldorf School' here. This Waldorf School is to be brought into being by our friend Mr. Molt, initially for the children of the workers at Waldorf-Astoria. This school should be set up in such a way that the children between the ages of six and fifteen are taught not in the way that teaching has been conducted at this school level so far - out of the mere needs of the template state - but in a way that is appropriate to human nature between the ages of seven and fifteen, according to a thorough understanding of that human nature. What people have in mind as a so-called unified school that is not born out of anything other than human nature, which is a unity for all people, especially in these years, should underlie the entire structure of the Waldorf school. The whole structure of the Waldorf school should be based on this knowledge of what should grow with the human being in the world, and on this knowledge of how teaching should be structured. Teachers should work seriously to receive a pedagogy that is based on real anthropology, on a comprehensive anthropology. The task of these teachers is to educate the human being to develop the powers that lie within the human being, which must be cultivated during childhood, so that something can be avoided in the future that every observer of human nature, who has a knowledge of psychology, can see so clearly today.

Indeed, what is the most important and essential characteristic in the life of our time? What is it that weighs so heavily on our minds today as a major cultural concern? If we look at what prevails among people today, we find that most people today are what I would call “bent natures”: those people whose will and feeling and thinking are “bent” by the vicissitudes of life. Why are they “bent”? The reason is that our school education for children is such that the most important powers of the soul are not strengthened to such an extent that they can no longer be “bent” later on, that the human being is able to cope with life. This should be the concern when setting up a Waldorf school: to prepare the human being for life in such a way that the soul and emotional forces that can only be developed in childhood are developed so that the human being can cope with life. Everything that is to be taught in so-called subjects is only secondary. Everything that figures as a so-called subject will always be asked: How does it contribute to the development of the powers of the human soul? When is this and this, at what age should this or that be introduced to the child? Lessons should be taught from a comprehensive understanding of the human being. Then the people who come out of such a school will be able to stand strong in life. Not less, but more effort will be needed by the human being in the age that hopes for social organization - in contrast to the divisions into class differences and the like that existed before. Of course, what is today the middle school, grammar school, secondary school and so on would also have to be reorganized, and what should be completely different for the future if one wants to have people who are good for life; it would have to be raised to a higher level than the lower level of elementary school, and the reorganization would have to extend up to the highest levels of teaching, at least to the college level. You can find more details on how this is to be achieved in the appeal to found a cultural council.

As I said, you can do something on a small scale, like the Waldorf School, with someone who really has such a deep understanding, like our friend Mr. Molt, for what needs to be done in terms of threefolding. The individual can have a beneficial effect by doing such a foundation. But with such an individual foundation today, the necessary is not yet done. Today it is a matter of awakening the consciousness in people in the widest possible circle: that which can be intended for such a particular thing should become the common property of humanity if we do not want to sail into the downfall of European culture. Today it always looks as if one is merely putting some kind of fantasy before the world when one says: we are faced with the “either/or”. Either we must decide on great things, or we must familiarize ourselves with the thought that European civilization is sailing towards its destruction. Anyone who still does not believe in this “either/or” today simply does not understand the times. Today's call is not for our timidity, but for our courageous will. And here I must say: in view of everything that has been said about the transformation of spiritual life in the sense of threefolding, it is truly one of the most serious disappointments that now, after weeks of efforts, nothing more is available than the attempt at such an appeal, which has indeed found a number of signatures, but of course not nearly enough. Because what is to be done today must be well-founded in the broadest sense of the mass judgment. Only in this way can we move forward.

The negotiations have shown time and again that the old problem is also occurring in this matter: one person wants this, the other that; one person did not like a sentence, another did not like the stylization; one person finds it necessary to spend weeks discussing a matter. Yes, it must be said: the concerns that have been expressed, especially by this or that personality on whom we had counted in this cultural appeal, were of such a nature that they really proved how necessary the transformation of our intellectual life is. – There is nothing that shows the poor state of our intellectual life more than the intellectual life that has produced such objections as those that have been raised against us. That is why this cultural appeal must be discussed today.

You see, when we talk about what concerns humanity as a whole, what is so clearly shown by the whole configuration of our time that it concerns all of humanity, what do we learn? These days, I read in various Stuttgart newspapers a description of what the Waldorf School wants. This description was also contained in the local Social Democratic paper of the USPD, the “Sozialdemokrat”. The “Sozialdemokrat” could not help but make the following comment on this description, which was [objective]: The matter would be all very well, but it comes from factory owners, and we will not put up with that.

This is the state of mind of contemporary humanity. But this state of mind of contemporary humanity is particularly evident in what has been encountered in so-called “bourgeois” economics, namely the most enlightened economists at our university, the leading economists at our university.

I ask you to buy this issue, which is entitled “Das gelbe Blatt” (The Yellow Sheet) – the current issue. You will find an article by Professor Lujo Brentano about the entrepreneur. Of course, today the newspapers are everywhere reporting on Professor Brentano's article about the entrepreneur, as they are accustomed to doing based on their belief in authority. For our time, which according to its illusion is not one of blind faith in authority – it is more blindly faith in authority than Catholics ever were in relation to their church leaders in earlier times. But try to read this article by Professor Brentano on entrepreneurship with your common sense, emancipated from all this blind faith in authority. It is to be hoped that as many people as possible today will apply common sense to such things.

First of all, there is a definition of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is characterized in three points. And a concept of the entrepreneur is created, a concept that the luminary of economic science, Professor Brentano, ultimately uses to such an extent that the concept of the entrepreneur also includes the ordinary proletarian worker; because, according to Professor Brentano, the ordinary proletarian worker is the entrepreneur of his own labor, which he brings to market at his own risk and expense. Today our intellectual life is such that pure nonsense enjoys the greatest fame. Until we can fully grasp the full weight of this fact, we will not develop a sense of what is necessary. And until we develop this sense, we will not understand how much inner courage is required for this transformation of our intellectual life; how much is demanded by a truly fundamental renewal of our intellectual life, especially of our education and teaching.

Oh, I would give anything to have the gift of very different words and word coinages to make today's humanity aware of what one really had to achieve through a bloody struggle for life. Do you think it is easy to say such things as I had to say against a so-called luminary of today's science? If you say such a thing, everyone sees you as an angry rabble-rouser, as a person who must be silenced. And only the most sacred sense of duty can lead one to tell the truth about these things today. And this truth is serious, very serious. For what have we already achieved in the details?

I would like to recall the lecture I gave in Heilbronn on the threefold social organism, which Mr. Molt has already mentioned today. In the review of the “Heilbronner Zeitung” that Mr. Molt reported on, there are many things that do not interest me, because I am highly indifferent to what a line-pushing writer writes about what is spoken out of today's seriousness of life. But if this wordiness becomes a symptom of what lives in today's hearts and minds, then it needs to be considered a little. There it has yet such a wordy windbag managed to say that I have resorted to “the three old hits Freedom, Equality, Fraternity”. Well, this is how far this generation has come, that today one can freely say that these three great goods of humanity – freedom, equality, fraternity – are “hits”, that one can mock what is most sacred to people. One is reminded of the words of Hamlet: “Writing tablets, writing tablets, that one may write down, that one may smile and always smile and yet be a villain.” And one would like to say: writing tablets, so that one can be considered an educated person in the face of contemporary humanity and even be allowed to write in newspapers and still be allowed to mock the highest ideals of humanity in the most stupid way!

These things are rooted in our present-day culture; that they be seen, that what everyone who takes today's world seriously longs for, and that out of this longing develops that which in turn can result in a recovery of our social organism!

We are really on the verge of the catastrophe that is looming in the most diverse areas of life. What we need is to find the strength to draw upon our inner resources. We need to do everything we can, especially in view of the impending danger to Central Europe, to draw upon our innermost human powers. We need to let the danger to Central Europe become the impetus to do everything we can from our innermost being. Much will be taken from this Central Europe, it will be made very, very poor. And truly, one is repeatedly reminded of what one has already had to let sink in again and again from life, very, very bitterly: It was always a painful sight for me to see a young child here and there in more intimate circles during these war years, because then one had to feel: The old have at least something behind them, have a memory of something; but those who are now children are growing up in terrible times. And today, this feeling does not only come to mind through the general world situation; today it also comes to mind when one has to notice how sleepy humanity is in the face of what can be observed today. It must be observed how we are absolutely sailing into destruction if we do not start from such points of view, which I have been able to characterize here today, albeit very imperfectly, in just a few words.

Let me say it once again: Much will be taken from this Central Europe; it will be made very poor. It can only be saved if it draws on something that cannot be taken away: the innermost powers of the soul. And it is precisely the folk forces of this Central Europe that are capable of cultivating this innermost power of the soul. We have not cultivated it in Central Europe in recent decades – that is our great fault. Let us learn from necessity to cultivate it.

This is what comes to mind today when one wants to speak about something like the founding of a cultural council. It is from such serious foundations that this appeal for the founding of a cultural council is written. May its individual sentences be found good or bad; I do not care what these individual sentences are called - it is the spirit behind them that matters! And one would like to see this spirit recognized; to see how it cannot be grasped merely in the mind, but how it must be grasped as a stimulus to real action for a renewal, a transformation, a new creation of our spiritual life.

At the end of the first world war, Emil Molt, managing director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, foresaw that a completely new basis must be found for education in the new world which even then was beginning to arise. He therefore invited Rudolf Steiner to become the educational director of a school he intended to found for the children of the workers in his factory—the first Waldorf School opened in 1919.

Steiner asked a number of people from all walks of life to become the original teachers in this school, and they gladly responded to his call. To them he gave the course of fourteen lectures contained in this book, as well as two other courses published in English as Practical Course for Teachers and Discussions with Teachers, which should be studied in conjunction with this work.

All these teachers were already familiar with Steiner's fundamental teaching as to the nature and evolution of man and the world, such as will be found in his books Philosophy of Freedom, Occult Science—an Outline, and Theosophy (a term which he used in a much wider historical sense than has come to be the case in England). The first of these books contains the philosophical justification for the existence of the spiritual investigations on which the present work is founded: the second gives a description of the evolution of the kingdoms of nature, the sequence of historical epochs, the relation of man to the hierarchies—on all of which much is built in these lectures: the third gives a full account of the threefold, sevenfold and ninefold nature of man, in which elements from the past are always meeting what is striving to be born out of the future. For Steiner's psychology is unique in that it takes account not only of forces playing into man from the past but also of future states of consciousness and being, which will not be realised till the far distant future but which are already affecting his character and destiny.

It was Steiner's way to approach a problem from one point of view at a time and develop that view fully. At another time he would approach the same problem from another viewpoint, and present what at first hearing may seem to be on almost opposite conclusion. It is important to remember in reading his works that nothing is intended to be final, conclusive or dogmatic. Life is full of complications and contradictions, and any valid account of it must reflect this fact.

After the founding of the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart in 1919 many other schools were soon founded on the same basis in a number of countries, and Steiner was called upon to lecture on education in various countries, including England. A list of further translated educational works will be found at the end of this volume.

Some personal words to the original group of teachers, stressing the importance of the founding of the school, with which Steiner opened the course of lectures, have been omitted from this translation.

In this translation an intimate conversational style has been preserved in order to convey as far as possible some idea of the local colour and scene at the time the lectures were held.

The occasion was the opening of the Waldorf School, Stuttgart—the first school to be started by Dr. Steiner. And in these lectures he was to instruct those who aspired to be teachers under this new system. As far back as 1907 he had given his views in lectures to the public and in printed books, but his proposals had not materialized until 1919.

In that year, thanks to the initiative and financial help of Herr Molt, the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria Tobacco Factory at Stuttgart, a school had been built. At the inauguration, Dr. Steiner gave three parallel courses of instruction, one called Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Pädagogik dealing with the Theory of Education on the basis of the entire human being. It is quoted frequently in this volume, but has not yet been published in English. These lectures were followed every morning by the ones now given in this book. In the afternoon came the third series as a sort of practical seminary (the English publication is being prepared).

It seems, therefore, more consistent with the intimate relationship existing between the lecturer and his audience to translate the original text in the frank and homely style in which Dr. Steiner dealt with the questions put to him, omitting a few paragraphs which have no bearing at all outside Germany.

It is only through the public-spirited generosity of Frau Dr. Steiner that these lectures have now come into the hands of the public. They appeared in book form in the original German in 1933 and 1934. Until that time they had been kept in the custody of a few teachers to guide them in their work.

After the opening of the Waldorf School, news of its rapid success soon reached English and American Educationalists, and in 1922, upon the invitation of the Educational Union for the Realization of Spiritual Values, Dr. Steiner lectured at Stratford-on-Avon and Oxford, and on Shakespeare's birthday gave the inaugural lecture at Stratford-on-Avon.

In that year he spoke at several places in England and gave a course of lectures at Ilkley in 1923.

Dr. Steiner died in 1925, but interest in his life's work is increasing, and the result can be seen especially at the Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland.

But it is increasing also in America and other English-speaking countries. Schools are starting and are already promising good results.

The Goetheanum, Dornach, is the recognized centre of all Dr. Steiner's activities, and its educational agency in England is the Rudolf Steiner Educational Union.

The Rudolf Steiner Educational Union has been formed for the co-ordination and representation of educational work on the lines laid down by Rudolf Steiner.

The offices in England are at 54 Bloomsbury Street, London, W.C.I.

At the end of this volume will be found a short description of those translations into English of Dr. Steiner's Educational works now available. These and other works by Rudolf Steiner are procurable from the Rudolf Steiner Educational Union.

