The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Last night I tried to show how the deep gulf between practical life and spiritual-cultural life (the latter being very theoretical at this point) hinders modern teachers from discovering a true art of teaching. The effects of this contemporary phenomenon are not generally taken seriously enough because the intellect is unaware of the true situation, a situation revealed to the human mind and soul only over the course of life. There is a strong tendency these days to remain deaf to all that the human sensibility would tell us. We are more easily prepared to listen to the voice of the intellect.

People today feel compelled to grant unlimited and infallible authority to science, which is actually only a science of physical nature and not a science of the soul and spirit. This is true, because in every connection the intellect has been set up to judge everything, including things that do not proceed from the intellect alone, but from the whole human being. Teachers, no less than other people, are the products of our whole civilization’s approach to cultural-spiritual life, and the feelings and sensibility they bring to their work in the schools come directly from what they themselves had to endure in school. Yet, when they are with their children in a classroom situation, they are very keenly and intensely aware of the influence of the gulf I already mentioned.

Teachers have learned all kinds of things about the human soul and how it works. Their own feeling and will impulses have been shaped accordingly, as well as the whole tone and frame of mind brought to their work as teachers. And beyond all of this, they are expected to base their work on extremely theoretical notions of mind and soul.

It is not very useful to say: Theory? Certainly a teacher’s work in school comes from the whole human heart! Of course it does, in an abstract sense. It is very easy to make such a statement abstractly. You might as well suggest that a person jump into the water without getting wet. We have the same chance of jumping into the water and not getting wet as we have of finding help in meeting the fresh souls of children within today’s academic institutional teachings about the human soul and spirit. Just as certain as you will get wet if you jump into water, so will the teacher, having assimilated the academic learning of today, be a stranger to everything that belongs to soul and spirit. This is a simple fact. And the primary concern of all who would practice the art of teaching should be the recognition of this fact in its full human significance.

Teachers who have gone through a modern academic education may be prepared to meet the child with sincere human feelings, with sympathies and an earnest desire to work with and for humanity; but when they have a little child before them—the “becoming” human being—they feel as if everything they have assimilated theoretically has failed to warm their hearts and strengthen their will for spiritual activity. At best, all of that theory will enable them merely to “hover around the child,” as it were, instead of providing an opening for them to meet the child.

Thus, teachers enter their classrooms as if surrounded by a wall they cannot cross to reach the children’s souls; they busy themselves with the air around the children, and cannot accompany, with their own souls, the in-breathing process through which the air enters the child. They feel like outsiders to the children, splashing about, as it were, in an ill-defined theoretical element outside the child. Or again, when teachers stand in front of children, they feel that everything they learned intellectually from our excellent natural science (which gives us such strong and clear understanding of the mineral world) does not help them at all to find their way to the child. It tells them something about the bodily nature of the child, but even this is not fully understood unless they reach down to the underlying spiritual element, because the spiritual element is the foundation of all corporeality.

Thus it happens that those who wish to approach the child in a pedagogical way are led to engage in external physical experiments. They use trial-and-error methods, testing for things related to the child’s body so that the memory forces are developed properly; they try to find out how to treat the child’s physical body in order to exercise the child’s powers of concentration and so on. The teacher begins to feel like one who, instead of being led into the light, is given dark glasses that almost cut out the light completely, for science manages to make even the physical nature of the human being opaque. It does not and cannot enable a teacher to reach the real being of children with their natural spirit-filled soul life.

These things are not yet discussed rationally in our present civilization. Where else will you hear what I have been saying—that without a proper and true knowledge of the human being, and despite our remarkable knowledge of physical phenomena, we simply bypass the child, who remains alien? And because no one else can say this, anything that could be said on the matter finds expression in feelings and sentiments instead of in human speech. Consequently, teachers go away from almost every lesson with a certain feeling of inner dissatisfaction. This feeling may not be very pronounced, but it accumulates and tends to harden them, causing them to be, not just strangers to the child, but strangers to the world, with their hearts and minds growing cold and prosaic.

And so we see freshness, life, and mobility vanishing because of a lack of intimate human contact between the adult teacher and the growing child. These things need to be considered and understood intellectually, but also with the teacher’s full humanity. Today’s intellectual understanding, schooled only in outer, sense phenomena, has become too coarse to get a hold on these more intimate soul connections in all their refinement and tenderness.

When the art of teaching is discussed, we hear the old demands echoing again and again; as you well know, pedagogy is derived on the one hand from psychology, from the science of the soul, and on the other from ethics, the science of human, moral responsibility. Educational theorists, when speaking of the art of teaching, tell us that education should be based on two main pillars: the science of the soul and the science of ethics. But all we really have is something that falls between the two. It is a complete illusion to believe that a true science of the soul exists today. We need to remind ourselves repeatedly of the phrase, “a soulless science of the soul,” coined in the nineteenth century, because human beings no longer have the power to penetrate the soul. For what is our present science of the soul? I may sound paradoxical if I say what it really is.

In the past, human beings had a science of the soul that sprang from original instincts, from clairvoyant knowledge then common to all humanity. This clairvoyant knowledge of ancient times was primitive, pictorial, mythical; nonetheless, it deeply penetrated the human soul. Ancient people possessed such a science of the soul; they had a feeling, an intuitive sense for what a soul is. And they coined words that bear a true relation to the human soul, for example, the words thinking, feeling, and willing. Today, however, we no longer have the inner life that can truly animate these words.

What does anthroposophy show us about thinking? As human beings, thinking equips us with thoughts. But the thoughts we have today in our ordinary civilized life appear as if, instead of looking at the face of someone we meet, we look at that person only from behind. When we speak of thoughts today, we see only the “rear view,” as it were, of what really lives in thought. Why is this so?

When you look at a person from behind, you see, of course, a certain shape and form, but you do not learn about the person’s physiognomy. You do not see the side where the soul life is outwardly expressed. If you learn to know thoughts the usual way in this scientific age, you come to know the rear view only, not the inner human being. If, however, you look at thoughts from the other side, they retain their life and remain active forces.

What are these thoughts? They are the same as the forces of growth in the human being. Seen externally, thoughts are abstract; seen internally, we find the same forces in them by which the little child grows bigger, whereby a child receives form and shape in the limbs, in the body, in the physiognomy. These are the thought forces. When we look externally, we see only dead thoughts; in a similar way, when we view a person’s back, we do not see that individual’s living character. We must go to the other side of the life of thoughts, as it were, and then these same forces reveal themselves as working day by day from within outward, as the little child transforms an undefined physiognomy more and more into an expression of soul. They are the same forces that pass into the child’s facial expressions, giving them warmth and inner fire; they are the forces that change the shape of its nose, because the nose, too, continues to change its form after birth. These same forces introduce order and purpose into the first erratic movements of a baby’s limbs. Indeed, they are responsible for all that lives and moves inwardly during the entire time that physical growth continues in the young human being. When we begin to look at the life of thoughts from the point of view of anthroposophy, it is as if we are now looking into a person’s face, having previously learned to know that person only from behind. Everything dead begins to live; the whole life of thought becomes alive when we start to view it internally.

In earlier times this was not consciously recognized as is now possible through anthroposophy, but it was felt and expressed in the language of myth. Today we can recognize it directly, and thus carry it into practical life. If we enter into these things in a deep and living way, therefore, we can educate the child artistically, we can make pedagogy into an art.

If you know thinking only from behind, only from its “dead” side, you will understand the child only intellectually. If you learn to know thinking from the front, from its living side, you can approach children so that you do not merely understand them, but can also enter into all of their feelings and impulses so that you pour love into all of the children’s experiences.

In general, nothing that lives has survived all these things. Current civilization has only the word for thought; it no longer holds the substance that the word represents. When we speak of the science of the soul, we no longer speak of reality. We have become accustomed to using the old words, but the words have lost their substance. Language has lost its content in connection with the life of feeling, and with the life of the will—even more than with the life of thought. Feelings push their way up from the subconscious. The human being lives in them but cannot look down into the subconscious depths. And when it is done, it is done in an amateurish way through the eyes of a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst does not reach or find the soul element that lives and moves in the subconscious of a person’s feelings. So for feelings, too, only the words remain; and this loss of substance applies even more to the will sphere. If we wanted to describe what we know about these things today, we should not speak of the human will at all, because will has become a mere word in our present civilization. When we see a person writing, for example, we can only describe how the hand begins to move, how the hand holds the pen, and how the pen moves over the paper; we are justified only in describing the external facts that are displayed in movement. These are still facts today, but the inherent will in the activity of writing is no longer experienced. It has become a mere word.

Anthroposophy’s job is to restore real substance and meaning to the words of our so-called science of the soul. For this reason, anthroposophy can offer a true knowledge of the human being, whereas in our present civilization, verbosity spreads like a veil over the true facts of psychology. It is interesting to note that the late Fritz Mauthner wrote Critique of Language because he found that when people speak of things pertaining to soul and spirit today, they speak in mere words.1 He pointed out that today people have only words devoid of true meaning; but he should have gone further in drawing attention to the necessity for finding again the true content in words.

From a general scientific perspective, Mauthner’s Critique of Language is, of course, nonsensical; for I would like to know if anyone who grasps a hot iron could possibly be unable to distinguish the fact from the word. If someone merely says the words, “The iron is hot,” the iron does not burn the speaker. Only if touched does it burn. Those who stand amid life know very well how to discriminate between physical reality and the words that natural science uses to designate it—that is, assuming they haven’t been completely ruined by too much theorizing.

Psychology, however, stops at this point; only words are left. And someone like Mauthner, with the best of intentions, says that we should do away with the word soul altogether. (Here we see something inwardly arising to the surface, which will find outer expression later.) Therefore, according to Mauthner, we should not speak of the soul, but coin a new abstraction to avoid the erroneous view that we are referring to a concrete reality when speaking of the human soul. Mauthner is perfectly correct as far as contemporary civilization is concerned. Today a new penetration into the soul’s true nature is necessary, so that the word soul may again be filled with inner meaning.

It is indeed devastating to see people merely playing around with words when it comes to knowledge of the soul—if it can be called knowledge at all—whereas, the true nature of the soul remains untouched. As a result, people puzzle over problems, such as, whether the soul affects the body or the body affects the soul, or whether these two phenomena are parallel to each other. As far as such matters are concerned, there is no insight to be found anywhere, and therefore any discussion and argument is bound to remain abstract and arbitrary. Yet, if these things are habitually discussed only from an external viewpoint, one loses all the enthusiasm and inner warmth that the teacher, as an artist, should bring to the classroom. Parents also, by the way, should have been able to acquire these qualities simply by virtue of living in a vital culture, so they could have the right relationship with their growing children.

What we are saying is this: one pillar of the art of education is psychology, the science of the soul. But in this culture, we have no science of the soul. And even worse, we lack the honesty to admit it, because we cater to the authority of the physical sciences. So we talk about the soul without having any knowledge of it. This falsehood is carried into the most intimate recesses of human life. On the other hand, it must be said that there is undoubtedly much sincere good will among those who today speak about the ideals of education, and who supply the world so liberally with ideas of reform. There is plenty of good will, but we lack the courage to acknowledge that we must first come up with a true science of the human soul before we may so much as open our lips to speak about educational reform, about the art of education. To begin with, we must recognize that we do not have the first of the two main pillars on which we rely—that is, true insight into the life of the soul. We have the words for it, words that have been coined in far-distant antiquity, but we no longer have an experience of the living soul.

The second pillar is represented by the sum of our moral principles. If on the one hand our psychology consists of mere words, a “psychology without a psyche,” so on the other hand, our moral teaching is bereft of divine inspiration. True, the old religious teachings have been preserved in the form of various traditions. But the substance of the old religious teachings lives as little in the people today as does the science of the soul, which has shriveled into words. People confess to what is handed down to them in the form of religious dogma or rituals, because it corresponds to old habits, and because, over the course of evolution, they have grown accustomed to what is offered to them. But the living substance is no longer there. So there is a psychology without a soul and ethics without real contact with the divine and spiritual world.

When people speak theoretically or want to satisfy emotional needs, they still use words that are relics of ancient moral teachings. These words were used at one time to accomplish the will of the gods; we still speak in words coined in those distant times, when humans knew that the forces working in moral life were potent forces like the forces of nature or the forces of divine beings. They knew that divine spiritual beings gave reality to these ethical impulses, to these moral forces. To this day, people express these origins in various ways, inasmuch as their daily lives are lived in the words handed down from earlier religions. But they have lost the ability to see the living divine spirituality that gives reality to their ethical impulses.

Dear friends, can people today honestly say that they understand, for example, the epistles of Saint Paul, when he says that in order not to die, human beings need to awaken to the living Christ within? Is it possible for people to feel, in the fullest sense of the word, that immoral conduct cannot possibly be associated with the moral duties of the soul, just as health and illness have to do with life and death of the body? Is there still a spiritual understanding of how the soul dies in the spirit unless it remains in touch with the moral forces of life? Do Saint Paul’s words still live when he says that, unless you know that the Christ has arisen, your faith, your soul, is dead? And that when you pass through physical death your soul becomes infected by physical death, and begins to die in the spirit? Does an understanding of these things, an inner, living understanding, still exist?

Worse yet, our civilization has not the courage to admit this lack of inner, living understanding. It is satisfied with natural science, which can speak only about what is dead, but not about the living human soul. It is strictly through habit that this civilization of ours accepts what is said about the immortality of the soul and about the resurrection of the Christ on Earth. Hasn’t this materialistic spirit pervaded even theology itself?

Let us look at the most modern form of theology. People have lost the insight that the Christ event stands in earthly world history as something spiritual and can be judged only on spiritual grounds; they have lost the insight that one cannot understand the resurrection with natural-scientific concepts, but only through spiritual science. Even the theologians have lost this insight. They speak only of the man Jesus and can no longer reach a living comprehension of the resurrected, living Christ; basically, they fall under Saint Paul’s verdict: “Unless you know that Christ has arisen, your faith is dead.”

Unless we succeed in calling to life between the ages of seven and fourteen the living Christ in the inner being of the child, with the help of the kind of pedagogy that anthroposophy describes, unless we succeed in doing this, human beings will step into later life unable to gain an understanding of the living Christ. They will have to deny Christ, unless they choose, somewhat dishonestly, to hold on to the traditional Christian beliefs, while lacking the inner means of soul to understand that Christ has risen insofar as the person experiences the resurrection, and insofar as the teacher experiences with the child the living Christ in the heart, in the soul. Christ can be awakened in the soul, and through this union with Christ, immortality can be restored to the soul.

In order that immortality be given back to the soul, there must first be a spiritual understanding of what immortality really is. One must first come to the point where one can say: When we look at nature by itself, we are faced with natural laws that teach us that our Earth will die by heat one day, that the time will come when everything on Earth will die away. But unless we have some insight into the living spirituality of the world, we are bound to believe that our moral ideas and principles will also die in the general heat; that death will befall the Earth and that everything will end up as one great cemetery.

If we do have insight into the living spirit, however, we will realize that the moral impulses welling up from the soul are received by the divine spiritual beings, just as we receive the oxygen in the air that keeps life going. Then we know that what we do in the moral sphere is received by the divine spiritual beings of the world, and consequently our soul itself is borne out into other worlds, beyond the destruction of the physical Earth.

We must be able to make this knowledge an intrinsic part of our view of life, and take it into our thinking life and into our feelings, just as today we integrate what we learn about X-rays, telephones, and electromagnetism. People believe in all these because their senses experience a direct inner connection with them. To have a true and living relation to these matters, we must experience a living connection with them; we must live with them. Otherwise, in connection with the things of the soul, we would be like the artist who knows what is beautiful and the rules for making a work of art beautiful, but who knows it in dry, abstract, intellectual concepts without being able to wield a brush, use colors, knead clay, or otherwise handle any artist’s materials. If we want to find our way to the living human being, we must seek the power to do so in the living spiritual life itself. Spirituality, however, is lacking in our present civilization. And yet, spirituality has to be the second pillar on which the art of teaching rests.

Teachers today who should be artists of education confront the students with a purely natural-scientific attitude. The realm of the human soul has fallen away to become a mere collection of words; and the spiritual world, the moral world, has itself sunk to the level of a collection of ceremonies. We would begin an art of education based on science of the soul and on morality; but we are faced with a “soulless science of the soul” and an ethics devoid of the spiritual. We would speak of Christ, but to be able to speak of Him properly, it is necessary to have absorbed the quality of soul, something of the divine and spiritual. If we have neither, we can speak only of Jesus the man—that is, we speak only of the man who walked among people in a physical body like any other human being.

If we want to recognize the Christ and put the power of the Christ to work in schools, we need more than a science of the soul and an ethics made only of words. We need living insight into the life and work of the soul, into the working and weaving of moral forces, similar to the weaving and working of natural forces. We must know moral forces as realities, not merely a form of conventional morality. Instead of accepting them out of habit, we should see that we must live in these moral forces, for we know that unless we do so, we die in the spirit, even as we die in the body when our blood solidifies.

Such contemplations in all their liveliness must become a kind of life-capital, especially for the art of education. An enlivening and mobile force, bringing to life what is dead, needs to permeate the teacher’s whole being when endeavoring to educate and teach.

Whether educated or not, people today talk about the soul in lifeless words. When speaking about the spirit today, we live only in dead words. We do not live in the living soul, and so merely splash about and hover around the child, for we have lost the key to the soul of childhood. We try to understand the child’s body by engaging in all manner of experimental methods, but it remains dark and silent for us, because behind everything physical lives the spiritual. If we wish to lead the spiritual into an art and if we wish to avoid remaining with a merely intellectual conception of it, using abstract thoughts that have lost their power, then the spiritual has to be apprehended in its living manifestations.

As mentioned earlier, one hears it said everywhere that the art of teaching should be built on two main pillars—that is, on ethics and on the science of the soul. At the same time, one hears bitter doubts expressed as to how one should go about educating children. It was pointed out that, in earlier times, the child was seen as a future adult, and educated accordingly. This is true; for example, how did the Greeks educate their children? They did not really pay much attention to the life and experience of children during their childhood. Children who would obviously never grow into proper Greek adults, were simply left to die. The child as such was of no consequence; only the adult was considered important. In all their education of the young, the Greeks considered only future adults.

Today we have reached a stage in our civilization where children no longer respond unless we attend to their needs. Those with experience in such matters know what I mean. If we do not give them their due, children will resist inwardly; they do not cooperate unless the adults allow them to be themselves and do not consider them only from the adult viewpoint. This brings many problems with it concerning education. Should our education aim to satisfy the child’s specific needs, or should we consider how to awaken what the child must become one day as an adult?

Such questions arise if one observes the child only from the outside, as it were—when one no longer perceives the inner human being. Certainly, we will not come near children at all if we educate them with an understanding that has arisen from experimental psychology, or with one that sees things from a viewpoint that would lead logically to experimental psychology. The inner soul being of a child is not carried outwardly on the surface so that one only needs to understand them in a way that might be sufficient for understanding an adult. Merely to understand the child, however, is not enough; we must be able to live inwardly with it. What is essentially human must have entered us directly enough that we can truly live with the child. Mere understanding of the child is completely useless.

If we can enter the child’s life livingly, we are no longer faced with the contradictory alternatives of either educating the child as a child or educating the child as a potential grown-up. Then we know that, whatever we have to offer the child, we must bring it so that it accords with the child’s own will; we know also that, at the same time, we are educating the future adult in the child. Do children in their inmost nature really want to be only children? If this were so, they would not play with dolls, in this way imitating the ways of the grown-up world. Nor would children experience such delight in “working” with craftsmen when there is a workshop nearby. In reality, of course, children play, but to children such imitative play is serious work.

Children truly long to develop, in their own way, the forces that adults develop. If we understand the human being and thereby also the child, we know that the child, through play, is always striving toward adulthood, except that a child will play with a doll instead of a living baby. We also know that children experience the greatest joy when, as part of what we bring them in education, we educate the future adults in them. This must be done properly, not in the dry and prosaic way that reflects our frequent attitude toward work as an irksome and troublesome task, but so that work itself becomes second nature to the human being. In the eyes of a child, work thus assumes the same quality as its own earnest and serious play.

When we have a living understanding of this way of educating—and not merely an abstract idea of it—we are no longer beset by doubt about whether we should educate the grownup person in the child, or the child as such. We then see in the child the seed of adulthood, but we do not address this seed in the way we would address an adult. We speak in the child’s own language. And so, unless we can come very close to the nature of the young human being, wherever we turn we find ideas that are nothing but empty words. It is the task of anthroposophy to lead people away from, and beyond, these empty words.

Today, there is an ongoing conflict between materialism and a spiritual view of the world. You hear people say that we must overcome materialism, we must come back again to a spiritual viewpoint. But for anthroposophy, the concept of matter, in the form that haunts the thoughts of people today like a ghost, has lost all meaning; because, if one comes to know matter as it really is, it begins to grow transparent and dissolves into spirit, to speak pictorially. If one understands matter properly, it becomes transformed into spirit. And if one understands spirit properly, it becomes transformed into matter before the eye of the soul, so that matter becomes the outward revelation of spirit in its creative power.

The words matter and spirit, used in a one-sided way, no longer have any meaning. If we begin to speak from the standpoint of this deeper perception, however, we may still talk about spirit and matter; after all, these words have been coined, but we use them in a very different way. When we say the words matter or material substance, we give them yet another coloring with our feeling if we have behind us the anthroposophical knowledge I have just described. The word matter or material takes on another, more hidden timbre, and it is this hidden timbre that works upon the child and not the content of the word matter.

Reflect for a moment about how much human understanding and feeling live in the word when used with full comprehension! Suppose someone had felt, as Fritz Mauthner did, that we have no more than words for what refers to the soul, and that it would be truer, in fact, not to speak any longer of the soul (Seele), but to speak of a generic soul (Geseel). This may raise a smile. But suppose we were to carry this same attitude into the sphere of the religious and the ethical, into the moral sphere, where our accomplishments and activity take effect—suppose that, out of the same feeling, someone were to make up the appropriate word in this sphere; what would we get then? Ado (Getue) [rather than Tue, or “to do”]. As you see, I have formed the words Geseel and Getue according to the same syntactical principle. Geseel will at most produce a smile; Getue will be felt to be an outrageous word, for if all one’s action and conduct were to become nothing but abstract ado (Getue), this word would indeed be annoying. This is not due to the content of the word, however, but arises from what we feel when the word is spoken. The experience in our feeling is quite different according to whether we are coining words that have to do with the soul nature—Geseel, for example—or whether we are coining words to indicate what brings us into the external world, what brings us to where our actions themselves become events in nature. If one uses the word Getue in this context, it will arouse indignation.

Consider how indifferently words are now used, one next to another, as it were, and one even running into one another. We speak in the same neutral way of matter, spirit, and body; of soul or of the human brain; or again, of the limbs, and so on. The ideal of natural-scientific knowledge seems to be that we should express everything neutrally without letting any human element enter into our speech, into our naming of things.

But if we no longer pour the human element into our words, they die. The abstract words of natural science die unless we infuse them with our human participation. In physics we speak, for example, of the theory of impact. At best, we write down a mathematical equation, which we don’t understand when we speak of impact without the living sensation experienced when we ourselves push or hit something. Words can only be translated into life if we bring human beings back into our culture.

This is what anthroposophy wishes to do—restore the human element into our civilization. Things are still all right as long as we go through life in a lazy, indifferent way, simply allowing externals run their course by means of technology, the child of our wonderfully advanced physical sciences. But if we move into the spheres where one person has to help a fellow human being, as physician, teacher, or educator, then it becomes a different matter. Then we feel the need for a real, living and consciously assumed knowledge of the human being that is revealed in the art of teaching. If we talk about the need for this knowledge to fulfill the still unconscious or subconscious demands of present-day education, it is not due to any wilfulness on our part, but to a necessity of our civilization.

