The Rudolf Steiner Archive

As a complement to the art of eurythmy, to which we were pleased to introduce you earlier, I will be speaking today about its pedagogical aspect. This subject has become an established and organic part of Waldorf pedagogy. When it was my task, on previous occasions, to justify including eurythmy as a compulsory subject in our curriculum, it seemed appropriate to speak of it in terms of an “ensouled and spirit-permeated form of gymnastics.” However, I wish to emphasize right from the start that this remark must in no way be taken as derogatory as far as conventional gymnastics is concerned. It arose from the lack of a gymnasium, which initially prevented us from giving gymnastics its rightful place in the curriculum, in addition to eurythmy. Now that we are fortunate enough to have a gymnasium, gymnastics also is an obligatory subject.

I do not share the view once expressed to me by a very famous contemporary physiologist, after he had heard the introduction I often make before a school eurythmy performance. I had said that eurythmy was to be presented as an ensouled and spirit-imbued form of gymnastics, to be practiced along with the more physically centered conventional gymnastics, which also had its proper place. Afterward, the famous physiologist came to me, saying: “You declared that gymnastics, the way it is practiced today, has a certain justification. But I tell you that it is sheer barbarism!” Perhaps his words are justified, if they imply that this whole subject of gymnastics ought to be reviewed, having fallen prey to the materialistic attitude of our times. This, however, would be a very different issue. The point is that gymnastics, as it is taught in our schools, deals with physical movements and efforts of the human organism, which place the human body into a position of equilibrium relative to the outside world. The aim of gymnastics is that the human body, with its system of blood circulation and its potential physical movements, find the proper relationship to an outside space, which has its own forms and internal dynamics. Gymnastics is primarily concerned with adapting internal human dynamics, the human system of movement and blood circulation, to the dynamics of outside space. Gymnastics will find its proper and justified place in the school curriculum if and when one can find, both in freestanding exercises and in those using an apparatus, the appropriate orientation into world dynamics, seen also as human dynamics, for the human being stands as microcosm within the macrocosm.

On the other hand, eurythmy as an educational subject for children is very different. Eurythmy belongs more to the inner realm of the human organization. It can be seen as furthering and enhancing what is done in gymnastics. In eurythmy, the person works more with the qualitative and inner dynamics that play between breathing and blood circulation. The person doing eurythmy is oriented toward the transformation, into externalized movements of the human organism, of what is happening between internal breathing and blood circulation. In this way, the eurythmist gains an intimate relationship of body and soul to the self, and experiences something of the inner harmony inherent in the human being. This experience, in turn, brings about greater inner stability and firmness because the essence of the ensouled and spirit-imbued movement works on the entire human being. Conventional gymnastics mainly activates the physical part of the human being and, in its own way, indirectly affects the soul and spirit of the athlete, whereas eurythmy activates the whole human being as body, soul, and, spirit. Eurythmy movements cause the human soul and spirit to flow into every physical movement. Just as speech and song embody laws inherent in one part of the human being, so eurythmy embodies laws inherent in the whole human being; similarly, eurythmy works on the young child as a matter of course just as the organic forces inherent in speech work and flow through the young child.

Children learn to speak because of the stimulation of sounds coming from outside, and the children’s innate impulse to form sounds. Experience has shown that when children are introduced to eurythmy at the right age, they feel at home in its movements, with the same natural readiness as children finding their way into speech. An essential human feature—or, as I would like to call it, the most essential human feature—is developed and widened in this way. And since all education and training should aim at getting hold of the innate human being through the pupil’s own self, we feel justified in using eurythmy as a form of ensouled and spirit-imbued gymnastics in its own right, even though it originated and was at first cultivated only as an art form within the anthroposophical movement.

The following may seem a little difficult to understand at first, but if we can recognize how, in accordance with human nature, the child incorporates into the organism what is derived from eurythmy lessons—complemented by musical and sculptural activities—one can see how all these elements affect the child’s organism, and how they all work back again upon the entire nature of the child. One sees the child’s faculty of cognition becoming more mobile and receptive through the influence of eurythmic exercises. Children develop a more active ideational life, opening with greater love toward what comes to meet them; and so, by using eurythmy in appropriate ways, the teacher has the possibility of training the children’s powers of mental imagery.

Eurythmy also works back very powerfully on the will, and especially on the most intimate traits of the human will. For instance, it is easy enough to lie with words, and there are many ways of counteracting such a weakness in children, merely by speaking to them. But in such a case one can also make profitable use of eurythmy, for if, as a eurythmist, one lets words flow directly into physical movements so that they become visible speech, it becomes very evident that the use of this medium simply cancels out the possibility of lying. The possibility of lying ceases when one begins to experience what is involved in revealing the soul through one’s physical movements. Consequently one will come to see that, with regard to the human will, truthfulness, which is of such great ethical importance, can be developed particularly well with the aid of eurythmy exercises. To sum up, one can say that eurythmy is a kind of gymnastics developed out of the domain of the human soul and that it gives back to the soul, in turn, very much indeed. This is the reality of eurythmy and its specific character. Eventually it will be regarded quite naturally as an intrinsic part of education. We have no doubt that it will happen. However, these things take their time because the public first needs to overcome built-in prejudices. There will be those who say, “Look at this handful of crazies,” but such has always been the way of the world. There once were a handful of people among whom one crazy fellow actually maintained that the Sun stood in the center of the universe and that the planets, together with the Earth, were revolving around it. Such a crazy idea was at first totally rejected, for no one of a sane mind would contemplate such nonsense. Nevertheless, during approximately the first third of the nineteenth century there was quite a following for this “crazy” idea, which Copernicus had asked to be taken as the truth. Why should one not wait patiently until something that cannot even be proved as convincingly as the Copernican system of the universe is accepted by society at large!

Eurythmy feeds back into the child’s cognitive faculties, endowing them with greater mobility, causing a keener interest and a sense of truthfulness; it feeds back into the human emotional disposition, which lives between the faculties of cognition and a person’s will capacity. It is tremendously important that the human being, with the aid of eurythmy, be able to keep hold of the self as a whole, instead of living in the dichotomy of soul and spirit on one side, and human physical existence on the other.

One could keep asking forever, “What is the relationship between body and soul?” It is downright comical to see the question coming up again and again! There have been no end of attempts to construct theoretical explanations of how the one side affects the other. But if this matter can be experienced directly—which happens when one does eurythmy—the question immediately assumes a different character. The question then becomes: How does an intrinsic unity composed of body, soul, and spirit come to work in separate ways, on the one side as soul element and on the other side as physical element? Getting hold of these interactions completely forces one to reshape the question altogether. Then, there is no need for theorizing, for everything is founded on practical experience and in accordance with reality. Some people have the opinion that anthroposophy deals with “cloud-cuckoo-land,” whereas in fact, anthroposophy aims at working directly into practical life.

Nowadays, the spirit in matter is no longer perceived; as a result, the nature of matter is no longer understood. This nature can be comprehended only by doing. This may suggest how eurythmy affects the child. One can say that, when doing eurythmy, children, through the will, gets hold of the inner harmony between the upper more spiritual side of the human being and the lower more physical side, so that will initiative is being created. And will initiative is the very thing that needs to be cultivated in today’s education. Those who observe the psychological development of our times know very well that there is a great lack of will initiative. It is badly needed in the social sphere, and the art that will bring it about os most needed in pedagogical practice.

The things I have indicated briefly, you will be able to witness for yourselves while watching the children of the Waldorf school perform eurythmy. I hope that what you see on the stage, done with youthful joy and vigor, confirms what I have tried to put into words for you.

Ladies and gentlemen! From the viewpoints the Waldorf School takes as its points of departure, there is not one path but many that lead away from the unnatural things that have been imposed on humanity, and especially on our public life, toward something natural that is being demanded by human nature in its broadest sense, so to speak. I intend to outline one such path, the path between the teacher and the parents” house, in the remarks I am going to present to you today.

You may say that this path can be taken for granted, and yet, ladies and gentlemen, not only has the path teachers and educators take to the parents” house been found to be very difficult at times, but there are many, many significant views on education that pay no attention to it at all. I need only remind you of something that was experienced as a great event in the course of German cultural development—the appearance of Johann Gottlieb Fichte in all fields. Today, however, we will only mention his appearance in the field of education. During one of the most difficult times in German history, he gave his penetrating “Speeches to the German Nation” in which he pointed out that healing and re-enlivening German life after the humiliation of 1806 would have to happen through education.¹ We can say that Johann Gottlieb Fichte, one of the noblest of all Germans, found the most beautiful and most significant words to say about education. However, he regarded it as a fundamental prerequisite for carrying out his pedagogical intentions that children be taken from their parents homes and cooped up together in special educational institutions that would be run according to strict principles and only by a unified state. After his time, we also witnessed a great variety of educational experiments in which children from certain circumstances were brought together in special places to be educated appropriately. In the course of humanity’s evolution we have seen numerous examples that necessitated the removal of children from their homes.

Although Waldorf education and its spirit work with at least as much urgency and at least as much out-of-the-depths of the human soul as the educational experiments sketched briefly above, this spirit of Waldorf education took a very different direction from the very beginning. It did not take superficialities as its starting point. It did not say that this or that social provision had to be made for the sake of the children. It did not say that children needed to be removed from their normal situations and placed in different ones. From the very beginning the spirit of Waldorf education was a purely pedagogical and methodological one. The social situation and the circumstances of the children’s lives are accepted for what they are, and everything that is to be accomplished through Waldorf education is striven for on the basis of the inner spiritual foundations of pedagogy itself. We can thus say, in effect, that wherever educational difficulties arise because of a childs social situation or other circumstances, these are accepted as destiny by the spirit of Waldorf education, and methods are put into effect that will allow the difficulties to be overcome out of the spirit and out of teaching practices that are individualized for the child in question to the greatest possible extent. This means, however, that a school like the Waldorf School stands in the midst of actual life. In actual life, if we are dealing with a school that takes children at age six or seven, they are coming from home, and since we have no boarding facility they remain at home and in the care of their parents during the time when they are not in school. Thus the entire thrust of education in the Waldorf School is to work together with the parents. In particular, as we shall see, we must feel, sense, and think together with the parents.

No doubt many of you have often been presented with the idea of the significance of the stages of life for the life of a child.

There are two or three of life’s stages that are of concern to our theory of education. The first begins at birth and ends at the change of teeth, the second begins at the change of teeth and ends at puberty, and the third continues from there until approximately the twenty-first year of life. If we have an unprejudiced sense of how things are, each of these stages in the life of a child shows us the child in a totally different constitution of soul and of body. Let us first consider the child’s soul constitution.

Until the change of teeth, the child is definitely dependent on imitation for learning what is taught. What you demonstrate to the child works like an outer stimulus that calls upon the child’s entire bodily organization—in some places more visibly, in others less visibly—to imitate the impression. To substantiate this, we need only keep in mind the decisive fact that children acquire their native language wholly through imitation, which works deeply into the organization of their bodies and souls. We must take into account that the vibration, the waves of movement, of any spoken sound is experienced much more intensely in childhood than it is later on in life. Even in speaking, when it is a person’s native language that is in question, any adjusting of the larynx, any inner ensouling of the organs, is based on imitation. This is how it is with everything in the child’s life until the change of teeth.

Nowadays, when a misunderstanding, or rather numerous misunderstandings, generate great errors in our otherwise so admirable scientific world-view, we often talk about the hereditary basis of one or the other thing a child acquires in the first stage of life up to the change of teeth. But as far as the child is concerned, the only basis for this talk of heredity is the fact that the people who are talking about it have no real sense of observation. Otherwise they would find out that basically much of what we attribute today to this dark and mysterious heredity must actually be looked for in the child’s clearly comprehensible tendency to imitate.

However, consider how close the child’s soul life, which arises out of this imitative activity, is to the life of the parents simply because the child is a being who imitates. If we really grasp how strong the tendency toward imitation is in the child, we come to have a holy awe and a profound respect for the child/parent relationship. And if we then look at the basis for all this in spiritual cosmic connections, then we are truly able to say that since a human being is a spiritual being prior to embarking on a physical existence, this person—in spite of being a free being—enters earthly existence with a very specific destiny with regard to the forms, if not the routines, of life. If we look on the one hand at how this destiny unrolls with an inner regularity from the smallest experiences of childhood to a ripe old age, and on the other hand at how the child grows close to the parents by being an imitative being, if we really see all this in the context of all the underlying spiritual connections, we begin to have sensations that are religious in character, you might say, about what is given to us as teachers and educators when a child is entrusted to us. And these almost religious sensations make us strongly inclined to want to understand, when a child is entrusted to us on entering school, precisely how this child is connected to his or her parents.

It may be said that theoretical pedagogical considerations or abstract principles are truly not what determine how the spirit of Waldorf education sets out to meet the parents of the children. Rather, it is something living, just as everything else in the Waldorf school is meant to be something living. It is a living thing; it is the Waldorf teacher’s active need to be able not only to approach the child in spirit but also to find a way from the child to the parents through every expression of soul the child presents, through every motivating force, through every type of childish impulsiveness, and even through every gesture and every hand movement. This confirms our understanding of the child, which we Waldorf teachers need above all else if we are to teach by deriving our educational impulses from the very nature of the child in question. First and foremost, we can confirm that we are looking at a child in the right way by turning to the parents standing behind him or her. This is the case even when the parent/child relationship is not absolutely harmonious. In actual life what grows out of children and parents living together can manifest in the greatest possible variety of ways. Of course we have an inner feeling of happiness when we look at the destiny of a child who has the possibility of living in fully harmonious circumstances with exemplary parents. But may we not pose a counterquestion to this? If we observe life, either contemporary or historical life, without bias, do we not find that the greatest spirits, not only intellectual geniuses but also geniuses of virtue and moral action, have often sprung from grave disharmonies between child and parents? Waldorf teachers must acquire the habit of not criticizing the child/parent relationship, but of accepting it objectively, because their acquaintance with the parents can shed light on the child’s idiosyncrasies.

Thus it is not some pedagogical principle that challenges the Waldorf teacher to find a way to get to know the parents, but rather an inner heartfelt need, just as Waldorf education in general is essentially a pedagogy of the heart.

Let us now look at something else, namely the fact that teachers are now obliged to take on part of what used to be provided solely by the parents of children of elementary-school age. On entering elementary school, a child is going through the change of teeth. Nowadays children are sent to school somewhat too early; elementary-school age actually only begins with the change of teeth, but that is not the main point here.

When a child is sent to school and entrusted to a teacher, the teacher must take on a part of education or child-rearing that acquires its specific character from the fact that the child’s entire soul life, the child’s entire constitution of soul and spirit, is also transformed at the change of teeth. After that, the child is no longer an imitative being, although the principle of imitation does persist for several years into the child’s time in elementary school. Fundamentally, however, the child is now no longer an imitative being, but a being who is stimulated by what it meets in the form of images, through our structuring what we present in an appropriate and artistic way, you might say. At this age, children no longer tend to apply themselves imitatively and with their entire constitution to what is presented to them. Instead, they shift to the principle of natural authority. Whereas earlier it was the children’s will that imitatively traced what was demonstrated to them in their entire constitution, now it is their feeling that likes or dislikes what their teacher presents to them in images, including the images of his or her entire personality and actions, of the composition of his or her speech, and so forth. And the authority that prevails in school between the change of teeth and puberty must not be arbitrarily imposed. It must be a matter of course. Without admitting this, it is impossible to look at how human life unfolds as a whole. It is so easy to say that we should always use visual aids in our lessons. I do not mean to say anything against visual aids, but they should not become a means of trivializing instruction. We cannot take it as a principle to reduce everything to the level the children are already on. The point is that only those things that directly nurture the children through visualization need to be cloaked in a visual representation. But take a circumstance from religious or moral life—how are we supposed to use visual aids in this case? Aside from that, however, the inner soul nature of the children is such that something is true because a teacher to whom they feel sympathetic, who is an authority to them as a matter of course, has pronounced it true. They feel something to be beautiful because a natural authority finds it beautiful; they find something good because this authority finds it good. The authority figure incorporates the true, the beautiful and the good. It is bad for a person to have to acquire a feeling for the true, the good, and the beautiful as a matter of principle, on the basis of abstract commandments or all kinds of rational rules, before having acquired it at the right age—the age between the change of teeth and puberty—by having it confront him or her in the person of another human being. We should first learn that something is true because a respected person declares it true, and only later recognize the inner abstract laws of truth, which actually can have an effect on us only after we achieve sexual maturity.

Surely you do not expect someone who wrote 7he Philosophy of Freedom over thirty years ago to go to bat for the principle of authority in a place where it does not belong. However, the authoritative principle that children demand by their very nature absolutely does belong in the elementary school. Teachers themselves, with their rationality, their hearts and feelings, and their whole nature as human beings, are guidelines with regard to the true, the good, and the beautiful as the children are meant to embrace them. The human relationship that comes about reaches right into how the children construe the true, the good, and the beautiful. All this is presented in greater detail in various pedagogical writings on Waldorf education which are available for you to read.²

But let us now consider the position Waldorf teachers are in as a result of acknowledging this principle of natural authority and trying to apply it to its fullest extent. They depend on not having this natural authority undermined in any way. We must keep in mind that at the age when the change of teeth is taking place, even in families in which a lack of harmony prevails between the child and the parents, the child is inwardly close to the parents. This closeness is so strong that it basically outshines anything else that comes under consideration with regard to the being of the child at this age. This means that even if a child confronts his or her parents with antipathy, to use a severe term, a totally unshakable authoritative relationship to the parents is present subconsciously. I can present this only briefly here, but the matter can be verified in all its details. A true psychology, a true study of the soul, teaches us that even when children come into conflict with their parents and home when they are losing their baby teeth or in the years just after that, they are actually totally under the authority of the parents in the subtle, subconscious psychological layers of their being. And who would wish it otherwise? This is simply the relationship nature provides. If I were to depict the course that humanity’s evolution would follow if this were not the case, it would make a horrible picture. This means, however, that in their now completely different field of activity, where teachers are no longer examples to imitate but speakers who use their authority to present what enters the child, teachers must take a more subtle approach in influencing what the child has become in his or her inmost being as a result of parents and home. There is no other way of responding to the individuality of a child with your authority than by being able to link up fully consciously with what the child has become as a result of parents and home. The instinctive result of this in the Waldorf teacher is an inner urge to establish a connection to the parents.