THE EDITOR

Several weeks ago, when we all came to this school for the first time, I visited you more often. Then there were a few weeks when I had to be quite far away from here, but each morning when I got up and went to work, I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children and their teachers doing now?” This thought came to me often during the day. And now, in the festive Christmas season, I have had the privilege of being able to visit you again. I went into all your classes and asked many of you, “Do you love your teachers?” [“Yes!” shout the children.] And you see, you answered me warmly, just like that. And then I said to you, “That is an especially nice Christmas gift for me!”

And it is a nice Christmas gift for me. You see, dear children, I have to think about how you have been spending your days since Herr Molt gave us the gift of this Waldorf School. After resting from evening until morning in the divine spirit that watches over your souls from the time you go to sleep until the time you wake up, and after you have washed and dressed and gotten all ready, you come up here to this beautiful schoolhouse. And I believe that many of you, maybe even all of you, look forward to everything that will be here for you in this beautiful schoolhouse. [“Yes!” shout the children.]

Dear children, you have reason to look forward to it. You see, while I was away from you I thought of you often, and in my thoughts I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children doing?” And I also said to myself, “They will be doing just fine, because they have nice capable teachers, and these nice capable teachers approach them with real love and are working very hard so that something good will come of the children.” And then I had to think of how you look forward to coming up here and of the love you show for your teachers. These teachers have to work long and hard to be able to teach you all the good and beautiful things that will make good and capable people out of you.

And you know, my dear children, I was especially pleased when I was in the classes and some children would come in playing the part of Ruprecht¹ or of little angels, and they sang and talked about the child Jesus, about the holy Christ Child. It was beautiful and grand that you could speak about the Christ with such love, and that you could listen with such love.

And do you know where your teachers get all the strength and ability they need so that they can teach you to grow up to be good and capable people? They get it from the Christ, whom we think about at Christmas. We think about how He came into the world to bring joy to all people, and you gave some beautiful presentations about Him today.

You see, my dear children, there are beings on earth that are not like human beings—for example, the animals around us—and we might often think that we should envy these animals. You can look up and see the birds flying, and perhaps then you might say, “Oh, if only we could fly, too! Then we would be able to soar into the air.” We human beings cannot fly like the birds because we have no wings. However, dear children, we can fly into the element of the spiritual, and we have two wings to fly there. The wing on the left is called “hard work,” and the other wing on the right is called “paying attention.” We cannot see them, but these two wings—hard work and paying attention—make it possible for us to fly into life and become people who are really ready for life. If we work hard and pay attention as children, and if we have teachers that are as good and capable as yours, then what makes us fit for life will come to us, and on the wings of hard work and paying attention we will be able to fly into life, where the love of our teachers carries us.

You know, you can sometimes think that there are things that are more fun than learning. But that is not really true; there is no greater joy than learning. You see, when you enjoy something that lets you be inattentive and does not make you work hard, then the joy is over immediately. You enjoy it, and then the joy is gone. But when you enjoy what you can learn, when you are flying on the wings of hard work and paying attention, then my dear children, something stays behind in your souls. (Later on you will know what the soul is.) Something stays in your soul, and you can enjoy that over and over again. When we have learned something good and proper, it comes back again and again; we enjoy it again and again with a joy that never stops. But the other fun things, the ones that come only from inattentiveness and laziness, they come to an end.

You see, because many of you—all of you, I would like to believe—want to work hard and pay attention to what your nice teachers are giving you, I was so glad to see your love for your teachers streaming out of your eyes when I saw you again. And so that you do not forget it, I would like to ask you again, “Don't you all sincerely love your teachers?” [“Yes, we do!” shout the children.] Now, that is what you should always say. That is what you should always feel, and then the spirit whose earthly life and birth we remember at Christmas time, the Christ spirit, will take joy in you.

Now, my dear children, when you have felt your teachers' love all day long up here, then you can go home again and tell your parents about what you have learned, and your parents will be glad and say to themselves, “Well, our children are going to grow up to be good and capable people.”

Make sure to write that in your souls, for now is a good time to do that. When we think of the great festival that reminds us that the Christ entered our world to bring comfort and joy to all human beings who turn their hearts and souls toward Him, then we can also inscribe in our souls the intention to become good human beings. Because the power of Christ is helping you, you will become what you write in your souls today, what you seriously intend to become. And when I come again and see that you have made even more progress, when I come again and see that you can once again show me that you have taken love for your teachers into your hearts and kept it there, then I will again be very glad. My warmest Christmas wish for you today is that this love will grow ever more perfect in you, and that you may continue to unfold the left wing of the human soul, which is hard work, and the right wing, which is paying attention.

And now that I have spoken to the children, let me still say a few words to those who have accompanied them here. What I just said to the children flows from a deeply satisfied heart, because I really have received the most beautiful Christmas greeting from them. When I came into the school, what wafted toward me was something I would like to call the good spirit of this school. It was the really good spirit, the good and unifying spirit, that brings teachers and children together here.

You see, in these days a Christmas mood was resting on all the serious teaching that was taking place, and it was deeply satisfying to perceive this Christmas mood, into which the revelation of Christ speaks, if I may put it like that, in all the corridors and especially in the classrooms. This was no mere supplement to the regular lessons. You could feel that our faculty managed to warm and enlighten everything that was being presented to the children's souls and hearts and understanding with the real, true spirit of Christ. Here, in accordance with the wishes of the divine spirit, we do not speak the name of Christ after every sentence—for “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!”—but it is nonetheless true that this spirit of Christ is with us in all our individual subjects and in every teaching activity. This is something that can readily be felt, especially at this time of year. Perhaps you too have been able to feel it in what came to meet you out of this Christmas assembly.

And finally, to conclude my Christmas greeting, I would like to appeal to the children whom you have sent here. I hope their progress pleases you.

Children, when you enter these rooms with the other boys and girls, recall that you are meant to love each other warmly, to love each and every other one. If love prevails among you, you will thrive under the car e of your teachers, and your parents at home will have no concerns and will have loving thoughts of how you are spending your time here.

There is something we may say today, ladies and gentlemen, which should resound, as the spirit of this school, from every word and glance the children bring home to you who have sent them here, as an echo of what is meant to permeate all of our human journeying on earth since the mystery of Golgotha took place, to permeate all human work and activity, and especially all activity in which the spirit has work to do. May the words that ring in our souls today weave through everything that human beings do out of self-understanding, weave like a warming breath of air or beam of sunlight:

The revelation of the divine from heavenly heights,
And peace to human beings on earth who are of good Will!

Luke 2:14

Our great ideal is to cultivate this good will in the children of the Waldorf School. Our concern must be to find the governance of the spirit of the world in our work, in everything we do. May the Christmas message, “The revelation of the spirit of God from the heavenly heights, and peace to human beings on earth who are of good will,” trickle down into all the work of the Waldorf School as well. May the school's working strength be governed by brotherly love and by the peace that inspires and supports all work! That, dear ladies and gentlemen, is my Christmas greeting to you today.

• 1. Ruprecht: in the European tradition, the Moorish helper of St. Nicholas, who carries a black sack and administers symbolic punishments to children who have been bad during the past year.

Dr. Steiner: It would be good if we could begin with your questions, with those things weighing upon you. Tomorrow’s School Association meeting will not be very long, so we can perhaps discuss things more thoroughly afterward. Today, I would like to learn about what is happening in the faculty itself.

A teacher: Saturday is the opening ceremony, but we have not yet spoken about it.

Dr. Steiner: It is difficult that the school closing and opening ceremonies are occurring so quickly one after another. Have you thought of some way you would like to begin?

A teacher: Perhaps you would say something.

Dr. Steiner: I would be happy to do that. I think it is also necessary that the class teachers once again receive the children. I am not certain if we should create a visible symbol for the beginning of school. A certain impression is made upon the children when the class teachers receive them. That is also true for those teachers of the other subjects like foreign language, eurythmy, shop, and handwork. The reception line is rather long, but it makes a certain impression upon the children when we say some warm words to them at the beginning. You will see that it makes an impression. I will give a short speech first, and then we could go on to that. Perhaps we could do something musically to receive the children, that is, play something to conclude the ceremony. It would be nice if the ceremony concluded musically.

A teacher: We could sing something.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, that is the sort of thing I mean.

A teacher asks about the teaching assignments.

Dr. Steiner: That is not an easy question. We have already determined some of the new class teachers, but others will begin later. Miss Düberg will take over the 1a class, Miss von Grunelius, the 3b class, and Mr. Ruhtenberg, 5b.

Then we have the eighth, ninth, and tenth grade classes. It will not be easy to continue what would otherwise be so desirable, namely, the system we have had until now.

(Speaking to a teacher) Could you perhaps take over mechanics and surveying and survey mapping? It would certainly be good if we had three teachers for the tenth grade. Then there would also be three teachers for the ninth grade. It would be good if we could arrange the last three grades so that they are taken care of by three teachers.

We will need to replace Dr. Schwebsch by the beginning of July. We do not have enough teachers. Mr. Englert is missing and Dr. Kolisko can come only in the fall.

How do we divide the material? Actually, I would prefer to have four teachers for these three classes, but that is not possible right now. What would you prefer to teach, Dr. Stein?

A teacher: I would prefer that you set my task.

Dr. Steiner: I think that you should remain with those things you have been doing. You should do literary history and history in the tenth grade, as well as literature and German in all three grades. I also think that Dr. X. should take over history for the eighth and ninth grades, and that you, Mr. Y., should teach mathematics, physics, and natural sciences for the three grades, as well as mechanics and surveying for the tenth grade. The only problem is that that is only one-third of the time. We will not make a lesson plan, but only determine the amount of time for each subject. I actually wanted four teachers, but that is not possible now. We could try out young Englert for teaching gymnastics.

A teacher: I had assumed I would be doing the practical work in the higher grades, or be teaching those children who have already graduated [from the eighth grade].

Dr. Steiner: The technology class begins in eleventh grade. You are an electrician. Somebody will need to teach spinning and weaving since that is a specific subject at the technical university. That is something our people from the Research Institute could do.

A teacher: I can learn that.

Dr. Steiner: (Speaking to Dr. Kolisko) When you begin in October, you could take over the Health and First Aid course in the tenth grade. That is something we need.

We now have only the problem of the 1b class. (Speaking to Mrs. Stein, who had been away for some months) You want to return to eurythmy. Could you, perhaps, take over the 1b class for six weeks or so? The only problem is your dialect [Mrs. Stein was from Hungary]. The children will pick that up. Perhaps, the best solution would be to ask Dr. Schubert to take over the 1b class.

I have sought everywhere, but have been unable to find anyone to teach religion. We need to separate the children according to grades. I want to avoid the appearance that the religious teaching is something integrated into the school.

There is a discussion of how to schedule foreign language instruction, during which mention is made that some of the Greek and Latin classes have very few children.

Dr. Steiner: If you only have one, if only one child is there, then that child needs to be taught. There is nothing to be done about it, that is what must be. Dr. Röschl is coming in the fall, and then we can take this up more forcefully. Let’s begin with the fifth grade. But we were speaking of the curriculum.

In handwork, we can add only the tenth grade, and we should make it increasingly artistic.

There is some discussion about the amount of work done by some of the teachers.

Dr. Steiner: Mr. X. has 22 hours. That is too much, and the same is true of Mr. Y. with his 24. Mr. Z. could do more, he only has 16 hours, whereas Mr. V. has sufficient with 22 hours.

A teacher asks about the connection between the various organs within the human being and the various periods of history. [Four days before, at the conclusion of the first lecture of the course on teaching adolescents, Dr. Steiner had mentioned that teachers could learn how to treat late Egyptian history by observing the function of the liver.]

Dr. Steiner: You should not do that too consciously. If you were to do it in a very conscious way, it would be forced. I would prefer the history teacher to simply acquire an understanding of the human organism. He will then discover the organ that provides the correct perspective.

There is not sufficient liveliness in the instruction. In most classes, you seem to be having difficulty working with the children. They are not all attentive, and many are not keeping up with their work. That is a problem we need to overcome.

I noticed, for example, that many of the children were very lethargic in the discussion about Jean Paul.

A teacher: That always happened when I was too abstract, that is, when I attempted to present something too strongly conceptual. When I gave examples and such things, then they were certainly interested.

Dr. Steiner: You certainly do not need to overemphasize the participation. You need to occasionally bring in some sort of “at ease!” without letting them get out of hand. You can achieve that when you have their complete attention. Then, you can slip something in by discussing some detail or making a joke or something like that. It is good for children when you bring in something that is not actually a part of the lesson so that you build a good relationship with them. Of course, you shouldn’t become a clown for the class, but it is certainly important to have a relationship to them. You should also bring in the relationships of the children to one another.

Dr. Steiner reads a letter from the medical inspector who, among other things, mentions that the children at the Waldorf School have bad teeth.

r. Steiner: That is just a bluff. That is something that could be determined only by investigating the situation. That is simply stupid. We would need to determine which children have bad teeth; how many have bad teeth and how many have good teeth. With those children who have bad teeth, we would have to find out where they come from, if they are workers’ children. We would then have to look more specifically at them. The fact that we have so many children with bad teeth is because we have so many workers’ children who are not well taken care of and thus have bad teeth. Do you have any insight into this question?

A teacher: I looked at the children in my class and saw that their teeth were not particularly bad. The worst was K. who came from America.

Dr. Steiner: It is quite common that children who come from far away have a bad tooth or sometimes more. We should look at that in more detail. It is total nonsense to say that the children at the Waldorf School have bad teeth. At the time that the good doctor looked at the children, the school had existed for not even two years. Even if demonic forces had brought all these children together, and even if they had worsened here in the Waldorf School, that would not be visible so quickly. Even if we went so far as to think that there were something in the Waldorf School that ruins teeth—we could certainly think that about the eurythmy room—that would certainly not be visible in one and three-quarters years.