However many organizations may be founded to bring about educational reforms, they will be of no avail unless we first have groups of men and women ready to work at rediscovering a living knowledge of the human being—that is, a science of the soul that really has a soul and a teaching of morality that really springs from the divine and the spiritual.

Such groups must lead the way. Others may then follow that would build again on the two main pillars supporting the edifice that still needs to be built out of a true science of the soul and a true ethics—a science of the soul that doesn’t merely talk in words and an ethics that knows how human moral conduct is anchored in the divine spiritual worlds. Then we shall have teachers and educators who work artistically and are thus able to at least approach the very soul of the child in whatever they say and do, even by the invisible workings of their mere presence on the child. They will find the way back to the human soul. And when they set out to educate the child ethically, they will know that they are integrating the child into a divine and spiritual world order. They will be working out of the supersensible element, both in a true psychology and in a true spirituality—that is, from genuine knowledge of the human soul; and they will introduce what belongs to the realm of the supersensible into a true spiritual life.

These things will serve as genuine supporting pillars for the art of education. They have to be explored, and anthroposophy seeks to do this. That is why we have an anthroposophical method of education, not from personal desire or opinion, but because of the need of the times in which we live.

In diverse quarters today, people speak of the need for an answer to certain educational questions thus far unanswered. The many endeavors in modern education clearly show this. What I am hoping to convey to you today, at the request of this country’s Anthroposophical Society, is not mere theoretical knowledge. The practical application of spiritual-scientific knowledge that comes from the anthroposophical viewpoint of the human being has already demonstrated its value—at least to a certain extent.

In 1919 Emil Molt took the first steps to open a free school, and he asked me to take care of the practical matters and direction of the school. Thus, the spiritual-scientific knowledge of the human being and the world, which it is my task to represent, became naturally the basis of the education practiced in this school. The school has existed since 1919 and currently offers twelve grades. Students who entered the twelfth grade this summer will take their final exams next year so they can enter a university or other places of higher education. The school offers everything pertaining to the education of children from the elementary school age (that is, after the age of six) until the boys and girls begin higher education.

This school’s practices, which are the outcome of a spiritualscientific worldview, was never intended to revolutionize any previous achievements in the field of practical education. Our goal is not to think up new radical methods, such as those tried in special rural boarding schools, where the creation of very particular conditions was believed necessary before teaching could even begin. Our aim is to continue along the educational paths already marked by enlightened educators at the beginning of the twentieth century. This we attempt not only on the basis of human knowledge during the various stages of earthly development, but out of insight into the whole of human nature in the widest and most comprehensive way possible. This insight includes not only the various physical happenings of earthly life between birth and death, but also what lives and manifests during life as the eternally divine in the human being. It is important to us that we add to what has already been achieved by educational reformers, and also that we offer what can be contributed from a wider, spiritual viewpoint. Furthermore, there is no intention of putting utopian educational ideas into the world—something that, as a rule, is far easier to do than creating something based fully on practical reality. Our aim is to achieve the best possible results under any given circumstances.

Achieving this goal means that the actual conditions one faces, whether urban or rural, must serve as a foundation for the human being that results from a genuine and true art of education, so that students can eventually find a way into current and future social and professional life situations, which will certainly become increasingly complex. This is why Waldorf education offers an education that is strictly practical and methodical, meaning that, essentially, its program can be accomplished in any type of school, provided that the fundamental conditions can be created. So far, events have shown that we have made at least some progress in this direction.

We opened our school under auspicious circumstances. Initially, the manufacturer Emil Molt began it for the children of the workers in his factory. There was, of course, no difficulty in enrolling them. Also, we received children whose parents were interested in the anthroposophical point of view. Still, we began with only one hundred and thirty students. Today, four years later, after the school has grown from eight to twelve grades, we have almost eight hundred students and a staff of over forty teachers. Here in Holland, there have recently been efforts to open a similar small school—but more on that later. There is some hope that the methods used in Stuttgart will also prove worthwhile in Holland. Steps are also being taken in Switzerland to begin such a school, and in England a committee has been formed to start a Waldorf school.

After these introductory remarks I would like to speak about the meaning of Waldorf pedagogy. It is based on a penetrating knowledge of the human being, and on the teachers’ ability, with the help of special preparation and training, to perceive the development and unfolding of their students’ individualities, week by week, month by month, and year by year. From this point of view, the question of Waldorf education has to be seen, primarily, as a question of teacher training. I will try to outline in sketchy and unavoidably abstract form what can be done on the basis of such knowledge of the human being. This abstract form, however, can only be a description. It is important that what is said becomes flesh and blood, so to speak, in the teachers and that this deepened knowledge of the human being arises from practice and not from theory, and thus becomes applicable in a school.

When we observe the growing child, we can easily overlook the significance of changes connected with three fundamental life stages. We may notice various changes during a child’s development, but usually we fail to comprehend their deeper significance. We can distinguish three fundamental stages of human development until about the twentieth year, when formal education ends, or makes way for more specialized education. The first period, which is of a homogeneous nature, begins at birth and ends with the change of teeth around the seventh year. The second life stage begins at the time of the second dentition and ends at puberty. During the third stage, we are concerned with sexually mature young people who nowadays often tend to feel more mature than we can actually treat them if we want to educate them properly. This stage lasts until around the twenty-first year.

Let’s look more closely at the child’s first period of life. To the unbiased observer, a child at this stage is entirely an imitating being, right into the most intimate fibers of the spirit, soul, and physical being; and above all, the child at this stage is a being of will. One will notice that the child becomes, during development, increasingly open to impressions that come from the environment, and pays more and more attention to external things and happenings. But it is easy to deceive oneself in believing that the child’s increasing attentiveness to the external world is due to an awakening of a conceptual life, something that, at such an early age, is not true at all. At no other time in all of life will the human being, due to inborn instinct and drive, want to be freer and more independent of the conceptual realm than during these early years before the change of teeth. During these years the child really wants to repel everything connected with conceptual life in order to freely follow the inclinations of inner nature. The child’s will, on the other hand, tends to merge with the surroundings, to the point where the will manifests physically. Nothing seems more obvious than a child’s tendency to imitate exactly through limb movements the habitual gestures or postures of surrounding adults. This is because the child feels an overwhelming urge to continue in the will sphere what is happening in the environment, right down to fidgeting. In this sense, the child is entirely a being of will. This is true also of the child’s sense perception. We can easily see that the child at that age is a being of will, even in sense perceptions—something that we must learn to see in order to become competent educators. Allow me to give some details:

Among the various sense perceptions are our perceptions of color. Very few people notice that there are really three different elements living in color perception. As a rule one speaks of “yellow” or “blue” as a color perception, but the fact that there are three elements to such a perception usually escapes notice. First, human will is engaged in our relationship to color. Let’s stick with the example of yellow and blue. If we are sufficiently free from psychological bias, we soon notice that the color yellow works on us not only as a perception in the narrower sense of the word, but also affects our will. It stimulates the will to become active in an outward direction. This is where some very interesting psychological observations could be made. One could detect, for instance, how a yellow background, such as in a hall, stimulates an inclination to become outwardly active, especially if the yellow shimmers with a slightly reddish tint. If, however, we are surrounded by a blue background, we find that the stimulus on the will is directed inward, that it tends to create a pleasing and comforting mood, or feelings of humility, thus exerting a tendency toward inner activity. In this case too, interesting observations can be made, for example, that the impression created by blue is related to specific glandular secretions, so that in this case the will is an impulse stimulated by blue and directed inward.

A second element in our investigation of the effects of color perception may be the observation of the feelings stimulated by the color. A yellow or reddish-yellow color gives an impression of warmth; we have a sensation of warmth. A blue or blue-violet color creates an impression of coolness. To the same degree that the blue becomes more red, it also feels warmer. These examples, then, show the impressions of yellow and blue on the life of feeling. Only the third response represents what we could consider the idea of yellow or blue. But in this last element of our mental imagery, the elements of will and feeling also play a part.

If we now consider the education of children from the perspective of an unbiased knowledge of the human being, we find that the will impulses of children are developed first through color experiences. Young children adapt their physical movements according to yellow’s outward-directed stimulation or with blue’s inward-directed effect. This fundamental trend continues until a child loses the first teeth. Naturally, feelings and perceptions always play a part as well in response to color, but during this first life stage the effect of color on the will always predominates.

During the second life stage—from the second dentition to puberty—the experience of esthetic feelings created by color is superimposed over the existing will impulse. Thus, we can see two things: With the change of teeth, something like a calming effect in relation to color stimulation, or in other words, an inner calming from the viewpoint of the child’s innate desire to “touch” color. During the time between the change of teeth and puberty, a special appreciation for warm and cold qualities in color comes into being. Finally, a more detached and prosaic relationship to the concepts yellow or blue begins only with the beginning of puberty.

What thus manifests in color perception is present also in the human being as a whole. One could say that, until the second dentition, the child has a kind of natural religious relationship of complete devotion to the surroundings. The child allows what is living in the environment to live within. Hence, we succeed best at educating (if we can call raising children during these early years “education”) when we base all our guidance on the child’s inborn tendency to imitate—that is, on the child’s own inward experience of empathy with the surroundings. These influences include the most imponderable impulses of human life. For example, if a child’s father displays a violent temper and cannot control his outbursts, the child will be markedly affected by such a situation. The fits of temper themselves are of little significance, because the child cannot understand these; but the actions, and even the gestures, of the angry person are significant. During these early years the child’s entire body acts as one universal sense organ. In the child’s own movements and expressions of will, the body lives out by imitating what is expressed in the movements and actions of such a father. Everything within the still impressionable and pliable body of such a child unfolds through the effects of such experiences. Blood circulation and the nerve organization, based on the conditions of the child’s soul and spirit, are under this influence; they adjust to outside influences and impacts, forming inner habits. What thus becomes a child’s inner disposition through the principle of imitation, remains as inner constitution for the rest of the person’s life. Later in life, the blood circulation will be affected by such outwardly perceived impressions, transformed into forces of will during this most delicate stage of childhood. This must be considered in both a physical sense and its soul-aspect.

In this context, I always feel tempted to mention the example of a little boy who, at the age of four or five, was supposed to have committed what at a later stage could be called “stealing.” He had taken money from one of his mother’s drawers. He had not even used it for himself, but had bought sweets with it that he shared with his playmates. His father asked me what he should do with his boy, who had “stolen” money! I replied: “Of course one has to note such an act. But the boy has not stolen, because at his age the concept of stealing does not yet exist for him.” In fact, the boy had repeatedly seen his mother taking money out of the drawer, and he simply imitated her. His behavior represents a perfectly normal attempt to imitate. The concept of thieving does not yet play any part in a child of this age.

One has to be conscious not to do anything in front of the child that should not be imitated; in all one does, this principle of imitation has to be considered. Whatever one wants the child to do, the example must be set, which the child will naturally copy. Consequently, one should not assign young children specially contrived occupations, as is frequently done in kindergartens; if this must be done, the teachers should be engaged in the same activities, so that the child’s interest is stimulated to copy the adult.

Imitation is the principle of a healthy education up to the change of teeth. Everything has to stimulate the child’s will, because the will is still entirely woven into the child’s physical body and has the quality of an almost religious surrender to the environment. This manifests everywhere, in all situations.

With the change of teeth, this attitude of surrender to the environment transforms into a childlike esthetic, artistic surrender. I should like to describe this by saying that the child’s natural religious impulse toward other human beings, and toward what we understand as nature, transforms into an artistic element, which has to be met with imagination and feeling. Consequently, for the second life period, the only appropriate approach to the child is artistic. The teacher and educator of children in the primary grades must be especially careful to permeate everything done during this period with an artistic quality. In this respect, new educational approaches are needed that pay particular attention to carrying these new methods into practical daily life.

I don’t expect the following to create much antagonism, since so many others have expressed similar opinions. I have heard it said more often than I care to mention that the teaching profession tends to make its members pedantic. And yet, for the years between seven and fourteen, nothing is more poisonous for the child than pedantry. On the other hand, nothing is more beneficial than a teacher’s artistic sense, carried by natural inner enthusiasm to encounter the child. Each activity proposed to children, each word spoken in their presence, must be rooted, not in pedantry, and not in some theoretical construct, but in artistic enthusiasm, so that the children respond with inner joy and satisfaction at being shaped by a divine natural process arising from the center of human life.

If teachers understand how to work with their students out of such a mood, they practice the only living way of teaching. And something must flow into their teaching that I can only briefly sketch here. I am speaking of a quality that addresses partly the teachers’ understanding and partly their willingness to take the time in their work, but mainly their general attitude. Knowledge of the human being has to become second nature to teachers, a part of their very being, just as the ability to handle paints and brushes has to be part of a painter’s general makeup, or the use of sculpting tools natural to a sculptor. In the teacher’s case, however, this ability has to be taken much more earnestly, almost religiously, because in education we are confronted with the greatest work of art we will ever encounter in life—which it would be almost sacrilegious to refer to as merely a work of art. As teachers, we are called on to help in this divine creation. It is this inner mood of reverence in the teacher that is important. Through such a mood, one finds ways to create a more and more enlivening relationship with the children.

Remember, at school young students must grow into something that is initially alien to their nature. As an example, let’s take writing, which is based on letters that are no longer experienced esthetically, but are strung together to make words and sentences. Our contemporary writing developed from something very different, from picture writing. But the ancient picture writing still had a living connection with what it expressed, just as the written content retained a living relationship with its meaning. Today we need learned studies to trace back the little “goblin,” which we designate as the letter a, to the moment when what was to be expressed through the insertion of this letter into one or the other word was inwardly experienced. And yet this a is nothing but an expression of a feeling of sudden surprise and wonder. Each letter has its origin in the realm of feeling, but those feelings are now lost. Today, letters are abstractions.

If one has unbiased insight into the child’s mind, one knows how terribly alien the abstractions are that the child is supposed to learn at a delicate age, written meaning that once had living links with life, but now totally bereft of its earlier associations as used in the adult world today.

As a result, we in the Waldorf school have endeavored to coax writing out of the activity of painting and drawing. We teach writing before we teach reading. To begin with, we do not let the children approach letters directly at all. For example, we allow the child to experience the activity of painting—for example, the painting of a fish—however primitive the efforts may be. So the child has painted a fish. Then we make the child aware of the sound that the thing painted on paper makes when pronounced as a word; we make the child aware that what was painted is pronounced “fish.” It is now an easy and obvious step to transform the shape of the fish into the sound of the first letter of the word F-ish. With the letter F, this actually represents its historical origin. However, this is not the point; the important thing is that, from the painted form of a picture, we lead to the appropriate letter.

The activity of painting is naturally connected with the human being. In this way we enable children to assimilate letters through their own experience of outer realities. This necessitates an artistic sense. It also forces one to overcome a certain easygoing attitude, because if you could see Waldorf children using their brushes and paints, you would soon realize that, from the teacher’s perspective, a measure of personal discomfort is inevitable in the use of this method! Again and again the teacher has to clean up after the children, and this demands a certain devotion. Yet, such minor problems are overcome more quickly than one might assume. It is noteworthy to see how much even young children gain artistic sensibility during such activities. They soon realize the difference between “smearing” paint onto paper somewhat haphazardly, and achieving the luminous quality of watercolor needed to create the desired effects. This difference, which may appear downright “occult” to many adults, soon becomes very real to the child, and such a fertile mind and soul experience is an added bonus in this introduction to writing.

On the other hand, teaching children to write this way is bound to take more time. Learning to write a little later, however, is not a disadvantage. We all suffer because, as children, we were taught writing abstractly and too early. There would be no greater blessing for humanity than for its members to make the transition to the abstract letters of the alphabet as late as the age of nine or ten, having previously derived them from a living painterly approach.

When learning to write, the whole human being is occupied. One has to make an effort to move the arms in the right way, but at the same time one feels this activity of the arms and hands connected with one’s whole being. It therefore offers a beautiful transition, from the stage when the child lives more in the will element, to the second stage when the element of feeling predominates. While learning to read, the child engages primarily the organs used to perceive the form of the letters, but the child’s whole being is not fully involved. For this reason, we endeavor to evolve reading from writing. A similar approach is applied for everything the child has to learn.

The important point is for the teacher to read what needs to be done in teaching within the child’s own nature. This sentence is symptomatic of all Waldorf pedagogy. As long as the teacher teaches reading in harmony with the child’s nature, there is no point in stressing the advantages of one or another method. What matters is that teachers be capable of perceiving what needs to be drawn out of the child. Whatever we need in later life always evolves from what was planted in our childhood.

To sense what wants to flow out of the inner being of the child, to develop empathy with the child between the ages of seven and fourteen, are the things that give children the right footing later in life. In this context, it is especially important to develop mobile concepts in students of that age. Flexible concepts based on the life of feeling cannot be developed properly if teachers limit their subject to include only what a child already understands. It certainly appears to make sense to plead that one should avoid teaching a subject that a child cannot yet comprehend. It all sounds plausible.

On the other hand, one could be driven to despair by textbooks delineating specific methods, and by books intended to show teachers what subject to teach in their object lessons and how to do it so that students are not instructed in anything beyond their present comprehension. The substance of such books is often full of trivialities and banalities; they fail to allow that, at this age, children can glimpse in their own souls what is not sense perceptible at all outwardly, such as moral and other impulses in life. Those who advocate these observational methods do not recognize that one educates not just on the basis of what can be observed at the child’s present stage, but on the basis of what will develop out of childhood for the whole of future life.

It is a fact that, whenever a child of seven or eight feels natural reverence and respect for a teacher who is seen as the gateway into the world (instinctively of course, as is appropriate to this age), such a child can rise inwardly and find support in the experience of a justified authority—not just in what the teacher says, but in the way the teacher acts, by example. This stage is very different from the previous one, when the principle of imitation is the guiding factor until the change of teeth. The early imitative attitude in the child transforms later into inner life forces. At this second stage of life, nothing is more important than the child’s acceptance of truths out of trust for the teacher, because the child who has a proper sense of authority will accept the teacher’s words could only be the truth. Truth has to dawn upon the child in a roundabout way—through the adult first. Likewise, appreciation for what is beautiful and good also has to evolve from the teachers’ attitudes.

At this stage of life, the world must meet the child in the form of obvious authority. Certainly you will not misunderstand that, having thirty years ago written Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom, I am speaking against human freedom. But even the most liberated of individuals should have experienced in childhood the infinitely beneficial effects of being able to look up to the authority of an educator as a matter of course—to have experienced through this respect for authority the gateway to truth, beauty, and goodness in the world. All this can be observed, week by week and month by month.

The child becomes the book where one reads what is needed. In this way one develops a profound sense for what to do with the child, for example, at any significant moment in the child’s life. One such moment is between the ninth and tenth years. Anyone who has become a natural authority for the child will inevitably find, through observing the child, that, between nine and ten, a significant change occurs that can be expressed in many ways. At this point in development, children need something fairly specific, but are not at all conscious of what they need.

Here is the situation: Until this stage children have experienced the authority of their educators entirely unconsciously and instinctively. Now more is required; the students now want to feel reassured that their feeling toward the authority of the teachers is fully justified, given their more mature and critical gift of observation. If at this point a teacher succeeds in keeping the aura of natural authority alive, then later in life, perhaps in the child’s forty-fifth or fiftieth year, there will be times when memories reemerge. Therefore, what was accepted at one time on trust during childhood days, maybe at the age of eight or nine, is considered again, but now with the maturity of one’s life experience. Such a memory may have been slumbering deeply for decades in the unconscious, and now resurfaces to be assessed from the perspective of mature life experience. Such an occurrence is immensely fertile and stimulates a wealth of inner life forces.

What is the secret of remaining young in mind and soul? It is certainly not a nostalgic attitude of reminiscences about “the good old days of youth, when everything used to be so beautiful and not at all how life is now.” It is the inner transformation of the experiences of our young days that keeps us young and makes us valuable to other human beings. This inner transformation represents the fruit of what was planted at one time into our souls when we were children. Impulses that are closely linked to human life and to our bodies are transformed in remarkable ways.

I would like to give just one example of such a transformation. There are people who, having reached a very old age, radiate a wholesome atmosphere on others in their company. They do not even need to speak words of wisdom; simply through their presence, they radiate a feeling of inner well-being on those around them so that their company is always welcome. They spread a kind of blessing. Where does this gift originate?

When we study, we consider only the years of childhood and schooling. In this way, education remains merely an external study. To study it in depth demands an extension of one’s observations and interest over the entire span of life—from birth to death. And if we observe human life from the viewpoint of the kind of education I advocate, we find that this gift of blessing is rooted in an earlier natural veneration for one’s educators, experienced during childhood. I would like to go even further and say that no one can spread arms and hands in inner admiration and reverence, in blessing, unless one has learned to fold hands in admiring or reverent prayer as a child. Over the course of human life, the inner experience of veneration is transformed into an ability to bless at a time of life when such blessing can affect others beneficially.

Once again, only when we include an entire lifetime in our observations can we practice a truly living education. In this case, one would not want to teach children rigid or fixed concepts. If we were to bind a child of five for a time in a tight-fitting garment that would not allow further growth—I am speaking hypothetically of course, for this does not happen—we would commit a dreadful and heinous crime in the child’s physical life. But this is just what we do to the child’s soul life when we teach definitions intended to remain unchanged, definitions that the child’s memory is expected to carry, fixed and unaltered, throughout life. It is most important that we give the child only flexible ideas and concepts, capable of further growth—physical, soul, and spiritual growth. We must avoid teaching fixed concepts and instead bring concepts that change and grow with the child. We should never nurture an ambition to teach children something to be remembered for all of life, but should convey only mobile ideas. Those who are serious about learning the art of education will understand this.

You will not misunderstand when I say it is obvious that not every teacher can be a genius. But every teacher can find the situation where there are some boys and girls to be taught who, later in life, will show much greater intelligence than that of their current teachers. Real teachers should always be aware that some of the students sitting before them may one day far outshine them in intelligence and in other ways. True artists of education never assume that they are intellectually equal to the children sitting before them.

The basis of all education is the ability to use and bring to fulfillment whatever can be gained from the arts. If we derive writing and reading from painting, we are already applying an artistic approach. But we should be aware also of the immense benefits that can be derived from the musical element, especially for training the child’s will. We can come to appreciate the role of the musical element only by basing education on real and true knowledge of the human being.

Music, however, leads us toward something else, toward eurythmy. Eurythmy is an art that we could say was developed from spiritual-scientific research according to the demands of our time. Out of a whole series of facts essential to knowledge of the human being, contemporary science knows only one little detail—that for right-handed people (that is, for the majority of people) the speech center is in the third left convolution of the brain, whereas for those who are left-handed it is on the right side of the brain. This is a mere detail. Spiritual science shows us further, which is fundamental to education, that all speech derives from the limb movements, broadly speaking, performed during early childhood.

Of course, the child’s general constitution is important here, and this is much more significant than what results from more or less fortuitous external circumstances. For example, if a child were to injure a foot during the earlier years, such an injury does not need to have a noticeable influence in connection with what I now have in mind. If we inquire into the whole question of speech, however, we find that, when we appropriate certain impulses rooted in the limb system of speech, we begin with walking—that is, with every gesture of the legs and feet. Within the movements of the extremities—for instance in the feet—something goes through a mysterious inner, organic transformation into an impulse within the speech organs situated at the very front. This connection lives, primarily, in forming the consonants. Likewise, the way a child uses the hands is the origin of habitual speech forms. Speech is merely gestures that are transformed. When we know how speech is formed from consonants and vowels, we see the transformed limb movements in them. What we send into the world when we speak is a kind of “gesturing in the air.”