There is a very specific reason why this urge develops. The spirit of Waldorf education is not a one-sided one; it encompasses the spirit, the soul, and the body equally. It would be a total misunderstanding of the spirit of Waldorf Education to believe that the physical aspect, whether in a healthy or an unhealthy state, is in any way underestimated in comparison to the spiritual aspect. The spirit of Waldorf education takes into account the whole human being in a child. But because it takes the whole human being into account without actually having the whole human being—it only has the child during school hours and perhaps for a short time before and after—it must experience an inner need to be in the closest possible contact with the parents, with the home in which the child spends the rest of his or her time.

It really is true with us—and I have often said this, particularly within the Waldorf School itself—that an educator does not need to be afraid of large classes. To set up small classes for pedagogical reasons means to count on a pedagogical weakness. That is not what is going on here. If it were desirable to work toward having smaller classes in the Waldorf school, the reason for it would be so that the teacher would have more possibility of establishing a connection to the parents of all the students in the class. That is what the teacher must do, out of the whole spirit of the Waldorf school.

But let us consider something else, since I am only trying to highlight a few of life’s stages. Those who can observe children in real life find that there is an extremely important point in life between the ages of nine and ten, approximately. You can see this point approaching; a certain inner crisis makes its presence known. It is not that the children start asking especially rational questions, but this crisis becomes evident when otherwise lively children start to hang their heads, when quiet ones become loud, when they give evidence of all sorts of unhealthy conditions, and so on. What is going on here is that in the child’s subconscious—and a great deal in the being of a child is in the subconscious rather than in consciousness—a question appears, a question that is not formulated rationally, but is active only in perception: Is the natural authority that has given me what is true, good, and beautiful up to now, is the natural authority that is the personification of truth, goodness and beauty, actually that? The doubt need not be expressed out loud, but it is there; it infuses the life of the child in the way I have described.

At this stage in a child's life, it is important for the teacher to have a healthy, independent gift of observation in order to find the right word and the right way of acting. Many things are needed—tact, instinct, intuition. Then you will be able to do something at this point in the child’s life that will be of wideranging significance for the entire earthly life that follows. If you find the comments, the actions and the relationship that can confirm for the child in an individually appropriate way that he or she was right in seeing a natural authority in you, then you have done something out of your inmost soul to become a true benefactor of that child.

Lucky the person who after this point around the ninth or tenth year can continue to look up to and respect an authority as a matter of course! No individual can become a free being in the course of his or her life without first learning, before entering puberty, to arrange life in accordance with how a highly respected person acts. To submit out of inner instinctive freedom in this way, to face such a person, recognizing that it is right to do as he or she does—that is what starts to make something out of the potentials for freedom that are concealed in a person.

In short, we as Waldorf teachers must maintain our natural authority in all respects and in the most subtle way. How can we do this? It is possible if our interaction with parents arouses the feeling in them that it is all right for them to influence their children to see the natural authority in the teacher. This may sound trivial, but it is true: Waldorf teachers should never pass up the opportunity to show themselves to the children’s parents in their true colors, so that the parents know who they are dealing with. This can sometimes be done in five minutes. The parent’s tone of voice, the nuance of each sentence they speak about the school, should be directed toward supporting natural authority in school. The connection between school and home cannot be close enough.

Still a third thing: If you have in front of you two, three or four sets of curricula and school regulations, all of them very cleverly thought out, then you know what you have to do. You have the curriculum, you have the regulations; that is what you have to do. But that is not how things are in the Waldorf School. If we are thinking in the spirit of the Waldorf School, it is right to think that some things must be different than they are in public education. Many people today cannot grasp that. And cleverness is so prevalent in our times. I cannot emphasize enough how clever people in our times are in comparison to other times. But it is just this rational cleverness—and I mean this quite seriously.

I am not being ironic—that commits the greatest stupidities. Nevertheless, people are clever, and this is expressed in a great variety of ways. If thirty people sit together and plan a school reform, it can be so clever that it cannot be disputed. And then lay thinkers can say, “That’s brilliant, it would be impossible to create better schools than these people have done with their points 1, 2, 3, and 4.” But just try to take it further, and look at the schools that have been created through those points 1, 2, 3, and 4. The principles are very clever, the statutes and paragraphs are very clever, but you cannot do anything with them in real life. The only way to do anything in real life is to feel life itself pulsing within you and to create out of this pulsing life.

This is where Waldorf teachers stand: They have no statutes and paragraphs, but only advice and suggestions which they must shape according to their own individualities. If you prescribe strictly what teachers have to do in school, then they should all be just alike. Just think of the consequences of that. If the regulations were seriously enforced, if we were to put into effect these very well-meaning abstract pedagogical principles that hold that there is only one way of teaching, then you would no longer be able to tell one teacher from another. You would meet one teacher and think it was some other one, because they would both be teaching according to the same abstract principles. But teachers are human beings. They are individuals. And they can only work if they can put themselves into it with the full independence of their being. Only then can they be really effective. But then they have to know life. You can only work in real live if you allow life to affect you. But what kind of life do you encounter in school? The parents’ life as it continues to work in the children. Our teachers are steered away from paragraphs and principles toward the real, immediate life of the children. This must flow into our methodology, into how we arrange all of our teaching.

So, ladies and gentlemen, if you could be a fly on the wall and listen in on our teachers’ meetings sometimes, you would hear how all the details of home are actually being taken into account and how intimately they are discussed with regard to how they shed light on the children. And if you were that fly on the wall, you would also find out that these teachers’ meetings are an ongoing learning process, that our educational practices are constantly evolving toward higher and more subtle effectiveness. It cannot be different if the school is meant to be a living organism, rather than a dead one. This means that the Waldorf School, because it calls itself an independent school, is an institution whose innermost being points to parents and home with regard to understanding the child as a total being.

Let us say that we get to know a child who is lacking in intellectual ability. That can happen. And there are many ways in which a lack of intellectual ability can be corrected, can be developed into something better. But we need a point of departure. Let us say that we get to know the child’s father and mother, and they are very intelligent. It does sometimes happen that children who are not intellectually gifted have very intelligent parents. It can also be just the opposite, that parents who are not intellectually gifted have highly gifted children. In any case, we will learn a very great deal about alleviating the child’s lack of intellectual ability if we look at the parents whom the child imitated up to the change of teeth. If we do so, we will find not only a theoretical explanation, but also suggestions for implementing what we have to do about it. The emotional life plays a very significant role in children of school age. It even plays into morality in that it receives the good only through sympathy for the good in the teacher. Children’s emotional life becomes transparent when we can see through their feeling into their parents’ particular variety of feeling life. This applies equally to the life of the will.

People whose intelligence tells them that an individual must be like this and such because that is average and proper human nature need not consider the parents. However, if we know that things and beings have origins, if we look to the source rather than to something abstract, then we must consider the child’s parents and home.

Waldorf education leads us along the path toward reality because it tries to live and breathe the spirit of reality, a spirit that is in accordance with nature and in accordance with the soul. And this path toward reality leads away from school and toward the parents’ home. This is the reason behind everything that can awaken the teacher’s interest in the parents and the parents’ interest in the teachers in the school. The parents’ evenings that are organized by the Waldorf School are there in order to create a bond between school and home. What we do in these parents’ evenings is meant to allow the parents to see the attitude and soul-constitution of the faculty.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the practical implementation of what is ultimately present as the highest—I cannot say principle, but the highest view in the spirit of Waldorf education. Out of the depths of their inner soul life and out of this spirit of Waldorf education, Waldorf teachers must realize that the parents are entrusting the school with the most precious thing they have when they send their children to us. These parents have had many experiences in life; perhaps they have been tested by life. This does not mean that they wish their children to remain untested, but they do wish them to be spared some of the difficult experiences that they themselves had to go through. For this and many other reasons, parents attach a great deal of hope to the moment when they entrust their child to a school. Out of the whole spirit of Waldorf education, our teachers know what is being entrusted to them. On the basis of views such as those I have characterized, they would like their effect on the children to be such that when the children are released from school and return to their parents, the parents can say, “We knew it all the time, ever since we first saw the school, that our hopes would be fulfilled.” However, this is not a conclusion they can come to at the last minute when their children graduate. It can mature gradually only through the interaction between school and home.

Thus, we can turn our backs on many different educational experiments, and even on well-intentioned pedagogical ideals, and turn to the spirit of Waldorf education, realizing that there is an extremely healthy instinct at work in children being together with their parents, and that it must therefore also be healthy for the school to grow close to this relationship by finding the right way to approach the parents.

Among the many things that the Waldorf School aspires to, which can all be characterized by saying that this school wants to rise above abstract principles and cleverness to a reality that is full of life, the main thing is that the Waldorf School wants to find a way to the most life-filled reality in the child’s existence. And in the existence of the small child, the child of school age, this reality is the parents.

This school with its spirit wants to be, not a school of theories, abstractions, and inflexible theoretical principles, but one full of life and reality. That is why it tries to find its way into the reality of the parents’ home.

• 1. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762-1814, Reden an die deutsche Nation [“Speeches to the German Nation”] given in Berlin during the Napoleonic occupation of 1807-08.
• 2. See Rudolf Steiner’s 7The Renewal of Education, Kolisko Archive Publications for Rudolf Steiner Schools Fellowship Publications, Forest Row, Sussex, England, 1980 [Die Erneuerung der padagogisch-didaktischen Kunst durch Geisteswissenschaft, Dornach, 1977], 14 lectures given in Basel, 1920, GA 301; Education and Modern Spiritual Life, Garber Publications, Blauvelt, NY, 1989 [Gegenwärtiges Geistesleben und Erziehung, Dornach, 1923], 14 lectures given in Ilkley, 1923, GA 307; The Roots of Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996 [Anthroposophische Pädagogik und ihre Voraussetzungen, Dornach, 1972], 5 lectures given in Bern, 1924, GA 309; Human Values in Education, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971 [Der pädagogische Wert der Menschenerkenntnis und der Kulturwert der Pädagogik, Dornach 1965], 10 lectures given in Arnheim, 1924, GA 310; The Kingdom of Childhood, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1995 [Die Kunst des Erziehens aus dem Erfassen der Menschenwesenheit, Dornach, 1979], 7 lectures given in Torquay, 1924, GA 311; The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996 [Die Erziehung des Kindes vom Gesichtspunkte der Geisteswissenschaft, Dornach, 1978].

[After a speech by Emil Molt, Rudolf Steiner takes the floor:]

Rudolf Steiner: Ladies and Gentlemen! Today is the second time that I have had the honor of addressing you here. The first time was at the invitation of Mr. Molt, to speak about what I believed at the time to be necessary for the progress of humanity out of the great turmoil into which human aberration and its consequences, the terrible catastrophe of the world wars, had led us. Today I am to speak in the presence of the light-filled Christmas tree for the Christmas celebration. But please do not expect me to give you any of the usual Christmas speeches, which can still be heard so often in our time. I would feel like a dishonest person if I did that, and I would also have to believe that if you yourselves are true in your feelings, you cannot bring anything from your hearts to such an unctuous speech. For let us admit it to ourselves: what is often heard in Christmas speeches today seems as if an inertia that has been held for centuries, a kind of mental inertia, had held on to words that still held their validity for times long past, but which today, in view of the world situation in which we find ourselves, seem as if those who speak them would see nothing with open eyes of what is truly going on around us.

Christmas today – one may say it bluntly, I think – is basically something that, in the feelings of the great mass of people and also in the feelings of the few who until recently were called the upper ten thousand, should initially only be a memory, a memory of feelings, of inner forces that were once alive in humanity, which, however, and we will talk about this, deserve to be revived, revived in a new form, but which are not alive today.

When Christmas approaches, people today think - depending on whether they are more or less blessed with goods of fortune - of giving each other more or less precious gifts. They also think of lighting the Christmas tree and getting into some kind of mood, although they don't really know what it is supposed to be. But it wasn't always like that. And I would like to mention just one detail – one could mention many such things, but let us think of this one detail; in a certain way it also characterizes the other things that were associated with Christmas in earlier centuries.

We can look back to the areas that are also around Stuttgart, which go far up to Thuringia and Hesse, which go over to Baden and Alsace and further into France, which go down to Italy, over to Bavaria and so on. We can see this area by looking back in history, and a remarkable picture presents itself to us as we look ahead to the approaching Christmas season.

In most villages – since this area was even less interspersed with towns back then, I am talking about the 14th and 15th centuries – a group of young men was gathered from October onwards, and this group of young men was to learn roles in order to perform Christmas plays at the time of the consecration festival. The text of these Christmas plays was usually available in handwritten form from a particularly favored family in each locality; they held it sacred. No one knew who had written it, so far back in time were memories of these Christmas plays; but the text was held sacred. As early as October, the person in possession of this text, who was also held in particularly high esteem in the village in question, would gather the young men he thought suitable for the performance. In those days, such performances were not yet performed with women, but only with male youths, who also played female roles, the role of Mary and so on. So this group of young men was assembled and taught. Strange traditions have been preserved from this teaching, and from these traditions, these traditions, one can see the deep sentiment with which the Christmas season was imbued as it approached.

There was, for example, the strict regulation that all those who were to play along, that is, who were the learning students of a teacher – it was prescribed, forgive me for mentioning such a harsh regulation after all – that all of them were not allowed to go to their girlfriends during the whole time. We only have to go back to the old cultural conditions to understand what such a rule meant, but it was strictly adhered to by the people who were considered called to take part in something like this. A second rule was that during the entire time that the young men were rehearsing the Christmas play, they had to obey their teacher strictly. That was also a rule that would be extremely difficult to enforce today. We, at least, who are now endeavoring to perform these plays again in the Anthroposophical Society, can hardly carry out any of these provisions. As for the first provision, it refers to something that does not occur at all among anthroposophists, and as for the second provision, it would never be adhered to, because such obedience does not exist there. The third rule, on the other hand, is one that cannot be implemented in anthroposophical circles if we are to rehearse these plays today. This is because the third rule meant that you had to pay a fine if you forgot something and said it wrong during the performance. We couldn't implement that either, because no one would pay the fine.

So I just wanted to mention these individual provisions to show you what was possible back then, out of the sacred mood. Now, there is something we cannot do within the Anthroposophical Society either, where we have resumed the Christmas plays in many places, especially this year, for example in many places in Switzerland, where they were rediscovered, because they had gradually been forgotten in the 19th century and were no longer performed. However, there is one thing we cannot do either: the teacher, who rehearsed these festival plays with the group of young people, was joined, as was only natural in a time when Christianity was as alive as in the centuries I have spoken of, by the local clergy. Of course, we cannot achieve that either. Then the teachers joined them. As it turned out, we could achieve this more easily, and we also succeeded where these teachers in particular had grown out of our own ranks.

Now, I presented all this to you to give you a picture of what was approaching in the mood of the individual places when the holy Christmas season approached. For what were people actually preparing for? They were not preparing for the Christmas tree – that did not yet exist at the time, it is at most 150 years old, when it was first established –; people did not gather around the Christmas tree, but they gathered to commemorate in the mood, in the inner experience of the heart, what they imagined with the birth of Christ Jesus. That was indeed a very different, more vivid conception than it can be today. For people in those days had a different awareness of human dignity and human existence. They still lived quite differently with one another, so the Christmas message was still something for them.

In this Christmas message, we may remember today, there is indeed a deep democratic trait. Today, we have no right to emphasize this democratic trait from the official confessions. But then, if one wants to cultivate true Christianity, as it must first arise again in humanity, then, my dear audience, one perhaps has a right to mention precisely this democratic trait.

There were two prophecies regarding the birth of Jesus Christ. One was for those who, at that time, we can say, formed what we might call the proletariat, and the other was for the shepherds in the field who sensed in their hearts that a time had come that needed healing. And out of this mood arose the mood that was poured into their words: Revelation of the divine, of the spiritual, in the heights, and peace to the people on earth who are of good will. - A drawing closer of man to the spiritual, that is what was felt. And in this approach, something was seen that was to bring renewal and refreshment to humanity from the conditions that existed at that time and that seemed unbearable.

But there is not only this one proclamation for those who could be called the proletariat of that time, for the poor shepherds in the field. There is a second proclamation, that for the wise men, for the kings from the East, that is, for those who were at the top of humanity at that time, for those who were the opposite of the proletariat of that time. Just as the shepherds in the field received the Christmas proclamation in their own way, so they also received the wise kings in their own way. But both found themselves confronted by that which simply wanted to be the representative of the whole of humanity. And in the same way, on the one hand the shepherds in the field and on the other the wise kings from the East, sacrificed and worshiped this representative of the whole of humanity, of the pure humanity that knows no human distinction. In this is indicated in the Christmas proclamation the deeply democratic trait that runs through Christianity and which, despite the many centuries, has not been fully realized to this day, and which can only be realized if one maintains a proper sense of this general, purely human quality that lives in all people and that knows no human distinctions.

One might say that the three main festivals that humanity, Christian humanity, has celebrated over the centuries, in the time when they were still alive in thought and feeling, drew people's attention, one might say, to a threefold structure of the year.

Christmas speaks most to the feelings; it speaks to the feelings by directing them to what, in the highest sense, has poured itself out over the world as the impulse of democracy.

Easter should take hold of the human being's thoughts more, should point him more to spirituality and freedom, while Christmas should point more to equality among people, to the absence of differences, if one wants to work into the deepest part of the human being. Easter should stir in man that liberating feeling that overcomes him when he rises to the spiritual and when he gains an awareness that the spiritual must ultimately always triumph if the world is not to perish, over external material things. This resurrection of the spiritual out of the material is, after all, the Easter idea. When the soul can resurrect inwardly, then it actually experiences freedom by being able to put itself in the place of the spiritual.