The gym is really terrible. Apparently the ground underneath it is not very good. It must be moldy. The cellar is damp. It has a moldy smell to it. We will move the eurythmy into another room. How are things with the construction of the new rooms? A report is given.

Dr. Steiner: Next spring, we will have the eleventh grade and will need a number of new rooms. We most urgently need more rooms for teaching music. That is something we really need. Basically, everything we have is just a make-shift, and that is terrible, that is a real problem. We still are missing something for completing the construction, something very important. The money. Two-and-ahalf million Marks. The Waldorf School Association cannot provide that.

Emil Molt proposes that the company should do it and take out a loan.

Dr. Steiner: Isn’t that what people mean in Vienna when they say, “Six of one and half-a-dozen of the other?”

Emil Molt: People say that here, too.

The possibility of obtaining more money is discussed.

Dr. Steiner: The first thing we need to take up today is the organization of the school. Then, in the next few evenings we need to look at the pedagogy, particularly in regard to extending the instruction this year and also in regard to the lower grades.

Today, I would like to begin with the eleventh grade, which will be the highest class. I would like to discuss in relation to some of the things I said in the short introductory course at the beginning of the school year, and in relation to what I said about those students when they entered the tenth grade. I said we would have to be especially careful with those children because they are, in a sense, at a difficult age. As I already mentioned to some of you, I could do nothing else other than listen when the tenth grade invited me to meet with them. Since then, I have been able to further develop what I observed at that time and what the children said, and I can now say that I have the impression that the Waldorf School was really not able to cope with that group of children last year. I also have to admit that the situation of this highest class is very troubling for me. Today, we certainly do not need to help foster the opinion that is arising among a small number of people in regard to the Waldorf School. We must, of course, seriously consider how we can learn to cope with students in the upper grades.

There is a great deal we can say about that. I hope that you, the faculty, will express your opinions also, but I would like to say that I have the impression that the children’s relationship to the faculty has not at all taken on a desirable form. The situation is actually such that these specific students do not feel genuinely connected to the school. You could certainly object that some of the children are lazy and disinterested, but I have already taken that into account. It is unimportant to me that there are some lazy children; some are difficult to handle, although I have taken that into account. Nevertheless, I need to say that the school could not cope with the highest grade last year, and that we unquestionably must find a way to correct the results of the previous year, regardless of the personalities involved. It is important that we correct much of what occurred.

The main problem in this class is that the children are not really present during instruction. They have no inner connection to the instruction. In a certain way, they distanced themselves from the material to be learned. Some of the children thought they learned too little in that class, but that is a judgment and children form judgments after they finish puberty. That is a fact. Now that this judgment has arisen, if we want to maintain the good name of the school, we will have to see that this attitude is, in fact, corrected.

If you did not believe that we must make a fundamental correction, I would certainly be troubled by the school organization. The previous tenth grade is causing me much trouble. Now, however, I would like to hear what you have to say about this class so that we can all decide how to proceed. In such things as these, we must speak extremely clearly and be aware matters have gone beyond our control.

A number of teachers discuss the matter.

A teacher: The children do not have the sense of security provided by a strict upbringing, a rigid structure. They have the feeling they are at loose ends.

Dr. Steiner: That is true only of those who have been brought up strictly. Deeper things are taking place here, but, of course, teaching according to various periods of development has the advantage of giving the students guidelines, they have something to hold onto. The feeling of being at loose ends arises from the way you are presenting this. Being at loose ends is a good term for this feeling. There is no real working together, and that is terribly dangerous. That is what I attempted to counteract by having one class teacher for as long as possible. That offers some protection against being at loose ends. But even in those cases where different teachers need to have the class, we should not come to this feeling.

N.G. is one of the most absent-minded children, he is one of the most difficult to handle. He is pulled this way and that.

A teacher: The children know what they should know, but they do not have the will to work independently.

Dr. Steiner: That is a problem that lies with the children, and one that we do not need to discuss. What is important now is how we cope with the children.

We have not taken the things I mentioned about these children at the beginning of the school year sufficiently into account. At that time, I intentionally said, but it was not taken into account, that the children are moving into an age that is really the most difficult. Afterward, it will become easier. This age is the most difficult, and we have not taken that into account.

A teacher says he did not have any difficulties. He had a good relationship with the students.

Dr. Steiner: I don’t mean the personal relationship. What I do mean is the relationship that results from the subject matter and the actual teaching. There is a real difference, and it needs to be clearly stated. The children say to themselves that a teacher is a real nice person, but they do not want to be taught by that teacher. The problem we have here is that an attitude has arisen such that the children do not know what to do with what they are taught.

A teacher: They resisted French.

Dr. Steiner: The children are wondering why they should learn that. They should not have such thoughts.

You also need to be able to cope with the boys. I can imagine going through Cicero and really awakening their enthusiasm. Remember, you have the children at an age when you as the teacher must be much more interested in the material than when you had a lower grade. Think about how you teach when you are enthusiastic about the material yourself. You can’t go wrong if you are enthusiastic about it. You can learn so much yourselves, and then come into the class with enthusiasm. In that case, you cannot miss the mark so easily.

A teacher: They ask, “Why are we learning that? We already did that in the beginning.”

Dr. Steiner: There you can see how little you need to really arouse interest.

A teacher: They want a deportment class.

Dr. Steiner: They like that.

A number of teachers mention there has been a great deal of change in the classes.

Dr. Steiner: That ruined things, all this being pushed about.

What disturbed the children the most was that they asked questions and did not always get an answer.

That is something that begins at this age, and you cannot protect the children from it. They could go to quite different lectures.

A significant problem is that the children do not have enough opportunity to fail and be absurd. They listen to the teacher. There is a great deal of lecturing instead of teaching. They have a tendency, from the very beginning, to judge. When you do not lecture, but instead ask questions so that the children have an opportunity to be corrected, something their souls long for, then that problem does not occur, and they will become more modest. When they say something and are then rebuffed, they will be less pretentious. That is something that you use too little in your teaching.

A teacher: The children want more drawing and painting.

Dr. Steiner: The children in the lower grades paint enough. In the upper grades, they are theoretically past that, at least in the three upper classes. They did not get into working together. They are losing their ability for teamwork. The tenth grade has no firm inner foundation. They were completely at a loss. What I am speaking of is in connection with the main lesson and some of the other things related to it.

A teacher: I was to present meter, poetics, The Niebelungen and Gudrun. There was a bad feeling that came into it because I did not well understand what I needed to teach. I was uncertain with this material.

Dr. Steiner: That is not at all true, my dear professor. I do not believe that was the main problem. I think that the somewhat negative, skeptical attitude of the faculty found its way into the class. There is an attitude that some do not agree with some things, and that is often emphasized. A kind of negative skepticism, a certain reserve of judgment, affects your teaching, particularly when you overemphasize that the “children must believe it.” That is unnecessary when you cover the material thoroughly. That is an expression of one of the intangibles.

The main thing is that if we want to confirm the good name of the Waldorf School, we must do a number of things in connection with this class, since a great deal needs correction. We certainly all need to be clear that the success of the Waldorf School is of highest importance in our hearts, and for that reason, we cannot shy away from a certain kind of forthrightness. I would, therefore, like to propose what I believe is necessary, namely, that we must make changes for this class in a very careful manner. I would ask you not to feel insulted when I say how I believe we need to divide some subjects among you, because other things will depend upon that.

Since it is not possible to do otherwise, we will develop the curriculum in a particular way. I would like to give German literature, history and everything connected with that for the eleventh grade to X. Everything connected with aesthetics and art would be done by Y., who will also do French and English. I have given considerable thought to this, and my suggestions are focused in a specific direction. I cannot get rid of the problems in any other way. I also want Z. to take over mathematics and physics and U. to do natural history and chemistry. Those are the most important subjects, and this is what we simply have to accept as necessary for correcting this class. This division of the classes is important. You will see that there are a number of reasons why I believe it is necessary. The rest of you can follow what we previously agreed upon.

Then there is another question about how we can bring handwork into this class. This class should have that, too, as well as a continuation of what has been done in the technology class. I think we need to include Mrs. Leinhas as our fourth handwork teacher. We also need to be quite clear that this class needs to learn bookbinding, and that they should also study waterwheels and turbines, and also papermaking. All this could be done in technology class. What is clear is that the theme is connected with waterwheels, turbines, and paper factories. We will include medicine in chemistry and natural history. Religion, music, and stenography remain as they were, and surveying will be included with mathematics. Greek and Latin remain, as does shop. Tomorrow, we can begin with mathematics and physics, logarithms and trigonometry. For tomorrow, try to prepare a way of relating the Carnot theorem to the world. Then we also have the languages.

A teacher asks a question about English. The class has read The Tempest.

Dr. Steiner: I would recommend you don’t drop that. Discuss the work with the children regardless of whether one or another knows more or less. Discuss it from what they do know, so that the children have to give an answer and can continue the discussion.

A teacher: We read Corneille’s Le Cid in French.

Dr. Steiner: That could be done in dialog. Prose needs to be read. I do not believe that it is impossible to read Taine, Origines, or the essays. You could also do some work on the philosophy of life, for instance, Voyage en Italie.

Then we have the former ninth grade, now tenth grade. I certainly hope that with this tenth-grade class, we do not repeat the whole story.

A teacher: The children would like to know more about modern literature.

Dr. Steiner: They are still too young for modern German poetry, but you could do Geibel and Marlitt. You could also do C. F. Meyer, but it is still too early for that. They need more maturity to understand Jordan, that is something they can understand only when they get to the twelfth or thirteenth grade. If you go through it like a governess, it is not worth doing. The children need to be sixteen or seventeen before doing Demiurgos. In general, it would be rather misleading to go through the most recent streams in literature with the children. Right now, what is important is what we can do tomorrow. What will you begin with so that you don’t spend all night going in circles of self-destructive skepticism?

French and English, those are things that are important because the children have gotten out of shape there. Won’t you give it a try, Mr. N.?

Natural history and chemistry need to be separated because natural history was done carelessly. That is something we cannot do carelessly. Mineralogy, crystals, botany, cells, and plant taxonomy.

Someone asks a question.

Dr. Steiner: In doing that, we should remember that this class has students who came from outside. We had to treat certain things in a way that took into account what they had previously learned. We need to do natural history and chemistry in the tenth grade.

In the eleventh grade we need to connect medicine with natural history and chemistry, and mechanics and surveying with physics. The eleventh grade should be singing solos in music. Begin with a development of taste, and then go into the critical aspects of music.

The tenth and eleventh grades can remain together in independent religious instruction.

They discuss teaching assignments for the remaining classes and subjects.

Dr. Steiner: Tomorrow, I want to give you a short lecture about pedagogy.

The school inspector received some complaints about discipline in the Waldorf School. Is this some sort of denunciation? This is something we will need to answer.

A teacher: Some of the religion teachers are not punctual, so the children become restless and run around before class.

Dr. Steiner: I can imagine that the children want to skip class. Given that these things have occurred for such a long time, can’t we complain to the school inspector about these religion teachers? We have fallen behind because of this. We should have complained, and then we would be ahead. It is important that we do not ignore these things. If there are other such occurrences, they should be looked at by tomorrow so that we can discuss them.

We need to try a number of things. The things that have happened are only symptoms, but they are symptoms nevertheless. For example, Mr. M. was in Stuttgart. He is in the process of trying to start a school in Norway. However, he heard all kinds of things here and returned to Norway and told people there that people are talking negatively about the Waldorf School. But, nothing he heard is true. He returned to Norway with the information that our work is not careful enough. People everywhere are paying attention to this school, but when people everywhere say that the children are always getting slapped, then we will fall behind in our work. We need to be extremely careful so long as the whole world is looking at the school. In the school, we must keep to the principle that people can complain and do what they want, but we must be correct. I certainly want to be able to say that we are always correct. The Waldorf School needs to be a prime example of an anthroposophical institution.

A teacher: F.S. has declared that he wants to flunk.

Another teacher: He is writing poems about one of his girl classmates.

Dr. Steiner: I thought so. There are some boys there who say to themselves, “We are going to class only because we can find some adventure there. We are not interested in the rest.” We cannot act clumsily. We need to tell him we think he is so capable that we simply cannot flunk him. We must take the risk that this splendid boy leaves us.

A teacher: I have a girl in my first-grade class who can already read.

Dr. Steiner: Let’s talk about that tomorrow.

A comment is made about O.R.

Dr. Steiner: It is certainly clear that this R. cannot be other than he is. Due to his environment at home, you cannot assume he will be other than he is. We need to help him. He is one of those whom we did not treat properly in the tenth grade. He’s a sleepyhead, but his father is even more so. Both of his parents are not particularly wide awake.

A teacher: His younger brother, W., is quite awake.

Dr. Steiner: There you have something else. He has other difficulties in his character. Only people who do not want to be disturbed choose such an environment. If you were to put R. out of the class, then you might risk destroying what it is that is asleep in him now and should awaken in him later. I would not throw him out.

I have seen that although we closed later, we did not achieve anything more than we could have achieved by Easter. We have actually lost the time from Easter until now. If we close at Easter next year, none of you will be finished. We are now past the middle of June, and we will have to change our curriculum accordingly.

The subject I addressed last Monday here in Utrecht was the question of how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can provide a method, a scientific path for penetrating the spiritual, supersensible world.