An artistic pedagogical method makes it possible for us to bring what can flow from real knowledge of the human being into education. Through such a method, those who will educate in the sense of this pedagogical art are made into artists of education. There is nothing revolutionary at the basis of this education—just something that will stimulate new impulses, something that can be incorporated into every educational system—because it has sprung from the most intimate human potential for development.

Naturally, this necessitates various rearrangements of lessons and teaching in general, some of which are still very unusual. I will mention only one example: If one endeavors to practice the art of education according to the Waldorf methods, the natural goal is to work with the life of the child in concentrated form. This makes it impossible to teach arithmetic from eight to nine o’clock, for example, as is customary in many schools today, then history from nine to ten, and yet another subject from ten to eleven, and in this way, teaching all the subjects in haphazard sequence. In the Waldorf school, we have arranged the schedule so that for three to four weeks the same main lesson subject is taught every day from eight to ten in the morning; therefore the students can fully concentrate on and live in one main lesson subject. If what has thus been received is forgotten later, this does not offer a valid objection to our method, because we succeed by this method in nurturing the child’s soul life in a very special way.

This was all meant merely as an example to show how a spiritual- scientific knowledge of the human being can lead to the development of an art of education that makes it possible again to reach the human being, not by an extraneous means, like those of experimental pedagogy or experimental psychology, but by means that allow the flow of life from our own inmost being into the child’s inmost being.

When entering earthly life, human beings not only receive what is passed on by heredity through their fathers and mothers, but they also descend as spirit beings from the spiritual world into this earthly world. This fact can be applied practically in education when we have living insight into the human being. Basically, I cannot think of impressions more wonderful than those received while observing a young baby develop as we participate inwardly in such a gradual unfolding. After the infant has descended from the spiritual world into the earthly world, we can observe what was blurred and indistinct at first, gradually taking on form and shape. If we follow this process, we feel direct contact with the spiritual world, which is incarnating and unfolding before our very eyes, right here in the sensory world. Such an experience provides a sense of responsibility toward one’s tasks as a teacher, and with the necessary care, the art of education attains the quality of a religious service. Then, amid all our practical tasks, we feel that the gods themselves have sent the human being into this earthly existence, and they have entrusted the child to us for education. With the incarnating child, the gods have given us enigmas that inspire the most beautiful divine service.

What thus flows into the art of education and must become its basis comes primarily from the teachers themselves. Whenever people air their views about educational matters, they often say that one shouldn’t just train the child’s intellect, but should also foster the religious element, and so on. There is much talk of that kind about what should be cultivated in children. Waldorf education speaks more about the qualities needed in the teachers; to us the question of education is principally a question of finding the right teachers.

When the child reaches puberty, the adolescent should feel: “Now, after my feeling and willing have been worked on at school, I am ready to train my thinking; now I am becoming mature enough to be dismissed into life.” What meets us at this stage, therefore, is like a clear call coming from the students themselves when we learn to understand them. Anthroposophic knowledge of the human being is not meant to remain a theory for the mystically inclined or for idle minds. It wants to lead directly into life. Our knowledge of the human being is intended to be a practice, the aspect of real life closest to the human soul; it is connected most directly with our duty to the becoming human being. If we learn to educate in this way, in harmony with human nature, the following reassuring thought-picture will rise before us: We are carrying into the future something required by the future! Our cultural life has brought much suffering and complication to people everywhere; it is a reminder of the importance of our work in confronting the challenge of human evolution.

It is often said (ad nauseam, in fact) that the social question is really a question of cultural and spiritual life. Whenever we say that, it should make us aware that the roots of the difficulties in contemporary life are the inner obstacles, and that these must be overcome. Oh, how people today pass each other by without understanding! There is no love, no intimate interest in the potential of other human beings! Human love, not theories, can solve social problems. Above all, one thing is necessary to make possible the development of such an intimate and caring attitude, to effect again direct contact between one soul and another so that social ideas do not become merely theoretical demands: we must learn to harmonize social life in the right way by paying attention to the institution where teachers and children relate. The best seed to a solution of the social question is planted through the way social relationship develops between children and teachers at school. To educators, much in this art of education will feel like taking care of the seed, and through a realistic imagination of the future—it can never be utopian—what they have placed into the human beings entrusted to their care will one day blossom.

Just as we are meant to have before our eyes the entire course of human life when we educate children, with this same attitude we should view also the entire life of society, in its broadest aspects. To work as an educator means to work not for the present, but for the future! The child carries the future, and teachers will be carried, in the same way, by the most beautiful pedagogical attitude if they can remind themselves every moment of their lives: Those we have to educate were sent to us by higher beings. Our task is to lead our students into earthly life in a right and dignified way. Working in a living way with the children, helping them to find their way from the divine world order into the earthly world order—this must penetrate our art of education through and through, as an impulse of feeling and will, in order to meet the most important demands for human life today.

This is the goal of Waldorf pedagogy. What we have achieved in these few years may justify the conviction that a living knowledge of the human being arising from spiritual science can prove fertile for human existence in general and, through it, for the field of education, which is the most important branch of practical life.

The desire has been expressed that I should say more about Waldorf education. Because today’s meeting had not been arranged yet when I spoke to you last Wednesday, tonight’s talk may have to be somewhat aphoristic.

A few days ago I pointed out how the art of education as discussed here is meant to be based on true knowledge of the human being. Such a knowledge and insight regarding the human being must be comprehensive—that is, it must consider more than the physical and soul aspects of the human being and include the entire human being, made up of body, soul, and spirit working together as a unified whole.

On the other hand, I have also emphasized that, if we want to practice a real art of education, we must keep in mind the life-span of each student from birth to death, because much of what is implanted through education during the first life period, with regard to both health and illness, often manifests only during the last stages of a person’s life. If teachers and educators consider only the students’ present physical and soul-spiritual conditions, and if they develop their methods only according to what they see at that particular stage, they will not be capable of laying the proper foundations for a balanced and healthy development of their students in later years, thus enabling them to grow into strong, harmonious, and able people. To lay such a foundation, however, is precisely the aim of the art of education we are speaking of here. Because of this goal, our education is not in any way one-sided. One could easily believe that, because this education is the offspring of anthroposophical spiritual science, it would tend one-sidedly toward a spiritual perspective. But this is just not the case. Simply because it stays conscientiously focused on the entire human being, the physical aspect of its students receives the same full consideration that the soul-spiritual aspect receives. One could even say that the educational treatment of the child’s soul and spirit is dealt with so that whatever the educator develops in the child will affect the physical organization in the best possible way.

In the Waldorf school in Stuttgart, as well as in other schools that follow similar educational principles and methods, we educate in order that the spiritual may have the best possible effect on the students’ physical organization with every step toward a spiritual development. This is how it has to be in a true and genuine art of education. In children the soul and spiritual spheres are not yet distinct from the physical body as they are in adults.

We all know the difficulties that today’s so-called philosophers encounter when trying to clearly picture the relationship between the spiritual and physical aspects of the human being. On the one side is the spiritual aspect. It is experienced inwardly through thinking and the soul life. Essentially, it is completely different from what we meet when studying the human physical body in physiology and anatomy. It is not easy to build a bridge from what we experience inwardly as our own soul and spirit to what an examination of the physical human body offers.

If one observes the child’s development without prejudice, however, and if one has an eye for what is happening during the change of teeth, when the child undergoes its first important metamorphosis in life, one cannot help realizing that at this point the child’s entire soul life goes through a great change. Previously, the child’s representations emerged in an elemental, dreamy way. During this stage of life, we witness the development of memory; good observers will notice a transformation of the memory during, or because of, the change of teeth. Observation shows that until the change of teeth, the inner activity involved in remembering—that is, the inner activity that lives in memory—is really in the nature of a habit developed through the physical body. The child remembers—indeed, remembers remarkably well. This remembering, however, feels more like practiced repetition of an activity that has become an acquired skill. Indeed, memory as a whole during the first period of life really is an inner skill, the development of an inner habit. Only from the change of teeth onward, does a child start looking back on past experiences—that is, surveying past experiences in its mind—in a kind of review. In the evolving of memory, the soul life of the child undergoes a radical change.

The child’s ability to form representations presents us with the same picture. When you look without bias at a young child’s mental imagery, you will find that the will forces are very active. The child under seven cannot yet separate inner will experience from the experience of will in thinking. This separation begins during the change of teeth. In other words, with the change of teeth, the child’s soul life goes through a complete metamorphosis. But what has actually happened? What is revealed as the child’s true soul life after the change of teeth obviously couldn’t have appeared from nothing. It must have been there already, but it did not manifest in the same way as during the later stage. It was active in the organic forces of growth and nourishment. It was an organic force that transformed into the force of memory, into freed soul forces.

If we want to progress in education in a way that is proper and professional, we must develop the same inner scientific courage shown in modern physics. There the concept of “latent heat” has been accepted, a concept that implies heat is bound to certain substances without radiating any externally measurable warmth. If, however, through some outer process this heat is drawn from the substance, it becomes so-called “liberated heat.” Previously it had been “latent” heat. In physics we are used to such a concept. We should have the courage to form a similar concept when speaking about the human being. We should say: With the change of teeth the child’s soul life has been liberated. Previously it was latent, bound to organic forces of growth, and worked in the form of nutrition and growth processes. Some of these forces, needed for later life, are still retained there, but part of them have separated off to become transformed into the liberated life of soul.

If these matters are not merely spoken of abstractly (and they need to be talked about), if as a teacher one can observe them concretely, a great wonder hidden in an intimate, tender, and refined way is revealed. The greatest wonder to be experienced in the world is for an attentive observer to watch the as yet indistinct features of an infant’s face gradually assume more definition, and the jerky, undirected movements become more and more coordinated into meaningful limb movements. It is wonderful to see something rise to the surface of the whole organism from the child’s center. If we can follow it with the open eyes of an artist, we experience wonderful world secrets in this unfolding of form and figure.

Similarly, when the child reaches school age—that is, during the change of teeth—we can see how what was working before through the forces of growth, is now liberated and develops as the child’s life of soul. If we see this happening concretely and in detail, enthusiasm for education really awakens in us. It then becomes possible to gradually and appropriately guide the forces that had lived within the child until the second dentition.

Until the change of teeth, the child is a being of will—not in the same sense as a human being in later life, but a being of will who, at the same time, is completely a sense being. The following is meant as a metaphor but, if I may express myself in this way, the child really is one great and comprehensive sense organ. Within each sense organ, there lives more than the ability to perceive; there is also a certain will force, although in the actual sense organs this element of will is somewhat hidden. Likewise, in the will element of the child, the will lives like a sense organ until the coming of the second dentition. The child perceives everything in the surroundings in a much more intimate and sensitive way, and in such a way that everything is imitated inwardly, right down to the most internal organic formations. The child is a refined imitator. It is interesting that the child not only reacts to what is seen in the movements and gestures of other people (and of course the child also learns to speak by imitating what is heard), the child not only perceives these outer things, but also imitates people’s moods, even their thoughts. One should be aware of life’s imponderables. While in the proximity of a young child, we should not allow ourselves even one impure thought, because the fine processes of vibrations, set in motion by our thoughts, are imitated by the child’s physical organism. Usually, people are totally unaware of such interplay between one human being and another. And scientific opinion is still fairly vague about this.

Permit me an aside to illustrate the strange relationships, not just between human beings, but even between a human being and an animal. It is something that does not easily fit into what one can perceive with one’s eyes in the ordinary ways of sense perception, and it touches on the supersensible element to which I have frequently referred during the last few days. Some time ago, there was much talk about the “counting horses.” I have not actually seen the main performing horses, which, as far as I know, were kept in Elberfeld, but I did observe one of these horses in action: It was the horse belonging to Mister von Osten in Berlin. I was able to study this horse and all its achievements. Spectators who observed superficially what was happening could see Mister von Osten standing next to his horse, presenting it with simple problems of arithmetic. The horse stamped the answers with one of its hooves, and this struck the onlookers as a great miracle.

However, ordinary members of the public were not the only ones to come and see this wonder; among the audience was also a university lecturer who wrote a treatise about Mister von Osten’s horse. It is a very interesting book, although one might disagree with it. Now this university lecturer came to a very peculiar conclusion. He could not arrive at a proper explanation of the fact that Mister von Osten’s horse could stamp “eleven” after being asked, “What is five plus six?” Because it is obvious to anyone who knows the limitations of such a creature that the horse could not possibly calculate numbers with anything like human sense. Consequently, it would be nonsense for anyone to believe the horse really could answer simple arithmetic problems.

To discover how these results were obtained, one needs to ponder what was happening below the surface. Still, the fact remained: the horse did answer the questions correctly. This led the university lecturer to theorize that Mister von Osten continued to count numbers up to eleven silently in his mind as he was asking the question, “Five plus six is?” And when he reached the number representing the answer, he made a very subtle facial expression. The author of the treatise believed that the subtle play in Mister von Osten’s face was giving the horse the hint, and while he counted to eleven, specific vibrations emanated from him that were different from those accompanying previous numbers. According to the lecturer, the horse was supposed to notice these vibrations, which caused it to stamp the answer with one of its hooves. Thus, the trick was presumably due to the fine vibrations the horse was able to perceive.

So much for the lecturer’s theory. There is, however, one flaw, and the lecturer was well aware of it. Apart from the horse, any observer should be able to detect the fine play of expressions in Mister von Osten’s face. The author of the treatise explained this away by saying that human beings cannot detect such a play of features—which amounts to an admission that a horse had a greater capacity for observing a human face than a university lecturer! This really goes a little too far, and the crux of the matter is actually very different.

While I was studying the relationship between Mister von Osten and his horse, the most important factor for me was the strange feeling rapport with the horse, which Herr von Osten kept going all the time by taking sugar lumps from his pocket and giving them to his horse while it was answering the problems. In this way an animalistic feeling of sympathy arose. Here, I was witnessing one of life’s imponderables. This feeling of gratitude must have enabled the horse to perceive what was in its master’s mind, not through the play of features on Mister von Osten’s face, but on the waves of the animals’s own feelings of gratitude for the sugar lumps, enabling it to know to stamp when hearing its master call out the number eleven as answer to the question, “What is six plus five?” The secret of this phenomenon was an intimate relationship between master and horse, enabling the horse to feel its way into what lived in von Osten’s mind. This is how a kind of telepathy of sentiments came about. I do not wish to go into this matter further, but only wanted to mention it in this context. I came to my conclusion after careful consideration. I mention it as proof that even in more primitive creatures, empathy can occur between one living being and another.

A similar thing happens very much in the young child. The child also experiences in other people what cannot be seen with the eyes or heard with the ears, and these experiences have a lasting inner effect. Consequently we should not allow a single unworthy thought to enter our minds while around a young child, even though we cannot possibly prove the existence of such a thought by specific vibrations. Yes, the child is a very fine sense organ and completely an imitator. You must try to realize what this means. You must imagine that whatever happens in the proximity of the child will have an effect right into the physical organization, even if the effect cannot be proved with the aid of crude external instruments. If, for example, a choleric father bursts into tempers in the presence of a child, and if such outbursts become part of daily life, the child will experience these scenes right into its blood circulation and into the formation of its glandular secretions.

The whole physical organization of the child will be formed according to what the soul and spirit experienced from the surroundings. The child is an imitator during the first period of life, up to the second dentition. But this form of imitation has a direct effect on its physical organism. In the blood, in the blood vessels, and in the fine structure of the nervous system, we all carry throughout our lives a certain constitution resulting from what influenced us during the first life period. From this point of view, the very first education or upbringing, either in the parental home or anywhere else in the child’s environment, very naturally amounts to a physical education par excellence. All spiritual influences around the child also enter the physical, bodily realm of the child. Whatever the delicate organization of the child absorbs in the bodily realm has lasting effects during its entire earthly life until the moment of death.

When a child has gone through the second dentition, this fine sense perception decreases. The child’s own ideation begins to separate from sense perceptions. But the essential quality of the sense perceptions, which during the first life period completely sets the tone, is the pictorial element, because the child naturally cannot yet comprehend abstract concepts. Introducing these to a child would be an act of gross folly. Living in pictures is of paramount importance for the child’s life of ideation—indeed, for the child’s entire soul life until the beginning of puberty—and any intellectual teaching before the age of puberty is a sin against the development of the child’s entire soul life. A child needs to be taught through a pictorial and artistic presentation. During this stage the relationship between teacher and student is immensely important. I would like to clarify this with an example.

To anyone who wants to introduce a higher truth to the child—for example, the truth of the immortality of the human soul—it will be obvious that one has to begin in the form of an image. One could gradually lead the child to the concept of immortality by saying, “Look at the caterpillar that turns into a cocoon.” One can show the child a cocoon, or a chrysalis. Then one shows how a butterfly emerges. Finally one can tell the child that the human soul is resting in the body, just as the butterfly rests in the chrysalis, except that the human soul is not outwardly visible; nevertheless, it flies out of the body after death.

Of course, such an approach is not meant to demonstrate the immortality of the soul. This approach would provoke legitimate objections that have already been voiced by various people. All I have in mind is to show how one can give the child a picture of the immortality of the human soul. The child will become acquainted with the proofs at a later stage in life. The point is that between the change of teeth and puberty the child must receive content in the form of images. Such pictures enliven the soul and make it fertile for the entire life to come.

In this context there are two ways to proceed. Some teachers may feel vastly superior in intelligence to the child, whom they consider immature and as yet ignorant. This is a very natural feeling, or so it would appear, at least—how else could a teacher teach a child? Consequently, such teachers may think up a picture of the emerging butterfly for the benefit of the ignorant child and then describe it. They will not be very successful, for their efforts will make little impact upon the child’s soul.

There is, however, another possibility; a teacher may not feel at all intelligent, and that the child is stupid. By the way, I am not suggesting here that teachers should assume the opposite either. Nevertheless, one can take a different approach. A teacher may hold the view that this picture reveals a truth that spiritual powers have revealed in a natural process, and in this case one believes in the truth of this picture. One really believes in the truth of this simile. A teacher may well feel and believe that the creative forces of nature have placed before our eyes a picture of what actually happens on a higher level when a human soul leaves the physical body at death. If one permeates such a picture with one’s own belief, thus feeling fully united with it, and if one speaks to a child with the naturally ensuing enthusiasm, then such a picture will live in the child and become fertile for life.

This example shows that being smart in itself is not necessarily the hallmark of a good teacher. Of course intelligence and cleverness will help in many ways and, in any case, it is obviously preferable and better if the teacher is clever rather than foolish. Still, cleverness alone does not make a teacher into a real artist of education. Artistry in teaching is achieved only when the teacher faces the world with a mind and soul that brings about a truly living relationship between teacher and student, so that what lives in the teacher can continue in the soul of the child. Then a natural sense of authority will develop in the child rather than one artificially imposed.

All teaching during the time between the change of teeth and puberty has to be built on this natural sense of authority. This is why we must place the greatest emphasis on the use of a pictorial approach during the early school years (from around six to approximately fourteen). During these years we must introduce our subject matter in images. At the latest possible time (maybe not until the approach of puberty between thirteen and fourteen) we can gradually introduce subjects that need to be understood abstractly. It is best to wait as long as possible before drawing children out of a direct, realistic experience of life in their surroundings. This is because, even between the change of teeth and puberty, something is left, although weakened, that was present during the first tender age of childhood up to the second dentition; even now, everything a child encounters from the outside world has after-effects within the physical corporeality.

During the second life period, whatever the child perceives now has a less powerful effect on the organic constitution than during the years preceding the change of teeth. Nevertheless, how teaching content is introduced to children matters very much in how it effects physical development. Here the teacher must achieve something that cannot be accomplished theoretically, but only through the artistic approach that must weave and work throughout education. Let us again keep to a single detail; no matter how much one insists that a child’s memory should not be overloaded—a request that, in the abstract, is correct—it is nevertheless in the child’s nature to develop memory. The child’s memory forces need to be cultivated. But it is essential that, through proper knowledge of the growing child, the teacher should be able to feel and observe how much pressure upon the memory becomes harmful. A very great deal depends on this faculty of good judgment.

Teachers who have become artists of education will see in the students’ outer appearance something like a barometer, which will tell them how much memorizing they may expect from the students and when to stop appealing to the powers of memory. Here are the facts: What happens when we strain the students’ memory too much? Where does the force of memory originate? Remember what happens during the second dentition—that the forces of growth working in the nutritive processes are liberated and now work in the realm of the soul. This also happens continually, though to a lesser extent, later in life, which is why we need forces of growth through the digestive processes of nutrition. The entire human life is a transformation of healthy forces of growth, working to build the organs and the blood, into liberated soul forces.

What happens in the child at the change of teeth—in a big way and all at once, as it were—happens again and again, whenever we absorb something into memory. Whatever works on us when we perceive something with the senses, or when we perceive something in words, affects our entire physical organism. Anyone expected to remember something—by memorizing a poem, for example—will experience the necessity for the physical organism’s cooperation. Just look at someone who is told to remember something; you will observe much physical activity in the act of memorizing. What has found a seat in the physical organism cannot be remembered yet, however, because it is linked to the forces of growth and nourishment, and it must first be transformed into soul forces. In the realm of the soul, this is done through memory.

Whenever I give a child too much to remember, I use up too much of the child’s life forces, the vital forces; consequently, if I can see through the entire process, I will notice the child becoming pale and anxious, because I am appropriating organic forces. One needs to watch for this pallor and for subsequent anxiety and nervousness. You see, by aiming continuously and rigorously at training the child’s memory, we weaken the growth forces. If we activate the students’ memory too much, we stunt their physical growth. Such retarding of the forces of growth is caused by an exaggerated appeal to the memory forces. What is done to the students’ organism in such a case is expressed years later in various metabolic illnesses caused by harmful deposits of uric acid or kindred substances.

The most important point is this: We must guide children’s education in ways that work in proper harmony with their physical organism. We must avoid planting seeds of metabolic diseases for later life. Too little is known about the links between old-age gout and rheumatism, and the wrong kind of schooling through overtaxing students’ memory; if more were known, we would stand on a more realistic ground in education. One would then also recognize the fallacy of separating education into academic and physical subjects, since everything one does in the academic subjects works into the physical constitution of the child, and, conversely, everything one does in physical education works back again into the child’s spiritual conditions. If you perceive a melancholic temperament in one child, or a sanguine temperament in another, this observation should immediately color your treatment of the two different types of children.

If you notice, for example, that a child’s pronounced melancholic character is endangering the physical health, then the parents must be contacted. The Waldorf school is built entirely on direct and close contact with the parents. In the Waldorf school, the students’ parents are called to parent meetings every month, and sometimes even more frequently. Matters that require cooperation between home and school are discussed in such meetings. Many points must be brought to the parents’ notice. For example, there may be a child of a strongly melancholic temperament. One recognizes that this disposition is connected with the secretion of the liver, and that this in turn is related to the sugar consumption. In meetings with the parents, every possibility is offered to reach an agreement to increase the sugar intake by sweetening the child’s foods. As an educator, one always has to consider the physical aspect, insofar as it has a spiritual counterpart. On the other hand, one educates the child so that, with the help of the spiritual, one can effect the best possible conditions for physical health.

Let us now take the opposite case, not an overloading of memory, but the opposite. I am thinking of modern teachers who may advocate never straining the students’ memory, and who consequently omit altogether the cultivation and training of the memory in their teaching. I often feel tempted to say to those who always clamor for the observational methods of object lessons: If one neglects the training of the memory, one will also notice physical symptoms in the children. The child’s skin becomes unhealthily red. The child begins to complain about all kinds of inner pressures, and finally one realizes that the child is growing at an alarming rate.