And the idea of Pentecost points us to brotherhood. It is presented to us in such a way that we are made aware of how those who were called upon to proclaim Christianity at the time found the right tone to speak to all people in pure brotherhood, to approach all people. If we understand it correctly, it points to what we must feel inwardly if we want to achieve brotherhood in relation to the external, material life of humanity.

It is something ancient, rooted in the human spirit, which has always guided thought in the most diverse areas of life according to the threefold order. Today, my dear audience, we need this threefold order again to heal something in humanity, again to eradicate something unhealthy. Therefore, it was basically for the same reason that I spoke when I had the honor of addressing you for the first time, and that I would like to speak to you today.

We live in a time that is so ill that most people do not want to imagine their illness, partly out of convenience, partly perhaps even out of ill will, but mainly out of selfishness. It is indeed the case today that most people who are content with comfort are always satisfied when, out of the turmoil of the day, a little improvement appears here and there and they can see that not everything has fallen apart, that there and there is “a better economy”. But for those who can see through it, today's life is like that of a person who, three years ago, was still able to buy a suit, and wears this suit - even if it is a bit shabby, he can still wear it - but he cannot buy a new one. And because he can still wear this suit, he still believes himself to be in a possible situation in life. But it is in store for him that one day the suit can no longer be worn. Such is the case with today's conditions. We see how people are trying to patch them up, how they are applying all kinds of mixtures to improve things a little here and there and keep the old. But today's social life is like the skirt. The skirt can still be worn and this social life can continue for a while, but it will surely tear; it will not go on. And the fact that people somehow believe that it will continue is, ladies and gentlemen, a great illusion that people create for themselves by comfortably wanting to persist in the old and not wanting to approach what wants to be a real new creation, as the impulse of threefolding supposes.

It is not surprising that at first, after the idea of threefolding became known, the proletarian leaders not only ignored us, but even put all kinds of obstacles in our way. It is not surprising that everything that Mr. Molt has already described to you has happened. For today we see that the call for the threefold social order is countered by another threefold impulse. This other threefold impulse we may perhaps - even if it does not sound like the usual unctuous Christmas words - present to our souls. For it is precisely by looking a little into the present that we can find the strength that could really perhaps lead not only to the illusion of living in a possible situation as long as the skirt is not yet torn, but to acquiring a new skirt.

Today we see the world filled with a threefold order, but what a threefold order it is! You see, this fall in Dornach, in a more intensive way than was previously possible, we tried to show in a series of college courses how the spiritual life itself in science must be transformed, how it must be placed on its own feet if humanity is to be saved. We were able to show what should be taught in the future in the fields of the individual sciences, in the field of economics and practical life, so that the teachings can penetrate into life and become practice. What are our views on such matters today? Well, today we think entirely from the old conditions, and in this field in particular we are the most conservative of all. Of course, there are people who, in their own belief, have a very good opinion of the popularization of spiritual things. They found adult education colleges, adult education centers, public libraries, and so on. They make the people happy by bringing out among the people what has flourished in the universities and schools in those times that led us into the catastrophe. One feels extraordinarily comfortable when founding such libraries, such popular educational institutions among the people.

In this area, the impulse of threefolding that has emerged from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must think quite differently. For anyone who is familiar with the circumstances is aware of something quite different. The situation is that the scientific approach and intellectual life cultivated in our schools today is of no use because it belongs to the declining world itself. And no social order, however well-intentioned, can do anything other than lead to decline and not to the dawn if it merely carries the intellectual life that is cultivated in schools today out into the world. For it is not a matter today of carrying out into the people that which is cultivated under the roofs of the university, that which is cultivated in secondary and primary schools, but rather of carrying a new spiritual life into the universities. A new spiritual life must first come into the universities, which can bring salvation to mankind. That is not the case there.

That is why, you see, spiritual science with its consequences, the threefold social order, is too radical for people today - too radical even for the proletarian leaders, who of course want to do nothing other than to conservatively place the old spiritual life in the heads of the people. What makes it difficult to work socially with such an endeavor?

There is the first link in today's threefold order, there is the sum of today's representatives of intellectual life, who, insofar as they deal with the matter at all, want to know nothing of such a renewal, but always emphasize that their old way of spreading Christianity must in turn become popular. And now, ladies and gentlemen, here is how the spiritual life as it is cultivated by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science was characterized by a representative of intellectual life who holds a professorship at a university: He said: First of all, for national reasons – these gentlemen are very fond of invoking national reasons – the people need the nourishing bread that comes from the pulpits, the nourishing bread that they are accustomed to seeing represented by the representatives of the confessions. Only then does it need the sweet. He describes what is attempted by spiritual science as sweet.

This is just one example. I could cite many more of the ways in which what is anthroposophical spiritual science is defamed from the lecterns of these teaching institutions. It is no wonder that the representatives of these teaching institutions react in this way to a movement that wants to bring something different under the roofs of these teaching institutions. For in a certain way, after all, the masters are stepped on, and then they squeal. That is the only explanation for this matter, after all, if one understands it. But it is necessary to understand that one needs an independent spiritual life in relation to the political and economic order. We need a spiritual life that works out of its own forces. And such a spiritual life, as far as it can be today, is anthroposophical spiritual science, through its inner essence, despite the fact that everywhere its throat is being cut. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants nothing more than to provide the pattern for the spiritual life that must come and that can only bring freedom to people. On the other hand, we see the other link in the present threefold social order: the representatives of intellectual life, who are today the most conservative people and would like to suppress all spiritual progress, especially that which can truly bring salvation.

And this first link in the present threefold division is joined by another, which is made up of politicians and statesmen and so on, who have still grown out of the old conditions - out of those old conditions that have brought about the terrible catastrophe over European civilization, through which millions and millions of people have been killed and crippled. They do not want to see that the only hope lies in the fact that new people are emerging from the broad masses, new people who have no connection with those who led into the catastrophe. And it is not the proletarian leaders who belong to these new people, because they are the ones who, like the others, only continue what led to the bloody catastrophes. No matter whether they are delivering speeches at labor meetings or sitting on such curule chairs and shouting abstractions into the world like the one on which Woodrow Wilson sat ; all these people, they want nothing that could bring salvation to humanity today, because they have completely outgrown the old with their thoughts, they only strive to preserve the old in some way.

One must not get hung up on words, my dear audience. Even the word “League of Nations,” which is now going around the world, should not create any illusions in us. A League of Nations can be something very good, something great and salutary, if it is rooted in those ideas that are needed to bring salvation to humanity, in the sense that I indicated when I had the honor of addressing you here almost two years ago. A League of Nations that would emanate from such people, who feel that way, would certainly be a League of Nations that could contribute something to the salvation of humanity. But such a League of Nations must proceed from quite new people, from people who grow out of the broad masses, who today may not even be noticed or, if they are noticed, are trampled to death – at least spiritually. But Leagues of Nations as they arise from the minds of old politicians, these are phrases, at most something Versailles or Geneva-like. And the Geneva spirit is nothing but a talking-shop that fails to take account of the realities of contemporary Europe, just as if one did not see the real conditions with one's eyes open. That is the second link in today's threefold division.

And the third link in today's tripartite division is made up of those people who want to hold on to the old economic system, who only ever think of galvanizing the old again. These are the people who have illusions about American credit to Europe, who have illusions about the possibility of improving the exchange rate situation according to old recipes, who do not want to see that the only thing that can bring salvation is what is called associative economic life in the sense of threefolding. I do not need to characterize it here today; it has often been characterized here and in other places.

We have a threefold order, but it is a threefold order of the negative, a threefold order of today's representatives of the spiritual life, of today's politicians and statesmen, of today's business people, who are working against the good of humanity. This threefold order must be replaced by the other threefold order. And anyone who thinks they can get through with small thoughts today is very much mistaken. Today it is only a matter of ideas that span the globe, while individual countries, especially after the war, have increasingly sought to erect Chinese and other walls around themselves. And while this pernicious game continues to be played, world conditions today cry out for the internationalization of economic life. And today we know that if we only want to ensure that there can be salvation under the influence of the internationality of economic life. Why keep putting a ban on anything that is to be introduced or exported? This only leads further into decline. Only the freedom of economic life is what can bring salvation and blessing to Europe and the whole of today's civilized world. And until the community of people in the world who have an understanding of the fact that such internationality must take hold, it will not get better. Today we have the task of bringing the impulse of threefolding into as many minds as possible.

When I left Switzerland last April to work here – called by friends in Stuttgart – in the sense of the threefold order, after the appeal “To the German People and to the Cultural World” was given to individuals to sign, a very well-known pacifist who had written extremely well during the war visited me. He did not want to put his name to the appeal without first having obtained more precise information about the intentions, which he thought he could not deduce from the appeal. The “key points” had not yet been published, and he told me, among other things, the following: “So you are going to Germany now. I can imagine that you are banking on the second revolution and you would like to pour into the Second German Revolution - the Second Russian Revolution was already over - that which is the meaning of threefolding. - I said: No, because firstly, I have no faith in the Second German Revolution; it will not be something acute, it will remain something chronic. And secondly, even if such a revolution should assert itself, not all the minds will have been removed from the same, which, despite all radicalism, want to continue to cultivate the old ideas among people. - I leave it to everyone to decide whether, in principle, both have not fully materialized.

Therefore, my dear attendees, I would like to say: He who today perceives the great Hydra, the snake that asserts itself as the false threefolding, he who sees this Hydra, this snake, in its real form, could already be pointed out that we in turn need a cure for the morbid conditions of civilized humanity. Therefore, it does us no good today to sit under the Christmas tree with its lights and just remember in an unctuous way what people used to celebrate when Christmas approached. Today we must turn our gaze, if I may say so, from the usual Christmas, from the Christmas of history, to the world Christmas. We must realize that we must live again in a mood in which we must see through what is there, that we must live again in a mood in which we acknowledge: Something must be born again, a spirit must embody itself within humanity. Today we can no longer imagine it figuratively, no, today we must imagine it in full reality. Today we do not need a frivolous radicalism, but we need the radicalism that was also present when Christianity entered the world. Today we need a world Christmas radicalism again. And we must say to ourselves: into this world, as it is around us – disintegrating, sick -, into this world something spiritual must come. And attention should be drawn to what should come as spiritual: to the threefold social order. This threefold social order should embody itself within humanity.

And so, as the world lies today, we can actually do no other than absorb the Christmas spirit into ourselves as a feeling for the future. One might say that the Christmas spirit as a world Christmas spirit has basically no truth today. It only has truth when we absorb it into ourselves as a sense of the future and let it permeate our hearts.

If we look at the Christmas tree in this way, we see its lights shining us into a future in which a possible Christmas will come again. For basically, we can only be in the Advent mood today, in the mood of expectation, and in that mood of expectation that demands deeds, devoted action from us, so that the World Christmas, that is, the outpouring of a new spiritual life into sick humanity, can happen again. We need the mood of Advent, and we need the mood that wants to awaken the strength within us to bring about this Christmas for the world.

But we will never come to this true Christmas mood if we just continue to recite the old, worn-out phrases about Christmas in an unctuous manner, but we will come to this true Christmas mood only if we look with clear spiritual eyes at what stands today as the false threefold division of the world, which is also a spiritual, a political-legal and an economic one. And we will only come to understand what the new Christmas can be for the world if each of us does our duty, if each of us seeks understanding of the world situation. We will only recognize it if we visualize the image that was so often presented to devout humanity in earlier times, so that this devout humanity felt much about this image: below the snake, the dragon, above the one who conquers this dragon. The snake, the dragon is there - the false threefold order is there, my dear attendees. From our hearts, from our intellects, from our understanding of the world situation, there must arise that which will crush the head of this snake. Then, when that happens, only then will Christmas be again. Therefore, today, anyone who lives sincerely and honestly in accordance with the aims of the threefold order cannot speak of anything other than the world Christmas that must be brought about through the efforts of people to achieve the right threefold order, as something healing, that crushes the head of the false, world-murderous threefold order, so that health may once again enter into the social life of humanity.

I would like to have said my admittedly inadequate words today so that the Christmas idea can live in us. But what they want is for these words to find their way to your hearts, so that this Christmas idea may arise in your hearts and the true threefolding may be present in the world, crushing the false threefolding, the dragon that is rearing its head ever more boldly and impudently in the world today.

To you, my dear friend Emil Molt,¹who first conceived the idea of this school, founded it, and have been involved with it ever since its founding; to you, dear Herr Weippert, who have placed your architectural skills in the service of this building; to you, my dear friends on the faculty, who decided at the very beginning to devote yourselves to working here in this school; to all of you from the Waldorf School Association and the Board of Directors of the Kommenden Tag² who have pledged your care, collaboration and guidance to this place which is dedicated to the salvation of humanity; to you members of the Bund fiir Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus [Association for Social Threefolding] who have accepted the task of protecting the seed of a free spiritual life here in this school; and to you, my dear children, pupils of this school, who have been privileged to enjoy its first lessons and its education toward humanity, so to speak; to all of you I turn in this moment when, with hearts that are grateful to destiny, we gather to lay the foundation stone for this school building that has come about, through the concern of all involved, for our children and the student body. In laying this foundation stone, we send with it these words, which according to age-old custom are inscribed on the document that will be buried in it:

May there prevail in young human beings
what spirit power can furnish in love,
May there work in them
what spirit light can furnish in goodness,
Out of certainty of heart
and firmness of soul
For the body’s ability to work,
For the soul’s inwardness,
For the spirit’s brightness.
To this end let this place be dedicated.
May young sensibilities find here
a human caring endowed with strength,
devoted to light.
Those who place this stone
Are mindful in their hearts
Of the spirit that is to prevail here,
That this spirit may secure the foundation on which
liberating wisdom,
strengthening spirit power,
and the manifest spiritual life
Shall live, reign, and work.
To this there would bear witness
in Christ’s name,
in pure intent,
and in good will:³

(signatures of Emil Molt, Herr Weippert, Rudolf Steiner, Marie Steiner, and members of the faculty, the Waldorf School Association, the Board of Directors of the Kommenden Tag, and Association for Social Threefolding.)

We place this document in the pentagonal dodecahedron, which is the symbol of the active power of the human heart and spirit, of the power that we will apply with all our strength to what is to come about in this school. Let us now place the pentagonal dodecahedron with this document into the ground.

My dear friends, dear children, dear students of the Independent Waldorf School!

The Waldorf School was born out of the spirit of our times into a time of great trouble. A great misfortune broke in on humanity in the form of a terrible, catastrophic war, and after this catastrophe had subsided outwardly, it brought on times in which we had to consider how to begin to prepare a future for humanity in which forces of further evolution, of progress, of ascent out of great need and out of humanity’s decline, could be nurtured. The school is among the things that can be most effective in carrying the forces of the present—which may in fact be able to do little good at present—over into a future in which they will be able to have a greater effect. And in these difficult times, when humanity had to turn to such thoughts of the future above all else, the idea came to our dear friend Emil Molt to take the initiative to let the Waldorf School come about. Today, on the day when this building that will expand the Waldorf School receives its foundation stone, let us recall this fruitful idea most heartily and most thankfully. At the time when our friend Emil Molt set about founding this school and conceived this idea, such an idea encompassed all the great issues of the present. There will come a time when it may be possible to see the founding of this school in a more objective light than is possible at the present moment with all the incredibly complicated and confusing circumstances that are still confounding humanity and preventing it from seeing in all clarity that such a place for young people, which proceeds from an independent cultural life, is above all else an absolute necessity for our times. That Emil Molt was able to conceive this idea out of his feeling for these great issues of our times will never be forgotten and will always be given due recognition wherever people have any understanding of such needs of humanity and of the great impulses of human evolution in general.

In order to inscribe it on your hearts, dear children, dear students, I must also recall the people who have decided to form this school’s first faculty. You, dear children, who were the first to enjoy being taught in this school, should inscribe this on your hearts and souls: In the face of the immense great tasks that human beings have been given with regard to education for the sake of our human future and goals, becoming a teacher in this school was a great and significant decision. We must keep in mind, however, that for now the school has gained the confidence of people in the widest circles, we might even say throughout the world. If you look at what is happening, you know that there are human souls all over the world who not only know that there is a Waldorf school in Stuttgart, but are also actively interested in the question of what we are trying to accomplish with something like this. You, my dear children, should be mindful that you are the first to be taught in a school that is being looked at by people all over the world, and for good reason. Above all, you and all the rest of us should be aware with sincere gratitude that a momentous decision was needed to bring about this school’s faculty, which is the first to subject itself to such world-wide scrutiny. But this body of teachers is also imbued with the idea and the impulses from which this school took its start. These teachers know that they are working, although within a limited context, for something that ultimately concerns human evolution as a whole. They have demonstrated their ability to apply their full strength, to continue to apply their full strength, for the sake of what must happen for this school as a result of this attitude and these impulses. We have already seen many flowers as this school unfolds. This will not be forgotten by those who have dedicated themselves to cultivating what is meant to be nurtured here in this school in an all-encompassing sense. And when, as I have often done, I ask you children who are to be educated here in this school if you love your teachers, and you answer in the affirmative, then the whole relationship between students and faculty tells me that you are in the process of allowing this spirit to gradually enter the school.

Now I am going to ask you once again, so that you can answer from your hearts, how it stands with your relationship to your teachers. Once again, dear students, dear boys and girls, I am going to ask you, “Do you love your teachers, and are you grateful for what they are doing?” If so, then say “Yes!” [“Yes!” shout all the children.]

Dear students, dear boys and girls, this is what you should always feel. If you do, then the right spirit will be present in the school. Only in the light of this spirit can we bring about what must happen here.