I have pointed out how it is only possible to penetrate into this environment if man brings forth from this soul certain abilities and powers that indeed lie dormant in every soul, and if he lifts up what is ordinary knowledge to the level of vision; to a vision that, for example, comes to develop full awareness of what it means to have a soul-spiritual life independent of all corporeality. We know precisely through modern science - and with regard to the everyday life of the soul, this science is absolutely right - that this ordinary life of the soul is bound to the instrument of the body. And only spiritual scientific methods can tear the spiritual-soul life away from the body, can thereby penetrate to the being in the human being that dwells in the spiritual world before it has united with a physical body through conception or birth, that passes through the gate of death, discards the human body and again consciously enters a spiritual world.

And I continued last Monday by saying that anyone who makes such an acquaintance with man's own supersensible being is also able to perceive, behind nature's sensuality and behind everything that can be explored with the ordinary mind, a supersensible environment, an environment of spiritual beings.

What is recognized in this way as the spiritual and soul life in man, what is recognized as the spiritual essence of the world in which we live, is what actually enables us to gain a true knowledge of the human being.

Over the last three to four centuries, we have acquired a complete natural science, but we have not been able to draw any knowledge about human beings from this natural science. In developmental theory, we start from the lowest living creatures. We ascend to the human being; we regard him, so to speak, as the end link in the animal series. We learn what humans have in common with other organisms, but we do not learn what humans actually are in the world as a separate being. We can only learn this through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. And what asserts itself in this way in knowledge ultimately also asserts itself in the feelings and impulses that modern humanity has developed in social life.

Just think how many people who, through modern technology, have developed as a new class of people, through the whole modern economy - actually under the influence of certain socialist theories - believe that what lives in people as morality, as science, as religion, as art, is not drawn from an original spiritual source, but that it is only drawn from what economic, material processes are. The theory professed by modern social democracy, the theory that has sought to become reality in such a destructive way in Eastern Europe, this theory basically sees the forces that rule history as being outside of the human. And what man brings forth in art, custom, law, religion, that appears only as a kind of smoke. People call it a superstructure that rises up on the substructure. It is like a smoke that comes out of the purely economic-material. There, too, in this placing of the human being in the practical world, the actual human being is extinguished. If we are to characterize what modern education and the modern social consciousness have brought about, we cannot say otherwise than: the human being has been extinguished.

What spiritual science, as it is meant here, is to bring to humanity again is the knowledge of the human being, the appreciation of the human being, the connection of the human being as a supersensible being to the supersensible, universal being of the world.

And only with this do we stand in true reality. Only with this do we stand on ground that leads into a truly practical life. This is what I would like to substantiate today, first in the question of education and teaching. And here, in the way it has emerged from the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has from the very beginning been conceived not as something unworldly and far removed from the world, but as something thoroughly realistic and practical. And one of the first practical foundations was in the field of education with the Free Waldorf School, which Emil Molt founded in Stuttgart and which I myself have the educational and didactic responsibility for. In this Free Waldorf School, the impulses of a true knowledge of the human being that can flow from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science are developed pedagogically and didactically.

For a long time people have been talking about the fact that education and teaching should not graft this or that into the child's soul, but rather develop what is in the human being out of the human soul. But when it is expressed in this way, it is, of course, initially only an abstract principle. The point, however, is not to have this principle intellectually, to extract something from the human soul, but to be able to truly observe the developing human soul in the child. And for that, one must first develop a sense for it. This sense is only developed by someone who is aware of how the actual individuality of the human being, the actual spiritual-soul entity from a spiritual world in which it has lived for a long time, descends; how from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, in all that develops physically and psychically in the child, a supersensible element lives; how we, as educators, as teachers, have been entrusted with something from a supersensible world that we have to unravel. When we see from day to day how the child's physiognomic traits become clearer and clearer, when we can decipher how a spiritual-soul element, sent down to us from the spiritual world, gradually unravels and reveals itself in these physiognomic traits , it is important to develop, above all, a sense of reverence for the supersensible human being descending from the spiritual worlds as the basis of a pedagogical-didactic art.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science makes it possible to observe the child's development from year to year. First of all, I would like to show the main stages of human development.

It is often said that nature or the world does not make any leaps. Such things are constantly repeated without actually looking at what they are supposed to mean. Does not nature constantly make leaps when it develops the green leaf and then, as if with a leap, the sepal and the colored petal and then again the stamens and so on? And so it is with human life. For the person who, unbiased by all the stimuli and impulses that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can give him, observes this developing human life in the child, he finds, above all, not out of mystical grounds, but out of faithful observation, a leap in development around the seventh year, when the child begins to get the second teeth. Here we see how our knowledge of the soul, as it is currently used in science, has basically become somewhat exaggerated. Unless one has become completely materialistic, one differentiates between body and soul. But one speaks of the relationship between body and soul in an extraordinarily abstract way. One does not get used to observing in this field with the same kind of faithful and unprejudiced observation as one has learned in natural science. In natural science, for example, one learns that when heat appears through some process, and one has not added it, this heat was in some other form in the body. In physics one says “latent”. One says that the latent heat has been released. This attitude, which is provided by natural science, must also be adopted for the science of man, which, however, must then be spiritualized in relation to natural science. Thus, one must observe carefully: What then changes in the human being when he passes the age of changing teeth?

Now, if we really have the necessary impartiality for observation, we can see how the child, when it passes the age of seven, actually only begins to have outlined, contoured ideas, whereas before that it had no such ideas. We can see how it is only with this period that the possibility of thinking in actual thoughts, however childlike they may be, begins. We see how something emerges from the child's soul that was previously hidden in the human organism. Anyone who has acquired a spiritual eye for this matter can see how the child's soul life changes completely when the second dentition begins; how something emerges from the deepest, most hidden part of the soul and comes to the surface. Where did it come from, this thinking that now appears as a definite life of ideas? It was there as a principle of growth in the human being; permeating the organism; living as a spiritual-soul element in the growth that then comes to an end when the teeth are pushed out from within and replace the earlier teeth. When an end is put to this growth, which finds its conclusion in the change of teeth, then, so to speak, only one growth remains, for which less intensive forces are necessary. We see, then, how that which later becomes thinking in the child was once an inward organic growth force, and how this organic growth force is metamorphically transformed and comes to light as soul power.

By adopting this approach, we arrive at a science of the soul that is not clichéd, which, when it comes down to it, is simply transposed into the spiritual and is based on the same methods as those on which natural science is also based. Just as natural science is a faithful observation of a physical nature, so in order to understand the human being, a faithful observation is necessary, but now of the soul and spirit. If one learns to see through the human being in this way, then this way of looking at the human being is transformed into an artistic way of looking. It is indeed the case that today people often say, when someone expresses something like I just did: Yes, one should just look at something scientifically, in terms of knowledge; one should stick to sober logic; one should work through the intellect to arrive at abstractly formulated natural laws. This may be a comfortable human demand. It may appear to man that he would like to grasp everything in the wide-meshed logic of concepts in order to get to the bottom of things. But what if nature does not proceed in this way? What if nature works artistically? Then it is necessary that we follow her on her artistic path with our capacity for knowledge. Anyone who looks into nature and the world in general will perceive that what we bring about in natural laws through sober logic bears the same relation to the whole, full, intense reality as a drawing made with charcoal strokes does to a painting done in full color.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science draws from the full physical and spiritual reality. Therefore, it transforms mere logical recognition into artistic comprehension. But this also enables one to turn the teacher, the instructor, the educator into a pedagogical-didactic artist who acquires a fine sense for every single expression of the child's life. And indeed it is the case that every child has their own particular, individual way of expressing themselves. These cannot be registered in an abstract pedagogical science, but they can be grasped if one receives anthroposophically oriented impulses from the fullness of humanity and thereby gains an intuitive view of the spiritual and soul life in the human being, which then has an effect on the physical and bodily life. For what works roughly as the power of thought before the change of teeth in the growth of the child, we see more finely as a spiritual-soul activity in the child. As teachers and educators, we must pursue this from day to day with an artistic sense, then we will be able to be for the child what a real educator, a real teacher should be for the child.

I would like to give a brief description of how the first period of life, from birth to the change of teeth, and the second period of life, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, now emerges.

In the first period, from the first to the seventh year of life, the human being is primarily an imitative being. But we must understand this in the fullest sense of the word. The human being enters the world and gives himself completely to his surroundings. In particular, he develops what he initially brings to light as his impulses of will and instinct in such a way that he imitates what is around him. Language, too, is initially learned in such a way that it is based on imitation. Between birth and the age of seven, the child is entirely an imitator. This must be taken into account. In such matters, one must be able to draw the right conclusions. If you associate with the world in these matters, people sometimes come to you for advice on one matter or another. For example, a father once told me that he had a complaint about his five-year-old child. “What did the five-year-old child do?” I asked. “He stole,” said the father sadly. “But then you have to first understand what theft actually is.” He told me that the child had not stolen out of ill will. He had taken money from his mother's drawer and bought sweets, but then distributed them to other children on the street. So it was not blind selfishness. What was it then? Well, the child had seen his mother take the money out of the drawer day after day. At the age of five, the child is an imitator. It did not steal, it simply imitated the things that its mother does day after day, because the child instinctively regards what its mother always does as the right thing to do. - This is just one example of all the subtle things one needs to know if one is to understand the art of education in a way that truly corresponds to the human being.

But we also know that children play at imitating. Basically, the play instinct is not something original, but an imitation of what is seen in the environment. If we look with unbiased eyes, we can see that imitation is at the root of play. But every child plays differently. The teacher of a small child before the age of seven must acquire a careful judgment about this, and one necessarily has to have an artistic sense to make such a judgment, because it is different for each child. Basically, each child plays in its own way. And the way a child plays, especially in the fourth, fifth, or sixth year, goes down into the depths of the soul as a force. The child grows older, and at first we do not notice how one or other of the special ways of playing comes to light in the child's later character traits. The child will develop other powers, other soul abilities; what was the special essence of his play slips into the hidden part of the soul. But it comes to light again later, and in a peculiar way, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, in the period of life when the human being has to find his way into the outer world, into the world of outer experience, of outer destinies. Some people adapt to this world skillfully, others awkwardly. Some people come to terms with the world in such a way that they derive a certain satisfaction from their own actions in relation to the world; others cannot intervene with their actions here or there, and they have a difficult fate.

You have to get to know the life of the whole person, you have to see how, in a mysterious way, the sense of play comes out again in this sense of life in the twenties. Then you will gain an artistically oriented idea of how to direct and guide the play instinct, so that you can give something to the person for a later period of life.

Today's pedagogy often suffers from abstract principles. By contrast, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims to give pedagogy an artistic-didactic sense, to work in the earliest youth in such a way that what is formed there is a dowry for the whole life of the human being. For anyone who wants to teach and educate children must get to know the whole of human life. The magnificent scientific development of the last few centuries has not taken this kind of knowledge of human nature into account. Consider the social significance of really being able to give children the kind of education I have described.

When the child has now changed its teeth, or at least has got them, the second epoch of the child's life begins. Then the actual school age sets in, that which one has to study particularly carefully if one wants to pursue pedagogy from the point of view of true human knowledge. While the child up to the age of seven is essentially an imitator, from the age of seven until sexual maturity, that is, from about the age of thirteen to sixteen, there develops (and this varies from individual to individual) what the unbiased observer recognizes as a natural urge to submit to an authority, a human authority, a teacher or educator. Today, it is a sad day when one hears from all sorts of political parties that some kind of democratic spirit should enter the school; that children should, to a certain extent, already practice a kind of self-government. With such things, which arise from all kinds of partisan views, one rebels against what human nature itself demands. Those who truly understand human nature know what it means for one's entire later life if, between the ages of seven and fifteen, one has been able to look up with devoted veneration to one or more human authorities; if one has called true that what these human authorities said was true; if one felt that what these human authorities felt was beautiful; if one found that what such revered personalities presented as good was also good. - Just as one imitates until the age of seven, so one wants to believe in what comes from authority until sexual maturity. This is the time when one must be open to the imponderable influences that can come from a soul, from a personality.

We founded the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Many people say they would like to attend the Waldorf School to get to know something of the method and so on of this Waldorf School. Imagine a copperplate engraving of the Sistine Madonna, and someone cuts a piece out of it to get an idea of the Sistine Madonna. That would be the same as perhaps looking at what happens in the Waldorf School for a fortnight or three weeks. You wouldn't even see anything special. Because what happens in the Waldorf School is a result of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Those who are teachers there have acquired their artistic pedagogy and didactics from the impulses of anthroposophical spiritual science. If you want to get to know the Waldorf school, you have to get to know anthroposophically oriented spiritual science above all. But not in the way one gets to know it from the outside, where people are led to believe that it is some kind of complicated, nebulous mysticism, some kind of sectarianism; no, one has to get to know this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science from the inside, how it draws from the full humanity what the human being really is as a sensual and supersensible being within the world and within time.

These things do, however, lead one to perceive the supersensible nature of the working of such an authoritative personality. Let me give an example. One could imagine a picture – and it is best to speak in pictures to children from seven to fourteen years of age, especially up to the age of ten. Let us take any picture by which we want to teach the child an idea, a feeling, about the immortality of the soul. One can think up this picture. But one can also point out to the child the butterfly pupa, how the butterfly crawls out of the pupa. And one says to the child: the human body is like the pupa. The butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. When a human being dies, the immortal soul leaves the body as the butterfly leaves the chrysalis. It passes over into the spiritual world. There is much to be gained from such a picture. But a real intuitive perception of the immortality of the soul can only be conveyed to a child under very definite conditions. If, for example, a teacher thinks, “I am clever, the child is stupid, it must first become clever” – and the teacher thinks something like this in order to make the child understand something – then the teacher may perhaps achieve something, but what really brings the child to a sense of immortality will certainly not be achieved. For only that which one oneself believes, in which one oneself is completely immersed, has an effect on the child. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science gives you the opportunity to say: I myself believe in this image; for me, this crawling out of the butterfly from the chrysalis is absolutely the one that I did not think up, but what nature itself presents at a lower level for the same fact that, at a higher level, is the emergence of the immortal soul from the body. If I myself believe in the picture, if I stand within the content of the picture, then my faith has the effect of awakening faith, imagination and feeling in the child. These things are absolutely imponderable.