By following such a case, we may notice that the neglect of memory training is weakening the physical body’s ability to absorb food into various organs. If memory is insufficiently stimulated, the stomach reacts by not secreting enough acids, or the acids secreted are not adequate for a proper digestion. This tendency will spread over the whole organism, and the ability to absorb necessary substances decreases. After many years, one may discover that the physical body of such a person is always hungry, yet it cannot function properly, organically speaking. Such a person has a tendency toward lung diseases and kindred illnesses. Any education based on real knowledge of the human being will not drift into a “never-never land” of vague spirituality, but will continually observe the whole human being, encompassing spirit, soul, and body. This is absolutely essential to the art of education.

Teaching must be arranged so that there is enough variety within the lessons. On the one hand, students must be kept occupied intellectually. (The intellectual approach is used only for subjects directed to the immediate realm of the soul; the intellectual element as such must be avoided until the approach of puberty.) In physical training, the children are kept busy with gymnastics, eurythmy, and similar activities. If the children’s day is organized on the basis of abstract requirements, however (and this happens only too often for mere scheduling convenience), one’s efforts are unlikely to be fruitful. One must keep in mind that, when we teach children reading, writing, and arithmetic, which work most of all on their soul life, there is an opposite process going on at the same time in the physical organism, indicating that everything engaging the child’s head has the opposite effect in the limb and motor system. It is incorrect to say, for example, that children tire less in gymnastics lessons than in reading or writing lessons, which is what experimental psychology claims to have determined. In reality, if you put gymnastics between two other lessons—for example, an arithmetic lesson from nine to ten A.M., gymnastics from ten to eleven, and history from eleven to twelve—then the child, having had gymnastics in the previous lesson, is not rested for the history lesson, but quite the contrary.

The real point is something very different. A person who can apply real knowledge of the human being knows that something is always working in the physical organism, even if only subconsciously. Within the child, much remains only partially conscious. It escapes observation, therefore, and is not taken up consciously later. It then happens that, through the activity of soul and spirit, a process of desire is stimulated. This must be allowed to proceed so that our teaching does not remain external to the child. Lessons that appeal to soul and spirit must be arranged so that, through the lessons, an inner physical mood for gymnastics is stimulated. If I engage a child in gymnastics who has no inner organic desire for this activity, the child will soon show signs of being unable to direct the forces inward as a continuation of outer movements. Everything that is developed while the body is engaged in physical movements must be prolonged inwardly. While the body is moving, inner metabolic processes occur. Something we could call a process of combustion, transformed into conditions for life, occurs. And what is thus activated, continues to work throughout the organism.

If I allow a child to do gymnastics when there is no inner desire for it, the child cannot cope with these inner metabolic processes. As a result, I may notice the child becoming somewhat emotional through doing gymnastics in these circumstances. All kinds of passionate feelings may develop. If I force a child to do gymnastics, a child who has no organic desire for it, I can arouse an unhealthy inner mood that can even lead to fits of anger. Such a mood may become a chronic part of a child’s characterological disposition.

All this can be avoided. The enhancement of a healthy physical development can be achieved only when, as an artist of education, one is guided by the right instincts of soul to give gymnastics lessons their proper place in the timetable relative to other subjects, where soul and spirit are engaged so that a desire for gymnastics is awakened. Then the organism can use properly the forces developed through the activity of gymnastics.

It is very important that the teacher be a kind of artist, who can affect the child with an artistic outlook, but also with a tremendous sense of responsibility. While the latter is not absolutely imperative in other artistic pursuits—where the material used is not living—it is essential for teaching. The teacher works with the growing human being—that is, with this wonderful interplay of thousands of forces working into each other. This interplay cannot be comprehended through a theoretical kind of pedagogy any more than one could teach someone to regulate the digestion through theoretical physiology. It can be comprehended only through intuition.

Consequently, anyone who educates out of full knowledge of human nature will train their students’ spiritual faculties in a way that enhances the healthy development of their physical bodies. They will arrange the physical aspect of education so it can be the basis for an all-around development of the spiritual aspect. This development, however, is only possible with the kind of intimate adjustment between teacher and student that I have indicated with the example of the emerging butterfly as a picture of the human soul’s immortality. If such a close-knit relationship exists, the natural feeling for the authority of the teacher, which I presented as an essential feature in education, will develop naturally. To the students the teacher becomes the unquestioned representative of truth, beauty, and goodness. The child should not have to judge abstractly what is true or false, beautiful or ugly, good or evil; this faculty of moral judgments belongs to a later age. The student’s sense of truth should be guided by the teacher’s revered personality. The teacher has to be the portal for the experience of beauty, truth, and goodness. The student’s sense of truth will be the natural consequence of the right relationship between teacher and child.

Something absolutely essential is achieved in this way for the moral development of the child, and it has to be accomplished by the proper means. For, from the moral perspective, a young person is morally crippled by a premature introduction of moral commandments in the form of “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not.” Children need to experience what is good or evil through the living medium of a teacher. For this to happen, the teacher’s attitude must engender in children a spontaneous love for good, a pleasure in what is good, and a feeling of aversion toward evil. In our moral teaching, we must not insist on moral commandments, or the prohibition of what we consider morally wrong; please note this carefully, Ladies and Gentlemen, because much depends on precisely this nuance. We must nurture in children, between the change of teeth and puberty, an experience of what is good or evil in the emotional sphere—not in will impulses. The good must bring inner pleasure. We must engender love and sympathy for the good before we turn it into a moral duty by appealing to the will sphere. What eventually must become moral action first has to grow from an experience of moral pleasure or aversion in the realm of feeling.

Again, we work best toward this goal when we approach it through imagery. If teachers have the necessary imagination to present to their students the moral or immoral actions of well-known historical people, which the children will then wish either to emulate or to shun, if teachers know how to describe a historical situation in such a lively way that they evoke inner pleasure or displeasure in the students, or if they invent such stories (which is even better because through their own creativity they are more closely linked to this inner pleasure or displeasure in students), then moral appreciation is awakened in the students’ feeling life.

And then something interesting will happen; when the children reach sexual maturity, the right moral impulses for the will life will develop out of a properly conducted feeling of moral pleasure or displeasure, just as sexual love grows naturally from physical development. The hallmark of a right education is that whatever is meant to develop through inner maturity of soul out of a previous budding stage, will do so on its own. This approach is far better than grafting preconceived moral codes onto students. If we wish to cultivate morality, it must grow in the sphere of the will. This growth will occur only when we plant the seeds for it in young children. We can do this by kindling feelings of pleasure for good and feelings of aversion for evil during the stage of life when children need to experience love and sympathy for the educator.

Everything depends on bringing the appropriate content to children at the right time of life. That content will then work itself out properly in later life. Just as when we plant an acorn in the soil, branches, leaves, and fruits will grow above it, so when we plant the right seeds within children at seven or eight in the form of moral pleasure or displeasure, the appropriate sense of moral duty will evolve as the child turns seventeen or eighteen.

It is especially important in this sense to know how to guide the child’s religious development. It cannot be genuine and inwardly true if it is brought about solely through religious stories or creeds; it depends rather on the teacher’s ability to engender a religious mood in the child. Religious education achieves its goals only when the religious mood rises spontaneously from the depths of children’s souls. However, if the teachers themselves are not permeated with a religious mood, it cannot develop in the child. If, on the other hand, this mood is there in the teachers, they need only do as we do in our so-called free religion lessons in the Waldorf school.

I want to emphasize strongly at this point that the Waldorf school is definitely not an ideological school. We do not wish to educate students to become young anthroposophists; but we do wish to use our anthroposophical knowledge so that the school can become an organization using proper methods in the truest sense. With the help of anthroposophy, we want to develop the right methods of education in every sphere. It is simply untrue to say that the Waldorf school’s intention is to indoctrinate students into anthroposophy. To prevent such an unfounded rumor from gaining ground, I have given instructions for religion lessons to be given by members of the various religious denominations. This means that Roman Catholic children will receive their religious instruction from Roman Catholic priests, Protestant children from Protestant ministers, and so on.

Due to the inherent circumstances of the Waldorf school’s beginning, however, many of our first students were children of religious dissenters. For these children, “free” Christian religious lessons—that is, free of established denominations—were initially included on a trial basis in the Waldorf school schedule. We were gratified to find that children of thoroughly atheistic parents attended these lessons with their parents’ consent. One can truly say that these free religious lessons are supported extremely well. Nevertheless, we take great care not to be mistaken as a denominational or an ideological school, but to show that our interest is in the practice of definite educational methods.

One of these methods, for example, consists of introducing the appropriate lesson material in the right way and at the appropriate age. These free religious lessons are there only for children who attend them voluntarily. Admittedly these now include considerably more students than are receiving religious instruction from Catholic or Protestant religion teachers. We cannot be held responsible for this situation. Students feel greatly stimulated by these free religious lessons, which bear a thoroughly Christian viewpoint and character; otherwise students would shun them. I mention this merely as a fact and not with the intention of judging.

The religious lessons are based on the premise that a religious atmosphere can be created in every lesson and subject. Such an atmosphere is created in our school. When teachers, through their own soul mood, connect everything that exists in the sensory world to the supersensible and divine, everything they bring to their classes will naturally transcend the physical, not in a sentimental or vaguely mystical way, but simply as a matter of course. All that is needed for this is the necessary feeling of tact. Then everything introduced to the students in various subjects can be summed up, as it were, in a religious mood. Our few specific religion lessons are given as additional lessons during each week. What lives in all of the other lessons anyway, and leads students to the divine-spiritual, is brought together in the free religious lessons, and lifted to the divine and spiritual level, through interpretation of natural phenomena and observation of historical events. Eventually, through the right cultivation of the religious mood, the children will experience moral impulses as the divine speaking in human nature and in the human being.

To bring about the right cultivation of a religious mood, something easily overlooked nowadays needs to be developed in the children; an honest, entirely open, feeling of gratitude must be nurtured beginning at an early age. Certainly, love must grow in the natural relationship between teacher and student during the years between the change of teeth and puberty, and much care must be given in nurturing this love. Gratitude has to be developed so that children experience it for everything received. Whatever it may be, whatever has been received from another person calls forth a feeling of gratitude. An immense enrichment of the soul is achieved through the experience of this feeling of gratitude. One should see to it that, even in a very young child, a feeling of thankfulness is developed. If one does this, a feeling of gratitude will be transformed into love when the child enters the second period of life. In every situation in life, love will be colored through, permeated with gratitude. Even a superficial observation of social life demonstrates that a valuable impulse for the social question can be fostered when we educate people toward a greater feeling of gratitude for what their fellow human beings are doing. For this feeling of gratitude is a bridge from one human soul and heart to another; without gratitude, this bridge could never be built.

If people had a greater sense of gratitude toward other human beings, we would not see so much of what passes for social demands, social radicalism, and so on, occasionally of a rather grotesque kind. When I say this, I am not siding with one or another social group. My own contribution to the subject can be read in my book Towards Social Renewal. However, if this feeling of gratitude is nurtured in the child at an early age, and experienced in the child’s love for the teacher between the second dentition and puberty; if gratitude is encouraged to enter the child’s soul so that with the arrival of sexual maturity the soul can unfold genuine love for other human beings, as well as for all of nature and the divine and spiritual beings; if gratitude becomes all-pervasive, then out of gratitude, the religious mood will develop in the human being. Gratitude toward the divine and spiritual powers sustaining life can be a tremendous protection for the soul. It is an important factor in the generation of inner warmth and a sense of security in life. The feeling of gratitude toward the divine and spiritual powers is in itself a great source of revitalization for our earthly life. I would like to put it this way: What intensifies the physical organic forces in the blood is comparable to what vitalizes the human soul spiritually when it develops love and gratitude toward the entire universe.

Working in the art of education as we advocate avoids one-sidedly physical or spiritual-mental education. It allows instead the beneficial confluence of spirit working in matter and matter as the bearer of creative spirit. Then we educate the spiritual and the physical sides simultaneously. This is the only adequate way, because the human being is a unity of spirit and the physical. However, such an education must never degenerate into one-sided theorizing, but must remain a true art, an art that lives in the person of the teacher. But one needs to have faith that nature herself is the great artist working in harmony with divine, spiritual forces. Basically, unless one can lead abstract natural laws into an artistic appreciation, one does not understand what is weaving and living in nature.

What is the central point of such an attitude toward education? Today there is much talk about how children should be educated. Prescriptions are handed out for a more or less intellectual kind of education, or for more emphasis on the will aspect in education. Great! One talks a lot about children, and rightly so. Of course, children should be at the center of all educational endeavor. But this is possible only if each individual teacher is really capable of deep insight, with an artistic eye that can see the human being as an entity. That is why all realistic discussions about education ultimately come down to the question of finding the right teachers. To do this, Waldorf pedagogy has been created from the work of the teachers’ faculty meetings and various staff meetings. Ultimately, the faculty of teachers is the soul of the school, but this can be only when the various teachers can work together.

To conclude, let me say this: If one enters a school run according to the aims of this art of education, if one views the attitude of the teaching staff, from which everything radiates that happens in each class and affects each child, one would be reminded of the words above the door of the room where the teachers meet for their consultations, the ever admonishing words: “All your educational endeavors should bring out in you the urge for self-education! Your self-education is the seed for everything you do for your children. Indeed, whatever you achieve can only be a product and result of your self-education.”

This must not remain just a more or less external admonishment; it must be engraved deeply into the heart, mind, and soul of every teacher. Ultimately, human beings are educated into becoming good citizens of the world, of use to their fellow human beings. Only one thing can and must be achieved in education, especially at a time when life has become so complex and demands so much constructive energy to supplant the forces of decay; this one thing is the recognition that true education, education toward love, will be fostered through the dedicated efforts of the head, the soul, and the heart of each individual teacher.

First of all I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Mackenzie for her kind words of greeting, and to all of you who have made the effort to meet again, at Professor Mackenzie’s invitation, to discuss questions of education.

In the short time available little can be said about the educational methods based on anthroposophy, for their essence is in an educational practice that does not have fixed programs, nor clearly defined general concepts to encompass it. The main intention of Waldorf education is that its teachers should be able to look deeply into the nature of the child from a true and genuine knowledge of the human being, and that in the individuality of each child who has come down into the earthly realm, they should be able to experience a wondrous enigma, which the educator and the world can never hope to understand completely. The teacher’s practical task is to discern ways to approach the mystery, the enigma, that divine guiding spirits present us with each child who joins our contemporary society. The teacher’s task begins at the age when the child discards the baby teeth, around the seventh year, and extends until the eighteenth or nineteenth year when, as a young man or woman, the student either goes out into life or enters higher education.

A few years ago, due to the devastating war, many new ideals, and certainly many illusions as well, emerged in Germany. At that time, the industrialist Emil Molt saw an opportunity to do something important for the workers in his factory. He felt that, by opening a school for their children, he could to some extent help reconcile his workers with their destiny as factory workers, and above all do something about what was then the great social demand of the time—he wanted to begin a school for his employees’ children, where the children, although laborers’ children, would get the best possible education imaginable.

This should make it clear immediately that the education I am representing here was not hatched from some ideas or from any plan for reform; it was, instead, born as a direct answer to a practical life situation. Emil Molt simply declared, “My workers have a total of a hundred and fifty children, and these children must be educated in the best way possible.” This could happen within the anthroposophical movement because, as strange as it may sound to you, anthroposophists are neither theorists nor visionary dreamers, but practical people who take the pragmatic side of life seriously; indeed, we like to believe that practical matters are nurtured especially within the anthroposophical movement. In other words, the idea regarding this education was the direct result of a practical need.

In Stuttgart, where all this happened, the necessary conditions for starting such a school were soon created. At that time, a democratic legislation of schools did not yet exist; that came into force only with the subsequent democratically constituted assembly. We came just in time to begin the school before the emergence of a “free” school legislation, which forced a general levelling of all schools in Germany—paying lip service to freedom by enforcing fixed laws. So we were only just in time to open such a school. I must quickly add that the school authorities have always shown great understanding and cooperation ever since the school was founded. It was fortunately possible to begin “The Free Waldorf school” in complete freedom. Its name arose because of its association with the Waldorf-Astoria Factory.

I do not wish to imply in any way that state-trained teachers are inferior, and certainly not that they are poor teachers simply because they have passed a state exam! Nevertheless, I was granted freedom in my choice of teachers, regardless of whether they were state trained or not. It was left to my discretion whether my candidates would make good and efficient teachers, and it happens that most of the teachers at the Waldorf school, based on the educational principles I wish to speak about, are in fact not state trained.

However, the situation did not remain as it was then. The school was begun with a hundred and fifty students. In no time at all, anthroposophists living in Stuttgart also wanted to send their children to this school because the education it offered was supposed to be very good. Since then (only a few years ago) the school has grown to more than eight hundred children. Several grades, like our fifth and sixth grades, have three parallel classes.

A further step, perhaps not quite as practical (I don’t want to judge this) was that Emil Molt, after deciding to open the school, asked me to provide the school with spiritual guidance and methods. It was only possible to give this guidance based on the spiritual research and knowledge of the human being that I represent. Our fundamental goal is to know the complete human being as a being of body, soul, and spirit, as a person grows from childhood, and to be able to read in the soul of the child what needs to be done each week, month, and year. Consequently, one could say our education is a teaching based entirely on knowledge of the child, and this knowledge guides us in finding the appropriate methods and principles.

I can give only general and sketchy outlines here of what is meant by knowledge of the human being. There is much talk nowadays about physical education, about the importance of not sacrificing physical education to the education of the child’s mind and soul. However, to separate the physical aspect from that of the soul and spirit is in itself a great illusion, because in a young child, spirit, soul, and body form a unity. It is impossible to separate one realm from the other in early childhood.

To give an example, let us imagine a child at school; a child becomes more and more pale. The paling of the child is a physical symptom that the teacher should notice. If an adult becomes increasingly pale, one seeks the advice of a doctor, who will think of an appropriate therapy according to an understanding of the case. Teachers of an abnormally pale child must ask themselves whether this child was already that pale when entering the class, or if the child’s complexion changed afterward. Lo and behold, they may realize that they themselves were the cause of the child’s pallor, because of excessive demands on the child’s memory forces. Consequently they will realize that they must reduce the pressure in this respect. Here is a case where physical symptoms reveal problems in the sphere of the soul. The child becomes pale because the memory has been overtaxed.

Then again, teachers may be faced with a different type of child; this time the child does not turn pale; on the contrary, the complexion becomes increasingly ruddy. This child appears to lack good will, gets restless, and turns into what is usually called a “hyperactive” child. The child lacks discipline, jumps up and down and cannot sit still for a moment, constantly wanting to run in and out. It is now up to the teacher to find the cause of these changes, and, lo and behold, it may be found (not always, because individual cases vary greatly and have to be diagnosed individually) that the child had been given too little to remember. This can easily happen because the appropriate amount of material to be remembered varies greatly from child to child.

As it happens, government inspectors visit our school. The authorities make sure that they know what is happening in our school! At the time when socialism was flourishing, one local director of education came to inspect the school, and I took him around to the various classes for three days. I pointed out that our physical education was intended to develop the students’ spiritual capacities, and that we educate their mental-spiritual capacities in such a way that their physical bodies benefit, because the two form a unity. Thereupon the inspector exclaimed, “But in this case your teachers would have to know medicine as well, and that is not possible!” To which I answered, “I do not think so, but if it were indeed necessary, it would have to be done, because a teacher’s training must ensure that the teacher is capable of thorough insight into the physical and spiritual background of the growing child.”

Furthermore, if one has a child of the type just described, a child who becomes increasingly restless and who does not pale but, on the contrary, becomes flushed, one can think of all kinds of things to do. However, to help such a child, one has to make sure of the right treatment. And the right treatment may be very difficult to find, for insight into human nature must not limit its considerations to a certain period of time, such as from age seven to age fourteen, which is the time when the class teacher is with the children. One must realize that much of what happens during these seven years has consequences that manifest only much later. One might choose the comfortable ways of experimental psychology, which only considers the child’s present state of development to decide what to do, but if one endeavors to survey the child’s whole life from birth to death, one knows: When I give the child too little content to remember, I induce a tendency toward serious illness, which may not appear before the forty-fifth year; I may cause a layer of fat to form above the heart. One has to know what form of illness may be induced eventually through the education of the child’s soul and spirit. Knowledge of the human being is not confined to an experiment with a student in the present condition, but includes knowledge of the whole human being—body, soul, and spirit—as well as a knowledge of what happens during various ages and stages of life.

When these matters become the basis for teaching, one will also find them relevant in the moral sphere. You may agree with me when I say that there are some people who, in ripe old age, give off an atmosphere of blessing to those in their company. They needn’t say much, but nevertheless radiate beneficial influence to others merely by the expression in their eyes, their mere presence, arm gestures—saying little perhaps, but speaking with a certain intonation and emphasis, or a characteristic tempo. They can permeate whatever they say or do with love, and this is what creates the effect of blessing on those around them. What kind of people are they?

In order to explain this phenomenon with real insight into human life, one must look back to their childhood. One then finds that such people learned, in their childhood, to revere and pray to the spiritual world in the right way, for no one has the gift of blessing in old age who has not learned to fold his or her hands in prayer between the ages of seven and fourteen. This folding of the hands in prayer during the age of primary education enters deeply into the inner organization of the human being and is transformed into the capacity for blessing in old age. This example shows how different life stages are interrelated and interwoven in human life. When educating children, one educates for all of life—that is, during a person’s younger years one may cultivate possibilities for moral development in old age. This education does not encroach on human freedom. Human freedom is attacked primarily when a certain inner resistance struggles against a free will impulse. What I have been talking about is connected with freeing a person from inner impediments and hindrances.

This should suffice as an introduction to tonight’s theme. When one tries to achieve a more intimate knowledge of human nature, observing it not just externally but also with the inner gaze directed more toward the spiritual, one discovers that human beings pass through clearly defined life periods.

The first three periods of life are of particular importance and interest for education. The first one has a more homogeneous character and lasts from birth to age seven—that is, until the time of the change of teeth. The second period of life extends from the change of teeth to puberty, around age fourteen. The third begins at puberty and ends in the twenties. It is easy to notice external physical changes, but only a trained capacity for observation will reveal the more hidden aspects of these different life periods.

Such observation shows that during the first seven years, roughly from birth to the change of teeth, the child’s spirit, soul, and body are completely merged into a unity. Observe a child entering into this world, with open features still undifferentiated, movements uncoordinated, and without the ability to show even the most primitive human expressions, such as laughing or weeping. (A baby can cry, of course, but this crying is not really weeping; it does not spring from emotions of the soul because the soul realm has not yet developed independently.) All of this makes the child into a unique being, and indeed, the greatest wonder of the world. We observe a baby weekly and monthly; from an undefined physiognomy, something gradually evolves in the physical configuration of the little body, as if coming from a center. Soul qualities begin to animate not only the child’s looks, but also the hand and arm movements. And it is a wonderful moment when, after moving about on hands and knees, the child first assumes the vertical posture. To anyone who can observe this moment, it appears as a most wonderful phenomenon.

When we perceive all this with spiritual awareness, which can be done, it shows us the following: There, in this unskillful little body, spirit is living, spirit that cannot yet control limb movements. This is still done very clumsily, but it is the same human spirit that, later on, may develop into a genius. It is there, hidden in the movements of arms and legs, in questing facial expression, and in the searching sense of taste.