This school, whose foundation-stone laying we are celebrating today, must also consider a second thing. In a certain respect, the school stands here as an example of how children should be taught today. As a single school, however, it cannot be more than a model. People look at this model in the way I described before. When I was in Norway giving lectures a short time ago, I could see that even at this distance there were numerous people who were watching this school and intimately participating in it. What has been founded here is seen as a model school. What is still lacking, however, is the more widespread insight that founding a model school is not enough. It is not enough unless an insight into the necessity of founding such schools spreads throughout the whole world. It is not enough unless hundreds and hundreds of people join together in an international school association to found schools like this everywhere. Otherwise, the most that can happen will be that this small student body will carry out into the world what humanity needs to see fostered for the sake of its evolution.⁴

However, we have not yet been able to find this second thing out there in the world. My dear friends, if we were in a position to found schools modeled on the Waldorf School in many places, if we were to receive the means to do so out of a clear blue sky, these schools would be filled all over the world. Not one of these schools, paid for with money from out of the blue, would stand empty. But what is lacking in the world today is the sense for social sacrifice. The impulse is strong enough to want to found schools like this everywhere, but it does not manage to move from outwardly acknowledging an idea that is necessary for our times in the strongest sense of the word, to actually summoning the will to accomplish what these times require. And the idea of the Waldorf School will not accomplish its task until this impulse is fulfilled in the world.

To accomplish this task requires many people who approach it with understanding. If it were possible for us today—we can only do it through thoughts—to establish inwardly as well as outwardly through this deep inner foundation we are laying in burying the foundation stone for this school building, to lay a foundation stone in the hearts of many people as a seed of what we hold necessary for humanity’s evolution and ultimate goal, then a lot would have been done.

Dear boys and girls of the Waldorf School, I speak to you all out of a heart and soul that are inwardly moved, so that in this solemn moment we can direct the forces in our hearts to what has just been described as necessary for humanity, to what has been indicated in the idea of the Waldorf School. When what is meant to live in human hearts actually is alive in them, they do possess a certain strength.

My dear friends, dear children, dear boys and girls of the Waldorf School! When people in ancient times prepared to lay the foundation for a building, they buried something living in the earth along with the document which stated the goal and purpose of the building and the names of those involved in its construction. This idea became more and more spiritualized. Today we exercise our sacred freedom in burying in the earth a symbol of the spirit, the pentagon dodecahedron that contains our promise, given in the name of Christ out of our pure intentions and our active working strength—however we may apply it. Today we place this symbol in the earth like a seed, having directed toward it the most beautiful thoughts of which we are capable.

And just as the forces of the world bring forth a living tree from a seed buried in the earth, let there come forth from what we have buried in the earth—steeped in our heartfelt wishes that the reason for this building’s construction may flourish, steeped in our inmost hopes and expectations for the future—let the flower of what we have buried in the earth, of the thoughts and feelings and impulses of will whose symbol is our foundation stone, be what we must again and again call the goal and impulse of the Waldorf School—that it may be a place in which to nurture everything humanity needs for new moments in its progress, its civilization and its culture. May this flower spring up from the spiritually living seed that we are burying in the earth today.

You, dear children, dear boys and girls of the Waldorf School, are to be the first to unite your feeling and good will and good intentions with what has been said to you on this festive occasion. It is the true foundation stone of the Waldorf School, of what is meant to grow and bloom here on this site and to evolve on behalf of the well-being and goal of humanity.

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• 1. A night bombing in 1943 damaged this building extensively, filling in but not completely destroying the first floor, which served as the basis for the school’s reconstruction in 1945. The foundation stone containing the verse was well protected under the main entry. The original building, which had been acquired and remodeled by Emil Molt, was not damaged.
• 2. Magazine, The Coming Day.
• 3. No copy exists of the version of the verse that was sealed up in the foundation stone. It is reproduced here according to the stenographic record of what Rudolf Steiner read at the ceremony. An apparently earlier version, different in minor details, has been found in a notebook of Rudolf Steiner’s. See Wahrspruchworte—Richtspruchworte, second edition, Dornach, 1953. [Translator’s note: Neither version is included in Arvia MacKaye Ege’s translation of selections from the Wakrspruchworte, ( Truth-Wiought-Words).]
• 4. In the summer of 1920 Rudolf Steiner assumed that the founding of an International School Association was imminent. This Association was to awaken a feeling for independent spiritual life in the broadest possible circles and to create as quickly as possible the means for establishing schools independent of the state, wherever this was still possible under national laws. When people later set out to make the Association a reality, Rudolf Steiner said that the time in which an independent spiritual life could have been initiated was over.

Ladies and gentlemen!¹ I call this first official meeting of members of the Independent Waldorf School Association to order. Before I go into the agenda, please allow me to welcome you most heartily in the name of the Board. Of course only a small number of the Association’s members are here today; we welcome all the more heartily those of you who are able to be here. We have 1,400 members, and not nearly that many are here, but it is a pleasure to see that a considerable number have come.

To begin with, ladies and gentlemen, there are some things that need to be said with regard to the development of the Waldorf School up to this point. We now have two school years behind us. From various publications that have already appeared, you probably know that in this Waldorf School which Emil Molt founded, we aspired to something that could really bring about something new in various directions as a result of new pedagogical and methodological viewpoints and as a result of a universal humanitarian way of thinking. We aspired to release new forces that are needed in the field of education in order to counter the forces of decline that are so apparent in our times. Understandably enough, something important must be done now in the realm of the educational system. Our task was not an easy one; in choosing the teachers, we needed to make sure that the spirit of a much-needed new pedagogical and methodological way of thinking, as we may call it, was alive and active in them.

In addition, the faculty first had to come to a common understanding of what our task would have to become as we got into the details of pedagogical and methodological activity. For this purpose, a pedagogical and methodological course was given prior to the opening of the school for the college of teachers as it was initially constituted. Instruction was then begun, attempting to take this course as a basis. In addition to this first somewhat longer pedagogical course, a shorter supplementary course was given before the start of the second school year, and a second supplementary course is taking place now before the third school year begins.² On the various occasions when I as the educational director was able to visit the school in the course of these two years, it became evident—and I say this after a conscientious investigation—that in spite of all the difficulties that some individual teachers had to overcome in themselves—difficulties due in part to outer circumstances and in part to the difficulty of the task itself—it has become possible for the spirit that prevails in our school to take hold of the college of teachers ever more strongly. We have been involved in an ascending development, and the way in which this spirit of the Waldorf School has settled down among us to an ever greater extent leads us to hope that we will also be able to note an ascending development in the Waldorf School spirit in the school year to come. It has become evident that the new teachers who joined the old ones as the expansion of the school made it necessary have found their way into the spirit of the Waldorf School with astounding rapidity. In this connection, we can say that this spirit of the Waldorf School is becoming something more and more alive, something you discover and are touched by as soon as you come into the school.

In this connection, after properly assessing the situation, we have only good things to note; we can hope that by developing the spirit we aspire to we will gradually get to the point at which we can offer clear evidence that the Waldorf School will be able to achieve its goal. This is what there is to report about the spirit that prevails in the school and in the teachers’ conferences, about the spirit that was evident to me, as the one who had to verify it, in the attitude and way of thinking that prevails within the college of teachers. The college of teachers consists of its founder Herr Emil Molt and his wife in the role of patrons, so to speak, and of the people you know. By the very nature of the thing, the educational directorship has fallen to me, and I may say that in the teachers’ conferences that have been held in my presence and in the classes in which I participated, which happened quite often in the course of these two years, what I have just described has certainly been evident.

This is all that needs to be noted in brief about this side of things; however, there is something that needs to be presented from the other side. This is something that I believed to be fully justified in saying in all kinds of talks before the opening of the school and at the opening itself, namely that the Waldorf School will only really fulfill its mission if other such schools are founded very soon. With a single school, of course, we can provide nothing more than a model and a pedagogical and methodological example. I believe I am justified in telling you this. Of course we will be able to produce a model and an example of this sort, but in our times this can only be a beginning. What is needed now is to carry the spirit of which we have spoken into the entire educational system in the sense of the threefold social organism. This threefolding requires a truly free cultural life with regard to education. The spirit of which we have spoken can be achieved only through the broadest possible dissemination of the idea of the Waldorf School. The Waldorf School must have successors, and this depends of course on interest in the school developing in the widest possible circles. It may be said that the active cooperation of the members of the Waldorf School Association, and also of the parents, demonstrates an admirable degree of interest. Unfortunately, however, the idea of the Waldorf School has not excited interest in wider circles; interest there remains extraordinarily low. Apart from the single small-scale and very gratifying attempt that has been made within Central Europe, the Waldorf School has not found any successors, and there are very few movements afoot to get such successors started.

We can also say that the interest has not been as great as expected from another point of view, namely that it takes money for even one model school to thrive. We have had to set things up in a way that involves adding one grade a year. When the school was founded, it had eight grades; last year we added the ninth grade, and with the beginning of the third school year, which takes place tomorrow, the tenth grade will be added. In this way, we will expand the school upward each year so that eventually our graduating students will be able take the Abitur and go straight on to various colleges and universities. There is still time for all this, but this is how we imagine the school’s expansion to take place. Of course this requires constant additions to our physical space. In addition, our original idea, which was to found this school primarily for the children of associates of the Waldorf-Astoria factory, has broadened considerably. We have been getting more and more applications from all over the place; in this respect there is no lack of interest. Interest in increasing the size of the school, in expanding this one school, and in the spirit of the school is certainly already present. This is evident from the fact that we have students applying on all sides, and that most grade levels have several parallel classes.

The Board of Directors” report will mention the difficulties with regard to expanding the school.³ We can see from all this that it is necessary to arouse interest in the school in a financial context. We really cannot say that the school has met with this interest in a financial sense. We encounter new financial worries each time an expansion becomes necessary. Already today the Board will present some of its concerns in its report to this official members’ meeting. While on the one hand we can report considerable satisfaction with the school’s spiritual progress, this must be balanced by reporting our concerns, which will increase greatly in the next few weeks. Naturally, the college of teachers cannot deal with these concerns; it already has a great deal to do in keeping up with the school’s spiritual progress. This is something that must be taken to the broader public in the right way in the near future. We simply must awaken interest in financially supporting the Waldorf School, or else even the model that a single school provides will not be able to develop in the appropriate way. It is to be hoped that if we succeed in raising the interest of the broader public in the spirit of the Waldorf School and its results, we will be able to meet our other need, namely to broaden the concept of the Waldorf School by founding other such schools as successors to this one. If this does not happen, establishing a model and an example is all that will be possible. This would certainly not do justice to the ideas and ideals of the Waldorf School movement.

This is what I wanted to present to you in my role as chairman of the Waldorf School Association.

From the discussion

E. Molt: I could not wish for a nicer task than to have to present Dr. Steiner with our heart-felt thanks for his loving leadership of the school. We know that we have him to thank for the successful growth of the school

Dr. Steiner: Ladies and gentlemen! I would like to thank Herr Molt for his kind words, and all of you for agreeing with them. I believe I may also express these thanks in the name of the entire college of teachers of our Waldorf School. There can be no doubt that to the extent to which this college of teachers has been successful in building up the Waldorf School, this has only been possible because the entire college of teachers is deeply imbued with the need for the idea of the Waldorf School, because each individual member of this college of teachers is enthusiastically involved with the idea of the Waldorf School. From this enthusiasm comes the strength to work at something essentially new. We can rest assured that in spite of many difficulties, this enthusiasm will endure, and as a consequence the strength needed by those of us who must provide for the Waldorf School and its spiritual progress will also endure. And in this sense, since you may be able to believe that we in this school are working out of pure enthusiasm for the idea of the Waldorf School, you will also be able to accept the promise I would like to make, in my name and in the name of my dear friends in the college of teachers, to you who have taken such a deep interest in the Waldorf School. Please accept our promise that we will in future continue to work in the way that you have seen and in a way that will satisfy you.

Someone expresses the wish to have a chance to see the Waldorf School.

Dr. Steiner: I believe you would not get much out of seeing the Waldorf School itself, and that the faculty would not be able to conduct a tour tomorrow morning. If it is possible for you to modify your wish, perhaps you could take part in the opening assembly here in the Stadigartensaal at 9:30 tomorrow, if there are not too many of you. Would it be possible for you to do this instead? I am sure the teachers will have no objections. And if you should wish to take a walk tomorrow evening after six o’clock, the members of the college will be glad to show you the building when school is not in session.

A member: Perhaps people can be allowed to visit the school on a certain day? The eurythmy lessons, for instance?

Dr. Steiner: Eurythmy belongs to our lessons, so the same objections would apply to it as to other classes. I would like to comment that the most that would be possible would be that we might decide to show visitors the empty school when the children and teachers are not there. There can be no question of visiting while school is in session. That is, such a visit could only take place after weighing it up carefully in consultation with those who hope to learn something by visiting the school—for instance, with people who want to see something of this school because they are trying to found a similar school elsewhere, because they themselves are doing something relevant to spread the idea of the Waldorf School. Seeing the school in operation would only come into question in infrequent cases of this sort. Of course we have already had many requests along these lines, but for purely pedagogical and methodological reasons it would not be possible to have it happen on a more general basis. Even a legitimate visit during a lesson is a cause of disturbance, a disturbance that is not justifiable in pedagogical terms. Anyone coming into the classroom disturbs the lesson. Sometimes there is a higher goal that justifies the disturbance, and we have to accept reasons of this sort. But we need to be sensitive to the fact that a lesson requires presence of mind and should therefore under no circumstances be subjected to visitation unless there is some urgent need.

I believe, therefore, that it is also the view of the other members of the college that the most we can allow is for you to see the classrooms, and even this would be burdensome at the moment. I can assure you that the classrooms will be well worth seeing once we are receiving a lot of financial support. But with regard to equipment that comes from endowments, people are probably much more likely to feel that they are getting their money’s worth if they go and look at other schools. We, on the other hand, would only be subjecting ourselves to the danger of having them tell us that they didn't see anything, that the instructional materials are anything but ample, and that they want their money back!

With regard to eurythmy, let me remind you again that we have done everything possible to demonstrate what eurythmy is like. We have organized events where people could see what the Waldorf children do in eurythmy, and I hope that these events will continue. These are opportunities for you to convince yourselves of what the Waldorf children can accomplish in eurythmy. For pedagogical reasons, it does not seem possible to me for us to make exceptions in the case of eurythmy to what applies to the rest of the lessons.

So far we have accommodated to the greatest possible extent any legitimate wish people might have to inform themselves of what is going on in the Waldorf School, and people have taken advantage of the possibility to see the school to an equally great and not always desirable extent.

In this regard, nothing healthy can come of it if visitation and our interaction with the outer world are governed by any directives other than those the directorship and teachers™ college of the Waldorf School see fit to issue. It does not seem possible to me for the school’s leadership to receive any such directives from an Association. The issue here is that only a proper decision of the teachers’ college can come into consideration in a matter like this, so it does not seem necessary to me to vote in the context of the Waldorf School Association on whether or not this should be permitted. How this matter is handled depends absolutely on the college of teachers. There has also been no motion to do otherwise.

... It does not work to have what I described in the first part, the spirit of the Waldorf School, on display for visitors. It has to be developed in the lessons, and this can be done only in the way in which it has been attempted so far. The only way in which the spirit of the Waldorf School can be presented to the public is through public testimonials of people who have children here, who are becoming familiar with our educational ideals; that is, through parents and others related to the school. There is no possibility of drawing attention to the spirit of the Waldorf School in any other way.

I can assure you that I know that this suggestion was made with good intentions, but in the past two years we have been accommodating on all sides. We must guard carefully against having people come who are merely curious. However, we will also continue to not turn away anyone who has legitimate grounds for getting to know the school.

Now that we have come to the end of our gathering, allow me to still express on behalf of the Board our hearty thanks to you for being willing to attend this first gathering. I hope the experiences you will be able to have will satisfy the interest you have demonstrated by being present here today. In this sense, I thank you in the name of the Board of the Waldorf School Association for being here today. Let me now call this first official members’ meeting to a close.

• 1. This speech was revised by Rudolf Steiner himself for inclusion in the Mitteilungsblatt für die Mitglieder des Vereins Freie Waldorfschule [Newsletter for Members of the Independent Waldorf School Association], August 1921, Vol. 1. He did not, however, revise the discussion that followed.
• 2. Supplementary courses: See Rudolf Steiner’s Meditativ erarbeitete Menschenkunde (1947) (available also as the first four lectures, Stuttgart, Sept. 15, 16, 21, 22, 1920 in Erziehung und Unterricht aus Menschenerkenntnis, GA 302a), Balance in Téaching (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1990) and Menschenerkenntnis und Unterrichtsgestaltung (Eight lectures, Stuttgart, 1921, GA 302), Educating Adolescents(Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Presas, 1996).
• 3. Because of a ruling on the laws governing primary schools, the Waldorf School had to reapply for approval in the fall of 1920. This was granted under the proviso that starting in the 1922/23 school year it, like other private schools, was not to admit a new first grade and would have to decrease the number of students in the first four grades. However, as an experimental school the Waldorf School was expected to win an extension to this deadline. The ruling was later repealed.

After the points of business, Rudolf Steiner took the floor:

On the whole, it can be said that many of the outcomes of our goals actually constitute a single phenomenon within a larger framework of facts. Please allow me to make a few comments on this, and especially on the experience we have gathered since founding the Waldorf School.

As you know, we founded the Waldorf School as one part of the effects that were intended to proceed from a spiritual movement that is over two decades old. The Waldorf School would be inconceivable without this spiritual movement. In its particulars, the plan to found the school came from our dear friend Emil Molt at a time when there was a certain interest in great humanitarian questions because it was a time of such great need. Counting on this interest, we began to work in many different directions to try to influence aspects of public life from anthroposophical points of view. We may well say that since that time we have been able to acquire very extensive experience along certain lines.

To begin with, we encountered a certain interest that promised to encompass broader circles. In 1919 humanity had a great interest in working in one or the other direction to enable forces of ascent to replace the forces of decline that were so evident. And today we still see a universal interest in educational issues, not only in Central Europe but all over the world. It is a remarkable fact that this year’s Shakespeare festival in Stratford actually took place under the auspices of educational issues. You know that I myself had to give lectures at this festival, and that the event stood fully under the sign of educational issues. In fact, a committee on new ideals in education organized this event. This summer we will have another opportunity to have a conference, this time at Oxford, where nine out of twelve lectures will deal with educational issues in a narrower sense.¹ This shows that at any rate an interest in educational issues is still present today.