What happens on the outside is not even as important as what takes place between the feelings of the teacher and those of the pupil. It matters whether I go into the school with noble thoughts or ignoble ones, and whether I believe that simply what I say is what has an effect. I will give what I say a nuance that does not affect the soul if I do not enter the classroom with noble thoughts and, above all, with thoughts that are true to what I am saying. - That, first of all, about the relationship between the pupil and the teacher in the second epoch of life from the seventh to the fifteenth year. There would be much more to say about this, but I will only highlight a few specific points so that you can get to know the whole spirit that inspires the pedagogy and didactics that flow from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Then we started at the Waldorf school with really bringing out what the child should learn. We are faced with very significant questions, especially when we take the child into primary school. We have to teach the child to read and write; but when it comes to what lives in the human being, writing, the printed word, has long since become something quite abstract within human civilization, something that has taken on the nature of a sign and is no longer intimately connected with the full, original, elementary soul life of the human being. The external history of civilization does provide some information about such things, although only to a limited extent. If we go back to the various cultures, we find pictographic writing, where, however, what was fixed externally was pictorially recorded, which is what was actually meant. In older cultures, writing had not been developed to the point of the mere sign being as abstract as it is today. In fact, when we teach reading and writing in the usual way, we introduce something to the child that is not initially related to his nature. Therefore, a pedagogy and didactics that is truly based on a full knowledge of the human being will not teach reading and writing as it is usually done. Instead, we start from the child's artistic nature in our method. We do not begin with reading at all, not even with writing in the usual sense of the word, but with a kind of painting-drawing, drawing-painting. We lead the child to learn to form letters not only from the head, but from the whole human being, bringing lines and forms, even in colored drawing, onto paper or some other surface; lines and forms that naturally emerge from the human organism. Then we gradually introduce what has been taken from the artistic into the letter forms, first through writing, and from writing we only then move on to reading. That is our ideal. It may be difficult to implement in the early days, but it is an ideal of a true didactics that follows from a full knowledge of the human being. And as in this case, the essence of human nature is the basis for all education and teaching.

We start, for example, from the child's musical and rhythmic abilities because these flow from human nature and because we know that a child who is properly stimulated in a musical way around the age of seven experiences a particular strengthening and hardening of the will through this musical instruction.

Now, we try to teach the child in pictorial form what is to be taught to the child, so that the child is not introduced too early into an intellectualized life. We also note that there is an important turning point between the ninth and tenth to eleventh year of the child's life. Anyone who can observe childhood in the right way knows that between the ages of nine and eleven, there is a point in a child's development that, depending on how it is recognized by the educator and teacher, can influence the fate, the inner and often also the outer destiny of the person in a favorable or unfavorable sense. Up to this point, the child does not isolate itself much from its surroundings, and it must be borne in mind that a plant described by a child before the age of nine must be described differently than afterwards. Before this time, the child identifies itself with everything around it; then it learns to distinguish; only then does the concept of the self actually arise – before that, it only had a sense of self. We must observe how the child behaves, how it begins to formulate certain questions differently from this point on. We must respond to this important point in time for each individual child, because it is crucial for the whole of the following life.

We must also be aware, for example, that subjects such as physics and the like, which are completely separate from the human being and only attain a certain perfection by excluding everything subjective from the formulation of their laws, may only be introduced to the child from the age of eleven or twelve. On the other hand, we teach our children the usual foreign languages in a practical way right from the beginning of primary school. We see how, by not teaching a foreign language by translation but by letting the child absorb the spirit of the other language, the child's entire soul structure is indeed broadened. This is how an artistic didactics and pedagogy is formed out of this spirit. I could go on talking here for another eight days about the design of such a pedagogy and didactics as art. But you can see how what comes from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science flows directly into the practical side of education.

And how does this apply to the individual teacher? It applies in such a way that he actually gets something different from this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science than can be obtained from the rest of today's scientific education. And here we touch on one of the most significant social issues of the present day.

The social question is said to be the fundamental question of our time, but it is usually understood only as an external economic question, not really grasped in its depth. This depth only comes to mind when one becomes aware of how, in the broad masses of today's proletariat, one word can be heard again and again. That word is ideology. What does the modern proletarian mean when he speaks of ideology, according to his Marxist instruction? He means: When we develop any ideas about custom, law, art, religion, it is not something real in itself, it is only an abstraction, it is only an unreal idea. Everything we have in this way is not reality, it is an ideology. Reality is only the external, material production processes.

From this fact one can sense the radical change that has taken place in human development in terms of world view and state of mind. Consider the basic tenet of ancient Oriental wisdom. Last time I spoke here, I said that we should not long for the past, but there are many things we can take from it for our own orientation. The ancient Oriental spoke of Maja. What did Maja mean in the ancient Orient? It meant everything that man can recognize in the external sense world. For reality was that which lived within him, which sprouted within as custom, religion, art, science. That was reality. What the eyes saw, what the ears heard, what one otherwise perceived, that was Maja. Today, in the Orient, only a decadent form of that which, from a certain point of view, can be characterized as I have just done, is present. Our broad masses of people have come to the opposite through Marxist guidance. One could say that the development of humanity has taken a complete turn. The external, the sensual, is the only reality, and that which is formed within, custom, religion, science, art, is Maya. Only one does not say Maya, but one says ideology. But if one were to translate Maja in a general sense, then one would have to translate it with ideology, and if one wanted to translate into the language of the old world view of the Orient what the modern proletarian means by ideology, then one would have to translate it with Maja, only that the application is the opposite.

I mention this because I want to show what an enormous turn human development has taken, how we in the West have in fact developed the final consequences of a world view that runs directly counter to what is still contained in the Orient in a decadent way. Those who are able to observe the conflicts of humanity from such depths know what potential for conflict exists between East and West today. Things appear differently in the various historical epochs; but however materialistic the striving of today's East may be, in a certain way it is the striving that was also present in ancient Buddhism and the like, which has now become decadent. And our Western culture has undergone a complete turnaround in relation to this. We have now arrived at a point where broad masses of people do not speak of the fact that spiritual reality fills them within, but that everything that fills them within is only Maya, ideology.

This is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science gives back to humanity: not just thoughts that can be seen as ideology, not just unrealities; but man is again filled with what he was filled with at that time, with the consciousness: Spirit lives in my thoughts. The spirit enters into me; not a dead, ideological spirit, but a living spirit lives in me. To lead people back to the direct experience of the living spirit is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to give. This is then what is incorporated into anthroposophical pedagogy and didactics. This is what should live in the teacher's dealings with the pupil.

But it is also that which is directly involved in dealing with the social question. Those people who talk about ideology today have gone through our schools. But we need a humanity that actually develops social impulses from the very depths of its being. This humanity must emerge from other schools. What has emerged from the schools we so admire has led to the social chaos we see today. We need a humanity that has been educated in such a way that the education corresponds to a real, comprehensive knowledge of the human being. This is what makes the question of education a universal social question. Either we will have to decide to see the question of education in this sense as a social question, or we will be blind to the great social demands of the present.

But we must sense what is necessary for the teacher, for the educator, in order to practise such an education, in order to allow knowledge of the human being to be transformed into a pedagogical-didactic art. We must sense that this is only possible if the teacher, the educator, does not need to follow any other norm than the norm that is within his or her own inner being. The teacher and educator must be answerable to the spirit that he experiences. This is only possible within the threefold social organism, in a free spiritual life. As long as the spiritual life is dependent on the economic life on the one hand and on the state life on the other, the teacher is in the thrall of the state or of economic life. You will find, when you study the connections, what this thrall consists of.

In truth, one can only establish a surrogate for a free school today. It was possible in Württemberg to establish the Waldorf School as a free school in which only the demands of the pedagogical art prevail, before socialism created the new school law.

If freedom is to prevail, then every teacher must be directly involved in the administration; then the most important part of spiritual life - like all spiritual life, in fact - must have its free self-government. One cannot imagine a spiritual life in which such free schools are common other than in such a way that from the teacher of the lowest elementary school class to the highest teacher, everything falls into corporations that are not subordinate to any state or economic authorities and that do not receive instructions from any side. What happens in the administration must be such that every teacher and instructor needs only so much time to teach or instruct that he still has so much time left to help administer. Not those who have retired or who have left the field of teaching and education, but those who are currently teaching and educating should also be the administrators. Hence the authority of the capable arises as a matter of course. Just try self-administration and you will find that because you need someone who can really achieve something, their authority will naturally assert itself. If the spiritual life administers itself, it will not be necessary to use this authority or the like. Just let this free spiritual life develop and you will see that because people need the capable, they will also find them.

I have only been able to sketch out the issues here, but you will have seen how a truly artistic approach to education requires a free spiritual life. We can see how it is necessary to first separate the free spiritual life from the entire social organism.

Just as Karl Marx or Proudhon or other bourgeois economists base what they want to base, so one does not base things of life experience, things of life practice. What is said in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question” or in other writings on the threefold social organism is based on decades of all-round observation of life, and is spoken and written from practice. Therefore, one cannot grasp it with lightly-draped concepts. I know exactly where one can easily start a logical critique. But what has just been taken from reality is as multifaceted as reality itself. And just as little as reality can be captured in lightly-draped logical concepts, so little can something that is supposed to fit reality be captured in such concepts. But anyone who has ever inwardly felt what it means to be in school, in class, in education, as it is necessary to do so through a true understanding of the developing human being, the child, has, in their feeling, in the whole experience, full proof that the spiritual life must be given its free administration. And all the objections do not apply, so that one simply raises them, but only so that one must eliminate them through reality.

Then people come and say: If spiritual life is to be based on free recognition, people will not send their children to school, so you cannot establish a free spiritual life. — That is not what someone who thinks realistically says. Above all, he feels the full necessity of liberating spiritual life. He says: spiritual life must be freed; it may perhaps have the disadvantage that some people do not want to send their children to school; then one must think of means to prevent this from happening. One must not treat this as an objection, but one must raise such a thing and then think about how it can be remedied. In many things that concern the full reality of life, we will have to learn to think like this.

They sense that a complete turnaround must occur, especially with regard to intellectual life – and public intellectual life is, after all, essentially provided in its most important parts through teaching and education. Those who are accustomed to working in today's intellectual life will not go along with these things. I know that certain teachers at secondary schools, when they were approached with the suggestion of moving towards self-management, said: I would rather be under the minister than manage with colleagues; it's not possible. I am less likely to be with my colleagues from the faculty than with the minister, who is outside.

Perhaps one will not exactly get the necessary impetus in this direction. But just as, with regard to the big questions of life today, it is not the producer but the consumer who is becoming more and more decisive, so one would like the consumers of the educational system to reflect on what is necessary in the teaching and educational system as the most important public part of intellectual life. These are, above all, people who have children. We have seen the impression that parents have gained from the end of the school year, from everything else that children have experienced during the school year at the Waldorf School. We have seen how, when these children come home, their parents have realized that a new social spirit is actually emerging that is of tremendous importance for the next generation — provided, of course, that the Waldorf School does not remain a small school in a corner of Stuttgart, but that this spirit, which prevails there, already becomes the spirit of the widest circles.

But it is not only parents who are interested in what goes on in schools and educational institutions. Basically, every person who is serious about human development has an interest in it. Every human being must care about the next generation. Those who think this way and who have a sense of how we need a spiritual renewal today, as I explained in the last lecture here in Utrecht, should become interested in this new education that can be achieved through the school system from the lowest to the highest levels.

At the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, we are trying to establish an educational institution in the highest sense of the word, based on this spirit. We still have a hard time of it today. We can give people renewal and inspiration in the individual specialized sciences; we can give them something like our autumn courses were, like our Easter courses will be. We can show them how, for example, medicine, but also all the other sciences of practical life, can receive through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science what is necessary for the present and especially for the near future.

But for the time being we can give nothing but spirit, and that is not yet highly valued today. Today, people still value the testimonies that we cannot yet give. We must fight for what is recognized as a necessity for the development of humanity and for the near future to become official. This can only come about if a mood develops in the widest international circles for what I would call a kind of world school association. Such a world school association need not limit itself to founding lower or higher schools, but should include all impulses that lead to something like what has been attempted in Dornach in a certain special way. Such a world school association would have to embrace all those people who have an interest in the forces of ascent entering into the developmental forces of humanity in the face of the terrible forces of descent that we have in humanity today. For such a world school association would not become a kind of federation from the impulses that are already there; it would not try to shape the world according to the old diplomatic or other methods. Such a union, such a world school association would try to form a world union of humanity out of the deepest human forces, out of the most spiritual human impulses. Such a union would therefore mean something that could really give a renewal of that life, which has shown its fragility so much in the terrible years of the second decade of the 20th century.