Then we find that, from birth until the second dentition, the young child is almost entirely one sense organ. What is the nature of a sense organ? It surrenders fully to the world. Consider the eye. The entire visible world is mirrored in the eye and is contained in it. The eye is totally surrendered to the world. Likewise the child, though in a different way, is surrendered fully to the environment. We adults may taste sweet, bitter, or acid tastes on the tongue and with the palate, but the tastes do not penetrate our entire organism. Although we are not usually aware of it, it is nevertheless true to say that when the baby drinks milk the taste of the milk is allowed to permeate the entire organism. The baby lives completely like an eye, like one large sense organ. The differentiation between outer and inner senses occurs only later. And the characteristic feature is that, when a child perceives something, it is done in a state of dreamy consciousness.

If, for example, a very choleric father, a man who in behaviors, gestures, and attitudes is always ready to lose his temper, and displays the typical symptoms of his temperament around a child, then the child, in a dreaming consciousness, perceives not only the outer symptoms, but also the father’s violent temperament. The child does not recognize temperamental outbursts as such, but perceives the underlying disposition, and this perception directly affects the finest vascular vessels right into the blood circulation and respiration. The young child’s physical and bodily existence is thus affected immediately by the spiritual impressions received. We may admonish a child, we may say all kinds of things, but until the seventh year this is all meaningless to the child. The only thing that matters is how we ourselves act and behave in its presence. Until the change of teeth, a child is entirely an imitating being, and upbringing and education can be effected only by setting the proper example to be imitated. This is the case for moral matters as well.

In such matters one can have some rather strange experiences. One day a father of a young child came to me in a state of great agitation because (so he told me) his son, who had always been such a good boy, had stolen! The father was very confused, because he was afraid this was a sign that his son would develop into a morally delinquent person. I said to him, “Let’s examine first whether your son has really stolen. What has he actually done?” “He has taken money out of the cupboard from which his mother takes money to pay household expenses. With this money he bought sweets, which he gave to other children.” I could reassure the father that his boy had not stolen at all, that the child had merely imitated what he had seen his mother do several times every day. Instinctively he had imitated his mother, taking money out of the cupboard, because Mother had been doing it.

Whether in kindergarten or at home, we educate the child only when we base all education and child rearing on the principle of imitation, which works until the second dentition. Speaking, too, is learned purely by imitation. Up to the change of teeth, a child learns everything through imitation. The only principle necessary at this stage is that human behavior should be worthy of imitation. This includes also thinking, because in their own way, children perceive whether our thoughts are moral or not. People do not usually believe in these imponderables, but they are present nevertheless. While around young children, we should not allow ourselves even a single thought that is unworthy of being absorbed by the child.

These things are all connected directly with the child as an imitator until the change of teeth. Until then all possibility of teaching and bringing up a child depends on recognizing this principle of imitation. There is no need to consider whether we should introduce one or another Froebel kindergarten method, because everything that has been contrived in this field belongs to the age of materialism. Even when we work with children according to the Froebel system, it is not the actual content of the work that influences them, but how we do it. Whatever we ask children to do without doing it first ourselves in front of them is merely extra weight that we impose on them.

The situation changes when the child’s change of teeth begins. During this stage the primary principle of early education is the teacher’s natural authority. Acceptance of authority is spontaneous on the child’s part, and it is not necessary to enforce it in any way. During the first seven years of life a child will copy what we do. During the second seven years, from the change of teeth until puberty, a child is guided and oriented by what those in authority bring through their own conduct and through their words. This relationship has nothing to do with the role of freedom in human life in a social and individual sense, but it has everything to do with the nature of the child between the second dentition and puberty. At this point it is simply part of a child’s nature to want to look up with natural respect to the authority of a revered teacher who represents all that is right and good. Between the seventh and fourteenth years, a child still cannot judge objectively whether something is true, good, or beautiful; therefore only through the guidance of a naturally respected authority can the students find their bearings in life. Advocating the elimination of a child’s faith in the teacher’s authority at this particular age would actually eliminate any real and true education.

Why does a child of this age believe something is true? Because the authority of the teacher and educator says so. The teacher is the source of truth. Why does something appeal to a child of this age as beautiful? Because the teacher reveals it as such. This also applies to goodness. At this age children have to gain abstract judgment of truth, goodness, and beauty by experiencing concretely the judgments of those in authority. Everything depends on whether the adult in charge exerts a self-evident authority on the child between seven and fourteen; for now the child is no longer a sense organ but has developed a soul that needs nourishment in the form of images or thoughts. We now have to introduce all teaching subjects imaginatively, pictorially—that is, artistically. To do so, teachers need the gift of bringing everything to children at this age in the form of living pictures.

As teachers, we ourselves must be able to live in a world of imagery. For example, let’s imagine that we have to teach a young child to read. Consider what this implies—the child is expected to decipher signs written or printed on paper. In this form they are completely alien to the child. Sounds, speech, and vowels that carry a person’s feelings and are inwardly experienced, are not alien to the child. A child knows the sense of wonder felt at seeing the sun rise. “Ah” (A) is the sound of wonder. The sound is there, but what does the sign that we write on paper have to do with it? The child knows the feeling of apprehension of something uncanny: “Oo” (U).

But what does the sign we write on the paper have to do with this sound? The child has no inner relationship to what has become modern abstract writing. If we return to earlier civilizations, we find that writing was different then. In ancient days, people painted what they wished to express. Look at Egyptian hieroglyphics—they have a direct relationship to the human soul. When introducing writing to the child, we must return to expressing what we wish to communicate in the form of pictures. This is possible, however, only when we do not begin by introducing the alphabet directly, nor reading as a subject, but when we start with painting.

Consequently, when young students enter our school, we introduce them first to the world of flowing colors with watercolor painting. Naturally, this can cause a certain amount of chaos and disorder in the classroom, but the teacher copes with that. The children learn how to work with paints, and through the use of color the teacher can guide them toward definite forms. With the necessary skill, the teacher can allow the shapes of the letters to evolve from such painted forms. In this way, the children gain a direct relationship to the various shapes of the letters. It is possible to develop the written vowels A or U so that first one paints the mood of wonder (or of fright), finally allowing the picture to assume the form of the appropriate letters.

All teaching must have an artistic quality based on the pictorial element. The first step is to involve the whole being of the child in the effort of painting, which is subsequently transformed into writing. Only later do we develop the faculty of reading, which is linked to the head system—that is, to only one part of the human being. Reading comes after writing. First a form of drawing with paint (leading the child from color experience to form), out of which writing is evolved. Only then do we introduce reading.

The point is that, from the nature of the child, the teacher should learn how to proceed. This is the right way of finding the appropriate method, based on one’s observation and knowledge of the child. Our Waldorf school has to do with method, not theory. It always endeavors to solve the wonderful riddle, the riddle of the growing child, and to introduce to the child what the child’s own nature is bringing to the surface. In using this method, one finds that between the second dentition and puberty one has to approach all teaching pictorially and imaginatively, and this is certainly possible. Yet, in order to carry the necessary authority, one has to have the right attitude toward what one’s pictures really represent. For example, it is possible to speak to one’s students even at a relatively early age about the immortality of the human soul. (In giving this example, I am not trying to solve a philosophical problem, but speak only from the perspective of practical pedagogy.) One could say to a child, “Look at the cocoon and its shape.” One should show it to a child if possible. “You see, the cocoon opens and a butterfly flies out! This is how it is when a human being dies. The human body is like the cocoon of a butterfly. The soul flies out of the body, even though we cannot see it. When someone dies, just as the butterfly flies out of the cocoon, so the soul flies out of the body into the spiritual world.”

Now, there are two possible ways that a teacher can introduce this simile. In one instance, the teacher may feel very superior to the “ignorant” student, considering oneself clever and the child ignorant. But this attitude does not accomplish much. If, in creating a picture for the child, one thinks that one is doing so only to help the child understand the abstract concept of immortality, such a picture will not convey much, because imponderables play a role. Indeed, the child will gain nothing unless the teacher is convinced of the truth of this picture, feeling that one is involved with something sacred. Those who can look into the spiritual world believe in the truth of this picture, because they know that, with the emerging butterfly, divine-spiritual powers have pictured in the world the immortality of the human soul. Such people know this image to be true and not a teacher’s concoction for the benefit of “ignorant” students. If teachers feel united with this picture, believing what they have put into it and thus identifying themselves with it, they will be real and natural authorities for their students. Then the child is ready to accept much, although it will appear fruitful only later in life.

It has become popular to present everything in simple and graphic form so that “even children can understand it.” This results in appalling trivialities. One thing, however, is not considered. Let’s assume that, when the teacher stands before the child as the representative and source of truth, beauty, and goodness, a child of seven accepts something on the teacher’s authority, knowing that the teacher believes in it. The child cannot yet understand the point in question because the necessary life experience has not occurred. Much later—say, at the age of thirty five—life may bring something like an “echo,” and suddenly the former student realizes that long ago the teacher spoke about the same thing, which only now, after having gained a great deal more life experience, can be understood fully.

In this way a bridge is made between the person who was eight or nine years old, and the person who is now thirty-five years old, and this has a tremendously revitalizing effect on such a person, granting a fresh increase of life forces. This fact is well-known to anyone with a deep knowledge of the human being, and education must be built on such knowledge.

Through using our educational principles in the Waldorf school in this and similar ways, we endeavor to attune our education of body, soul, and spirit to the innermost core of the child’s being. For example, there might be a phlegmatic child in a class. We pay great attention to the children’s temperaments, and we even arrange the seating order in the classrooms according to temperaments. Consequently we put the phlegmatic children into one group. This is not only convenient for the teachers, because they are always aware of where their young phlegmatics are sitting, but it also has a beneficial effect on the children themselves, in that the phlegmatics who sit together bore each other to death with their indifference. By overcoming some of their temperament, they become a little more balanced.

As for the cholerics who constantly push and punch each other when sitting together, they learn in a wonderfully corrective way how to curb their temperament, at least to some extent! And so it goes. If teachers know how to deal with the various temperaments by assuming, let us say, a thoroughly phlegmatic attitude themselves when dealing with phlegmatic children, they cause in these little phlegmatics a real inner disgust with their own temperament.

Such things must become a part of our teaching, in order to turn it into a really artistic task. It is especially important for students at this age. Teachers may have a melancholic child in their class. If they can look into the spiritual background, in an anthroposophical sense, they may want to find and think through some measure for the benefit of such a child. The education we speak of begins with the knowledge that spirit exists in everything of a physical-bodily nature. One cannot see through matter, but one can learn to know it by seeing its spiritual counterpart, thereby discovering the nature of matter. Materialism suffers from ignorance of what matter really is, because it does not see the spirit in matter.

To return to our little melancholic, such a student can cause us serious concern. The teacher might feel prompted to come up with very ingenious ideas to help the child overcome a particularly melancholic temperament. This, however, can often prove fruitless. Although such a situation may have been observed very correctly, the measures taken may not lead to the desired effect. If, on the other hand, teachers realize that a deterioration of the liver function is at the root of this melancholic nature, if they suspect that there is something wrong with the child’s liver, they will know the course of action necessary. They must contact the child’s parents and find out as much as possible about the child’s eating habits. In this way they may discover that the little melancholic needs to eat more sugar. The teachers try to win the parents’ cooperation, because they know from spiritual science that the beginnings of a degeneration in the liver function connected with melancholia can be overcome by an increased sugar intake. If they succeed in gaining the parents’ help, they will have taken the right step from an educational perspective. It would be necessary to know, through spiritual insight, that an increase of sugar consumption can heal or balance a pathological liver condition.

One must be able to perceive and know the growing child and even the individual organs. This is fundamental in our education. We do not insist on particular external circumstances for our schooling. Whether forest or heath, town or country, our opinion is that one can succeed in a fruitful education within any existing social conditions, as long as one really understands the human being deeply, and if, above all, one knows how the child develops.

These are only a few criteria that I may speak of today, which characterize the nature of Waldorf education and the methods used for its implementation, all of which are based on a spiritual- scientific foundation.

If one can approach the child’s being in this way, the necessary strength is found to help children develop both physically and morally, so that fundamental moral forces manifest also. Barbaric forms of punishment are unnecessary, because the teacher’s natural authority will ensure the proper inner connection between teacher and child. Wonderful things can happen in our Waldorf school to demonstrate this. For example, the following incident occurred a little while ago: Among our teachers there was one who imported all kinds of customary disciplinary measures from conventional school life into the Waldorf school. When a few children were naughty, he thought he would have to keep them in after school. He told them that they would have to stay behind as punishment and do some extra work in arithmetic. Spontaneously, the whole class pleaded to be allowed to stay behind and do arithmetic as well, because, as they called out, “Arithmetic is such fun!” What better things could they do than additional work in arithmetic? “We too want to be kept in,” they declared. Well, here you have an example of what can happen in the Waldorf school where teachers have implanted in their students the right attitude toward work. The teacher of course had to learn his own lesson: One must never use something that should be considered a reward as a punishment. This example is one of many that could be mentioned. It shows how one can create a real art of education based on knowledge of the human being.

I am extremely thankful to Mrs. Mackenzie for giving me the opportunity of at least outlining just some of the fundamentals of education based upon anthroposophical spiritual science. Our teaching is based on definite methods, and not on vague ideals born of mere fantasy. These methods answer the needs and demands of human nature and are the primary justification for our education. We do not believe in creating ideas of what ideal human beings should be so that they fit into preconceived plans. Our goal is to be able to observe children realistically, to hear the message sent to us through the children from the divine-spiritual worlds. We wish to feel the children’s inner affirmation of our picture of the human being. God, speaking through the child, says: “This is how I wish to become.”

We try to fulfil this call for the child through our educational methods in the best way possible. Through our art of education, we try to supply a positive answer to this call.

First I must thank Mrs. MacMillan and Mrs. Mackenzie for their kind words of greeting and for the beautiful way they have introduced our theme. Furthermore, I must apologize for speaking to you in German followed by an English translation. I know that this will make your understanding more difficult, but it is something I cannot avoid.

What I have to tell you is not about general ideas on educational reform or formalized programs of education; basically, it is about the practice of teaching, which stands the test of time only when actually applied in classroom situations. This teaching has been practiced in the Waldorf school for several years now. It has shown tangible and noticeable results, and it has been recognized in England also; on the strength of this, it became possible, through the initiative of Mrs. Mackenzie, for me to give educational lectures in Oxford. This form of teaching is the result not only of what must be called a spiritual view of the world, but also of spiritual research. Spiritual research leads first to a knowledge of human nature, and, through that, to a knowledge of the “human being becoming,” from early childhood until death. This form of spiritual research is possible only when one acknowledges that the human being can look into the spiritual world when the necessary and relevant forces of cognition are developed. It is difficult to present in a short survey of this vast theme what normally needs to be acquired through a specific training of the human soul, with the goal of acquiring the faculty of perceiving and comprehending not just the material aspects of the human being and the sensory world, but also the spiritual element, so that this spiritual element may work in the human will.

However, I will certainly try to indicate what I mean. One can strengthen and intensify inner powers of the soul, just as it is possible to research the sense-perceptible world by external experiments using instrumental aids such as the microscope, telescope, or other optical devices, through which the sense world yields more of its secrets and reveals more to our vision than in ordinary circumstances. By forging inner “soul instruments” in this way, it is possible to perceive the spiritual world in its own right through the soul’s own powers. One can then discover also the fuller nature of the human being, that what is generally understood of the human being in ordinary consciousness and through the so-called sciences is only a small part of the whole of human nature, and that beyond the physical aspect, a second human being exists.

As I begin to describe this, remember that names do not matter, but we must have them. I make use of old names because they are known here and there from literature. Nevertheless, I must ask you not to be put off by these names. They do not stem from superstition, but from exact research. Nevertheless, there is no reason why one should not use other names instead. In any case, the second human member, which I shall call the etheric body, is visible when one’s soul forces have been sufficiently strengthened as a means for a deeper cognition (just as the physical senses, by means of microscope or telescope, can penetrate more deeply into the sense world). This etheric body is the first of the spiritual bodies linked with the human physical body.

When studying the physical human being only from the viewpoint of conventional science, one cannot really understand how the physical body of the human being can exist throughout a lifetime. This is because, in reality, most physical substances in the body disappear within a period of seven to eight years. No one sitting here is the same, physically speaking, as the person of some seven or eight years ago! The substances that made up the body then have in the meantime been cast off, and new ones have taken their place. In the etheric body we have the first real supersensible entity, which rules and permeates us with forces of growth and nourishment throughout earthly life.

The ether body is the first supersensible body to consider. The human being has an ether body, just as plants do, but minerals do not. The only thing we have in common with the minerals is a physical form. However, furnished with those specially developed inner senses and perceptions developed by powers of the soul, we come to recognize also a third sheath or member of the human being, which we call the astral body. (Again I must ask you not to be disturbed by the name.) The human being has an astral body, as do animals. We experience sensation through the astral body. An organism such as the plant, which can grow and nourish itself, does not need sensation, but human beings and animals can sense. The astral body cannot be designated by an abstract word, because it is a reality.

And then we find something that makes the human being into a bearer of three bodies, an entity that controls the physical, etheric, and astral bodies. It is the I, the real inner spiritual core of the human being. So the four members are first the physical body, second the etheric body, third the astral body, and finally the human I-organization. Let those who are not aware of these four members of the human being—those who believe that external observation, such as in anatomy and physiology, encompasses the entire human being—try to find a world view! It is possible to formulate ideas in many ways, whether or not they are accepted by the world. Accordingly one may be a spiritualist, an idealist, a materialist, or a realist. It is not difficult to establish views of the world, because one only needs to formulate them verbally; one only needs to maintain a belief in one or another viewpoint. But unless one’s world views stem from actual realities and from real observations and experiences, they are of no use for dealing with the external aspect of the human being, nor for education.

Let’s suppose you are a bridge builder and base your mechanical construction on a faulty principle: the bridge will collapse as the first train crosses it. When working with mechanics, realistic or unrealistic assumptions will prove right or wrong immediately. The same is true in practical life when dealing with human beings. It is very possible to digest world views from treatises or books, but one cannot educate on this basis; it is only possible to do so on the strength of a real knowledge of the human being. This kind of knowledge is what I want to speak about, because it is the only real preparation for the teaching profession. All external knowledge that, no matter how ingeniously contrived, tells a teacher what to do and how to do it, is far less important than the teacher’s ability to look into human nature itself and, from a love for education and the art of education, allow the child’s own nature to tell the teacher how and what to teach.

Even with this knowledge, however—a knowledge strengthened by supersensible perception of the human being—we will find it impossible during the first seven years of the child’s life, from birth to the second dentition, to differentiate between the four human members or sheaths of which I have just spoken. One cannot say that the young child consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, in the same way as in the case of an adult. Why not?

A newborn baby is truly the greatest wonder to be found in all earthly life. Anyone who is open-minded is certain to experience this. A child enters the world with a still unformed physiognomy, an almost “neutral” physiognomy, and with jerky and uncoordinated movements. We may feel, possibly with a sense of superiority, that a baby is not yet suited to live in this world, that it is not yet fit for earthly experience. The child lacks the primitive skill of grasping objects properly; it cannot yet focus its eyes properly, cannot express the dictates of the will through limb movement. One of the most sublime experiences is to see gradually evolve, out of the central core of human nature, out of inner forces, that which gives the physiognomy its godlike features, what coordinates the limb movements to suit outer conditions, and so on. And yet, if one observes the child from a supersensible perspective, one cannot say that the child has a physical, etheric, and astral body plus an I, just as one cannot say that water in its natural state is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. Water does consist of hydrogen and oxygen, but these two elements are most intimately fused together. Similarly, in the child’s organism until the change of teeth, the four human members are so intimately merged together that for the time being it is impossible to differentiate between them.

Only with the change of teeth, around the seventh year, when children enter primary education, does the etheric body come into its own as the basis of growth, nutrition, and so on; it is also the basis for imagination, for the forces of mind and soul, and for the forces of love. If one observes a child of seven with supersensible vision, it is as if a supersensible etheric cloud were emerging, containing forces that were as yet little in control because, prior to the change of teeth, they were still deeply embedded in the physical organism and accustomed to working homogeneously within the physical body. With the coming of the second teeth they become freer to work more independently, sending down into the physical body only a portion of their forces. The surplus then works in the processes of growth, nutrition, and so on, but also has free reign in supporting the child’s life of imagination. These etheric forces do not yet work in the intellectual sphere, in thinking or ideas, but they want to appear on a higher level than the physical in a love for things and in a love for human beings. The soul has become free in the child’s etheric body. Having gone through the change of teeth the child, basically, has become a different being.

Now another life period begins, from the change of teeth until puberty. When the child reaches sexual maturity, the astral body, which so far could be differentiated only very little, emerges. One notices that the child gains a different relationship to the outer world. The more the astral body is born, the greater the change in the child. Previously it was as if the astral body were embedded in the physical and etheric organization. Thus to summarize: First, physical birth occurs when the embryo leaves the maternal body. Second, the etheric body is born when the child’s own etheric body wrests itself free. Due to the emergence of the etheric body we can begin to teach the child. Third, the astral body emerges with the coming of puberty, which enables the adolescent to develop a loving interest in the outside world and to experience the differences between human beings, because sexual maturity is linked not only with an awakening of sexual love, but also with a knowledge gained through the adolescent’s immersion in all aspects of life. Fourth, I-consciousness is born only in the twenty-first or twenty-second year. Only then does the human being become an independent I-being.

Thus, when speaking about the human being from a spiritual perspective, one can speak of four successive births. Only when one knows the condition of the human being under the influence of these successively developing members, can one adequately guide the education and training of children. For what does it mean if, prior to the change of teeth, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I cannot yet be differentiated? It means that they are merged, like hydrogen and oxygen in water. This, in turn, means that the child really is as yet entirely a sense organ. Everything is related to the child in the same way a sense impression is related to the sense organ; whatever the child absorbs, is absorbed as in a sense organ.

Look at the wonderful creation of the human eye. The whole world is reflected within the eye in images. We can say that the world is both outside and inside the eye. In the young child we have the same situation; the world is out there, and the world is also within the child. The child is entirely a sense organ. We adults taste sugar in the mouth, tongue, and palate. The child is entirely permeated by the taste. One only needs eyes to observe that the child is an organ of taste through and through. When looking at the world, the child’s whole being partakes of this activity, is surrendered to the visible surroundings. Consequently a characteristic trait follows in children; they are naturally pious. Children surrender to parents and educators in the same way that the eye surrenders to the world. If the eye could see itself, it could not see anything else. Children live entirely in the environment. They also absorb impressions physically.

Let’s take the case of a father with a disposition to anger and to sudden outbursts of fury, who lives closely with a child. He does all kinds of things, and his anger is expressed in his gestures. The child perceives these gestures very differently than one might imagine. The young child perceives in these gestures also the father’s moral quality. What the child sees inwardly is bathed in a moral light. In this way the child is inwardly saturated by the outbursts of an angry father, by the gentle love of a mother, or by the influence of anyone else nearby. This affects the child, even into the physical body.

Our being, as adults, enters a child’s being just as the candlelight enters the eye. Whatever we are around a child spreads its influence so that the child’s blood circulates differently in the sense organs and in the nerves; since these operate differently in the muscles and vascular liquids which nourish them, the entire being of the child is transformed according to the external sense impressions received. One can notice the effect that the moral and religious environment of childhood has had on an old person, including the physical constitution. A child’s future condition of health and illness depends on our ability to realize deeply enough that everything in the child’s environment is mirrored in the child. The physical element, as well as the moral element, is reflected and affects a person’s health or illness later.

During the first seven years, until the change of teeth, children are purely imitative beings. We should not preconceive what they should do. We must simply act for them what we want them to do. The only healthy way to teach children of this age is to do in front of them what we wish them to copy. Whatever we do in their presence will be absorbed by their physical organs. And children will not learn anything unless we do it in front of them.