This interest is to be found everywhere. In the widest possible circles today, we definitely find that educational issues are thought to be the most important issues of all. We find numerous people who believe, and rightly so, that any talk of social issues does not rest on firm ground if it does not take educational issues as its starting point. We have come to realize that the chaos that humanity has fallen into and will continue to fall into has essentially been brought about by our failure to place the right value on the spiritual issues of humankind’s evolution.

However, this interest is “thought interest,” if I may put it like that. The way in which this interest manifests clearly shows that we are dealing with some kind of thought interest. People organize conferences on education just as they organize other conferences today. They get together and talk about educational issues, and it cannot be denied that extraordinarily clever things are talked about at these gatherings. People nowadays talk with extraordinary cleverness. A large portion of humanity today is smart, and it is also the case that the majority of these very smart people like to hear themselves talk. This creates the best circumstances imaginable for holding conferences to discuss how to find ways out of these chaotic conditions.

If it depended only on conferences of this sort, we would be well on the way. Ladies and gentlemen, this is something we should consider very carefully. I have often stated that I am convinced that if twelve people or some other number of people would get together to undertake to establish an agenda for educating children in the best way, something extremely clever would come out of it. I say this in complete seriousness. When it comes to establishing an agenda for assembling the best pedagogical principles for dealing with children, the literature available today is excellent. What people are saying today in these conferences is literature. However, it all depends on accomplishing the work that is to be done on the basis of real life. People who establish agendas are never dealing with real life. In real life you deal with a certain number of students and a certain number of teachers; you deal with people. These people will do what needs doing; they will do whatever they can do.

However, in order to actually accomplish what is theoretically possible, we depend on having our hands free to do our work on a humanitarian basis. This brings us to the fact that nowadays the presence of a “thought interest” in great existential issues is much less important than the presence of the will to actually bring about the conditions that make a system of education such as this one possible. The remarkable thing about this is that while there is the broadest possible interest in the thought or the feeling that such and such ought to be, this is not accompanied by any real will interest. That no real will interest accompanies it is the reason why I call what it is our conferences deal with, “literature.” Literature is what it actually is; it is not something that will be transformed into action.

One of the most important facts about the background of the Waldorf School is that we were in a position to make the anthroposophical movement a relatively large movement. The anthroposophical movement has become a large one. This is evident from the fact that difficult anthroposophical books go through many editions.”² Interest springs up everywhere. This is a “thought interest,” or even goes beyond thought interest to the extent that the people who come together in the anthroposophical movement also have a feeling interest in it, an interest of the heart. In all of our modern movements people are coming together with a mere “thought interest” that is transformed into a talking interest in those who are somewhat active. The anthroposophical movement gathers together those people who have an intense human need, a soul need, to make headway with regard to the essence of the human being. This is what things look like when we consider an interest in knowledge, a feeling interest, more theoretically. There are very many people today who realize that there is something here that can satisfy their spiritual interests. That is how it stands today, and I hope that its growth is guaranteed in spite of the scandalous opposition to it.

But what we are lacking are people who are not merely interested in the anthroposophical movement becoming as large as possible and bringing forth as much spiritual content as possible, but who are also interested in making this anthroposophical movement happen, in being co-workers in its coming about. There are extraordinarily few of them. We have many people who listen, many who want something for themselves, but we have extraordinarily few people who are co-workers in the fullest sense of the word.

You know, when our conference in Vienna was being organized, which was not a conference in the same sense as other conferences—the point of our conferences is for people to get together to receive something they can take home, while in other conferences everyone wants to get rid of what they bring from home—in any case, when this conference was being organized, there had to be workers there to get ready for it and bring it about, and there had to be speakers there. There are always a small number of friends who nearly have to run their legs off, work their fingers to the bone writing letters, and empty out their wallets. There are only a small number of them, the Waldorf teachers and a small number of others, and they are thoroughly overworked almost every month of the year because of their involvement. Actually, they are always terribly overworked.

But at the end of a conference such as this, even if it is as successful as the one in Vienna, we experience once again that although all the conditions are in place for our Waldorf system of education to expand, or something of that sort, the way these conditions come about means that the small number of active people get in over their heads. Again and again we have to be on the lookout for new coworkers. Perhaps not all of you will agree with me, but I would like to state my experience quite openly. As things stand today, I believe there would be a possibility of gaining plenty of members. I got the impression in Vienna that it would be possible to attract enough people who would become coworkers in the best sense of the word.

But—and here our general concern coincides with our concern for the Waldorf School—at this point we bump up against the fact that it is not possible to expand our circle of coworkers for the simple reason that we have no money. People everywhere have the means of supporting their coworkers, but this is only possible for us to a very inadequate extent. The main question is always how to offer people the means to exist when we disconnect them from their previous means. That is the fact of the matter. Today, if we want to move forward, we need a large number of coworkers. Those we have are simply not enough. Thus, what needs to be taken care of can be done only by exhausting the strength of the forces we have, and what can be done in this way is at most a tenth of what could be accomplished under conditions at present if we could count on a full complement of coworkers. After the Vienna conference in particular, we could watch the experience I have just described welling up.

Naturally this is not a question of an ordinary appeal to the wallets of those who are already members. That is not the issue. The issue, to put it very strongly for once, is that in recent times whenever we have appealed to the will, the matter in question failed.

In the end, the Waldorf School movement is connected to the threefold movement. The Waldorf School movement is conceivable only within a free spiritual life. The “thought interest” we met with at first has not led to a will interest. When the attempt was made to accomplish the deed of founding the World School Association as our only means of expanding beyond Central Europe, this attempt failed.³ It was to have encompassed the entire civilized world. The attempt to rouse whatever belief people had that the educational system must change, which was what was being attempted in the World School Association, was a miserable fiasco. There is such a terrible feeling of being rebuffed when you appeal to the will. I do not say that I am appealing for money in this case. We are lacking in money, but we are lacking in will to a much greater extent. The interest that exists does not go very deep, otherwise it would extend to the right areas.

We were able to found the Waldorf School. Herr Stockmeyer⁴ read the ruling,⁵ the gist of which was that as of Easter of 1925 we will lose our first grade, and eventually the four lowest classes. We would hardly have been able to open the school at all anywhere else. In founding the Waldorf School, we took advantage of the right moment in which it was possible to do such a thing.

Whenever the educational system is at the mercy of universal schematization, we can point to strongly working forces of decline. We encounter them everywhere. We can point them out wherever what is laid down in the regulations for primary schools is taken to the last stage. In Lunatsharsky’s school system in Soviet Russia, it has been carried through to its conclusion. People there are thinking the way we will think here when this is carried through to its conclusion and the full consequences have been felt. The current misery in Eastern Europe is what comes of it when this way of thinking about non-independent schools finds its way into practice.

I am trying to speak today in a way that awakens enthusiasm, so that people feel the spiritual blood trickling in their souls and a large number of people who realize this will commit themselves, so that public opinion is aroused. Actually, I must say that at any point in the last twenty years when I tried to speak a language that appealed to people’s hearts not only in a theoretical sense, but to the heart as an organ of will, what I felt, first in the Anthroposophical Society and later in other groups, always made me wonder, “Dont people have ears?” It seemed that people could not hear things that were supposed to move from words to action. The experience of the fiasco of the World School Association was enough to drive one to despair.

How do we think when we hear something such as this ruling that was read aloud? We think that perhaps ways and means will be found to push through the lower classes for a few years, after all. Even in more intimate circles, not much more comes of it than thinking, “Well, maybe the possibility will be there for a few more years.” The point, however, is for all of us to stand behind it now. Education must evolve independently, as has been emphasized ever since 1919. There is no other way for this to become a reality than through general acceptance of what is offered by the members of our various associations, who are in full agreement that something like this should exist, and through them being joined by more and more people who will become active members. The will has to develop first!

I would like to tell you how my calculation goes: If numbers speak, we can say that we have no money. Having said that, we then collect money and fill the gap by the skin of our teeth.

However, we will also not get very far by this means. We will get further only by the means I intended in speaking of the World School Association. We must have an active faith that what is being done will really become a factor in public opinion. In order to maintain the Waldorf School and establish additional schools, we need a growing public conviction that continuing in the sense of the old school system will lead only to forces of decline within humanity. This conviction is what we need. We will move forward only when instead of merely establishing schools here and there for the sake of practicing some kind of educational quackery, we can make the breakthrough to deciding to take our educational principles to the public in a way that will make them a matter of inner conviction for parents and non-parents alike.

Please excuse me, but in a certain respect I really cannot avoid saying that I know many people will recognize the truth in what I have just said, but you only really acknowledge the truth of something by doing something about it! By doing something about it! This is why, above all, we must make sure that we do not found schools simply to an extent that lies within our existing means, which come from our branches and from wallets that are already empty. We must try to work for ideas and ideals so that an ever growing number of people is imbued with them.

In this respect our actual experience is just the opposite. The current issue of the newspaper for threefolding has just announced that in future it will be a magazine for anthroposophy. Why? Because the promising beginnings in understanding threefolding have petered out. Because, fundamentally, we must go back to the style we had prior to the threefolding movement. In spite of the fact that a lot has been said about threefolding, this is another case of being driven to despair when you talk with people. We need something to come of this; we need it to enter public opinion. That is what we need above all else if we want to make progress with the Waldorf School.

I must admit that I have been saying this for a long time. But just about anything else strikes a chord more readily than what I have said today. I would like to say that if I see what lives in people’s will as mere faith—well, no one believes that mere faith, the mere faith that humanity can only be helped by having an independent system of education, will accomplish anything. But it would lead people who are still able to do so to support us financially, so that we would not continually be left empty-handed in comparison to other movements.

The anthroposophical movement is the basis of the Waldorf School movement. Even if it is set back by scandalous things such as are happening now,⁶ it has within it the necessary prerequisites for life. A lot of associations are founded that have adequate monetary means but no inherent prerequisites for life. Associations are constantly being founded, and people have money for them, and yet they fail. If all the money that people spend today on unnecessary associations could be directed into our channels, then the reports would look different. Herr Leinhas⁷ would have to report that our reserve fund is so large that we will have to try to invest it fruitfully.

I do not believe at all that the main thing for us today is our lack of money. What we are lacking is the will to assert ourselves in real life, to insist that the portion of spiritual life that we acknowledge as true be given its due in the world. What use would it be if I had claimed that our effectiveness in the past year was satisfactory in some way? But here, in a members’ meeting, it is necessary to speak from this point of view. I am fully convinced that our Waldorf School can get as good as it can, but if we do not find the possibility of imbuing public opinion with our educational impulses, then all of our fancy arithmetic will not help us at all.

The will to convince everyone must be present in an everincreasing number of people. In addition, the conviction must become widespread that for the salvation of humanity, it is necessary for something such as is present in embryonic form in the Waldorf School to keep on growing.

That is what I wanted to have said to that percentage of hearts in which the impulse of will is present. We can get very far if we only think about what it depends on: It depends on us using our will to really get public opinion to where it ought to be. That is what I needed to say.

From the discussion

I must add that a great number of parents have expressed the request that something be done by the Waldorf School to manage the relationship of the faculty to the parent body—what can the parents themselves do for the children? I would like to say that we will very soon be giving careful thought to how we can work in this direction. At parents’ evenings, I myself will try to offer something along the lines indicated by these many signatures.⁷

We will try to do everything possible along these lines in the very near future.

Expanding our circle of coworkers can be achieved only if the circumstances of which I spoke become a reality. Something must first be done to shape public opinion so that more extensive work can be undertaken. Then it will be possible to do many things. But as long as what is growing on our grounds remains the secret of the members, we will not be able to move on.

A question is asked, among others, regarding the official ruling mentioned in the speech.

Dr. Steiner: It would not help us to file a complaint with the authorities. As many people as possible must be won over to the idea that such a school should exist. The authorities are doing the right thing if that is the law. It is a question of opinjons gaining a foothold, becoming an effective force. There is something much deeper at stake. We must decide to interpret things ambitiously, to realize that what we think to be right must become the opinion of the public. The point is to get this idea into as many heads as possible. That must be accomplished so that as many people as possible change their view.

Dr. Steiner (in response to a suggestion). That does not come into question at all. Influencing public opinion is the only possible means of bringing the other methods up for discussion. To win over public opinion is the only practical way for us to go. We have not done so because there are far too few of us who believe in such a thing. I imagined that the World School Association would be promulgated in a certain way. If the monthly contribution could be one franc per member, we would be able to achieve what would have to be achieved by such an association. It would only be a question of individuals working in such a way that enthusiasm is present in their will.

Without doing that, we will get no further; we will simply manage to use up our last reserves. Even if we still find a lot of well-meaning members, it would be impractical to carry out. Even if something like that were to become a reality, we would only use up our last reserves. Our experience has shown most recently that it is necessary to attract the circles that are interested in what we are doing but are being kept away by the fact that the majority of the current membership feels the urge to keep the membership small.

May I still say that although we have established a certain level of contribution for membership, it is very good not to exclude anyone who is simply not in a position to pay the whole amount. Alongside the paragraph in the bylaws, let us remember among ourselves that people can also pay less.

• 1. This international congress on “Spiritual Values in Education and Social Life” at which Rudolf Steiner was invited to speak took place under the patronage of the English Minister of Education and others active in public life in England. From August 16-25, 1922, Steiner spoke on “The Basic Forces of Soul and Spirit in the Art of Education” [Die geistig-seelischen Grundkréfte der Erziehungskunst], 12 lectures, Oxford, 1922, GA 305, 1978], see The Spiritual Ground of Education, Garber Publications, Blauvelt, NY, nd.
• 2. For example, if paperback editions are included, in 1980 7heosophywas in its 30th German edition (164,000), Occult Science in its 29th edition (108,000), How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds in its 21st edition (150,000), The Philosophy of Freedomy/Spiritual Activity in its 14th edition (156,000) and Riddles of Philosophy in its eighth edition (31,000).
• 3. See note p. 119.
• 4. A teacher at the Independent Waldorf School in Stuttgart.
• 5. See note p. 95.
• 6. The opposition to Rudolf Steiner and the Goetheanum.
• 7. Chief accountant of the Independent Waldorf School Association.
• 7. The thrust of this request can be gathered from Rudolf Steiner’s presentation on “Issues of School and Home” at the parents’ evening on June 22, 1923. See pp. 190-202 of this volume.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends! It is incumbent upon me to open this third official members’ meeting of this association for an independent school system, the Waldorf School Association. It gives me great satisfaction to be able to welcome you warmly in the name of the Board, and I would also like to express my pleasure in the fact that you intend to discuss with us the future fate of the Waldorf School Association. Before we embark on today’s official agenda, please allow me to preface the report from the Board with some remarks on the affairs of the Waldorf School and on the course of the Waldorf School movement as such, to the extent that you are involved in this process.

Just a short time ago, an extremely gratifying pedagogical and artistic conference¹ took place, at which the aspirations of the Waldorf School movement (actually, of any educational movement that does justice to the demands of the present and the near future) were graphically presented to an audience that probably included all of you as well as many other interested parties. For the moment, therefore, in speaking of the current status of the Waldorf School movement, it is only necessary to point to what came to light at this pedagogical-artistic conference.

However, I would like to still allow myself the luxury of emphasizing a few things that were important for the basic tone of this gathering. We held this last conference at a time when, as I was able to make you aware, the will of the Waldorf School movement had been able to prove itself and demonstrate its spread, as was apparent from the fact that I myself had been invited to speak on the nature of this movement on the occasion of the Shakespeare festival in Stratford in 1922. As a result of this, the Waldorf School movement became known in England, and this in turn resulted in an invitation to hold the vacation lecture series in Oxford. This put me in a position to speak at some length in England on what the Waldorf School is actually trying to accomplish. These Oxford lectures then resulted in the founding of an English school association that will focus for the time being on transforming the Kings Langley School into a Waldorf School of sorts. It will also work to disseminate the idea of the Waldorf School in England. This demonstrates, however, that ideals and impulses that are inherent in the Waldorf School movement engage current interests in a very intense way. And here, too, the fact that a number of teachers from England visited the Waldorf School over a longer period of time at the beginning of this year shows how strongly this interest has taken hold in England in particular.

A further consequence of the spread of the Waldorf School idea was the course that I held in Dornach just a short time ago for a number of Swiss teachers and educators who organized it.² In addition to the Swiss teachers, however, seventeen Czech teachers took part in the course. At this course in particular, it was evident that in the hearts of people involved in education, it is a matter of course that something such as what is being attempted by our school movement needs to come about. In everything you heard at this course in Dornach, you could really recognize the educational professionals’ deep longing for something to enter the art of education that would aim very strongly at both spiritualizing the art of education and making it truly practical.

It is also very understandable that a quite specific feeling should have come up and been expressed by the participants in this last educational course in Switzerland. Those who experience strongly what such a course attempts to accomplish come away with a feeling of consternation; they feel overwhelmed. Now, I am only recounting what was expressed to me at the course in Dornach: Someone who was stating the view of many of the attendees said that the serious-minded among them were overwhelmed to see how little they were in a position to cope in their own souls with all the pedagogically necessary impulses that assailed them over a period of just a few days.

You can see that I then had to respond to this objection, which seemed totally justified to me. A thought such as this expresses what is present in many people today. Many people of the present day know perfectly well that some incisive intervention must take place if our system of education is to be able to meet the social demands placed on it and to extricate itself from the circumstances into which it has fallen. We really do not often take stock of how necessary an incisive reform of our educational impulses is. But if we think about it, we find that in their heart of hearts, parents and teachers are half-consciously or fully consciously convinced of the need for such incisive impulses to enter the system of education. Then people hear what we have to say. In fact, at the artistic and pedagogical conference, many people reached the point of saying, in effect, “All that needs to be done? How are we going to manage that? We get such a wealth of demands dumped on us in the course of just a few days;”—excuse me for expressing it like this, but this is a feeling I have often heard—“we come here with the best of intentions and leave feeling like a poodle that has been drenched with ideals instead of water. Our first impulse is to shake off what has been dumped on us.”