The people who are educated there will have the social impulses, and they will be the ones who can develop the right strength in the other areas of social life, in the area of an independent legal or state or political life and in the area of an independent economic life. Just as a free spiritual life can only be built on objectivity and expertise, and not on what comes to the fore through the majority, economic life can only be beneficial for humanity if it is separated from all majority rule, from all those areas in which people judge simply from their humanity, not from their knowledge of the subject or field. In economic life we need associations where people who belong to the sphere of consumption, people who belong to the sphere of production, and people who belong to the sphere of trade, join together. I have shown in my writings that these associations, by their very nature, will have a certain size. Such associations can truly provide that in economic life which I would call a collective judgment, just as it is true [on the other hand] that in spiritual life everything must come from the human personality. For through birth we bring with us our gifts from the spiritual world. Every time a human being is born, a message comes down from the spiritual world into the physical world. We have to take it in, we have to look at the human individuality; the teacher at the human individuality in the child, the whole social institution at the free spiritual life, in which the teacher is so situated that he can fully live out his individuality.

What can turn out to be a blessing for humanity in this free spiritual life would turn out to be a disaster in economic life. Therefore, we should not have any illusions. As much as we have to strive for a comprehensive and harmonious judgment through our individuality in spiritual life, we can do so much less in economic life. There we are only able to form a judgment together with the other people, to form a judgment in associations. One knows, by having worked, in a certain area, but what one knows there is one-sided under all circumstances. A judgment comes about only by not merely dealing theoretically with the others, but by having to supply a certain commodity to the other, to satisfy certain needs for the other, to conclude contracts. When the real interests face each other in contracts, then the real, expert judgments will form.

And what is basically the main thing in economic life is also formed from what works within the associations: the right price level. You can read all this in more detail in my books “The Key Points of the Social Question” and “In the Execution of the Threefold Order”, as well as in the journals. There is even a Dutch magazine about threefolding. There you can read about how a collective judgment must be sought in economic life. Since we have had a world economy instead of the old national economies in economic life, it has become necessary for the organization of economic life to be based on free economic points of view, for economic life to be lived out in associations that deal only with economic matters, but in such a way that majorities are not decisive anywhere, but rather expertise and professional competence are decisive everywhere. The result will be a division of labor. Those who have the necessary experience or other reasons will be in the right place. This will happen naturally in the associations, because we are not dealing with abstract definitions but with the activity of a contract. For example, if an article is being overproduced in a particular area, it must be ensured that people are employed in other ways; because where this is the case, the article becomes too cheap, and the one that is underproduced becomes too expensive. The price can only be set when a sufficient number of people are employed by associations in a particular area. If such a thing is to become real, it requires an intense interest in the entire economic life of humanity. It is a matter of developing, not merely as an empty phrase, what is called human brotherhood, but of bringing about this human fraternization in associations in the economic sphere.

Today I can only sketch out the main lines. The literature on threefolding already discusses the details. But what I want to suggest is only how spiritual science oriented to anthroposophy can practically take hold of life here as well.

And so, in the social organism, we have on the one hand the free spiritual life based on the human individuality; on the other, economic life based on associations that come together to form the global economy as a whole – without taking into account the political state borders, which today contradict economic interests. This may still be uncomfortable for some people to think, but it is what can bring about change from the chaotic conditions.

Between the two, the free spiritual life and the associative economic life, stands the actual political life, the actual state life, where majority decisions have their justification; where everything, including human work, comes up for negotiation, for which every mature person is competent. In the free life of the spirit, not every mature person is competent; here, majority decisions could only spoil everything, as they can in economic life. But there are, for example, the nature and measure of work, of human work; there are areas where every human being, when mature, is competent, where one person stands before another as an equal. This is the actual state-judicial, political area in the threefold social organism. This is what spiritual life is already pointing to most clearly today, but it can also be pursued in the other areas of social existence in accordance with the demands and necessities.

Threefold social organism: a free spiritual life, based on the full and free expression of the individual human personality; a legal or state life that is truly democratic, where people face each other as equals and where majorities decide, because only in this link of the social organism does it come to a decision on which every adult person is competent; an economic life that is built on associations, which in turn decides on the basis of factual and technical knowledge, where the contract applies, not the law.

There are people who say that this would destroy the unity of the social organism. For example, someone objected to me that the social organism is a unified whole and must remain so, otherwise everything would be torn apart. At that time I could only answer the objection: A rural family is also a unit. But if one claims that the state must also manage the economy and administer the schools, then one could also claim that a rural household, which is also a unit with master and mistress and maid and cow, because the whole is a unit, everyone should give milk, not just the cow. The unity would arise precisely from the fact that each one does the right thing in its place. The unity arises precisely from the fact that the three links arise. One should just not rush into a matter that is based on correct observation of those things that are pressing for transformation in contemporary social life, based on a partial or incomplete understanding.

Liberty, equality, fraternity – these are the three great ideals that resound from the 18th century. What human heart would not have felt deeply about the three ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Nevertheless, there were always clever people in the course of the 19th century who constructed a contradiction between freedom and equality: How could one be free if, after all, all people had to develop their abilities to the same extent and how that was also not true of fraternity? — Much clever and concise things have been said in favor of the contradictory nature of these three ideals. Nevertheless, we feel them and feel their justification. What is actually at issue here? Well, people have formed the three ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity out of the intense depths of the soul, and these are truly as justified as anything historical and human can be justified. But for the time being people remained under the suggestion of the unitary state. In the unified state, however, these three ideals contradict each other. Nevertheless, they must be realized. Their realization will lead to the tripartite social organism. If one realizes that this is something that can be started tomorrow, that it is thought out and formed out of practice, that it does not remotely have a utopian character like most social ideas, that it is thoroughly practical, if one realizes how the unity state today, out of itself, creates the necessity to divide itself into three parts: then one will also understand the historical and human significance of the three great ideals that have been resonating in humanity since the 18th century. Then we will say to ourselves: the threefold social organism is what first consolidates these three ideals, it is what gives these three ideals the possibility of life. In conclusion, let me express, as a summary of what I wanted to say today about the practical development of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, how it must come about in humanity: the threefold social organism, Spiritual life administered for itself, economic life administered for itself, and in the middle the state-legal-political life administered for itself. Then, in a genuine, true sense, humanity will be able to realize itself: freedom in spiritual life, equality in democratic state life, brotherhood in associatively shaped economic life.

Answering questions

Question: How can we differentiate in the spiritual-scientific field between human and animal blood? The I expresses itself in human blood, but not in animal blood?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, the materialistic way of thinking, which had been in preparation since the middle of the 15th century, but which became particularly strong in the 19th century and developed into the 20th, has gradually caused the sense of it to die away, that the external expression [of a thing] is not decisive for the inner structure and for the whole context [in which it stands]. I have to refer to some of this, which of course I cannot explain in detail today. You can find it in the spiritual scientific literature, but I have to say a few words about the question.

We have to distinguish between the physical body, which can be seen with the eyes and which is also considered in ordinary science through anatomy and physiology, for example. We then distinguish the etheric or life body, which we become aware of when we observe something like the release of thinking during the change of teeth; this is how we get to know the life of the etheric body. We must not confuse this with the old, hypothetical life force; it has nothing to do with it. This is the result of direct observation. Then we learn to recognize what part of the soul governs this etheric body, what one can call the soul organism, and the actual I.

These four members, however, express themselves in turn in the physical. For example, the etheric body has a particular effect on the glandular system, the I has a particular effect on the blood system in humans. Now one can raise such a question as the one asked here, but one must first acquire something that I would like to make clear through the following comparison. Imagine someone were to say: a knife is just a knife, it is used to cut meat. You cannot say that. Nor can you say: man has red warm blood, animals have red warm blood – the expression for the I. Suppose someone finds a razor and uses it to cut meat because it is a knife. It is not a matter of how something is outwardly and materially formed, but how it fits into a whole context. For an animal, the red warm blood is the expression of the soul organism; for a human being, the same red blood is the expression of the I, just as the razor is a knife for shaving and the knife on the table is a knife for cutting meat. One should not ask: What is blood as blood? It can be an expression for this in one context and for something else in another context.

Question: Is it also possible in other countries to establish schools like the Waldorf School?

Rudolf Steiner: Whether such schools can be founded in other countries depends on the laws of the country concerned. I have already expressed myself appropriately with regard to the Waldorf School. I said: Before the new democratic, republican school constitution came into being, it was possible to found the Waldorf School. Recent developments have been such that we are gradually forfeiting one freedom after another. And if we in Central Europe were to arrive at Leninism, then the Central Europeans would also get to know what the grave of human freedom means. But it depends everywhere on the laws in question whether you can found schools like the Waldorf School. So it depends entirely on the individual state laws. You can try to go as far as possible. Recently, for example, I was asked to appoint teachers for a kind of initial school in another place, and I said that we would of course have to do a trial first. I initially appointed two very capable teachers for the first class, but they had not taken an exam, so that people could see whether they could implement such teachers. It is certainly not out of the question in a Waldorf school to employ teachers who have not taken the exam. For example, when I was recently asked by a teacher whether it would be possible to employ her even though she had not yet passed her exams, but was on the exam list, I said: That doesn't matter; you will also have the exam one day.

Now, the point is to work towards a real liberation of the spirit and of school life on a large scale. For this, something like a world school association is needed. It must become possible that the question of whether schools like the Waldorf School can be established in different countries will no longer arise, but that this possibility will be created everywhere through the power of conviction of a sufficiently large number of people. We also experienced the same in other areas, as is also beginning today in the area of education. Many people do not agree with conventional medicine, so they turn to those who want to go beyond conventional medicine – not in a quackish way, but in a thoroughly appropriate way. I even met a minister of a Central European state who trumpeted the monopoly of conventional medicine in his parliament with all his might, but then came himself and wanted help in a different way. This is the striving, on the one hand, to leave what the feeling actually wants to overcome, but to leave it and to achieve the other through all possible back doors. We have to get beyond that. We don't have to want to set up private schools, but we have to create the opportunity everywhere to set up a free school in the sense described today. If we do not have the courage to do this, then those who understand these things will not allow themselves to be used to establish private schools or to appoint teachers for them. A great movement should arise in which every person who reflects on the tasks of the time should become a member, so that through the power of such a world federation, what could lead to the creation of such schools everywhere.

But above all, in the case of such a world school association - please allow me to mention this only in passing, in parentheses - a certain idealism in humanity must disappear, I mean the kind that says: Oh, spiritual things, anthroposophy, that's so high, the material must not approach it; it would defile anthroposophy if the material were to approach it. This idealism, which is so idealistic that it uses all kinds of phrases to describe the spiritual and elevates it to heaven, to a cloud-cuckoo-land, while keeping a firm hand on the purse, does not go together with the reasoning of a world school association or the like. Here one must muster an idealism that does not disdain the purse in order to do something for the ideals of humanity. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must think its way into practical life, that is, not just into the clouds, but also into the stock market. There are also nooks and crannies there that belong to practical life. —- That is just a characteristic of what a right worldview is.

Question: Are there contradictions between anthroposophical spiritual science and Protestant Christianity?

Rudolf Steiner: There is no need to construct contradictions. Two things must be distinguished: The Mystery of Golgotha is a fact: that a spiritual being from the supermundane worlds descended to earth and united with the man Jesus of Nazareth. This spiritual fact, which alone gives meaning to our earthly development, will be grasped in different ways by each age. Our age needs a new understanding of this fact. We can best grasp this fact if we learn to understand spiritual facts in general. Anyone who believes that some discovery, whether in the physical or spiritual realm, should somehow shake Christianity, thinks little of it. If the official representatives of Christianity, or rather of the traditional denominations, turn so fiercely against anthroposophy today, it only speaks against these official representatives, who do not really have true Christianity in mind, but the rule of their respective church. True Christianity has indeed grasped anthroposophical spiritual science, but only in a supersensible way, through supersensible knowledge. You can read more about this in my book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact' and in other writings.

Question: Does spiritual life have a kind of supremacy over the other two areas in the threefold social organism?

Rudolf Steiner: You can see in my book on “The Core Points of the Social Question” how capital is used in the threefold social organism. It enters into a kind of circulation, like blood in the human organism, and remains with the one who is best qualified to manage it and thus also manages it in the interest of the community. For this, however, spiritual life must constantly interact with the other limbs. This is the peculiar thing about such a natural structure of the social organism as the human organism. The human organism – and this is the result of thirty years of research for me – is tripartite by nature. Firstly, there is the nervous-sensory organism, which is mainly localized in the head; secondly, the rhythmic system, which is localized in the chest as breathing and blood circulation; and thirdly, the metabolic system, which is connected to the limbs. But these three limbs work together in such a way that, in a sense, the head is indeed leading, but in another sense, the other two limbs are leading as well. So one cannot say that something has supremacy, but precisely because of the way the three limbs are structured according to their essence, a harmonious wholeness will arise in the social organism. Question: Should children from seven to fourteen believe what the teacher says, or are they taught freely?

Rudolf Steiner: The nature of the human being demands what I have expressed in the lecture: a certain self-evident authority. This demand for a self-evident authority is based, in turn, on a certain development of human life as a whole. Certainly, no one can develop more feeling for the social rule of human freedom than I, who wrote my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1892, which is intended to provide the foundations for a liberal, social human life. But still, if a person is to face life freely in the right way, he must develop a sense of authority within himself between the ages of seven and fifteen. If one does not learn to recognize others through this self-evident authority, then the later demand for freedom is something that leads precisely to the impossibility of life, not to true freedom. Just as man only comes to a true brotherhood if he is educated in the appropriate way, by being guided in the right way in his imitation in the childhood years until the seventh year, so the sense of authority is necessary if man is to become free. Everything that is said today about governing school communities in a republican form is only asserted out of party considerations. That would destroy human nature. I say this out of a thorough knowledge of the human being. Such a demand for a healthy, authoritative way of teaching between the ages of seven and fifteen must be made. Only objectivity can be considered. Buzzwords should not be the deciding factor. It is precisely those who stand on the ground of freedom who must demand an authoritative education for this age group.