In this respect one can have some interesting experiences. Once a father came to me because he was very upset. He told me that his five-year-old child had stolen. He said to me, “This child will grow into a dreadful person, because he has stolen already at this tender age.” I replied, “Let us first discover whether the boy has really stolen.” And what did we find? The boy had taken money out of the chest of drawers from which his mother habitually took money whenever she needed it for the household. The mother was the very person whom the boy imitated most. To the child it was a matter of course to do what his mother did, and so he too took money from the drawer. There was no question of his thieving, for he only did what was natural for a child below the age of the second dentition: he imitated. He only imitated what his mother had done.

When this example is understood, one knows that, in the case of young children, imitation is the thing that rules their physical and soul development. As educators we must realize that during these first seven years we adults are instrumental in developing the child’s body, soul, and spirit. Education and upbringing during these first seven years must be formative. If one can see through this situation properly, one can recognize in people’s physiognomy, in their gait, and in their other habits, whether as children they were surrounded by anger or by kindness and gentleness, which, working into the blood formation and circulation, and into the individual character of the muscular system, have left lasting marks on the person. Body, soul, and spirit are formed during these years, and as teachers we must know that this is so. Out of this knowledge and impulse, and out of the teacher’s ensuing enthusiasm, the appropriate methods and impulses of feeling and will originate in one’s teaching. An attitude of dedication and self-sacrifice has to be the foundation of educational methods. The most beautiful pedagogical ideas are without value unless they have grown out of knowledge of the child and unless the teachers can grow along with their students, to the extent that the children may safely imitate them, thus recreating the teachers’ qualities in their own being.

For the reasons mentioned, I would like to call the education of the child until the change of teeth “formative education,” because everything is directed toward forming the child’s body, soul, and spirit for all of earthly life. One only has to look carefully at this process of formation. I have quoted the example of an angry father. In the gesture of a passionate temperament, the child perceives inherent moral or immoral qualities. These affect the child so that they enter the physical constitution. It may happen that a fifty-year-old person begins to develop cataracts in the eyes and needs an operation. These things are accepted and seen only from the present medical perspective. It looks as if there is a cataract, and this is the way to treat it, and there the matter ends; the preceding course of life is not considered. If one were ready to do that, it would be found that a cataract can often be traced back to the inner shocks experienced by the young child of an angry father. In such cases, what is at work in the moral and religious sphere of the environment spreads its influence into the bodily realm, right down to the vascular system, eventually leading to health or illness. This often surfaces only later in life, and the doctor then makes a diagnosis based on current circumstances. In reality, we are led back to the fact that, for example, gout or rheumatism at the age of fifty or sixty can be linked to an attitude of carelessness, untidiness, or disharmony that ruled the environment of such a patient during childhood. These circumstances were absorbed by the child and entered the organic sphere.

If one observes what a child has absorbed during the stage of imitation up to the change of teeth, one can recognize that the human being at this time is molded for the whole of life. Unless we learn to direct rightly the formative powers in the young human being, all our early childhood education is without value. We must allow for germination of the forces that control health and illness for all of earthly life.

With the change of teeth, the etheric body emerges, controlling the forces of digestion, nutrition, and growth, and it begins to manifest in the realm of the soul through the faculty of fantasy, memory, and so on. We must be clear about what we are educating during the years between the second dentition and puberty. What are we educating in the child during this period? We are working with the same forces that effect proper digestion and enable the child to grow. They are transformed forces of growth, working freely now within the soul realm. What do nature and the spiritual world give to the human being through the etheric body’s forces of growth? Life—actual life itself! Since we cannot bestow life directly as nature does during the first seven years, and since it is our task to work on the liberated etheric body in the soul realm, what should we, as teachers, give the child? We should give life! But we cannot do this if, at such an early stage, we introduce finished concepts to the child. The child is not mature enough yet for intellectual work, but is mature enough for imagery, for imagination, and for memory training. With the recognition of what needs to be done at this age, one knows that everything taught must have the breath of life. Everything needs to be enlivened. Between the change of teeth and puberty, the appropriate principle is to bestow life through all teaching. Everything the teacher does, must enliven the student. However, at just this age, it is really too easy to bring death with one’s teaching.

As correctly demanded by civilization, our children must be taught reading and writing. But now consider how alien and strange the letters of the alphabet are to a child. In themselves letters are so abstract and obscure that, when the Europeans, those so-called superior people, came to America (examples of this exist from the 1840s), the Native Americans said: “These Europeans use such strange signs on paper. They look at them and then they put what is written on paper into words. These signs are little devils!” Thus said the Native Americans: “The Palefaces [as they called the Europeans] use these little demons.” For the young child, just as for the Indians, the letters are little demons, for the child has no immediate relationship to them.

If we introduce reading abstractly right away, we kill a great deal in the child. This makes no sense to anyone who can see through these matters. Consequently, educational principles based on a real knowledge of the human being will refer to the ancient Egyptian way of writing. They still put down what they had actually seen, making a picture of it. These hieroglyphics gave rise to our present letters. The ancient Egyptians did not write letters, they painted pictures. Cuneiform writing has a similar origin. In Sanskrit writing one can still see how the letters came from pictures. You must remember that this is the path humanity has gone on its way to modern abstract letters, to which we no longer have an immediate relationship. What then can we do? The solution is to not plague children at all with writing and reading from the time they begin school. Instead, we have them draw and paint. When we guide children in color and form by painting, the whole body participates. We let children paint the forms and shapes of what they see. Then the pictures are guided into the appropriate sounds.

Let’s take, for example, the English word fish. By combining the activity of painting and drawing with a brush, the child manages to make a picture of a fish. Now we can ask the child to pronounce the word fish, but very slowly. After this, one could say, “Now sound only the beginning of the word: ‘F.’” In this way the letter F emerges from the picture that was painted of the fish. One can proceed in a similar way with all consonant sounds. With the vowels, one can lead from the picture to the letters by taking examples from a person’s inner life of feeling. In this way, beginning at the age of seven or eight, children learn a combined form of painting and drawing. Teachers can hardly relax during this activity, because painting lessons with young children inevitably create a big mess, which always has to be cleaned up at the end of the lesson. Yet this inconvenience must be carried by the teacher with understanding and equanimity. The first step is for the children to learn to create resemblances of outer shapes, using color and form. This leads to writing. In learning to write, the child brings the whole body into movement, not just one part. Only the head is involved when we read, which is the third step, after writing. This happens around the ninth year, when the child learns to read through the activity of writing, which was developed from painting.

In doing this, the child’s nature gives us the cue, and the child’s nature always directs us in how to proceed. This means that teachers are forced to become different human beings. They can’t learn their lessons and then apply them abstractly; they must instead stand before the class as whole human beings, and for everything they do, they must find images; they must cultivate their imagination. The teachers can then communicate their intentions to the students in imperceptible ways. The teachers themselves have to be alert and alive. They will reach the child to the extent that they can offer imaginative pictures instead of abstract concepts.

It is even possible to bring moral and religious concepts through the medium of pictures. Let us assume that teachers wish to speak to children about the immortality of the human soul. They could speak about the butterfly hidden in a chrysalis. A small hole appears in the chrysalis, and the butterfly emerges. Teachers could talk to children as follows: The butterfly, emerging from the chrysalis, shows you what happens when a person dies. While alive, the person is like the chrysalis. The soul, like the butterfly, flies out of the body only at death. The butterfly is visible when it leaves the chrysalis. Although we cannot see the soul with our eyes when a person dies, it nevertheless flies into the spiritual world like a butterfly from the chrysalis.

There are, however, two ways teachers can proceed. If they feel inwardly superior to the children, they will not succeed in using this simile. They may think they are very smart and that the children’s ignorance forces them to invent something that gets the idea of immortality across, while they themselves do not believe this butterfly and chrysalis “humbug,” and consider it only a useful ploy. As a result they fail to make any lasting impression on the children; for here, in the depths of the soul, forces work between teacher and child. If I, as the teacher, believe that spiritual forces in nature, operating at the level of the newly-emerged butterfly, provide an image of immortality, if I am fully alive in this image of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, then my comparison will work strongly on the child’s soul. This simile will work like a seed, and grow properly in the child, working beneficently on the soul. This is an example of how we can keep our concepts mobile, because it would be the greatest mistake to approach a child directly with frozen intellectual concepts.

If one buys new shoes for a three-year-old, one would hardly expect the child to still be wearing them at nine. The child would then need different, larger shoes. And yet, when it comes to teaching young children, people often act exactly like this, expecting the student to retain unchanged, possibly until the age of forty or fifty, what was learned at a young age. They tend to give definitions, meant to remain unchanged like the metaphorical shoes given to a child of three, as if the child would not outgrow their usefulness later in life! The point is that, when educating we must allow the soul to grow according to the demands of nature and the growing physical body. Teachers can give a child living concepts that grow with the human being only when they acquire the necessary liveliness to permeate all their teaching with imagination.

We need education that enlivens the human being during the years between the change of teeth and puberty. The etheric body can then become free. For example, take the word mouth. If I pronounce only the first letter, “M,” I can transform this line as picture of a mouth to this:

Similarly, I can find other ways to use living pictures to bridge the gap to written letters of the alphabet. Then, if the intellect (which is meant to be developed only at puberty) is not called on too soon, the ideas born out of the teacher’s imagination will grow with the child. Definitions are poison to the child. This always brings to mind a definition that once was made in a Greek philosophers’ school. The question, “What is a human being?” received the answer, “A human being is a creature with two legs and no feathers.” The following day, a student of the school brought a goose whose feathers had been plucked out, maintaining that this was a human being—a creature with two legs and without feathers. (Incidentally, this type of definition can sometimes be found in contemporary scientific literature. I know that in saying this I am speaking heresy, but roughly speaking, this is the kind of intellectual concept we often offer children.)

We need rich, imaginative concepts, that can grow with the child, concepts that allow growth forces to remain active even when a person reaches old age. If children are taught only abstract concepts, they will display signs of aging early in life. We lose fresh spontaneity and stop making human progress. It is a terrifying experience when we realize we have not grown up with fantasy, with images, with pictures that grow and live and are suited to the etheric body, but instead we grew up merely with those suited to abstraction, to intellectualism—that is, to death.

When we recognize that the etheric body really exists, that it is a living reality—when we know it not just in theory but from observing a developing child—then we will experience the second golden principle of education, engraved in our hearts. The golden principle during the first seven years is: Mold the child’s being in a manner worthy of human imitation, and thus cultivate the child’s health. During the second seven years, from the change of teeth to puberty, the guiding motive or principle of education should be: Enliven the students, because their etheric bodies have been entrusted to your care.

With the coming of puberty, what I have called the astral body is freed in a new kind of birth. This is the very force that, during the age of primary education until the beginning of puberty, was at the base of the child’s inmost human forces, in the life of feeling. This force then lived undifferentiated within the latent astral body, still undivided from the physical and etheric bodies. This spiritual aggregate is entrusted to the quality of the teachers’ imaginative handling, and to their sensitive feeling and tact. As the child’s astral body is gradually liberated from the physical organization, becoming free to work in the soul realm, the child is also freed from what previously had to be present as a natural faith in the teacher’s authority. What I described earlier as the only appropriate form of education between the change of teeth and puberty has to come under the auspices of a teacher’s natural authority.

Oh! It is such great fortune for all of life when, at just this age, children can look up to their teachers as people who wield natural authority, so that what is truth for the teacher, is also very naturally truth to the students. Children cannot, out of their own powers, discriminate between something true and something false. They respect as truth what the teacher calls the truth. Because the teacher opens the child’s eyes to goodness, the child respects goodness. The child finds truth, goodness, and beauty in the world through venerating the personality of the teacher.

Surely no one expects that I, who, many years ago, wrote Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom, would stand for the principle of authoritarianism in social life. I am saying here that the child, between the second dentition and puberty, has to experience the feeling of a natural authority from the adults in charge, and that, during these years, everything the student receives must be truly alive. The educator must be the unquestioned authority at this age, because the human being is ready for freedom only after having learned to respect and venerate the natural authority of a teacher. Only after reaching sexual maturity, when the astral body has become the means for individual judgments, can the student form judgments instead of accepting those of the teacher.

Now what must be considered the third principle of education comes into its own. The first one I called “the formative element,” the second one “the enlivening element.” The third element of education, which enters with puberty, can be properly called “an awakening education.” Everything taught after puberty must affect adolescents so that their emerging independent judgment appears as a continual awakening. If one attempts to drill subjects into a student who has reached puberty, one tyrannizes the adolescent, making the student into a slave. If, on the other hand, one’s teaching is arranged so that, from puberty on, adolescents receive their subject matter as if they were being awakened from a sleep, they learn to depend on their own judgments, because with regard to making their own judgments, they were indeed asleep. The students should now feel they are calling on their own individuality, and all education, all teaching, will be perceived as a stimulus and awakener. This can be realized when teachers have proceeded as I have indicated for the first two life periods. This last stage in education will then have a quality of awakening. And if in their style, posture, and presentation, teachers demonstrate that they are themselves permeated with the quality of awakening, their teaching will be such that what must come from those learning will truly come from them. The process should reach a kind of dramatic intensification when adolescents inwardly join with active participation in the lessons, an activity that proceeds very particularly from the astral body.

Appealing properly in this way to the astral body, we address the immortal being of the student. The physical body is renewed and exchanged every seven years. The etheric body gives its strength as a dynamic force and lasts from birth, or conception, until death. What later emerges as the astral body represents, as already mentioned, the eternal kernel of the human being, which descends to Earth, enveloping itself with the sheaths of the physical and etheric bodies before passing again through the portal of death. We address this astral body properly only when, during the two previous life periods, we have related correctly to the child’s etheric and physical bodies, which the human being receives only as an Earth dweller. If we have educated the child as described so far, the eternal core of the human individuality, which is to awaken at puberty, develops in an inwardly miraculous way, not through our guidance, but through the guidance of the spiritual world itself.

Then we may confidently say to ourselves that we have taken the right path in educating children, because we did not force the subject matter on them; neither did we dictate our own attitude to them, because we were content to remove the hurdles and obstacles from the way so that their eternal core could enter life openly and freely. And now, during the last stage, our education must take the form of awakening the students. We make our stand in the school saying, “We are the cultivators of the divine-spiritual world order; we are its collaborators and want to nurture the eternal in the human being.” We must be able to say this to ourselves or feel ashamed. Perhaps, sitting there among our students are one or two geniuses who will one day know much more than we teachers ever will. And what we as teachers can do to justify working with students, who one day may far surpass us in soul and spirit, and possibly also in physical strength, is to say to ourselves: Only when we nurture spirit and soul in the child—nurture is the word, not overpower—only when we aid the development of the seed planted in the child by the divine-spiritual world, only when we become “spiritual midwives,” then we will have acted correctly as teachers. We can accomplish this by working as described, and our insight into human nature will guide us in the task.

Having listened to my talk about the educational methods of the Waldorf school, you may wonder whether they imply that all teachers there have the gift of supersensible insight, and whether they can observe the births of the etheric and astral bodies. Can they really observe the unfolding of human forces in their students with the same clarity investigators use in experimental psychology or science to observe outer phenomena with the aid of a microscope? The answer is that certainly not every teacher in the Waldorf school has developed sufficient clairvoyant powers to see these things with inward eyes, but it isn’t necessary. If we know what spiritual research can tell us about the human being’s physical, etheric, and astral bodies and about the human I-organization, we need only to use our healthy soul powers and common sense, not just to understand what the spiritual investigator is talking about, but also to comprehend all its weight and significance.

We often come across very strange attitudes, especially these days. I once gave a lecture that was publicly criticized afterward. In this lecture I said that the findings of a clairvoyant person’s investigations can be understood by anyone of sane mind who is free of bias. I meant this literally, and not in any superstitious sense. I meant that a clairvoyant person can see the supersensible in the human being just as others can see the sense-perceptible in outer nature. The reply was, “This is what Rudolf Steiner asserted, but evidently it cannot be true, because if someone maintains that a supersensible spiritual world exists and that one can recognize it, one cannot be of sane mind; and if one is of sane mind, one does not make such an assertion....” Here you can see the state of affairs in our materialist age, but it has to be overcome.

Not every Waldorf teacher has the gift of clairvoyance, but every one of them has accepted wholeheartedly and with full understanding the results of spiritual-scientific investigation concerning the human being. And each Waldorf teacher applies this knowledge with heart and soul, because the child is the greatest teacher, and while one cares for the child, witnessing the wonderful development daily, weekly, and yearly, nothing can awaken the teacher more to the needs of education. In educating the child, in the daily lessons, and in the daily social life at school, the teachers find the confirmation for what spiritual science can tell them about practical teaching. Every day they grow into their tasks with increasing inner clarity. In this way, education and teaching in the Waldorf school are life itself. The school is an organism, and the teaching faculty is its soul, which, in the classrooms, in regular common study, and in the daily cooperative life within the school organism, radiates care for the individual lives of the students in all the classes.

This is how we see the possibility of carrying into our civilization what human nature itself demands in these three stages of education—the formative education before the change of teeth, the life-giving education between the change of teeth and puberty, and the awakening education after puberty, leading students into full life, which itself increasingly awakens the human individuality.

Formative education—before the change of teeth.
Life-giving education—between the change of teeth and puberty.
Awakening education—after puberty.

When we look at the child properly, the following thoughts may stimulate us: In our teaching and educating we should really become priests, because what we meet in children reveals to us, in the form of outer reality and in the strongest, grandest, and most intense ways, the divine-spiritual world order that is at the foundation of outer physical, material existence. In children we see, revealed in matter in a most sublime way, what the creative spiritual powers are carrying behind the outer material world. We have been placed next to children in order that spirit properly germinates, grows, and bears fruit. This attitude of reverence must underlie every method. The most rational and carefully planned methods make sense only when seen in this light. Indeed, when our methods are illuminated by the light of these results, the children will come alive as soon as the teacher enters the classroom. Teaching will then become the most important leaven and the most important impulse in our present stage of evolution. Those who can clearly see the present time with its tendency toward decadence and decline know how badly our civilization needs revitalization.

School life and education can be the most revitalizing force. Society should therefore take hold of them in their spiritual foundations; society should begin with the human being as its fundamental core. If we start with the child, we can provide society and humanity with what the signs of the times demand from us in our present stage of civilization, for the benefit of the immediate future.

In these serious times, we can look at what people who have considered the gravity of the situation think is necessary. We can see what new institutions they imagine are needed, what changes in our untenable conditions are necessary. If we do this, we will see people with the goodwill to dedicate themselves to new institutions, to cooperate in changing what seems to need change in one way or another. If we accept the responsibility for our all-too-obvious social circumstances, then we cannot get around the fact that, although there is so much goodwill and there are so many wonderful ideas, they collapse immediately or, in any event, are not carried out to the extent so necessary today.

Spiritual science seeks, through anthroposophical understanding, to open the path to supersensible knowledge for modern humanity. It has tried for decades to address the conspicuous problems of modern civilization, namely the flagging goodwill and the loss of the wonderful ideas that live in this goodwill. The spiritual science I have presented here for years has attempted to point out exactly what is so necessary in the present, and what so many modern people welcome with such great sympathy or reject with such great antipathy. It tries to point out, on the one hand, what has made conventional science so great, and, on the other hand, as we will discuss today, what this science lacks the means to understand, namely, human will and human feeling.

We live in a time when it is no longer possible for people simply to yield to their instinctive will impulses. The necessity to increasingly transform the old instinctive life into a fully conscious life is especially characteristic of our time, yet so many prejudices arise today when it comes to admitting this. That people must increasingly change the old instinctive motives of human nature into conscious motives is a historical fact, the most important historical fact. It is this fact that has led to the present crisis.

To this end, scientific advances over the last three or four centuries have done much for modern civilization. But today, anyone who contemplates the institutions that arise out of the most vital contemporary needs must come to feel the insufficiencies of modern times that come from the modern scientific orientation and way of thinking. Just now in this city a limited attempt is being made to solve a social problem, a social problem that is more important than most people want to believe. Perhaps this evening we can point out the difficulties of solving such a specific problem.

Through the insight into anthroposophical spiritual science that he has often demonstrated throughout the years, our friend Emil Molt has succeeded in founding the Free Waldorf School upon social thinking appropriate to our times. This school is intended for children of the workers at the WaldorfAstoria factory and for a few others who will shortly be included. The imprint of modern society is visible in the manner of the school’s creation and in its connection with an industrial firm. This school must take into account the most practical needs of the people who entrust it with the education of their children. We could say that it is symbolic that this school was created in connection, in direct connection, with the industrialism that gives rise to the most important social questions of our time.

In founding the school, the faculty (for whom I held an introductory seminar lasting several weeks) considered the social pedagogical tasks relevant to modern culture. More than we are aware, our picture of modern civilization (as I already mentioned) results from the way our imagination has developed out of our understanding of physical nature. As I have emphasized for decades, spiritual science fully recognizes the value and meaning of the modern scientific way of thinking; in fact, spiritual science values conventional science more highly than that science values itself. Nevertheless, because conventional science so colors our picture of modern civilization, spiritual science must go beyond it. I have also emphasized that the means used by spiritual science to come to its understanding of the world differ from those of conventional science. I have repeatedly explained how we can really enter into the supersensible world through the path of spiritual science, how, through the development of inner capacities that otherwise only sleep in human nature, the way opens for us to see into the spiritual world in which we live. We can see into the spiritual world just as we can recognize the laws of the physical world through our senses, through reason, through associated events. I have explained how we, by awakening dormant capabilities, can look into the spiritual world that always surrounds us, but is unknown to us because the necessary sense organs remain undeveloped in ordinary life.

Today I want to discuss the capacities that spiritual science uses to see into the supersensible world—healthy, quite normal capacities of human nature. Those who want a deeper insight into how spiritual science works need not concern themselves with the accusations of our critics that it is based upon the use of unwholesome powers. It is quite simple to show the source of Anthroposophy and its path to the supersensible world.

If you look at my book How 7o Know Higher Worlds, you will see that I describe those stages of supersensible knowledge that people can attain through the development of certain capacities sleeping within them: 1) the Imaginative stage of knowledge, 2) the stage of Inspiration and 3) the stage of true Intuition. Now, where does spiritual science find the forces involved in such things as Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition? We can show that certain capacities forming the basis of human nature are at work during childhood. Later in life, when people have reached their normal size, when growth is complete, in a sense these forces lie unused. This spring I discussed the various stages of child development.¹ I remarked that during the first period of life, people are primarily imitative beings. They instinctively learn everything that people around them do, and they imitate this in their movements, sounds, speech, even in their thoughts. This imitative behavior continues until approximately the change of teeth, until approximately seven years of age. Then those who can more exactly observe human nature begin to see another activity. They can observe the need in human nature, beginning at six or seven years of age and continuing until sexual maturity, to rely upon people with experience, upon those adults in whom children can devotedly believe. During this period, children need to act under the influence of honored authorities. The self-reliance that is based in people’s confidence in their power of judgment, the self-reliance that enables them to involve themselves in all sorts of things in life, first appears with sexual maturity at the age of fourteen and continues to develop until the age of twenty or twenty-one.

These are three quite distinct periods of human youth. Only people who have lost healthy judgment due to all kinds of prejudices can overlook what develops in the child, what causes physical development until the age of seven when bodily development is relatively complete—the form continues to grow but the general structure is complete. Only such people can overlook how those forces that act formatively until seven years of age subsequently work more inwardly, particularly as inner growth. They act as living forces, making children stronger until fourteen years of age. They work between the ages of fourteen and twenty to strengthen those organs directed toward the environment, those organs that are capable of immersing themselves in their surroundings. In this time those inner spiritual forces act upon the human physical body. Inner spiritual forces act in quite differing ways upon the human body until seven, then fourteen, then twenty-one years of age. Forces that for an unprejudiced observer are quite clearly inner spiritual forces work on human organs to master them and develop them further.