As I said, this was actually expressed frequently at the last conference in Dornach. My response was, “Yes, certainly I can see that, but you need to keep in mind that people have had a long time to get used to the educational practices that are prevalent everywhere in schools today. They grew up with them and are comfortable with them. Because people always have only a few days available to devote to progressive impulses, everything we have to say to them has to be said in a few days. Under these circumstances, it is totally understandable that people feel dumped on. However, if it is possible for the suggestions that will continue to be made to arouse interest in these issues among ever broader circles, then we will also eventually be in a position to present what we have to say at a slower place. Then people would not need to feel overwhelmed.”

This is proof that very intensive work is needed so that it will eventually be possible for us to actually set the pace that most people need, it seems, in order to grasp our ideas, rather than burdening people with them in the twinkling of an eye, as it were. I must point out that if this insight is taken as a starting point, then people would give us the opportunity to express ourselves more exactly and more slowly. So everything depends on a real interest in this issue of ours developing in ever broader circles. As things stand at the moment, the situation is very strange.

You know, we must keep in mind the inner process the Waldorf School movement has gone through in the four years of its existence. Naturally, the facts need to be weighed up in the right way. We now have around seven hundred students in the Waldorf School and nearly forty teachers. Years ago we started with fewer teachers and not even two hundred fifty students. The meaning of these two numbers—two hundred or two hundred fifty students then, and seven hundred now—is something extremely characteristic of the Waldorf School movement. They indicate not only a pedagogical and methodological, but also a complete cultural and social transformation of the Waldorf School movement, a real transformation. Depending on your taste, you can say either that it has found its feet or that it has been stood on its head; it does not matter to me. What I mean is the following: When the Waldorf School was founded, the thought among our friends was a social one. The intention was to found a comprehensive school of some sort, in accordance with the social impulses that prevailed at that time and that were surfacing in people’s social thinking and feeling in 1919. The idea of the Waldorf School was conceived on the basis of social circumstances. And now neither you nor Herr Molt will take it badly if I put forth a risky hypothesis—which is of course to be taken with the famous grain of salt—of how this transformation has taken place. I will try to express it clearly.

Assume for a moment that Herr Molt had not been an anthroposophist, but simply one of the many philanthropic factory owners of that time. This was not the case, but we may suppose that it was. On the basis of the social circumstances of the times, he would still have conceived the idea to found a school, but the Waldorf School as it is today would surely not have come about. The Waldorf School as it is today came about simply because it was born out of anthroposophy—that is, out of the circumstance that someone who was not only a philanthropic factory owner, but also Herr Molt the anthroposophist, conceived the idea and turned to anthroposophy for help with the school’s instructional methodology.

These are the cultural, historical and social factors. An idea characteristic of the times was realized with the help of anthroposophy, which was to provide the instructional methodology.

Now you see, over the course of time a transformation has taken place, and now a large percentage of the students we have today are here because of the pedagogy and methods that are cultivated in the Waldorf School. That the idea of the Waldorf School has expanded within the school itself is due to this pedagogy and these methods, so the original idea has been turned inside out. The original idea attracted the pedagogy and methodology that is used here. However, the Waldorf School is what it is today—and rightly so—because of this pedagogy and methodology. They were the main reason why parents who brought their children to us later on sought out the Waldorf School. Thus, in the course of these four years, an important development has taken place: Within the Waldorf School, a pedagogy and methodology born out of anthroposophy have come into their own.

And this pedagogy and methodology were what interested the people in England, what called forth the course in Dornach and so on. There is a specific pedagogical idea that is being realized in the Waldorf School, and that is what I have recently had to emphasize ever more strongly. The seven hundred students and the general expansion of the Waldorf School are due to the pedagogy and methodology that are practiced in the school. This is also demonstrated by frequent attempts to found schools on the example of the Waldorf School.

For me, naturally, what has become a reality here was the important thing from the very beginning. From the very beginning I conceived of the task of the Waldorf School as a purely pedagogical and methodological one, and in fact it has become apparent over time that wherever people were interested in the idea of the Waldorf School, this was because of its pedagogy and methodology.

Now there was a decisive interest in these various courses on the part of teachers and educators, but I must say that it has also been demonstrated in the longings of the parents. You know, the day before yesterday a number of parents from Berlin approached me again and told me that they had started small school groups in which they had offered instruction and tried to apply Waldorf School principles, but that now the government had come and would no longer allow it, so they had to send their children to the public schools. They asked whether it would not perhaps be possible to create a means of informing people by setting up a branch of the Waldorf School in Berlin. They thought that since it is still possible here, where things are administered more liberally, to not have the government intervening in the Waldorf School, it might also be possible in Berlin if a branch Waldorf School were opened.

I told them that it would not work, and that we needed to realize from this example that carrying out the idea of the Waldorf School is not possible without outreach into the broadest possible circles on behalf of the idea, which recognizes what thousands and thousands of people, or even more than that, are unconsciously wanting. These people basically want the same thing that is wanted here and simply are afraid to admit that they want it. And I still maintain that I did the right thing in issuing the challenge to found the World School Association once the model was there. I also still maintain that our task is not to get involved in all kinds of other experiments that pop up all over the place like quackery in the field of medicine, if I might put it like that—not real quackery, of course, but what is branded as quackery—but that it is more important to spread a real understanding of Waldorf education ever further and further. It must be spread ever further, and then the other thing will happen too.

You see, the Waldorf School is actually a challenge inherent in the evolution of education and in the relationship of educational evolution to the great ideas of culture and society. Perhaps it will be of interest to you if I draw your attention to how a turn-about in human feeling has occurred over a longer period of time, and how our thoughts have not caught up with it.

In March, 1792, there was an imperial chancellor in Central Europe for whom the task of educating the populace was merely a matter to be summarized as follows: “It is incumbent upon governments as a matter of course to disseminate the riches of the spirit, and in this just as in the enjoyment of man’s other social affairs it is up to governments to form a national policing agency of a sort.” This was spoken out of the feeling of concern for educational matters that was current at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was thought that the people had to receive directives from above with regard to the enjoyment of all social and human concerns, and especially with regard to administering pedagogical and methodological affairs.

And in the nineteenth century there was a person named Fröbel³ who said already as a young man of twenty-three, “All experiments in the field of pedagogy, including those of Pestalozzi, seem to me to be something crude and merely empirical. It would be necessary to arrive at exact principles of instruction, just as natural science has exact principles.” That was what Frobel said.

These two things, the pronouncement of the imperial chancellor Rottenhahn in 1792 and the passage from the letter by young Fröbel to his friend Krause, permit us an approximate characterization of what was alive at that time. The opinion prevalent at that time, which is still prevalent and must now be overcome, was that there was no need for further ideas on issues such as education and its methods; it was a matter of course to leave such things to the state. And the other idea was the sovereignty of the natural sciences: Whoever studied them and took them as their point of departure would necessarily discover the appropriate pedagogy.

Within both the current of subordination to the state and the current of science, it has become evident that we have reached a dead end in the field of education. Of course people had the best intentions in saying that it was necessary to establish a form of state policing in the field of pedagogy. Of course they had the best in mind, but that did not prevent the development of all the things that people now feel must change.

Educators are sighing to see things change; they say that they do not know how they ought to be dealing with human beings, that they believed that the art of dealing with human beings could derive from a—I cannot call it a mishmash, since that is not how the adherents of exact science would talk, so let us call it a synthesis simply to use a different word—a synthesis of anthropology, psychology, and ethnology. More recently, psychiatry is also being included. Time has shown that what Frobel wanted is not acceptable to a deeper feeling for education. In all the people attending the courses, in the wish for a branch Waldorf School in Berlin, it was evident that people are certain that something has to happen, but when Waldorf school people talk to them about things, they are like poodles drenched with the water of ideals. It cannot work its way into their heads in a few days; nevertheless, they know that something has to happen.

We must keep clearly in mind that our efforts correspond to the desires of thousands and thousands of people, and that we must do everything we can to make the idea of the Waldorf School and all its impulses become ever more popular, so that people begin to see it as a challenge of our times. All this needs is to awaken in many people the courage to recognize and act on what they have long experienced in their heart of hearts in an indefinite way. It has still been my hope recently that this would flow into the hearts of the friends of the Waldorf School ideal who come to gatherings such as this one, because this is the most important thing we need—to have the interest spread, to have the efforts to popularize the Waldorf School spread. This is what we need.

And you know, something similar is necessary with regard to our method’s inner progress. When we founded the Waldorf School four years ago, we had eight grades. It was clearly apparent to us that we had to work out of a striving that had remained unconscious to Fröbel and his ilk, that we had to create our curricula and educational goals on the basis of a true understanding of the human being, which can only grow out of the fertile ground of anthroposophy. Then we would have a universally human school, not a school based on a particular philosophy or denomination, but a truly universally human school.

The ideal that had been hovering over people for centuries was clear to us then. Since we had to take other existing circumstances into account, we had to accept compromises, but only to a certain extent: The first three school years would have to be allowed to run their course in a way that derived its standards for instructional goals and curricula only from the teachings of human nature itself. Upon completion of grade six (at age twelve) and grade eight (at age fourteen) we would try to have the children at a point where they would be able to transfer to other schools. We wanted to create the possibility of making the Waldorf School ideal a reality for as long as possible, on the one hand, and yet still offer the children the possibility to transfer.

This is something that is actually easier to carry out with regard to the eight primary grades than it is for the expansion of the school into grades nine through twelve, which has also become necessary. To the primary school education we offer, we need to add college-preparatory and vocational high school education. People are now saying that we need to get these young ladies and gentlemen to the point where they can pass the Abiturand enter a college or university. (Although the good will is there among certain individuals to open an institution of higher learning ourselves, this is a huge illusion for the time being, and the things we cultivate must always rest on real and solid ground.)

Naturally, there are inherent difficulties in our needing to prepare the young ladies and gentlemen who graduate from this school to take the Abiturso that they will be able to attend colleges that will grant them the degrees they need in what is now called “real life.” It immediately becomes apparent that in the upper grades, it is much more difficult to cope with both the challenge of the Waldorf School ideal of deriving educational goals and curricula from human nature itself, on the one hand, and the coincidental curricula that include nothing of what human nature demands, on the other.

When these young adults are fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen years old, we would really need to be introducing them to real practical life, which means that they should understand something of what happens in real practical life. But instead of that, along comes the teacher of Greek and Latin, reproaching us for trying to incorporate real demands based on understanding the human being, for including lessons in chemical and technological subjects, in weaving and spinning—in short, in things people should know about in real life. Along comes the Latin teacher, complaining of not having enough time to prepare people for the Abitur.

This is how these unsolvable conflicts arise. On the one hand, we are trying to make the idea of the Waldorf School a reality in the best and purest way possible, and on the other hand we have to break this up with all kinds of compromises that are imposed by the fact that we are not allowed to tear the young people away from so-called real life, if you will excuse the expression. If we help them find their place in life as they should, they are rejected by so-called real life and become bohemians. (I used that word recently in the course in Switzerland and immediately had to apologize because some of the participants were from Bohemia.) The fact is, however, that we must come to the fundamental realization that we are not striving for bohemianism as an ideal, but for a really practical life, for a way of teaching and raising children that gives people a firm footing in real life. But before we can do this, an understanding of what human nature really encompasses and demands must become as widespread as possible.

Thus, we will not popularize the idea of the Waldorf School without first deciding to make understandable what I have pointed out today. In broader circles we will not popularize the idea of the Waldorf School if we speak only of abstract things, of having the children learn comfortably and through play and so on. If we present the same trivial thoughts that others also present, if we do not go into the concrete things that really lie dormant in people’s hearts, we will not succeed in popularizing the idea of the Waldorf School.

Today we are faced with the difficult task of having to do something so that in future we are not always living from hand to mouth with regard to the Waldorf School’s finances. Given the existing state of the finances, we never know whether we will be able to sustain the school for three or four months into the future; we are forced to economize with no end in sight. Of course it is true that the idea of the Waldorf School gives us such a firm footing that we can also summon the enthusiasm to go on into the unknown. On the other hand, however, responsibilities do arise. Actually, hiring each new teacher is such a responsibility that it really needs to be said for once that financing the Waldorf School, which is the point of departure of the Waldorf School movement as the first pedagogical example of how to raise and educate children according to this method, would have to rest on foundations that guarantee a certain measure of stability.

That is what I wanted to add as the necessary consequence of what I said before, so to speak. This august body would need to apply every means available to come to decisions that will make it possible to stabilize the financing of the Waldorf School at least to the extent that we know we will be able to carry the responsibility for it, and that it will never get to the point where the whole thing falls apart in a few months. We see the factors involved in taking our cause to the world in a financial sense. If this would happen, the outer framework would be there too.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I can assure you that the things we experience in courses such as the ones I gave at Oxford and in Switzerland, the things we experience as the longings of teachers and parents, show that the Waldorf School movement is a challenge that is deeply embedded in the evolution of our civilization. This is proved in practical terms today by what has gone before. On the other hand, our ways of working in the Waldorf School, the fact that there is actually something present in the college of teachers, gives evidence of something from which the entire Waldorf School impulse radiates. It demonstrates how a strong will is making itself felt in the world out of the purest possible enthusiasm, as may have become evident to you most clearly during the recent artistic and pedagogical conference. In these two aspects, I might say, the school stands on firm foundations. Please excuse me for asking you to consider ways in which these two pillars which I have particularly tried to characterize, the first pillar of the challenge of the times coming from parents and teachers and the second pillar of the sacred, expert and fully appropriate enthusiasm that lives in the Waldorf School, can be joined by the third pillar of stabilizing the school’s financial foundations.

It is sad to have to speak of this. However, the fact of the matter is that doing anything at the present time takes money, lots of money. We can be certain that if we find ways to awaken understanding for the impulse of the Waldorf School, we will also arrive at the necessary financial means. This is why we must find the way from the first part of what I presented to what I have so presumptuously—there is no other word for it in this case—added to it by way of conclusion.

Points of business followed.

• 1. In Stuttgart, April 25-29, 1923. See Rudolf Steiner’s Pädagogik und Kunst, Pädagogik und Moral [Pedagogy and Art; Pedagogy and Morality], lectures and speeches, Dornach, 1978.
• 2. April 15-22, 1923. See Die pädagogische Praxis vom Gesichtspunkte geisteswissenschaftlicher Menschenerkenntnis [Pedagogical Practice from the Perspective of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge of the Human Being], eight lectures given in Dornach in 1923, GA 306, Dornach 1975. The Child’s Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996.
• 3. Friedrich Fröbel, 1782-1852.

Anyone who chooses to address the themes that I shall address tonight and again on the 27th knows that many people today long for a new element in contemporary spiritual life, an impulse that could revitalize and transform important aspects of our present civilization. Such longings live especially in those who try to look deeply into their own inner being, stirred by the various signs in contemporary society indicating that, unless present trends change, our civilization is heading for a general collapse. These signs themselves, of course, are a result of many characteristic features of the cultural stream of Western Europe over the last few centuries.

What may be said about the supersensible worlds today may therefore be said to every human soul. It may be said even to a hermit, a recluse, who has withdrawn from the world. Above all, however, it may be said to those who stand fully and firmly in life: for what we are talking about is every human being’s concern.

But this is not the only point of view from which I wish to speak today and again on the 27th. I want to talk about how, if we let them work upon our souls, the fundamental issues facing our civilization affect our attitudes. Those who feel called upon to lead their fellow human beings will find much that is inwardly disturbing here and much that makes them yearn for a renewal of certain aspects of spiritual and cultural life.

If we consider humanity’s present cultural, spiritual situation, we may trace it back to two fundamental issues. One shines out in contemporary science and in the way in which scientific life has developed during the last three or four hundred years. The other shines out from the practical sphere of life, which, naturally, has been largely influenced by modern science.

To begin with, let us look at what science has brought in its wake more recently. At this point, to avoid any misunderstanding, let me state clearly that anthroposophical spiritual science—as I shall represent it here—must in no way be thought of as opposing the spirit of modern science, whose triumphant and important successes the exponents of spiritual science fully recognize. Precisely because it wishes to enter without prejudice into the spirit of natural science, anthroposophical spiritual science must go beyond its confines and objectives. Natural science, with its scrupulous, specialized disciplines, provides exact, reliable information about much in our human environment. But, when a human soul asks about its deepest, eternal being, it receives no answer from natural science, least of all when science searches in all honesty and without prejudice. This is why we find many people today who out of an inner religious need—in some cases more, in others less—long for a renewal of the old ways of looking at the world.

The outer sciences, and anthropology in particular, already draw our attention to the fact that our forebears, centuries ago, knew nothing of what splits and fragments many souls today; namely, the disharmony between scientific knowledge on one hand and religious experience on the other. If we compare our situation today with what prevailed in ancient times, we find that the leaders of humanity who cultivated science then—however childlike their science might appear to us now—also kindled the religious spirit of their people. There was certainly no split between these two spiritual streams.

Today, many souls long for the return of something similar. Yet one cannot say that a renewal of ancient forms of wisdom—whether Chaldean, Egyptian, Indian, or any other—would benefit our present society. Those who advocate such a return can hardly be said to understand the significance of human evolution, for they overlook its real mission. They do not recognize that it is impossible today to tread the same spiritual paths that were trodden thousands of years ago. It is an intrinsic feature of human evolution that every age should have its own particular character. In every age, people must seek inner fulfillment or satisfaction in appropriate though distinctly different ways. Because we live and are educated in the twentieth century, our soul life today needs something different from what people living in distant antiquity once needed for their souls. A renewal of ancient attitudes toward the world would hardly benefit our present time, although knowledge of them could certainly help in finding our bearings. Familiarizing ourselves with such attitudes could also help us recognize the source of inner satisfaction in ancient times. Now, this inner satisfaction or fulfillment was, in fact, the result of a relationship to scientific knowledge fundamentally different from what we experience today.