In speaking of a movement among the youth, a clear distinction can be made between the youth movement in the wider sense and those young people who are particularly concerned with schools, with the sphere of education in general. I do not wish to accentuate either the one or the other, but our aim will be most readily attained if we consider the main difficulties of the inner life among the youth at Universities and Colleges.

We shall often have to start from details and then quickly soar to a wider outlook. Allow me to say a few words about the inner experiences undergone by young people at Universities. As a matter of fact, this situation has been preparing for many decades, but recently it has reached a climax making it more clearly perceptible.

Young people at the Universities are seeking for something. This is not surprising, for their purpose in going to college is to seek for something. They have been looking in those who taught them, for real leaders, for those who were both teachers and leaders or—as would be equally correct—teachers endowed with leadership, and they did not find them. And this was the really terrible thing clothed in all kinds of different words—one man speaking conservatively, the other radically, one saying something very wise and another something very stupid. What was said amounted to this: We can no longer find any teachers.

What, then, did youth find when they came to the Universities? Well, they met men in whom they did not find what they were looking for. These men prided themselves on not being teachers any longer, but investigators, researchers. The Universities established themselves as institutes for research. They were no longer there for human beings, but only for science. And science led an existence among men which it defined as “objective.” It drummed into people, in every possible key, that it was to be respected as “objective” science. It is sometimes necessary to express such things pictorially. And so this objective science was now going about among human beings but it most certainly was not a human being! Something non-human was going about among men, calling itself “Objective Science.”

This could be perceived in detail, over and over again. How often is it not said: This or that has been discovered; it already belongs to science. And then other things are added to science and these so-called treasures of science become an accumulation, something which has acquired, step by step, this dreadful objective existence among mankind. But human beings do not really fit in with this objective creature who is strutting around in their midst, for true and genuine manhood has no kinship with this cold, objective, bolstered-up creature. True, as time has gone on, libraries and research institutes have been established. But the young, especially, are not looking for libraries or research institutes. They are looking in libraries for—it is almost beyond one to say the word—they are looking for human beings—and they find, well, they find librarians! They are looking in the scientific institutes for men filled with enthusiasm for wisdom, for real knowledge, and they find, well, those who are usually to be found in laboratories, scientific institutes, hospitals and the like. The old have accustomed themselves to being so easy-going and phlegmatic that they really do not want to be there at all in person—only their institutes and libraries must be there. But the human being cannot bring this about. Even if he tries not to be there, he is there nevertheless, working not through the reality that lives in him as a human being, but through a leaden heaviness in him.

One could express this in other ways too: Human beings strive toward Nature. But—to take a significant point—you cannot help saying: Nature is round the young child too, for example. But in its life of soul-and-spirit the little child derives nothing from Nature. The little child has to get something from Nature by coming into relation with human beings with whom it can experience Nature in common. In a certain respect this holds good right up to very late years of youth. We must come together with human beings with whom we can experience Nature in common. This was not possible during the last decades because there was no language in which people, both young and old, could come to an understanding with one another about Nature. When the old speak of Nature it is as though they were darkening her, as though the names they give to the plants no longer fit them. Nothing fits! On the one side there is the riddle “plant” and we hear the names from the old, but they do not tally because the human reality is expelled; “objective” science is wandering about on the earth. This state of things came gradually but it reached a climax during recent decades.

In the nineteenth century it showed itself through a particular phenomenon in a significant way. When anyone with a little imagination cast an eye over the higher forms of culture in recent centuries, he made acquaintance at every turn with this objective creature “Science,” which came upon the scene in many different guises but claimed always to be the one and only genuine, objective science. And having made its acquaintance, having this objective science continually introduced to one, one perceived that another being had stolen away bashfully, because she felt that she was no longer tolerated. And if one were spurred on to speak with this being, secretly in the corner, she said: “I have a name which may not be uttered in the presence of objective science. I am called Philosophy, Sophia—Wisdom. But having the ignominious prefix ‘love’ I have attached to me something that through its very name is connected with human inwardness, with love. I no longer dare to show myself. I have to go about bashfully. Objective science prides itself on having nothing of the ‘philo’ in its makeup. It has also lost, as a token, the real Sophia. But I go about nevertheless, for I still bear something of the sublime within me, connected with feeling and with a genuinely human quality.”

This is a picture that often came before the soul, and it expressed an undefined feeling in countless young people during the last twenty or thirty years.

People have been trying to find forms of expression—for as there are forms of expression for the life of thought, so too for the life of feeling—they have always been trying to find expressions for what they were seeking. Possibly the most zealous, who felt the greatest warmth of youth, broke out into the vaguest expressions because all they really knew was: We are seeking for something. But when they came to express what it was that they were seeking, it was nothing, a Nothingness. In reality, the Nothingness was, as in the words of Faust, the “All,” but it presented itself as a Nothingness. It was a question of crossing an abyss. Such was the feeling, and it still is the feeling today. It can only be understood as part of history, but history in a new, not old sense.

And now I want to speak of something quite different, but gradually things will link themselves together. Human beings who lived at the beginning of our era were able to feel quite differently from the human being of today. This was so because in the life of feeling and human perception there still lived a great deal of what was old. Human beings had a heritage in their souls. Heritage was not there only at the beginning of our era; it continued far into the Middle Ages. But nowadays souls are placed into the world without it. The fact that souls come into the world without this heritage is very noticeable in the new century. That is one aspect. The other—well, my dear friends, suppose you were to ask anybody who lived at the beginning of our era if they spoke much about “education”. The farther back we go, the less we find that education is spoken about. Education, of course, may be spoken about in different ways, for instance: Through education the young should gradually be brought up to be what they want to be when they are old. For after all we must grow old in earthly life—however young we may still be.

In olden times human beings were young and grew old in a more natural way. Today people cannot be old and young in a way that is true to nature. People do not know any longer what it means to be young and what it means to be old. Nothing is known about it and that is why there is such endless talk about education, because there is a longing to know how to teach young people to be young in order that they may grow old respectably. But nobody knows how to direct things so that human beings should be truly young and how, in youth, they can decently assimilate what will enable them to become old in a worthy manner.

Centuries ago all this was quite a matter of course. Today a great deal is said about education. Mostly we do not realize the absurdity of what is said on this subject. Nowadays almost everyone is talking about education. And why? Usually he has but the vaguest realization of having been badly educated and yet difficulties in life are attributed to this cause. People talk about it because they find that they are uneducated. This they admit. But they do not experience anything real in this domain. Nonetheless conclusions are formed. The usual cry is: “We should have this program in education”—merely because people feel so insecure in themselves. One could also show that a strong will is present on all sides, but without any real content. And that is exactly what the young are feeling, that there is no content in this will. Why is there no content? Because only lately something genuinely new has arisen in earth-evolution.

The following can only be indicated in broad outline, but if you care to look at my book, Occult Science, it will be brought home to you. There you will find that the earth is shown as a heritage of other world-existences. The names are immaterial. I have called them the Saturn, Sun and Moon existences. But the first earth-epoch was only the repetition of earlier world-existences. On the earth there have been three periods of repetition: a Saturn, a Sun, and a Moon period. Then came the earth period proper. But this earth period proper, this Atlantean epoch, was again only a repetition at a higher level of earlier conditions.

And then came the post-Atlantean epoch—a still higher stage. But this again was a repetition. The post-Atlantean epoch was a repetition of a repetition. Until the fifteenth century A.D. mankind actually lived on nothing but repetitions, on nothing but a heritage. Up to the fifteenth century the human being, in his soul, was by no means an unwritten page. Before then, many things rose up of themselves in the soul. But from the fifteenth century onwards souls were really unwritten pages. Now the earth was new—new for the first time. Since the fifteenth century the earth has been new. Before then human beings lived on the earth with much they inherited. As a rule no heed is paid to the fact that since the fifteenth century the earth has become new for the first time. Before then human beings were fed on the past. Since the fifteenth century they have been standing face to face with Nothingness. The soul is an unwritten page. And how have human beings been living since the fifteenth century? Since then, the son has inherited from the father rough tradition what had once been inherited in a different way, so that from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century tradition was still always there. But as you can see, tradition has fared worse and worse.

Think for example of the Sphere of Rights. It would never have occurred to a man like Scotus Erigena to speak of Rights as modern people speak, because at that time there was still something in the souls which led human beings to speak as man to man. This is no longer so, because there is nothing in the soul that leads to the human reality; man has found nothing yet that leads out of the Nothingness. At one time the father could at least speak to the son. But at the end of the eighteenth century things had gone so far that the father had really nothing to say to his son any more. Then people began to seek, convulsively to begin with, for the so-called “Rights of Reason.” Ideas and feelings on the subject of Rights were supposed to be pressed out of reason. Then Savigny and others discovered that nothing more could be pressed out of reason. People began to establish Rights according to history, where it was a question of studying earlier conditions and cramming themselves with the feelings of men long since dead, because there was nothing left in themselves. Rights of reason were a convulsive clinging to what had already been lost. Rights according to history were a confession that nothing more was to be got out of the men of the day. Such was the situation at the onset of the nineteenth century: The feeling grew keener and keener that mankind was facing a Nothingness and that something must be got out of the human being himself.

In ancient Greece nobody would have known how to speak about objective science. How did man express his relation to the world? By reference to spiritual vision he spoke of Melpomene, of Urania, and so on; of the “Liberal Arts”. These Liberal Arts were not beings who went about on the earth, but for all that they were real. Even in the age of philosophy, the Greek's experience of his connection with the spiritual world was concrete. The Muses were genuinely loved; they were real beings with whom man was related and had intercourse. Homer's words: “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Peleus' son, Achilles” were not the mere phraseology they are thought to be by modern scholars. Homer felt himself a kind of chalice and the Muse spoke out of him as a higher manhood enfilled him.

Klopstock was unwilling to speak in the phrases which were already prevalent in the world into which he was born; he said: “Sing, immortal Soul, of sinful man's redemption.” But this “immortal soul” too has disappeared little by little. It was a slow and gradual process. In the first centuries of Christendom we find that the once concrete Muses had become dreadfully withered ladies! Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astrology, Music—they had lost all concrete reality. Boethius makes them appear almost without distinct features. It is impossible to love them any longer. But even so they are buxom figures in comparison with the objective science that goes about as a being among men today. Little by little the human being has lost the connection he had in olden times with the spiritual world. This was inevitable because he had to develop to full freedom in order to shape all that is human out of himself. This has been the challenge since the fifteenth century, but it was not really felt until the end of the nineteenth and particularly in the twentieth century. For now, not only was the inheritance lost but the traditions too. Fathers had nothing to tell their sons. And now the feeling was: We are facing a Nothingness. People began to sense: The earth has in fact become new.

What I have said here can be put in another way, by considering what would have become of the earth without the Christ Event.—Suppose there had been no Christ Event. The earth as it lives in man's life of soul and spirit would gradually have withered. The Christ Event could not have been delayed until the modern age. It had to occur somewhat earlier than the time when the old inheritance had gone, in order that the Christ Event could at least be experienced through the old inherited qualities of soul. Just imagine what it would have been like if the Christ Event at the beginning of our era had come about at the end of the nineteenth or in the twentieth century. How our contemporaries would laugh to scorn the pretension that an event could be of such significance! Quite a different kind of feeling was necessary. The feeling of standing before a Nothingness could not, at the time of that Event, have been there. The Christ Event came during the first third of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilization. And in the same epoch, in the first third of which there fell the Christ Event, the old era came to an end.

A new era begins in the fifteenth century, with the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilization in which we are now living. In this epoch there were only traditions. They have gradually faded out. In this epoch, as regards the Christ Event, as regards the deeper, more intimate religious questions, men are clearly facing a Nothingness. It has even become impossible for theologians to understand the Christ Event. Try to get from contemporary theology an intelligible conception of the Christ Event. Those who argue the Christ away from Jesus pass as the greatest theologians today. Quite obviously, people are facing the Abyss.

I am only describing symptoms. For these things take place in the deeper layers of man's life of soul. These layers of soul conjure into those who were born on earth to become the young of recent decades, something that makes them feel cut off from the stream of world happenings. It is as though a terrible jerk had been given to the evolution of the soul.

Suppose my hand were capable of feeling and were chopped off. What would it feel? It would feel cut off, dried up; it would no longer feel itself to be what it actually is. This is what the human soul has been feeling since the last third of the nineteenth century in regard to the stream of world happenings. The soul feels cut off, chopped off, and the anxious question is: How can I once again become alive in my soul?

But then, when one strives to speak out of what can bring this life back again, those who want to muddle along on the lines of the old spiritual life simply show no understanding. Just think how little is understood about the essence of the founding of the Waldorf School, for example. For the most part people hear about the Waldorf School something quite different from what they ought to hear. They hear things that were also said decades ago. The mere words that are spoken today about the Waldorf School can be found by them in books. They find every single word in earlier books. But when one wants to use different words, or perhaps only different ways of putting the sentences together, then people say: That is bad style. They have not the remotest notion of what must be done now, when human beings who still have a soul in their bodies must inevitably face the Nothingness.

Waldorf School education must be listened to with other ears than those with which one hears about other kinds of education or educational reform. For the Waldorf School gives no answer to the questions people want to have answered today and which are ostensibly answered by other systems of education. What is the aim of such questions? Their usual aim is intelligence, much intelligence—and of intelligence the present time has an incalculable amount. Intelligence, intellect, cleverness—these are widespread commodities at the present time. One can give terribly intelligent answers to questions like: What should we make out of the child? How should we inculcate this or that into him? The ultimate result is that people answer for themselves the question: What pleases me in the child, and how can I get the child to be what I like? But such questions have no significance in the deeper evolutionary course of humanity. And to such questions Waldorf pedagogy gives no reply at all.