These forces really exist. The forces that in a certain sense cause the crystallization of the second set of teeth out of human nature, a meaningful conclusion to the stage of human development ending at age seven, really exist. The forces that work mysteriously on that part of human beings that is connected with growth and the unfolding of human nature until age fourteen really exist. These forces are real; they are active. But after the completion of physical development (around the age of twenty), where are these inner spiritual forces that have acted upon our physical form? They still exist; they are still there. These inner forces fall asleep, just as the forces we use in our everyday life, our everyday work from waking to sleeping, fall asleep and become dormant while we sleep. The forces of human nature that blazed during childhood and youth, the forces that fired the developmental changes that transform children into adults, and everything connected with these changes, fall asleep around the age of twenty. Those who look at the whole human being know that at the very moment when human beings reach this point, the forces that acted in the child, in the youth, step back into the innermost part of human nature. These forces go to sleep.

We can awaken the forces that have brought forth the processes normally observed between the ages of fourteen and twenty, through which we slowly gain an understanding of our surroundings, through which those organs develop that can form only after puberty. These organs are not one-sidedly oriented toward sexual love, but are formed such that we can deepen our love of all humanity. This loving absorption in all humanity gives us true understanding of the world. The forces we use until the age of twenty-one for growing and forming the inner organs become inflexible, just critical intellect. A certain inner spiritual force stops working formatively. It becomes an imaginary inner force, a power of the soul, no longer so strong as it was earlier when it had to guide human formation. If we can find it sleeping in human nature, this power that once was a formative force but after the age of twenty no longer is, if we develop it so it exists with the same strength as before, then, acting now through love, it becomes Imaginative power. People attain a capacity to see the world not only through abstract concepts, but in pictures that are alive, just as dreams are alive, and that represent reality just as our abstract concepts do. The same force that previously acted upon the healthy developing human to form the capacity to love, can enable us to see such pictures of the world and to reach the first stage of supersensible knowledge. We can awaken this human capacity and plunge it deeper into our surroundings than normal thinking and normal sensing can go.

Then we can go further, since the forces that cause the important formative changes from approximately seven years of age, from the change of teeth, until sexual maturity, are also sleeping in us. These forces sleep deeper under the surface of normal soul life than the forces I just characterized as Imaginative. When we reawaken these idle formative capacities, when we call these spiritual powers out of their sleep, they become the forces of Inspiration. These teach us that Imaginative pictures are filled with spiritual content, that these pictures, which appear to be dreams but really are not, reflect a spiritual reality that exists in our surroundings, outside ourselves.

We can go even deeper, into the strongest forces sleeping in human nature, those that have worked upon human formation from birth until the change of teeth. These formative forces that were active in the first years of life have withdrawn themselves most deeply from external life. If we bring them forth again in later life and imbue them with Imagination and Inspiration, we will then have the Intuitive powers of supersensible knowledge. These are the powers that enable us to delve into the reality of the spiritual world in the same way that we can delve into the physical world through the senses and the will usually associated with the body.

In three stages, through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, we gain access to the supersensible world. These powers do not employ anything abnormal, but actually are the most normal of all things, namely the forces of healthy human development from birth until the early twenties. These forces then lie fallow, but we can bring them forth again. When they are no longer occupied with forming us, we can use them to open up the spiritual world.

I have now given you some idea of the source of those forces that open the way for spiritual science to enter the supersensible world. Those who seriously wish to follow this path will know how to differentiate what it can properly give from what simple conventional science, simple scientific understanding, can offer.

Why do I continually emphasize modern scientific understanding? It would not be so necessary to emphasize this scientific understanding and the attitude that derives from it, if modern popular thinking, including social thinking and social policies, were not so completely patterned after it. To be sure, we have here something that many people seldom consider. However, we must consider it if we wish to find something that will really lead to healing our ailing social conditions. We must be clear that scientific thinking so completely permeates all human thinking that when people begin to consider something else, they automatically revert to the modern scientific attitude and manner of thinking.

What is, in fact, the social political thinking of the second half of the nineteenth century right up to the present? What is it that fundamentally, even now, is presented to us as socialist theory? It is a social thinking patterned after mechanistic scientific thinking. Why does this social thinking appear to be so unfruitful, as I have often described it in these lectures? Because this social thinking, take for example the Marxist English Socialist thinking, is infested through and through with a conventional scientific attitude, an attitude that when used in this area simply cannot accomplish anything.

Now look at the most important characteristic of what I have referred to today as supersensible understanding in the sense of spiritual science. The most important characteristic is that this supersensible understanding uses those forces closely connected with what is human. What forces more closely connected with human nature could we possibly use than those that form human nature itself? How could we possibly use anything more human to achieve an ideal, to achieve anything we want to accomplish? How could we use forces for cognition more human than those that we can bring out of hiding the moment they are no longer needed to form human nature? There is a way of understanding in contrast to the modern scientific attitude and socio-political way of thinking, a life of abstract concepts connected only with the structure and function of the human head. This way of understanding is through those forces that people still retain after their formation is complete at the age of twenty or so. This way of understanding uses forces allowed to sleep, but which are more real because they work on human formation. What we can obtain from scientific concepts and happily use in the social sciences, and wish to use in social pedagogical tasks—these concepts and ideas, in fact, everything that we can obtain in this way for our souls, are only a reflection of reality in comparison to the content of supersensible knowledge. Every concept we can gain when our reason combines sense impressions and observations, everything that we know from our will impulses—all this is actually only a shadow, a reflection, in contrast to what is so tightly enmeshed with human growth and activity and existence as the forces that form us. Thus, the abstract character (the character of being “independent of human nature”) arises out of the scientific way of thinking that does not require people to use their will. We are proud of obtaining such knowledge that we can refer to as scientific and can call “objective.”

Concerning knowledge, spiritual science does not attempt to throw what is human out, but rather to draw it into the world. It attempts to come to its knowledge through just those forces that form people. We can observe that scientific concepts, and socio-political concepts patterned after the same methods, satisfy human intellectual curiosity. They satisfy the intellect, but clearly do not have the power to enliven, to infuse, to ignite human will. Were this scientific viewpoint and its onesidedness to become increasingly stronger and continually more dominant, in the end human willpower would completely atrophy. Nowadays we must motivate human willpower, atrophying under the influence of the scientific mentality, with something that can ignite it. This ability to stimulate willpower arises from people themselves because it can be drawn out of human nature as spiritual scientific knowledge.

This is what spiritual science wants to do, and what spiritual science, as we mean it here, can do. It wants to effect an understanding that is not simply there for the intellect alone, but flows into the feeling and the will.

Today, particularly in education, people repeatedly insist that we should not teach children knowledge simply for the sake of knowledge, that we should also teach them to be capable, to be able to work; we should develop the will. Here we have one of those points where the goodwill of our contemporaries becomes evident. Certainly much goodwill exists when people today say that we should not simply have “knowledge schools,” but schools that develop a capacity to work, schools that develop capabilities. But goodwill alone does not suffice. We need the capacity to illuminate this goodwill, to brighten it with true insight. We do not achieve this insight, however, by simply saying that we should create “schools of capabilities” instead of “schools of knowledge.” The core of this insight is that now we must move more and more from the instinctive to the conscious. It is necessary not only to affect the will instinctively, not only that the teacher instinctively affect the pupil. The important thing is that concepts, ideas and imagination be allowed to flow from the teacher to the child. However, these must be concepts that are not simply concepts in thought, but concepts that can stimulate the will, that can satisfy the whole person. We are not concerned that people often stress that only the will should be developed, or only the feeling. No, what we are concerned with is that we gain the possibility of working to obtain such an insight, such concepts that have the power in themselves to go into the will, to develop the inner fire of the will. This is what we need today to heal the present mentality, to properly use the will in the second social pedagogical area.

The first social pedagogical area is what the recently founded Waldorf School is intended to serve, namely that area encompassing the elementary grades.² Elementary education should prepare people for true social thinking today and in the near future. We shall see how much this is a question of spiritual science, a question of the path into supersensible worlds.

The other aspect of the social pedagogical question is to prepare people to learn from life. We do not fare well in life if we view it as a rigid and foreign object. We can place ourselves correctly in life only when every moment, every day, every week, every year becomes a source of learning for our further development. Regardless of how far we go in our schooling, we will have accomplished the most if, through this schooling, we have learned how to learn from life. If we find the proper way to place ourselves in relationship to everyone we meet, then they will become for us a source of further development through everything they are and through everything they consciously and unconsciously give us. In everything that we do, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, we experience ourselves such that everything we experience in our surroundings becomes a source of continuing further development. Life is a school for every healthy person.

However, neither of these social pedagogical realms, learning in school or learning from life, can meet the needs of society now and in the near future if they are not strengthened by what spiritual science can provide.

Today, people think we should educate children as “individuals.” We also find other fundamental thoughts represented in modern education. With one exception, I do not wish to go into the details of modern pedagogy. However, I do wish to mention that this pedagogy contains certain standards that are made clear to those who teach. The teachers are to educate according to these standards. Much goodwill lives in these standards also. People have done an exceptional amount of well-meant thinking in forming this pedagogy. However, what is necessary now and in the near future is a /iving pedagogy. What we need is a living pedagogy, derived from supersensible human understanding, that replaces an abstract pedagogy that sets up standards for teaching children.

This supersensible perception of human beings does not at all ignore sense-perceptible understanding—it takes it fully into account. The sense-perceptible view of human beings, with all its understanding of anatomy, physiology, and so forth, treats people as an abstraction. Supersensible perception adds the spirit-soul element, while at the same time taking sense-perceptible knowledge fully into account. It observes the whole person, with emphasis upon the development of the whole person. It can, therefore, concentrate upon the developing whole person at the time when the parents entrust him or her to the elementary school at about the age of seven. What developed in the child as a result of imitation requires the support of authority during this life-forming period. Only when we are able to look at people in such a way, can we see what truly lives in them. In that we observe such a change, we can see what is unfolding in people. If you notice in the right way, with sensitivity, what wants to develop in people at six or seven years of age, and if you have not become a teacher, but are a teacher, then an awareness for this most wonderful riddle awakens through the innermost living forces without the necessity of pedagogical standards—the developing person continuously offers him- or herself to your soul’s eye.

Here lies something that a true social pedagogical reformation, which must be the basis of a modern unified elementary school, must really take into account. Here we must say that it is essentially unimportant whether new teachers have really learned what is often taught as pedagogy, as special methods. What is important for future teachers is that, through their training, they have become capable of looking into the developing person. What is important is that they have acquired the skills that they can acquire through a thorough, real understanding of human beings. What is important is that they have become capable in the presence of each child and in each moment to newly form and re-form the educational task.

For the true teacher, pedagogy must be something living, something new at each moment. Everything that teachers carry in their souls as memories robs them of their originality. New insights into the nature of developing humans that allow the pedagogy to change and be alive in those people who teach must replace pedagogical norms. We could even say that the best pedagogy (stated radically) is one that the teacher continually forgets and that is continually reignited each time the teacher is in the presence of the children and sees in them the living powers of developing human nature. When an allencompassing interest in the secrets of the world, in the enigma of the world and in world views accompanies such an attitude, then within the teachers will live what enables them to give that part of themselves that should enter the being of the children.

How can the teacher’s inner nature become so alive in the way I have just described it? Certainly no longer through a way of thinking derived from science, but only when the teacher’s will is ignited through a science drawn from forces connected with human nature. The teachers who have absorbed what spiritual science knows about the supersensible nature of human beings, who have inwardly enlivened this, who in a living fashion carry within themselves a science founded upon those forces through which the child is to be educated—such teachers can make this knowledge into a living inner fire for teaching. The basis of such a pedagogical art is supersensible knowledge, that is, the same forces that from day to day, from week to week, from year to year bring about the growth and development of the child.

Think about it for a moment. Consider how close the sources of pedagogical art are to what grows in the child when supersensible knowledge controls and directs what the teacher brings to the child! We should not search for new abstract ideas nor clever new rules in what we refer to as social pedagogical effectiveness. What we should search for is that the living should replace the dead, the concrete should replace the abstract.

To demand such things today is much more necessary than people often imagine. It is remarkable that people cannot imagine that there is supersensible knowledge that acts upon sensible knowledge, that acts upon life and teaching, upon know-how and capabilities. Already people have begun to misunderstand the core of the Waldorf School, and thus they slander, often unconsciously, what we intend with the Waldorf School. People think the Waldorf School must be some kind of parochial school because those who stand at its cradle begin with spiritual science. They think that it is a school that teaches Anthroposophy to the children. They do not have any idea how deeply stuck they are in old ideas when they assume this, whether it be with a positive or negative attitude. We have absolutely no need to assert Anthroposophy, to assert it as a point of view by developing anthroposophical concepts and seeing to it that children learn these as they previously learned religion. That is not at all our task. We will continue with what we have already stated, namely that the Protestant and Catholic religion teachers shall teach the Protestant and Catholic religions. We will not set any obstacles in the way of the desire to give this religious instruction. We will keep our promises in this regard. We do not seek in any way to bring any new philosophical opinions into the school. We seek something else. Our viewpoint will result from spiritual science because it comes from human nature. We will pay attention to the way it develops human know-how, human capabilities, the way it directly flows into the human will. Our task lies in our pedagogical activities: how we act in a school, how we teach, how we plan the lesson and its goals, which teaching methods to use, how knowledge and philosophy affect the skill and capability of the teacher. These are our tasks.

For this reason, we will have to correct much that (out of goodwill, but without the necessary insight) people consider to be the goals and content of modern educational activity. For instance, people often say that we should emphasize visual aids.³ Yes, certainly, within boundaries, it is good to use illustrative material, that is, to teach children about things that we show them directly. But, we must not allow these materials to lead to a slide into the banality and triviality of superficial consideration. People always want to stoop to the level of the child, and then all kinds of trivialities result, like those we find when we read visual aid guides. We concerned ourselves with such things while forming the Waldorf School. There we could see how trivial the so-called visual aids are that are derived completely out of the materialistic attitude of our time. We could see how forced instruction is when the teacher stoops to the child’s level of understanding, when the teacher is not to teach the child anything other than what the child can easily comprehend.

Now, if you only teach children what they can understand, then you neglect what can be the most beautiful thing in human life. If you always want to stoop to the level of what the children can already comprehend, then you do not know what it means later in life, perhaps at the age of thirty or thirty-five, to look back upon what you were taught in school. You do not understand what it means to have been taught something that you did not fully comprehend because you were not yet mature enough. But it comes up again. Now you notice that you are more mature, because you now understand it. Such a re-living of what has been taught forms the real connection between the time in school and the whole rest of life. It is immensely valuable to hear much in school that we cannot fully comprehend until we re-experience it later in life. We rob the children of this possibility when, with banal instruction, we stoop to the level of the child’s understanding.

What then is the task of the teacher who wants to bring the children something they can absorb, but perhaps will understand only after many decades? Teachers must have the necessary inner life forces so that through their personality, through what they put into the teaching, they can give the children something they cannot yet fully understand. A relationship exists between the teacher and the children through which the teacher can bring things to the children. Things can be brought to the children through the way in which they live in the teacher, because the children feel the desire to experience the world that is aglow within the teacher. That is why the children can grasp them. It is tremendously important that the teachers become leaders in this way, that through the fire that lives in them, they become a wellspring for what the children will carry in their own lives. Compare this with how the banal instruction children receive dims with time.

There are many other examples to show that pedagogy must be something living, something stirred up in the teachers out of an understanding of human beings obtained through human capacities. More than anyone else, the teacher needs an understanding of humanity based upon a supersensible view of human beings. If, in teaching, we would use what comes from a supersensible world view and understanding of humanity, we could immediately remove all abstractions so that the teaching would come from the practical.

There are people today who think that they are practical, who think that they stand in practical life, but it is their “practicality,” which is really only routine, that caused the terrible misery and misfortune that resulted in the war, and in which we still find ourselves today. Instead of obtaining an insight into what supersensible knowledge could achieve for education, these people say supersensible knowledge has nothing to do with the true practicalities of life. They have conjured up these miserable times because they have always said this, because, in reproachable carelessness, they have thrown out the true supersensible content of practical life. We have scarcely caught our breath, and now these people want to continue this stupid practice by kicking to death every truly earnest desire for improvement. If those people who absolutely do not want to see what is necessary for our time are again victorious, then in a short time we will again have the same misery that started in 1914. Those people who wish to crush everything supersensible in the activities they so slander, which are in reality so practical, are exactly those people who have led us into this misery. That is what we need to see clearly today.

I would not have spoken these serious words had not the terrible croakings of doom again arisen where we want to create something quite practical, like the Waldorf School. We should have learned something from the terrible events of the last four to five years, and we should progress. We must keep a sharp eye on those who do not want to progress, who want to begin again where they left off in 1914. We need not worry that they will keep a sharp eye on us—that they will do for sure. But, we must also keep a sharp eye on them. All people must unite who have a sense that something must happen today that, on the one hand, really originates out of the true spirit, and, on the other hand, is capable of affecting serious practical life.

For such very practical reasons, what is often an empty slogan, particularly concerning pedagogical questions, must for once be handled with objective seriousness. We must take into account, for instance (we paid particular attention to such things in the seminar for the Waldorf School faculty), that around nine years of age something important ends and something new begins with children. Until the age of nine, children are strongly entwined with their surroundings. The imitative principle is still enmeshed in the authoritative principle. The possibility of developing the feeling of self first begins at the age of nine, so that, for instance, scientific facts, nature studies of the plant and animal world, can be brought to the child. At the same time, the stage between seven and nine years of age is such that we do well not to bring the children anything that is taught out of convention, that is not basic and does not obviously flow out of human nature.

We must gradually lead children into reading and writing. Anyone can see that the letters we have today are something conventional. (With Egyptian hieroglyphics, it was different.) That means we must teach writing starting from drawing. At first we do not pay any attention to the shapes of the letters, but draw forms. We must begin basic drawing and painting, along with music, in the lowest grades. We must derive the whole education from the child’s artistic capabilities. The children’s artistic capabilities touch their entire being. They touch the child’s will and feeling, and then, through will and feeling, the intellect. We then go on. We continue with drawing and painting to motivate the will through artistic instruction. We go on to writing and develop letters out of the drawn forms. Only then comes reading—it is even more intellectual than writing. We develop reading out of writing. I am giving these details so you can see that spiritual science is not off in the clouds but enters into all details of practical instruction. A living understanding of humanity, which must replace an abstract pedagogy, leads into all the details, into the ways in which we teach mathematics, writing, and languages.

So much for the special area of instructional pedagogy.

The social aspect of pedagogy encompasses all of practical living. After we have finished school, we go out into “real life,” but our conventional education creates a gulf between us and life. Thus we see that there is something instinctive in the great questions of humanity. Although these questions address the needs of life, there is no insight for solving them.

I would like to take note of another question that has concerned modern civilization for some time, the so-called feminist question, namely, what forms the gulf between men and women. People are correct in trying to close this gap, but they cannot close it when they do not really understand what is common between men and women. If they only pay attention to what they can learn about human beings in the physical world and from the modern scientific way of thinking, the difference between men and women remains extreme. We will first bridge the abyss between men and women when we bring the differences in perception and ways of working in the world into balance. We will attain this balance through what we can arrive at through the knowledge, will and feeling that exist in the forces that form the basis of human nature. What men do not have, but women do, gives men a certain inclination; and what women do not have, but men do, gives women a certain inclination. During the time when people are physically female, they are spiritually male, and during the time they are physically male, they are spiritually female. If what can come into our society from spiritual science would permeate our culture, then the ground would be prepared for such things as the so-called feminist question. We can apply this to numerous questions, but I only want to remark about one other.

People cry out for organization. It is obvious that they cry out for it since the complicated relationships of modern social life require organization. I have said much in my lectures about the nature of such structure. However, people think that we need only to organize things according to current scientific principles, according to modern socio-political thinking, without spiritual science. Lenin and Trotsky organize, Lunatscharsky organizes according to these principles. They have placed economic life into a mechanistic form, and they want to do the same with spiritual life. Neither the stories of various people who judge out of their impressions, nor what journalists and other people who have recently been in Russia tell, is important. What we can use are Lenin’s writings. They show anyone with insight what to expect: the organizational death of everything that is a true source of humanity, of what lies in the individual human being and in human nature. No greater foe of true human progress exists than what is now happening in the East.

Why is this? Because they absolutely ignore what can come from spiritual development, namely true social pedagogical life forces. We must organize, but we must be conscious that although we want to organize, people must live in this organization. People must live in this organization and have the opportunity to teach what the inner source of human nature is, what is hidden after people have grown, what we can again bring out of the sleeping powers of their human nature. Not everyone needs to be a clairvoyant and experience what can be experienced through the awakened powers of human nature, but everyone can be interested in what humanity can achieve through these living human forces.

When people take interest in such things, then a new capability awakens in them. This is a capability we can best characterize when we bring to mind an area where people already have somewhat weakened sensibilities. This capability can be likened to what a language is to all the people connected by it. To discover the spirit living in the language, those who speak one language must first understand the genius, the wonderful artistic structure of the language, even though they already speak it. They need to understand the spirit emanating from the language that permeates the people and forms the language into a unified whole. In that we learn to speak, we absorb, not consciously, but instinctively and unconsciously, with every word and with every connotation, something that reveals to us the genius of the language in a mysterious way. Social life is something that lives in many instincts. Language has always been one of the most wonderful social instruments. Only, in modern times, as we go from East to West, language has become increasingly abstract. People feel less and less what the sounds of the language say to the heart and to the head, and particularly the connections that the language forms to speak to the heart and to the head. People feel less and less the mysterious way in which the genius of the language makes impressions upon them.

Many other things that touch people as does the genius of language will become effective if a general human development becomes more widespread through the activity of the elementary school—acting not as a parochial school, but through rationally formed instruction. Then when people meet one another, they can unite through speech. Every conversation, every relationship to another person, becomes a source for the further development of our soul. What we do in the world that affects other people becomes a source of our own further development. We can first develop the elements of communication between people if we meet other people with those feelings aroused in us. We can develop this communication if we do not follow abstract modern science, but take up the living fire within us. This living fire can come to us from a science that is connected to what in human nature allows people to grow until twenty years of age, and from then on can lead to a development of supersensible knowledge.

Even though I have described the three forms of the social organism since spring, the spiritual sphere, the rights-political sphere and the economic sphere, I must emphasize that these are three external forms. Inside these three external forms will live the intimate inner connections forged from one human soul to another. People will recognize each other more clearly than they do today. If, in place of antisocial desires, those social motives that are the basis of true social life are present, then the modern scientific way of thinking can at last become fully useful for humanity. Through this scientific way of thinking we will be able to properly master the external lifeless nature that appears as technology and other things. The ethical, moral forces that can be kindled by the spiritual will derived from spiritual science will take care that the results of technology are useful to human beings. An inner structure that carries people and forms human life will come into the external forms of the social organism. Without this inner structure we cannot develop a fruitful external social form.

That is what I wanted to mention to you today, that spiritual science as we think of it here is not in any way abstract, is not something floating in the clouds, is not, as some people claim, metaphysical. It is something that streams directly into human will and makes people more adept and more capable of living. This remains unrecognized by those who refuse to see the present need for our spiritual science. They will also refuse to see that something like the Waldorf School has been formed, not arbitrarily, but out of truly practical life.