There is a certain phenomenon to which I would like to draw your attention. To do so is to open myself to the accusation of being either paradoxical or downright fantastical. However, one can say many things today that, even a few years ago, would have been highly dangerous to mention because of the situation that prevailed then. The last few catastrophic years [1914–1918] have brought about a change in people’s thinking and feeling about such things. Compared with the habits of thought and feeling of the previous decade, people today are readier to accept the idea that the deepest truths might at first strike one as being paradoxical or even fantastical.

In the past, people spoke of something that today—especially in view of our scientific knowledge—would hardly be acceptable. This is something that will be discussed again in a relatively short time, probably even in educated, cultured circles. I refer to the Guardian of the Threshold. This guardian stands between the ordinary world of the senses, which forms the firm ground of orthodox science and is where we lead our daily lives, and those higher worlds in which the supersensible part of the human being is integrated into the spiritual world. Between the sensory world—whose phenomena we can observe and in which we can recognize the working of natural laws with our intellect—and that other world to which we belong with our inner being, between these two worlds, the ancients recognized an abyss. To attain true knowledge, they felt, that abyss had first to be crossed. But only those were allowed to do so who had undergone intensive preparation under the guidance of the leaders of the mystery centers. Today, we have a rather different view of what constitutes adequate preparation for a scientific training and for living in a scientific environment. In ancient times, however, it was firmly believed that an unprepared candidate could not possibly be allowed to receive higher knowledge of the human being. But why should this have been the case?

An answer to that question can be found only if insight is gained into the development of the human soul during the course of evolution. Such insight goes beyond the limits of ordinary historical research. Basically, present historical knowledge draws only on external sources and disregards the more subtle changes that the human psyche undergoes.

For instance, we do not usually take into account the particular condition of soul of those ancient peoples who were rooted in the primeval oriental wisdom of their times, decadent forms of which only survive in the East today. Fundamentally speaking, we do not realize how differently such souls were attuned to the world. In those days, people already perceived external nature through their senses as we do today. To a certain extent, they also combined all of the various sense impressions with their intellect. But, in doing so, they did not feel themselves separated from their natural surroundings. They still perceived an element of soul and spirit within themselves. They felt their physical organization permeated by soul and spirit. At the same time, they also experienced soul and spirit in lightning and in thunder, in drifting clouds, in stones, plants, and beasts. What they could divine within themselves, they could also feel out in nature and in the entire universe. To these human beings of the past, the whole universe was imbued with soul and spirit.

On the other hand, they lacked something that we, today, possess to a marked degree, that is, they did not have as pronounced and intensive a self-consciousness as we do. Their self-awareness was dimmer and dreamier than ours today. That was still the case even in ancient Greece. Whoever imagines that the condition of soul—the psychic organization—of the ancient Greeks was more or less the same as our own can understand only the later stages of Greek culture. During its earlier phases, the state of the human soul was not the same as it is today, for in those days there still existed a dim awareness of humanity’s kinship with nature. Just as a finger, if endowed with some form of self awareness, would feel itself to be a part of the whole human organism and could not imagine itself leading a separate existence—for then it would simply wither away—so the human being of those early times felt closely united with nature and certainly not separate from it.

The wise leaders of the ancient mystery schools believed that this awareness of humanity’s connection with nature represented the moral element in human self-consciousness, which must never be allowed to conceive of the world as being devoid of soul and spirit. They felt that if the world were to be conceived of as being without soul and spirit—as has now happened in scientific circles and in our daily lives—human souls would be seized by a kind of faintness. The teachers of ancient wisdom foresaw that faintness or swooning of the soul would occur if people adopted the kind of world-view we have today.

You might well wonder what the justification for saying such things is. To illustrate that there is a justification, I would like to take an example from history—just one out of many others that could have been chosen.

Today, we feel rightfully satisfied with the generally accepted system of the universe that no longer reflects what the eye can observe outwardly in the heavens, as it still did in the Middle Ages. We have adopted the Copernican view of the universe, which is a heliocentric one. During the Middle Ages, however, people believed that the earth rested in the center of the planetary system—in fact, in the center of the entire starry world—and that the sun, together with the other stars, revolved around the earth. The heliocentric system of the universe meant an almost complete reversal of previously held views. Today, we adhere to the heliocentric view as something already learned and believed during early school days. It is something that has become part of general knowledge and is simply taken for granted.

And yet, although we think that people in the Middle Ages and in more ancient times believed uniquely in the geocentric view as represented by Ptolemy, this was by no means always the case. We only need to read, for instance, what Plutarch wrote about the system of Aristarchus of Samos, who lived in ancient Greece in the pre-christian era. Outer historical accounts mention Aristarchus’ heliocentric view. Spiritual science makes the situation clear.

Aristarchus put the sun in the center of our planetary system, and let the earth circle around it. Indeed, if we take Aristarchus’ heliocentric system in its main outlines—leaving aside further details supplied by more recent scientific research—we find it in full agreement with our present picture of the universe. What does this mean? Nothing more than that Aristarchus of Samos merely betrayed what was taught in the old mystery centers. Outside these schools, people were left to believe in what they could see with their own eyes. And why should this have been so? Why were ordinary people left with the picture of the universe as it appears to the eyes? Because the leaders of those schools believed that before anyone could be introduced to the heliocentric system, they had to cross an inner threshold into another world—a world entirely different from the one in which people ordinarily live. People were protected from that other world in their daily lives by the invisible Guardian of the Threshold, who was a very real, if supersensible, being to the ancient teachers. According to their view, human beings were to be protected from having their eyes suddenly opened to see a world that might appear bereft of soul and spirit.

But that is how we see the world today! We observe it and create our picture of the realms of nature—the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms—only to find this picture soulless and spiritless. When we form a picture of the orbits and the movements of the heavenly bodies with the aid of calculations based on telescopic observations, we see a world empty of soul and spirit. The wise teachers of the mystery centers knew very well that it was possible to see the world in that way. But they transmitted such knowledge to their pupils only after the pupils had undergone the necessary preparations, after they had undergone a severe training of their will life. Then, they guided their pupils past the Guardian of the Threshold—but not until they were prepared. How was this preparation accomplished? Pupils had not only to endure great deprivations, but for many years they were also taught by their teachers to follow a moral path in strict obedience. At the same time, their will life was severely disciplined to strengthen their self-consciousness. And only after they had thus progressed from a dim self-consciousness to a more conscious one were they shown what lay ahead of them on the other side of the threshold: namely, the world as it appears to us in outer space according to the heliocentric system of the universe. At the same time, of course, they were also taught many other things that, to us, have merely become part of our general knowledge of the world.

Pupils in ancient times were thus carefully prepared before they were given the kind of knowledge that today is almost commonplace for every schoolboy and schoolgirl. This shows how times and whole civilizations have changed. Because external history knows nothing of the history of the development of the human soul, we tend to be under a misapprehension if we go only by what we read in history books.

What was it then, that pupils of the ancient mystery centers brought with them before crossing the threshold to the supersensible world? It was knowledge of the world that, to a certain extent, had arisen from their instinctual life, from the drives of their physical bodies. By means of those drives or instincts, they saw the external world ensouled and filled with spirit. That is now known as animism. They could feel how closely a human being was related to the outer world. They felt that their own spirit was embedded in the world spirit. At the same time, in order to look on the world as we learn to do already during our early school days, those ancient people had to undergo special preparations.

Nowadays, one can read all kinds of things about the Guardian of the Threshold—and the threshold to the spiritual world—in books whose authors take it upon themselves to deal with the subject of mysticism, often in dilettantish ways, even if their publications have an air of learnedness about them. Indeed, one often finds that, the more nebulous the mysticism, the greater attraction it seems to exert on certain sections of the public. But what I am talking about here, what is revealed to the unbiased spiritual investigator concerning what the ancients called the threshold to the spiritual world, is not the kind of nebulous mysticism that many sects and orders expound today and many people seek on the other side of the threshold. Rather, it is the kind of knowledge which has become a matter of general education today.

At the same time, we can see how we look at the world today with a very different self-consciousness than people did in more ancient times. The teachers of ancient wisdom were afraid that, unless their pupils’ self-consciousness had been strengthened by a severe training of the will, they would suffer from overwhelming faintness of soul when they were told, for example, that the earth was not stationary but revolved around the sun with great speed, and that they too were circling around the sun. This feeling of losing firm ground from under their feet was something that the ancients would not have been able to bear. It would have reduced their self-consciousness to the level of a swoon. We, on the other hand, learn to stand up to it already in childhood.

We almost take for granted now the kind of world-view into which the people of ancient times were able to penetrate only after careful preparation. Yet we must not allow ourselves to have nostalgic feelings for ancient ways of living, which can no longer fulfill the present needs of the soul. Anthroposophical science of the spirit, of which I am speaking, is a renewal neither of ancient Eastern wisdom nor of old Gnostic teachings, for if such teachings were to be given today, they would have only a decadent effect. Spiritual science, on the other hand, is something to be found by an elementary creative power that lives in every human soul when certain paths that I will describe presently are followed. First, however, I want to draw attention to the fact that ordinary life, and science in general, already represents a kind of threshold to the supersensible world or, at any rate, to another world.

People living in ancient times had a quite different picture of life on the other side of the threshold. But what do we hear, especially from our most conscientious natural scientists, who feel thoroughly convinced of the rightness of their methods? We are told that natural science has reached the ultimate limits of knowledge. We hear such expressions as “ignorabimus,” “we shall never know,” which—I hasten to add—is perfectly justified as long as we remain within the bounds of natural science. Ancient peoples might have lacked our intense self-consciousness, but we are lacking in other ways.

To what do we owe our intense self-consciousness? We received it through the ways of thinking and looking at the world that entered our civilization with people like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bruno, and others. The works of such thinkers not only provided us with a certain amount of knowledge but, through them, modern humanity underwent a distinct training of soul life. Everything that the mode of thinking developed by these personalities has achieved in more recent times tends to cultivate the powers of intellect. There is also a strong emphasis on scientific experimentation and on accurate, conscientious observation. With instruments such as the telescope, the microscope, X-rays, and the spectroscope, we examine the phenomena around us and we use our intellect mainly in order to extract from those phenomena their fundamental and inherent natural laws. But what are we actually doing when we are engaged in observing and experimenting? Our methods of working allow only the powers of reasoning and intellect to speak.

It is simply a fact that, during the last centuries, it has been primarily the intellect that has been tapped to promote human development. And a characteristic feature of the intellect is that it strengthens human self-consciousness, hardening it and making it more intense. Due to this hardening, we are able to bear what an ancient Greek could not have born; namely, the consciousness of being moved around the sun on an earth that has no firm ground to uphold it. At the same time, because of this strengthened self-consciousness that has led to the picture of a world devoid of soul and spirit, we are deprived of the kind of knowledge for which our souls nevertheless yearn. We can see the world with its material phenomena—its material facts—as the ancients could never have seen it without appropriate preparation in the mystery centers, but we can no longer perceive a spiritual world surrounding us. This is why conscientious scientists confess “ignorabimus” and speak of limits to what we can know.

As human beings, we stand in the world. And, if we reflect on ourselves, we must inevitably realize that, whenever we ponder various things or draw conclusions based on experiment and observation, something spiritual is acting in us. And we must ask ourselves, “Is that spirit likely to live in isolation from the world of material phenomena like some kind of hermit? Does that spirit exist only in our physical bodies? Can it really be that the world is empty of soul and spirit, as the findings of the physical and biological sciences would have us believe and, from their point of view, quite rightly so?”

This is the situation in which we find ourselves at the present time. We are facing a new threshold. Although that circumstance has not yet penetrated the consciousness of humanity as a whole, awareness of it in human souls is not completely absent either. People might not be thinking about it but, in the depths of their souls, it lives nevertheless as a kind of presentiment. What goes on in the realm of the soul remains mostly unconscious. But out of that unconsciousness arises a longing to cross the threshold again, to add knowledge of the spiritual world to present self-consciousness.

No matter what name we might wish to give these things—that in most cases are felt only dimly—they nevertheless belong to the deepest riddles of our civilization. There is a sense that a spiritual world surrounding all human beings must be found again and that the soulless, spiritless world of which natural science speaks cannot be the one with which the human soul can feel inwardly united.

How can we rediscover the kind of knowledge that also generates a religious mood in us? That is the great question of our present time. How can we find a way of knowing that also, at the same time, fulfills our deepest need for an awareness of the eternal in the human soul? Modern science has achieved great and mighty things. Nevertheless, any unprejudiced person must acknowledge that it has not really produced solutions, but rather—one would almost have to say—the very opposite. Yet we should accept even this both willingly and gladly.

What can we do with the help of modern science? Does it help us to solve the riddles of the human soul? Hardly, but at least it prompts us to ask our questions at a deeper level. Contemporary science has put before us the material facts in all purity; that is, free from what a personal or subjective element might introduce in the form of soul and spirit. But, just because of this, we are made all the more intensely aware of the deep questions living in our souls. It is a significant achievement of contemporary science to have confronted us with new, ever deepening riddles. The great question of our time is therefore: what is our attitude toward these deepened riddles? What we can learn from the spirit of a Haeckel, Huxley, or Spencer does not make it possible to solve these riddles; it does, however, enable us to experience the great questions facing contemporary humanity more intensely than ever before.

This is where spiritual science—the science of the spirit—comes into its own, for its aim is to lead humanity, in a way that corresponds to its contemporary character, over the new threshold into a spiritual world. How this is possible for a modern person—as distinct from the man or woman of old—I should now like to indicate, if only in brief outline. You can find more detailed descriptions in my books How to Know Higher Worlds and Occult Science, and in other publications of mine.

First, I would like to draw attention to the point of departure for anyone who wishes to engage in spiritual research or become a spiritual researcher. It is an inner attitude with which, due to present circumstances, a modern person is not likely to be in sympathy at all. It is an attitude of soul that I would like to call intellectual modesty or humility. Despite the fact that the intellect has developed to a degree unprecedented in human evolution during the past three or four hundred years, a wouldbe spiritual researcher must nevertheless achieve intellectual humility or modesty. Let me clarify what I mean by using a comparison. Imagine that you put a volume of Shakespeare’s plays into the hands of a five-year-old. What would the child do? The child would play with the book, turn its pages, perhaps tear them. He or she would not use the book as it was meant to be used. But, ten-to-fifteen years later, that young person would have a totally different relationship to the same volume. He or she would treat the book according to its intended purpose. What has happened? Faculties that were dormant in the child have meanwhile developed through natural growth, upbringing, and education. During those ten to fifteen years, the child has become an altogether different soul being.

Now, an adult who has achieved intellectual humility, despite having absorbed the scientific climate of the environment by means of the intellect, might say: my relationship to the sense world may be compared with the relationship of a five-year-old child to a volume of Shakespeare’s plays. Faculties that are capable of further development might lie dormant within me. I too could grow into an altogether different being as far as my soul and spirit are concerned and understand the sense world more deeply.

Nowadays, however, people do not like to adopt an attitude of such intellectual modesty. Habits of thought and the psychological response to life as it is steer us in a different direction. Those who have gone through the usual channels of education might enter higher education, where it is no longer a question of deepening inner knowledge and of developing faculties of will and soul. For, during a scientific training of that kind, a person remains essentially at the level of his or her inherited capacities and what ordinary education can provide. Certainly, science has expanded tremendously by means of experimentation and observation, but that expansion has only been achieved by means of those intellectual powers that already exist in what is usually called modern culture. In furthering knowledge, the aim of science has not been to cultivate new faculties in the human being. The thought would never have occurred that anyone already in possession of our present means of knowledge, as given both by ordinary life and by science, might actually be confronting the world of nature in a way similar to how a five-year old responds to a volume of Shakespeare. Allowance has not been made for the possibility that new faculties of cognition could develop that would substantially alter our attitude toward the external world. That such new faculties are possible, however, is precisely the attitude required of anyone who wishes to investigate the spiritual world of which anthroposophy, the science of the spirit, speaks. Here, the aim is to develop human faculties inherent in each person. However, in order to bring these potentials to a certain stage of development, a great deal must be experienced first.

I am not talking about taking extraordinary or even superstitious measures for the sake of this soul development. Rather, I am talking about the enhancement of quite ordinary, well known faculties that play important roles both in daily life and in the established sciences. However, although those faculties are being applied all the time, they are not developed to their full extent during the life between birth and death. There are many such faculties, but I would like to characterize today the further development of only two of them. More detailed information can be found in the books mentioned previously.

First of all, there is the faculty of remembering or memory, which is an absolute necessity in life. It is generally realized—as anyone with a particular interest in these matters will know from books on psychology and pathology—how important it is for a healthy soul life that a person’s memory should be unimpaired and that our memory should allow us to look back over our past life right down to early childhood. There must not exist periods in our past from which memory pictures cannot rise to bring events back again. If someone’s memory were to be completely erased, the ego or I of such a person would be virtually destroyed. Severe soul sickness would befall such an individual. Memory gives us the possibility for past experiences to resurface, whether in pale or in vivid pictures. It is this faculty, this force, that can be strengthened and developed further. What is its characteristic quality? Without it, experiences flit by without leaving any lasting trace. Also, without memory, the concepts formed through such experiences would be only fleeting ones. Our memory stores up such experiences for us (here, I can give only sketchy indications; in my writings and published lectures you will find a scientifically built-up treatment of memory).

Memory gives duration to otherwise fleeting impressions. This quality of memory is grasped as a first step in applying spiritual-scientific methods. It is then intensified and developed further through what I have called meditation and concentration in the books that I have mentioned. To practice these two activities, a student, having sought advice from someone experienced in these matters or having gained the necessary information from appropriate literature, will focus consciousness on certain interrelated mental images that are clearly defined and easy to survey. They could be geometrical or mathematical patterns that one can clearly view and that one is certain are not reminiscences from life, emerging from one’s subconscious.