To give a picture of what Waldorf Education is, we must say that it speaks quite differently from the way in which people speak elsewhere in the sphere of education: Waldorf School Education is not a pedagogical system but an Art—the Art of awakening what is actually there within the human being. Fundamentally, the Waldorf School does not want to educate, but to awaken. For an awakening is needed today. First of all, the teachers must be awakened, and then the teachers must awaken the children and the young people.

An awakening is needed, now that mankind has been cut off from the stream of world-evolution in general. In this moment humanity fell asleep—you will not be surprised that I use this expression. They fell asleep, just as a hand goes to sleep when it is cut off from the circulation of the body. But you might say: But human beings have made such progress since the fifteenth century, they have developed such colossal cleverness, and, moreover, are aware of the colossal cleverness they have developed If the War had not come—which, by the way, was not the experience that it might have been, although people did realize to a slight extent that they were not so very clever after all—heaven knows to what point the phrase, “We have made such splendid progress” would have got. It would have been unendurable! Certainly in the sphere of the intellect tremendous progress has been made since the fifteenth century. But this intellect has something dreadfully deceptive about it.

You see, people think that in their intellects they are awake. But the intellect tells us nothing about the world. It is really nothing but a dream of the world. In the intellect, more emphatically than anywhere else, man dreams and because objective science works mostly with the intellect that is applied to observation and experiment, it too dreams about the world. It all remains a dreaming. Through the intellect man no longer has an objective relation with the world. The intellect is the automatic momentum of thinking which continues long after man has been cut off from the world. That is why human beings of the present day, when they feel a soul within them, are seeking again for a real link with the world, a re-entrance into the world. If up till the fifteenth century men had positive inheritances, so now they are confronting a “reversed” inheritance, a negative inheritance. And here a strange discovery can be made.

Up to the fifteenth century, men could welcome with joy what they had inherited from the evolution of the world. The world had not been unrolled and human beings were not altogether cut off from it. Today, after the switching off has occurred, one can again ponder what is to be got from the world without personal activity. But then a strange discovery is made, like a man who is left a legacy and forgets to inform himself about it accurately. A calculation is made and it is discovered that the debits exceed the assets. The opportunity of refusing the legacy has been missed. But this means a definite amount of debts which have to be paid. It is a negative inheritance. There are such cases. And so a negative inheritance comes to the soul, even concerning the greatest Event that has ever happened in evolution.

Before the time of Golgotha it was not necessary for human beings to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, because it had not taken place. Then it happened, and with the remains of ancient inheritance it could still be dimly understood in the age that followed. Then came the fifteenth century when these inherited remains were no longer there, although it was still possible for father to pass on to son the story of what took place in the Mystery of Golgotha.

None of this helps any longer. People are dreadfully clever. But even in the seventh and eighth centuries they would have been clever enough to perceive the contradictions in the four Gospels. The contradictions were, after all, very easy to discover. They began to be investigated for the first time in the nineteenth century. And so it is in every domain of life. The value of the intellect was too highly assessed and a consciousness, a feeling, for the Event of Golgotha was lost. Religious consciousness was lost in the deepest sense. But in its innermost essence the soul has not lost this consciousness, and the young are asking: “What was the Mystery of Golgotha in reality?” The elders were unable to say anything about it. I am not implying that the young are capable of this either, or that anything is known at the Universities. What I am saying is that something ought to be known about it.

To sum up, what is taking place chaotically in the depths of human souls: a striving to understand once again the Mystery of Golgotha. What must be sought for is a new experience of Christ. We are standing inevitably before a new experience of the Christ Event. In its first form it was experienced with the remains of old inherited qualities of soul; they have vanished since the fifteenth century, and the experiences have been carried on simply by tradition. For the first time, in the last third of the nineteenth century it became evident that the darkness was now complete. There was no heritage any longer. Out of the darkness in the human soul, a light must be found once again. The spiritual world must be experienced in a new way.

This is the significant experience that is living in the souls of profounder natures in the modern youth movement. By no means superficially but in a deeper sense, it is clear that for the first time in the historical evolution of mankind there must be an experience which comes wholly from out of the human being himself. As long as this is not realized it is impossible to speak of education. The fundamental question is: How can original, firsthand experience, spiritual experience, be generated in the soul?

Original spiritual experience in man's soul is something that is standing before the awakening of human beings in the new century as the all-embracing, unexpressed riddle of man and of the world. The real question is: How is man to awaken the deepest nature within him, how can he awaken himself? Zealous spirits among growing humanity—I can only express it in a picture—are like one who only half wakes in the morning with his limbs heavy, unable to come fully out of sleep. That is how the human being feels today—as if he cannot completely emerge from the state of sleep.

This lies at the root of a striving in many different forms during the last twenty or thirty years and is still shining with a positive light today into the souls of the young. It expresses itself in the striving for community among young people. People are looking for something. I said yesterday: Man has lost man, and is seeking him again. Until the fifteenth century, human beings had not lost one another. Naturally evolution cannot be turned back to an earlier condition and it would be dreadful to attempt it. We do not wish to become reactionaries. Nevertheless it is a fact that up to the fifteenth century man could still find man. Since that century dim thought-pictures were to be found in tradition and in what the father was still able to hand on, saying: “The other person over there is really a human being.” Dimly it was realized that this form going about was also a human being. In the twentieth century this has altogether vanished. Even tradition has gone, and yet the quest is still for the human being. Man is really seeking for man. And why? Because in reality he is seeking for something quite different.

If things continue as they were at the turn of the century, then no one will wake up. For the others too are in the state where they are incapable of awakening anybody. In short, human beings, in community life, must mean something to one another. It is this that has from the beginning radiated through Waldorf School Education, which does not aim at being a system of principles but an impulse to awaken. It aims at being life, not science, not cleverness but art, vital action, awakening deed. That is, what matters is a question of awakening, for evolution has made human beings fall into a sleep that is filled with intellectualistic dreams. Even in the ordinary dream—which is nothing compared with the intellectual dreaming that goes on—man is often a megalomaniac. But, ordinary dreaming is a mere nothing compared with intellectualistic dreaming.

An awakening is at stake and it will simply not do to go any further with intellectualism. This objective science which goes about and has discarded all its old clothes because it fears that something genuinely human might be found in them, has surrounded itself with a thick fog, with the mantle of objectivity, and so nobody notices what is going about in this objectivity of science. People need something human again: human beings must be awakened.

Yes, my dear friends, if an awakening is to take place, the Mystery of Golgotha must become a living experience again. In the Mystery of Golgotha a Spirit-Being came into the earth from realms beyond the earth. In earlier times this was grasped with ancient powers of the soul. The twentieth century is challenged to understand it with new powers. Modern youth, when it understands itself, is demanding to be awakened in its consciousness, not in the ancient and slumbering powers of the soul. And this can only happen through the Spirit, can only happen if the Spirit actually sends its sparks into the communities people are seeking for today. The Spirit must be the Awakener. We can only make progress by realizing the tragic state of world-happenings in our day, namely, that we are facing the Nothingness we necessarily had to face in order to establish human freedom in earth-evolution. And in face of the Nothingness we need an awakening in the Spirit.

Only the Spirit can open the shutters, for otherwise they will remain tightly shut. Objective science—I cast no reproaches, for I am not overlooking its great merits—will, in spite of everything, leave these shutters tightly closed. Science is only willing to concern itself with the earthly. But since the fifteenth century the forces which can awaken human beings have disappeared. The awakening must be sought within the human being himself, in the super-earthly. This is indeed the deepest quest, in whatever forms it may appear. Those who speak of something new and are inwardly earnest and sincere should ask themselves: “How can we find the unearthly, the super-sensible, the spiritual, within our own beings?” This need not again be clothed in intellectualistic forms. Truly it can be sought in concrete forms, indeed it must be sought in such forms. Most certainly it cannot be sought in intellectualistic forms. For if you ask me why you have come here, it is because there is living within you this question: How can we find the Spirit? If you see what has impelled you to come in the right light, you will find that it is simply this question: “How can we find the Spirit which, out of the forces of the present time, is working in us? How can we find this Spirit?”

In the next few days, my dear friends, we will try to find this Spirit.

In the library of the Research Institute in preparation for tomorrow's meeting, at which Dr. Steiner has promised to appear.

It was stated at the beginning that, according to Dr. Steiner, it is not the task of the group to discuss questions, as happened at the meeting on July 2 and for which Dr. Steiner's later participation Steiner's later participation in the meetings, which were intended to deal with how to prepare for the appearance of the etheric Christ, how to take the dead into account in society, and which ideals of which cultural epoch (the fifth or sixth) should be represented in society's basic attitude. All these are matters for private study. In contrast, the representatives of the institutions are together in our group to do practical work. The theoretical discussions must stop, and we must finally get down to doing real work.

After that, various matters were addressed. It was mentioned that the students (Maikowski, Rosenthal, and others) intended to use the funds that had been made available for a college at the delegates' meeting to build a house on the grounds of the Waldorf School that would also serve as a meeting place for the Free Anthroposophical Society. As Leinhas, who administers this fund, was not present, it could not be determined whether the benefactors had been informed of this use, which was not in accordance with the original purpose of the foundation. In any case, however, it was stated that if the funds were not used directly for a college - Dr. Steiner once said that even if we had billions for a college, we could not open one because there would be no teachers and because if the Waldorf teachers were claimed for it, then the Waldorf school would perish - they should not be used for such a construction under any circumstances. It would be better to spend it on a movement for a free university or to combine it with the intended Goetheanum foundation fund.

Dr. Stein then reported on a conversation with Mr. Kretzschmar. He had pointed out to him after the “financial meeting” on June 22 that the anthroposophical economists who had not yet joined the coming day should join forces to support the movement after the Stuttgart financiers had committed themselves in the coming day. Kretzschmar replied that this was not the case. On the contrary, Unger and Del Monte had rehabilitated their businesses by founding Kommender Tag, made a killing, and now walked around with a halo on top of it. Stein said he had communicated this to Leinhas, who had written to Kretzschmar but received an evasive answer.

Benkendörfer said that such things kept coming up, but that after the unpleasant experiences he had had, he was no longer interested in finding out more. Unger explained that he no longer cared about such things at all.

Finally, Dr. Stein reported that the Kerning branch had been continuously approaching the board of directors since the delegates' meeting about Dr. Unger's continued presence on the board, and even after the board had declared that it would continue to work with Dr. Unger, even after he knew everything that the Kerning branch had brought forward against him, was not satisfied and threatened to pursue the matter further.

When the matter was discussed, reference was made to events that had given rise to it 16 years ago.

At the time, Miss Völker had spoken of the Jewish rule that was here. Benkendörfer, on the other hand, had said during the fall of the Besant that Miss Völker would soon meet the same fate.

Here, too, Benkendörfer and Unger declared that any hope of an understanding was completely hopeless.

The following are three addresses given to the children of the first Waldorf school at school assemblies in 1919 and 1920. In the Christmas assembly address Steiner also spoke to the parents who were in attendance. Steiner had previously assisted the industrialist Emil Molt in establishing the school for the children of the factory workers of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany. He made frequent visits, traveling from Switzerland, to work with the faculty of the school and to view the students' progress. (A chapter from Molt's autobiography describing the opening of the school appeared in Issue No. 2 of The Threefold Review.)

What is most revealing in these addresses is how open and straightforward Steiner was concerning the Christian basis of the school. Even though Christ is central to Anthroposophy, the world view based on spiritual-scientific research and inaugurated by Steiner, Anthroposophy is open to everyone regardless of religious background. Waldorf schools, which are based on Anthroposophy, are also open to families of any religious background.

A universal approach to Christianity is elaborated by Steiner in the following passages:

“Would a Buddhist be justified in saying that he may not acknowledge Christ because nothing is said to this effect in his scriptures? Is anything essential at stake when a truth is not found in particular writings or scriptures? Would it be right for a Buddhist to say that it is against the principles of Buddhism to believe in the truth of the Copernican theory of the universe, for no mention of it is made in his books? What applies to the Copernican theory applies equally to the findings of modern spiritual-scientific research concerning the Christ-being, namely, that because He has nothing to do with any particular denomination, the Christ can be accepted by a Hindu or an adherent of any other religion. Those who reject what spiritual science has to say about the Christ impulse in relation to the religious denominations simply do not understand what the true attitude to religion should be.

“Perhaps some day the time will come when it will be realized that what we have to say about the nature of the Christ impulse and its relation to all religious denominations and world-conceptions speaks directly to the heart and soul, as well as [endeavors] to deal consistently with particular phases of the subject. It is not easy for everyone to realize what efforts are made to bring together things that can lead to the true understanding of the Christ impulse needed by man in the present cycle of existence. Avowal of the belief in Christ has nothing fundamentally to do with any particular religion or religious system. A true Christian is simply one who is accustomed to regard every human being as bearing the Christ principle in himself, who looks for the Christ in a Chinese, a Hindu, or whoever he may be. In a man who avows his belief in Christ is founded the realization that the Christ impulse is not confined to one part of the earth. To imagine it as confined would be a complete fallacy. The reality is that since the mystery of Golgotha, Paul's proclamation to the region with which he was connected has been true—Christ died also for the heathen. Humanity must learn to understand that Christ did not come for one particular people, one particular epoch, but for all the peoples of the earth, for all of them! Christ has sown His spirit-seed in every human soul, and progress consists in the souls of men becoming conscious of this.”¹

• 1. Life Between Death and Rebirth (Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, N.Y.,1968), pp. 50–51.