Whatever is held in consciousness in this way must result from a person’s free volition. One must in no way allow oneself to become subject to auto suggestion or dreaming. One contemplates what one has chosen to place in the center of one’s consciousness and holds it for a longer period of time in complete inner tranquility. Just as muscles develop when engaged in a particular type of work, so certain soul forces unfold when the soul is engaged in the uncustomary activity of arresting and holding definite mental images. It sounds simple enough. But, in fact, not only are there people who believe that, when speaking about these things, a scientist of the spirit is drawing on obscure influences, but there are others who believe it simple to achieve the methods that I am describing here, methods that are applied in intimate regions of one’s soul life.

Far from it! These things take a long time to accomplish. Of course, some find it easier to practice these exercises, but others have to struggle much harder. Naturally, the depth of such meditation is far more important than the length of time spent over it. Whatever the case might be, however, one must persevere in one’s efforts for years. What one practices in one’s soul in this way is truly no easier than what one does in a laboratory, in a lecture hall for physics, or an astronomical observatory. It is in no way more difficult to fulfill the demands imposed by external forms of research than it is to practice faithfully, carefully, and conscientiously what spiritual research requires to be cultivated in the human soul over a period of many years.

Nevertheless, as a consequence of such practice, certain inner soul forces, previously known to us only as forces of memory, eventually gain in strength and new soul powers come into existence. Such inner development enables one to recognize clearly what the materialistic interpretation is saying about the power of memory when it maintains that the human faculty of remembering is bound to the physical body and that, if there is something wrong with the constitution of the nervous system, memory is weakened, as it is likewise in old age. Altogether, spiritual faculties are seen to depend on physical conditions. As far as life between birth and death is concerned, this is not denied by spiritual science. For whoever develops the power of memory as I have described knows through direct insight how ordinary memory, which conjures up pictures of past experiences before the soul, does indeed depend on the human physical body. On the other hand, the new soul forces now being developed become entirely free and independent of the physical body. The student thereby experiences how it becomes possible to live in a region of the soul in such a way that one can have supersensible experiences, just as one has sense-perceptible experiences in the physical body.

I would now like to give you an explanation of the nature of these supersensible experiences.

Human life undergoes rhythmical changes between waking and sleeping. The moments of falling asleep and awakening, and the time spent in sleep, are interspersed with waking life. What happens in this process? When we fall asleep, our consciousness is dimmed down, in most cases to a zero point. Dreams sometimes “bubble up” from half-conscious depths. Obviously, we are alive during this condition for, otherwise, as sleepers, we would have to pass away every night and come to life again every morning. The human soul and spirit are alive but, during sleep, our consciousness is diminished. This diminution of consciousness has to do with our inability to employ our senses between when we fall asleep and when we wake up, and also with our lack of access to impulses that derive from our physical organs of will.

This dimming down of consciousness can be overcome by those who have developed the new higher faculty of which I have spoken of their given faculty of memory. Such people reach a condition, as they do in sleep, in which they no longer need eyes in order to see, nor ears in order to hear. They no longer need to feel the physical warmth of their environment, nor to use will impulses that under ordinary conditions work through the muscles and through the human physical organization generally. They are able to switch off everything connected with the physical body. And yet their consciousness does not diminish as is usually the case in sleep. On the contrary, they are able to surrender themselves in full consciousness to conditions normally pertaining only to the sleeping state. A spiritual researcher remains completely conscious. Just as a sleeping person is surrounded by a dark world of nothingness, so a spiritual researcher is surrounded by a world that has nothing to do with the sense world but is nevertheless as full and intense as the sense world. In the waking state, we confront the sense world with our senses. But when they are able to free themselves from the physical body in full consciousness—that is, when they can enter, fully consciously, the state normally gone through between falling asleep and waking up—spiritual researchers confront a supersensible world.

They thus learn to recognize that a supersensible world always surrounds us, just as the sense world surrounds us in ordinary life. Yet there is a significant difference. In the sense world, we perceive outer facts through our senses and, through those facts, we also become aware of the existence of other beings. Outer facts predominate while beings or existences make their presence felt within the context of these outer facts. But, when the supersensible world is opened to us, we first encounter beings. As soon as our eyes are opened to behold the supersensible world, real beings surround us. To begin with, we cannot call this world of concrete and real supersensible beings in which we now find ourselves a world of facts. We must gain such facts for ourselves by means of yet something else.It is an achievement of the modern anthroposophical science of the spirit that it enables human beings to cross a threshold once more and enter a world different from what usually surrounds us.

After one has learned to experience the state of independence from the physical body, one finally comes to realize not only that the soul during sleep lifts itself out of the body only to return to it upon awakening, but also that this return is caused by the soul’s intense desire for the physical body. Supersensible cognition enables us to recognize the true nature of the soul, whose re-entry into the physical body upon awakening is due to a craving for the body as it lies asleep. Furthermore, if one can make this true conception of falling asleep and awakening one’s own, one’s understanding expands to such an extent that one eventually learns to know the soul before it descends—through conception and birth—from the spiritual world into the physical body offered by heredity.

Once one has grasped the nature of the human soul, and has learned to follow it outside the body between falling asleep and waking up—at the same time recognizing the less powerful forces pulling it back into the body lying in the bed—then one also begins to know what happens to the soul when it is freed from the body and passes through the portal of death. One learns to understand that the reason why the human soul has only a dim consciousness during sleep is because it has a strong desire to return to the body. It is this craving for the body that can dull human consciousness into a state of total impotence during the time between falling asleep and awakening. On the other hand, once the soul has passed through death, this desire for the physical body is no longer there.

And once, through the newly developed faculty of enhanced memory, we have learned to know the human soul, we can follow its further progress beyond the portal of death. One then learns to recognize that, since it is no longer bound to a physical body and is therefore freed from the desire to return to it, the soul is now in a position to retain a consciousness of its own while in the spiritual world, a consciousness that differs from what is given through the instrument of the physical body. One comes to recognize that there were forces in the soul before birth that drew it toward a physical body while it was still in the spiritual world. That physical body, however, was as yet quite indeterminate; it cast a certain light toward the descending soul. Then one begins to see how the soul develops a strong desire to re-enter physical, earthly life. One learns to know—but in a different language—the eternal being of the human soul. This being becomes clear and, through it, one learns to understand something else as well.

One learns to cognize in pictures the soul’s eternal being as it goes through births and deaths. I have called those pictures imaginations. And one comes to recognize that, just as the body belongs to the sensory world, so too does the soul belong to a supersensible world; and that, just as one can describe the sense world with the help of the physical body, so can one likewise describe the supersensible world with its spirituality. One comes to know the supersensible world in addition to the sensory world. But, in order to attain this faculty, it is necessary to cultivate another soul quality, the mere mention of which—as a way of gaining higher knowledge—is enough to make a modern scientist wince. Certainly, one can fully respect the reasons for this, but what I have to tell you about the enhancement of this second soul faculty is nevertheless true.

As I said, the first power to be developed is the faculty of memory, which then becomes an independent force. The second power to be developed is the power of love. In ordinary life, between birth and death, love works through the physical organism. It is intimately connected with the instincts and drives of human nature and only in sublime moments does something of this love free itself from human corporeality. In those moments, we experience being freed from our narrow selves. Such love is a state of true freedom, in which one does not surrender to inborn instincts, but rather forgets the ordinary self and orients one’s actions and deeds toward outer needs and facts. It was because of this intimate connection between love and freedom that I dared to state publicly in my book, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path (first published in 1892 and in which I tried to found a new sociology in philosophical terms), that, far from making people blind, love makes them see; that is, free. Love leads us beyond what otherwise blinds us by making us dependent on personal needs. Love allows us to surrender to the outer world. It removes whatever would hinder our acting in full freedom. The modern spiritual investigator must therefore develop such love—love that shines actively into ordinary life in truly free deeds. Gradually, love must be spiritualized, in the same way as the faculty of remembering had to be spiritualized. Love must become purely a power of the soul. It must make the human individual as a soul being entirely independent of the body, so that he or she can love free from blood ties and from the physical organization as a whole. Love of this kind brings about a fusion of the self with the external world, with one’s fellow human beings. Through love, one becomes one with the world.

This newly developed power of love has another consequence. It makes us “co-workers” in the spiritual world that we have been able to enter through the newly developed faculty of memory. At this point, we learn to know real beings as spiritual facts. When describing the external world, we now no longer speak of our present planetary system as having originated from some primeval cosmic nebula and of its falling into dust again—or into the sun again—in some remote future. We do not contemplate nature as being thus alienated from the world of spirit. And, if people today are honest, they cannot help becoming aware of the dichotomy between what is most precious in them on one hand, and the interpretation of the world given by natural science on the other. How often has one come across oppressed souls saying, “Natural science speaks of a world of pure necessity. It tells us that the world originated from a primeval mist. This condensed into the natural kingdoms—the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms and, finally, also the human kingdom. And yet, deep inside us, something rises that surely is of fundamental importance and value, namely, our moral and religious world. This stands before our souls as the one thing that makes us truly human. But an honest interpretation of the world of natural science tells us that this earth, on which we stand with our moral ideas like hermits in the universe, will disintegrate, will fall back again into the sun, it will end up as one vast cinder. A large cemetery is all that will be left and all of our ideals will be buried there.”

This is the point at which spiritual science enters, not just to grant new hope and belief, but resting entirely on its own sure knowledge, developed as I have already described. It states that the natural-scientific theory of the world offers only an abstract point of view. In reality, the world is imbued with spirit, and permeated by supersensible beings. If we look back into primeval times, we find that the material substances of the earth originated in the spiritual world, and also that the present material nature of the earth will become spirit again in future times. Just as, at death, the human being lays aside the physical body to enter, consciously, a spiritual world, so will the material part of the earth fall away like a corpse and what then is soul and spirit on earth and in human beings will arise again in future times, even though the earth will have perished. Christ’s words—taken as a variation of this same theme—ring true: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Human beings thus can say, “Everything that our eyes can see will perish, just as the body, the transient part of the human individuality, does. But there will rise again from this dying away what lived on earth as morality. Human beings will perceive a spiritual world around them; they will live themselves into a spiritual world.”

In this way, deepening knowledge with spirit, anthroposophical spiritual science meets the needs of our present civilization differently from external science. It deepens knowledge and cognition to the level of deeply felt piety, of religious consciousness, giving human beings spiritual self-awareness.

Fundamentally speaking, this is the great question faced by contemporary civilization. But, as long as human beings lack the proper inner stability, as long as they feel themselves to be material entities floating about in some vacuum, they cannot develop a strong inner being, nor play a vigorous part in social life. Outer planning and organization, directly affecting social conditions, must be created by people themselves. Such outer social conditions are of great significance to the questions of present and future civilization—questions that lead us to search for true consciousness of our humanity. But only those with inner stability, which has been granted them through being anchored in the spirit, will be able to take their proper place in social life.

Thus, a first question is, how can people place themselves into present social conditions with inner firmness and certainty regarding matters of daily life? A second question concerns human relationships or what we could call our attitude toward our fellow human beings: the way in which each person meets his or her fellow human being. Here we enter a realm where, no less than in the realm of knowledge, modern civilization has brought us new riddles rather than new solutions. Only think of how the achievements of modern natural science have expanded the scope of technology! The technology, commerce, and transportation that surround us every hour of the day are all offspring of this new, grandiose way of looking at the sense-perceptible world. And yet we have not been able to find an answer in this age of technology to what has become a new, vital question; namely, how are we, as human beings, to live in this complex technical, commercial and traffic-ridden world? This question has become a by-product of modern civilization itself. The fact that it has not yet been resolved can be seen in the devastating political movements, the destructiveness of which increases the farther east we go, even right into Asia. Due to a working out of human instincts, nothing noble or elevating is being put into the world there. Rather, because the burning questions of our day have not been solved, havoc and destruction rule the day. There is no doubt that modern civilization would perish if what is emerging in the East were to spread worldwide. What is lurking there, intent on bringing about the downfall of modern civilization, is far more horrific than people living in the West can imagine. But it also testifies to the fact that something else is needed for the solution of the problem of contemporary civilization.

It is not enough for us to work within the bounds of modern technology, which is a child of the modern world outlook. We must also work toward attainment of another possibility. Human beings have become estranged from their old kinship to nature. In their practical activities and in their professional lives, they have been placed into a soulless, spiritually empty, mechanistic world. From cooperating with nature, they have been led to operating machines and to dealing with spiritless and mechanical means of transportation. We must find the way again to give them something to take the place of the old kinship to nature. And this can only be a world-view that speaks to our souls with a powerful voice, making us realize that there is more to human life than what can be experienced outwardly. Human beings must become inwardly certain that they belong to a supersensible world, to a world of soul and spirit, that always surrounds them. They must see that it is possible to investigate that world with the same scientific accuracy as the physical world, which is being studied and explored by outer science and which has led to this technological age. Only such a new science of the supersensible can become the foundation for a new, right relationship between people. Such a science not only will allow them to see in their fellow human beings what appears during the life between birth and death, but will make them recognize and respect what is immortal and eternal in human beings through their humanity’s close links with a spiritual world. Such a deepened knowledge will surely bring about a change for the better in how one individual perceives another.

Here is yet a third point of importance. It is the recognition that human life is not fully exhausted within the boundaries of birth and death, as the “ideology of the proletariat” would have us believe. Rather, what we are doing every moment here on earth is of significance not only for the earth, but for the whole of the universe. When the earth will have passed away, what we have carried into our daily tasks out of moral, soul-and-spiritual depths will arise to live in another world. Transformed, it will become part of a general spiritualization. Thus anthroposophical spiritual science approaches the problems of our time in a threefold way. It enables us to become aware of our spirituality. It helps us see in our fellows other beings of soul and spirit. And it helps us recognize that our earthly deeds, however humble and practical, have a cosmic and universal spiritual meaning.

In working towards these aims, spiritual science has been active not only in theory; it has also entered the sphere of practical life. In Stuttgart, there is the Waldorf school, which was founded by Emil Molt and which I was asked to direct. It is a school whose pedagogical principles and methods are based on insights gained through the science of the spirit I am speaking of here. Furthermore, in Dornach, near Basel, lies the Goetheanum, which houses our High School of Spiritual Science. This Goetheanum in Dornach is still incomplete, but we were already able to hold a large number of courses in the unfinished building during the autumn of last year.

Some time ago, on a previous occasion, I was also asked to speak about spiritual science here in Holland. At that time, I could say only that it existed as a new method of research and that it was something inherently alive in every human being. Since then, spiritual science has taken on a different form. It has begun to establish its own High School in Dornach. Last spring, I was able to show how what I could only sketch tonight as the beginning of spiritual-scientific research can be applied in all branches of science. On that occasion, I showed doctors and medical students how the results of spiritual science, gained by means of strict and exact methods, can be applied to therapeutics. Medical questions, which can often touch on other problems related to general human health, are questions that every conscientious doctor recognizes as belonging to the facts of our present civilization. They have become riddles because modern science will not rise from observing only what is sense perceptible and widen its investigations to include the supersensible, the spiritual world. During that autumn course, specialists drawn from many fields—including law, mathematics, history, sociology, biology, physics, chemistry, and pedagogy—tried to show how all branches of science can be fructified by anthroposophical spiritual science. Representatives of the arts were also present to demonstrate how spiritual science was inspiring them to discover new developments in their professions. Then there were others, too, drawn from such spheres of practical life as commerce and industry. These could show that spiritual science not only lifted them out of the old routines that led the world into the catastrophe of the last war, but also that it can help relate people to practical life in a higher sense. The courses were meant to show how spiritual science, far from fostering dilettantism or nebulous mysticism, is capable of entering and fructifying all of the sciences and that, in doing so, it is uplifting and linking each separate branch to become a part of a comprehensive spiritual-supersensible conception of the human being.

I shall have more to say next time about the practical applications of spiritual science, particularly with regard to education and the social question. Once I have done so, you will appreciate that anthroposophical spiritual science is not striving for some vague mysticism, removed from daily life, but wishes to grasp the spirit consciously. It wishes to do so for two main reasons—first, because it is essential for human beings to become aware of how they are related to their true spiritual origin and, second, because spiritual powers are intent on intervening in the practical and material affairs of daily life. Anyone, therefore, who tends to combine a life devoid of spirit with a truly practical life, or combine a spiritual attitude with isolation from daily life, has certainly not grasped the real nature of anthroposophical spiritual science, nor recognized the paramount needs of our present age.

We have found people who understand what the High School of Spiritual Science seeks to accomplish for the benefit of humanity along the lines already indicated. We have found people who appreciate the necessity of working in this way in view of the great problems facing our present civilization. Yet, due to difficult local circumstances, the completion of the Goetheanum has been greatly delayed. This building is still in an unfinished state and its completion will largely depend on continued help from friends who have the heart and the understanding to give their support for the sake of human evolution, so needed today. Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, more than a thousand people were assembled at the opening of our courses. Visitors can see in Dornach that spiritual science seeks to work out of the whole human being, that it does not wish to appeal only to the head. They can witness that it seeks to move ahead not only through what can be gained by experimentation and observation, but also by striving for truly artistic expression, free from empty symbolism or pedantic allegory. This is the reason why we could not possibly use just any arbitrary style for our building in Dornach. Its architecture, too, had to flow from the same sources from which spiritual science itself flows. Because it endeavors to draw on the whole human being, spiritual science is less one-sided than the other sciences, which work only on the basis of experimentation and observation. It is as exact as any other science could be and, in addition, wants to speak to the whole human being.

About the practical aspects, I shall have more to say next time. Today, I wanted to prepare the ground by showing how spiritual research leads us right into our present situation. When dealing with the practical side, I hope to show how our times are in need of what anthroposophical spiritual science has to offer. Such spiritual science seeks to complement the conscientious and methodical research into the world of matter, which it acknowledges more than any other spiritual movement. It is also capable of leading to a religious deepening and to artistic impulses, as did the old, instinctive science of the mystery centers, renewal of which, however, would no longer serve our present needs.

When dealing with the practical aspects, I shall have to show that spiritual science is in no way either antireligious or anti- Christian. Like all other true and religious aspirations toward an inner deepening, spiritual science strives toward the spirit.

This gives us the hope that those who still oppose spiritual science will eventually find their way into it because it strives toward something belonging to all people. It strives toward the spirit, and humanity needs the spirit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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