Can we expect much from those people setting the tone today? This spring and summer I repeatedly mentioned in my social lectures (I only mention this as characteristic of much of the modern intellectual attitude) that among the issues of the working class is that, in the future, work must not be a commodity. In a neighboring city I spoke about the “commodity character” of work. I think that people need only the tiniest bit of common sense to understand the general intent in the words “commodity character.” This morning I received a newspaper published in that neighboring city. The lead editorial closes with the sentence, “I am confused by the sentence that ‘work must be freed from its true character’”⁴ Yes, that's possible today. Today it is possible for people who are unable to understand something so clearly related to modern culture as “commodity character” to make judgments about such things. Someone like this could not in an entire life have possibly heard of the “commodity character of human work.” How do such people live in the present time? When it is possible to become so out of touch with reality, it is no wonder that we cannot get together in modern social life.

This is not only possible for people such as the writer of this editorial, it is also possible for those people who think they know everything about practical life. It is possible for people who, at every opportunity, look down upon what appears to them to be idealistic. They do not speak about real life any differently than people who see a U-shaped piece of iron and are told it is a magnet. “No,” they answer, “this is used to shoe horses.” These modern people who wish to shut supersensible knowledge out of practical life are like the person who sees a horseshoe-shaped magnet only as a horseshoe. They do not think anything can be true that does not directly meet their limited powers of understanding.

Today there are many more people than we think who hinder social progress. There are many people who do not want to understand that we cannot simply say that the last four or five years have brought something terrible to the people of Europe—something more terrible than ever before existed in historical times. To this we must add that now things must occur out of a depth of thought that people have never before reached in the course of what we call history. We have come to a time in which people think completely abstractly. Most abstract are the political opinions and programs that existed at the beginning of the twentieth century and that grew out of a modern scientific education. People do not want to understand how abstract, how foreign are the means they wish to use to come to grips with life. People think that they are practical. For example, people see today that in world trade money runs through their fingers, that the German mark is worth less day by day. And from day to day we do exactly those things that, of course, cause the value of the mark to fall. “Practical” people have again taken the helm. So long as people do not see that truly practical life does not lie where they, in 1914, looked for it, but in the understanding of the ideals of life, so long will nothing get better. People today are not modest enough to admit that things will get better only if they come to a deepening in their insight. Goodwill will not do it alone, that is the cancer of our times. It will be necessary that people see more and more what the true basis of spiritual cognition is. Spiritual cognition, because it is based upon the development of the same powers that work in the formation of healthy human beings, can place them in social pedagogical life. What we need today is spirituality—not a naive spirituality, not a spirituality lost in the clouds, not a metaphysical spirituality, but true spirituality that affects practical life, true spirituality that can master the problems of life. We also need practical insight into life; we need to be in life, but in such a way that our view of life kindles a desire to bring this spirituality into life.

From a spiritual-scientific point of view, people must understand one thing, otherwise no progress will be possible in our unfortunate times. The axiom must be:

Seek the truly practical material life, but seek it such that it does not numb you to the Spirit working in it.

Seek the Spirit, but seek it not in supersensible lust, out of supersensible egotism; seek it because you want to become selfless in practical life, selfless in the material world.

Turn to the old maxim: Never Spirit without matter, never matter without Spirit!

Do this so that you can say, “We want to perform all material deeds in the light of the Spirit, and we want to seek the light of the Spirit in such a way that it develops warmth within us for our practical deeds.”

Spirit brought by us to matter,
Matter wrought by us to its revelation
Driving the Spirit out;
Matter receiving from us Spirit revealed,
Spirit forged by us back into matter—
These create that Living Being,
Bringing humanity to true progress,
Progress only longed-for
By the best desires in the depths of human souls.

• 1. Translators’ note: Lectures of 5/11/19, 5/18/19, 6/1/19, contained in A Social Basis for Primary and Secondary Education (GA 192), Waldorf Institute, Adelphi University, New York, 1975.
• 2. Translators’ note: In the Germany of 1919, many children finished formal schooling with the eighth grade and then entered an apprenticeship.
• 3. Translators’ note: The reader should be aware that the “visual aids” and “illustrative materials” meant here are to be understood as actual materials in the classroom, as distinct from a verbal or written description of the object of discussion. Prior to this time illustrative material was rarely used in the classroom, and it was a somewhat controversial innovation in 1919.
• 4. Translator’s note: Steiner used the German word Warencharakter (commodity character); the editor understood him to say wahren Charakter (true character). Their pronunciation is nearly identical.

In the face of facts that speak loud and clear, we do not need to prove that the social question is now one of the most burning public concerns. However, those who can observe these facts without prejudice can also see that much deeper human questions play into modern social demands than the problems usually associated with slogans. If you look beyond current academic activity and trends to social facts, you can see how deeper human questions in a certain respect spring from these social problems.

It is obvious that, for the most part, academic life stands by helplessly when confronted with these burning social demands. I need only mention two things to prove this helplessness. We know that in the course of recent cultural development, in addition to the other branches of science, a theoretical socio- or world economics has emerged. We know how the differing schools of thought have affected the area of world economics in the last centuries, particularly in the nineteenth century. We know that there was a mercantilist school, a physiocratic school and so forth, and we know how these different streams have attempted to understand social facts. They have attempted to discover how human social understanding can become a part of human willing, for example, in various governmental programs. However, we have seen that these different theoretical viewpoints have not resulted in any really thorough, fruitful social initiatives. The clearest proof of that is the form that world economic theory has taken. It has slowly withdrawn into a scientific observation of social life and world economics. It has withdrawn into a description of social facts.

Specifically, we see the newest efforts in this area developing into all manner of descriptions or statistical observations and such. However, we do not see anywhere an impulse that can really be carried into social will, that can be fruitful for the social activity of public life. The incapacity of world economic theories in this area is thus evident.

On the other hand, we see the growth of social ideas and social demands from a wide spectrum of the working class.

Certainly, we would have much to discuss if we wanted to speak about the historical development of these more-thanhalf-century-old social demands. Here we wish to take note of only one feature, of one characteristic of these demands. I wish to express it like this: There were also older efforts in this direction, efforts that did not simply rely upon theoretical contemplation, as has been done in world economics, but that were based upon the goals of people seeking a new social structure. Since the time of these efforts (we need only recall Fourier, Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc and so forth), a quite different element has entered into these contemplations. This can be characterized by a certain mistrust. Among the masses and their socialist leaders a certain antipathy is prevalent concerning everything that arises out of the spirit, out of contemplation, out of the human willing that should lead to a rejuvenation of social relationships.

Those whose feeling and thinking embody the intellectual impulses of modern times have much goodwill toward achieving social change. Regardless of that goodwill, the belief has arisen that all this has a utopian character. In spite of all the human inventiveness and goodwill, the belief has arisen that it is impossible to create impulses that will lead to practical changes in social life, to a truly practical reformation of social life. Disbelief in the human spirit and its social ideas has become the prevailing sentiment of the masses and their leaders.

Thus, something has come forth that people in these groups feel to be a foregone conclusion—so much a foregone conclusion that to fight against it is extraordinarily difficult. The conviction has arisen that on/y the means of economic production can stimulate a reformation. The conviction has arisen that, in a certain sense, the human will is powerless and must wait until the means of production themselves cause a different configuration in social life. It has become a habit to speak of everything created through thinking as an ideology, as something powerless in real life. It has also become habitual to speak as though only material relationships and changes are real, as though thinking emerges from these like a wisp of smoke. People speak of historical materialism because they see reality only in materialism, particularly in economic activity. People view what comes from the human spirit as something that rises like smoke out of what is real—in this case, economic activity—and forms a kind of ideological superstructure.

If we look at theoretical world economics, based as it is on the world view of conventional science, or at the thoughts of such thoroughly honest, creative personalities as Saint-Simon or Louis Blanc, whose work comes fully out of modern intellectual life, a question arises. We now ask, given what these two sides desire, is it so incomprehensible that a disbelief in true spiritual impulses has occurred?

No, it is not. If we look at the basic character of modern intellectual life we will find the main reason. The basic character of modern intellectual life has slowly become purely abstract, something foreign and removed from reality.

We must constantly note that attitudes arising from what intellectual life has become in the last centuries have created ethical and moral viewpoints. However, the question is, do these moral viewpoints have the power to affect outer reality? Do they have the power to be creative in outer reality?

Neither science nor moral points of view have been able to create a true bridge between what lives in people’s spirit and what lies in material or natural processes. We see that over time the concerns of the human soul, the concerns of the human spirit, have become the intellectual monopoly, the cultural monopoly, of those groups who have made this or that credo their own. Thus, scientific endeavors have slowly become unaccustomed to concerning themselves with spirit and soul. People believe they are free from prejudice, that they follow a completely unprejudiced science, when they limit scientific methods to what is sense perceptible. People believe these methods immediately go beyond the bounds of human cognition when they enter the spiritual realm, when they enter the supersensible realm. People think that they are unprejudiced when, in fact, they are only following those forces that arise out of the historical course of events.

Those religious groups who, due to historical development, have had a monopoly in creating dogmas concerning the essence of spirit and soul out of old traditions, concerning the essence of human immortality, were in a position to prevent scientific research into these things. These groups applied pressure upon research until it simply succumbed to the pressure and accepted the dictates of the credo. Slowly the sciences came to believe they followed their own lack of prejudice, their own objectivity, because they were no longer conscious that what they actually followed are the prohibitions of the Church.

This “objective” approach has limited itself completely to external, sensible reality and has not endeavored to examine spiritual life with the conscientious methods that have brought modern science such great triumphs. It has, nonetheless, been able to affect the realm of spirit and soul. Thus the realm of spirit and soul has become something foreign to life. Life, external reality, is measured with exact methods. However, what concerns spirit and soul has slowly lost all living concepts. Those of you who follow the usual, the respected, the official textbooks and lectures on psychology and such will find in them nothing sparkling with life. Spiritual life has become something disconnected from life.

The only thing that could be a basis for the spiritual attitude of such people as Saint-Simon or Fourier or Louis Blanc when they considered social questions has remained unfruitful because nowhere were the living effects of the human spirit upon social reality taken into account. People go around talking in abstractions. With normal modern intellectuality, we cannot refute the statement that social facts can be observed only through economics, that no steps can be taken to fulfill human social longings. With only these means, we can make no counter argument when people insist that nothing results from spiritual life that could lead to a true healing of social relationships, that we must leave social development to the means of production. Modern intellectual life has become abstract. In a certain sense modern intellectual life is an ideology. Thus those who are, in the widest sense, members of socialist circles believe that a//thinking must be ideological.

This is just what lies so heavily upon the souls of those who accept spiritual science. Spiritual science does not want to follow the same path taken by that burned-out academic science that has developed in modern times. Spiritual science wishes to lead people back to the true spirit. It wishes to lead people to an understanding of the true spiritual life to which they belong in just the same way that their bodies belong to physical reality, in the same way that through their material needs they are part of economic reality.

When we speak of real spirit today, when we attempt to speak of real spirit, we not only meet opposition, we meet mockery. We meet the kind of ridicule that derides all spiritual desires as pipe dreams or worse. We really meet modern disbelief when we say that what we mean as spirit cannot be comprehended with the usual powers of cognition that lead us through everyday life, through conventional science. We meet disbelief when we emphasize that to grasp and understand this spirit, it is necessary first to awaken powers of cognition that otherwise only sleep in human nature—in the same way that we awaken the usual powers of cognition in the developing child. Modern people will not admit that there could be something like an intellectual unpretentiousness, that there could be something like a further development of the inner human out of our childhood when we instinctively and dully step into life. They will not believe that we can awaken this later development to assist the normal powers of cognition, and that we can continue its development. But, it is not continued because modern intellectual life has resisted its continuance.

It is not our intent to speak in a vague way about spirit and its reality. Due to the spiritual development of the last centuries, it is easier to speak to the hearts and souls of people when we talk about spirit and spirituality in generalities instead of in a more definite manner. When people speak about spirit, they almost immediately think of spirit as an abstraction, something foreign to life. We might say that true spirit has become so foreign to them that they expect this spirit to reveal itself only in an occasional guest appearance.

Now I do not want to hold you up long with things common to the spiritualism to which modern thinking has fallen prey. In the end, however, what is this spiritualism other than the final decadent outstreaming of a desire for an abstract spiritual life! What we must understand is a true, concrete spiritual life to which human spirit can connect itself, and which we can grasp at every step in physical and cosmic reality. true spiritual life is not there to fulfill people’s desires for theatrical effects, to show itself in spiritualist seances or in other ways desired by abstract mystics. The science of the spirit cannot speak of a spirit that partakes of guest appearances that have nothing to do with external reality, and are called forth simply to convince passive people that spirit exists. The science of the spirit cannot speak of such a spirit. Spiritual science can speak only of the spirit that in truth participates in every material effect and every material event. It speaks of the spirit with which people can connect themselves in order to master external reality. Thus, I will primarily speak about the activity of the spirit we must turn toward if we wish to learn how the spirit, working through people, can have an effect in life.

We first need to look at the way the spirit gradually develops out of the growing human. The growing child presents us with one of the greatest riddles of the world—a riddle we in education continuously try to solve. People have recently brought even this amazing riddle to a particularly abstract, nebulous height. Recently, there has been much talk about recognizing the power of education. People have recently made many attempts to use various educational principles. All such attempts have failed. They will stand as evidence of the goodwill of their proponents, but in the face of the great, the intense demands of our lives, these attempts must fail if they do not arise from a recognition of human essence.

People will not recognize human essence if they attempt to understand it only through modern science, or by intellectually assimilating the observations gained through science. Human essence reveals itself only if we understand how to observe it. It shows itself only if we develop the capability to investigate that certain something that reveals itself with every day, every week, every year after human beings enter into physical existence through birth or conception. We must observe the specific stages in the life of young humans if we do not want to remain in abstractions, but instead want to understand the spiritually concrete activity in external reality.

People value these things much too little today. For the observer of human essence, the stage when children change teeth, around six or seven years of age, indicates a deep change in the totality of human nature. If you have an organ that can truly examine such things empirically, the way we can empirically observe physical experiments in laboratories or in the astronomical observatory, then you can see such things. When you examine the life of the soul before this stage, you find that during the time preceding the change of teeth, people are primarily imitators. The imitative element, a kind of intuitive dependence upon the environment, motivates their entire being until seven years of age. In the first seven years of our lives we learn everything through imitation, through the most strict conformity to what is in our environment, right down to our movements, our gestures, our intonation.

In extreme cases, we can easily observe such things. I wish to mention only one of the many cases that become obvious if you have any sense at all for such things in life. I could mention a hundred others. I knew a young child who limped. Even though there was nothing wrong, the child limped, and people could not get her to stop limping. The reason the child limped was that she had an older sibling who, due to a diseased leg, actually had cause to limp! This imitative principle that motivates people until the change of teeth is thus expressed in an extreme case.

The true observer sees that quite new forces enter into the human life of body, soul and spirit when the change of teeth is complete. Then, what children perceive in their environment does not motivate them as much. Instead, they are especially ready to believe, to accept, what they feel to be the opinion or the belief of those who, through age or bearing, they intuitively perceive as authorities.

Until the time of puberty, this acceptance, this automatic acceptance of authority, is like a law of human nature. If you wish to properly affect the human essence during this time, then you must turn to this intuitive principle of authority.

Those who, without prejudice, without some pet theory, observe the life of young people, those who work with facts, know how much it can mean for their whole life if children have someone they can look up to as an authority. You need only observe how people’s feelings about such an authority change! You need only observe what later in life results from these feelings toward authority! Everything that we develop as truly free independent democratic feelings in human social life, everything that we gain in true human understanding and human respect, is at heart a result of appropriate development under intuitive authority during the period from the change of teeth until puberty.

We should not meddle with such things through special programs. We should approach this area through purely empirical observation. Then we will discover what we need to think and feel when we receive the school child who has developed in imitation of the care—or the neglect—of the parents. We will see how we must work out of the principle of authority in school if we truly want to work appropriately. We can only be effective when we derive our pedagogical methods and develop our whole teaching activity out of a human understanding.

If you are not able to observe from year to year, from week to week how other demands develop out of the core of the child and rise to the surface, then you will not be able to work with human developmental powers, you will work against them. Educational material and methods must, in fact, meet these requirements of the developing child.

If you do not know how authority works, if you do not know the intimate interactions that exist between the authority and the growing child, then you will never be able to work positively in the education of children this age. I wish to mention a single concrete example. You know that due to certain programs and prejudices, there is now much discussion concerning visual aids. You are supposed to show the children everything. This often implies that you should teach the children only about things you can place before their eyes, or at least demonstrate to their intellect, so that they can immediately understand everything with their immature comprehension.

You need only look at the books that are to serve as guides for such teaching. Certainly, illustrative material is, within bounds, quite appropriate. But, what is appropriate within certain boundaries leads to error when we extend it beyond these boundaries. Visual aids—as I mentioned, you can see it in the guides—often lead to extremely materialistic triviality. People try to limit instruction to what children can understand, to what such people, in their simple-mindedness, believe is the maximum children can understand. However, they neglect something. They do not take into account what teaching out of authority means to human life. Individuals who are thirtyfive years old may, due to some event, suddenly remember that when they were seven, eight, nine or ten years old, they learned something in school from a highly regarded authority. They say to themselves, “I did not really understand it then. I only looked with high regard to that honored authority. When that honored authority said something, led something into my soul, I knew it instinctively. I did not know how I knew it, but I felt it was something valuable. I remembered it, perhaps only as words, but it lived in me for many years afterward. After many years, now that I have become mature, I recall what I learned long ago.” When people are mature, these recollections of things they accepted in youth upon simple authority now become a source of strength. They now know what it means that things they learned as children can first be fully understood as recollections in later life. In this way, we can give people living strength!

I wish to mention one other thing about the intimate workings between educational authority and the child. We want to teach the child certain things meant for a later period in life. Of course, the child does not understand these things. Thus, we clothe them in all kinds of allegories and pictures. Let us take a picture someone might think of, for instance, the picture of immortality. The teacher might say, “Here you have the cocoon of a butterfly. The animal is nestled within it. It will creep out, the beautiful butterfly will come out of the cocoon.” Now, the teacher might go further and say, “Just as the butterfly is in this cocoon, in the same way the immortal soul lies within your body. When you go through the gates of death, this immortal soul will appear in the spiritual world just as the butterfly will appear here. Remember how here in the physical world the beautiful butterfly comes out of the cocoon.”

You can make such a picture. It may touch the child. But, such a picture will not achieve what it should achieve if, as a teacher, you only have the consciousness that you are clever and the child is dumb, and that, therefore, you have to clothe in a picture what the child cannot yet understand. There are great intangibles in living human relationships. Regardless of what occurs between the intellect of the authority and the child’s intellect, something will happen in the child’s subconscious that comes from the discrepancy between the teacher’s disbelief in the picture and the intent to develop the child’s belief through the picture.

You need only observe how differently things occur—this is something paradoxical—when you yourself believe that the picture of the cocoon and the butterfly is not simply a picture, when you are clear that you do not make this picture, but the creative natural powers themselves make this picture. The one and only great artist, Natura, forms this picture. She carries her divinity within her in such a way that this picture expresses the same thing at a lower level as immortality expresses at a higher level. In other words, when you have complete belief in the picture, when it is not something made up for someone else, when it is your own inner belief, then something occurs in your telling of it to the child. Then, when it affects the child in the proper way, later in life the grown child’s soul will carry a true picture of immortality. Today we must not judge the things connected with the principle of authority by appearances. To really understand what occurs in people’s lives, we need, at the least, a careful study from the standpoint I will discuss in a moment. We need such a study to understand what to use in education during the period between the change of teeth and puberty.

Real capabilities of judgment, of free, independent reason, first appear in human nature after puberty. If we activate this independent reason too early, if we appeal too much to the child’s intellect before puberty, then we do not appeal to what can be given from one person to another through authority. Then we kill much of what we need to develop between the ages of six to seven and fourteen to fifteen, that is, during the time of elementary school.

Now we must ask, where will the teachers gain insight into the forces they must use, first when the child is an imitator, then when the child is between the change of teeth and puberty, and then in that stage of life after puberty? Our detractors can mock, they can ridicule what spiritual science means when it says that particular powers, higher powers of cognition, must be formed in human nature so that people can recognize the spiritual and its actions in the different ages of human life.

In my book How to Know Higher Worlds, 1 have described in detail how people can obtain these higher powers of cognition. The same thing is in the second part of my Outline of Occult Science, and in other books. I have shown how people can use common everyday cognition, common scientific cognition, as a basis to rise through three higher stages that I have called (do not be disturbed by the names, you have to use some common names) Imaginative cognition, Inspired cognition and Intuitive cognition.

We can obtain Imaginative cognition when we systematically do quite specific meditations that I describe in the abovenamed books, when we train thinking beyond the level of normal life and conventional science. Imaginative cognition first gives us the possibility of developing pictures in our soul life, pictures that are not spatial, not fantasy, but that represent spiritual reality.

People learn to recognize that, in the end, everything humans develop as ideas, as conceptions, as sense perceptions for normal life and for conventional science is connected to human physical existence. We learn to slowly disengage the life of the soul from simple bodily life as we increasingly undertake to raise our powers of thinking to a meditative activity. We rise to an Imaginative cognition that at first consists only of pictures, but that shows us reality the moment we further develop ourselves as I describe in the above-mentioned books. When the Inspiration (which we have first prepared ourselves to be capable of comprehending) enters from the spiritual world that is just as much around us as the physical world, then the effects of the spiritual world fill these pictures.

If we then rise to Intuitive cognition, we will meet spiritual beings in just the same way we meet physical beings in the physical world. Today I can merely mention this and must direct you to the books where I describe these things in detail. If we can really rise to what I call Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive cognition, then these stages of cognition are not phantasms, are not daydreams as our contemporaries, with their lack of spirituality, call them. When they are feeling kindly, they say at best, “Well, all right, the product of a sick mind!” However, they will judge differently if we only indicate the true basis, the real source of this higher knowledge—and I will do that today by referring to a characteristic I have mentioned before. Where in human nature do these forces lie that we must develop in life so that we can look into the spiritual world?

Think for a moment. We have certain forces that make us into imitative beings until the change of teeth, forces that, in a certain sense, later recede. These forces find no further use in normal modern social life—they recede. However, they remain connected with human nature. Again, there are the forces that act between the change of teeth and puberty to stimulate the inclination toward authority out of the soul-physical realm. These forces, which I described in connection with the intangibles living between the teacher and the children, are real forces in childhood, but they, too, later recede.

Furthermore, as human beings we have forces that are active from puberty until around the age of twenty that also later recede. (Of course, now we seldom see what we call youthful idealism, youthful motivations that lead to living ideals. At one time people perceived living ideals in the same way that we perceive external life.) These are the same forces that after puberty first form the foundation of true judgment and that need to be brought to a special level of development. They also recede after the age of twenty-one or twenty-two.

In the last centuries, human life has developed such that we only cultivate intellectual capabilities, scientific capabilities, the ability to observe natural and social things. To the extent that this development has taken place, those powers active in the first three stages of life have receded. We can, however, bring them forth again. Imaginative cognition is nothing more than those forces whose spiritual activity forms the human body and soul from puberty until the age of twenty. It is nothing more than those soul forces that, under the direction of my book How To Know Higher Worlds, we can bring forth out of the depths of human nature. The spiritual researcher brings forth again what has receded. Where it otherwise remains hidden, we bring it forth again so that it enters into consciousness. Then it develops Imaginative cognition.

It is more difficult to bring forth those human forces that are active from the change of teeth until puberty but that recede later in life and lie deep in the organism. However, through such exercises as I have described in my books, we can call them, too, into consciousness. These prove to be identical with forces that are active in children, but remain unknown and unnoticed by science. We learn how to master these forces. Through an Inspired cognition, they bring into our consciousness certain spiritual secrets of our surroundings. This is not a made-up force, not something that does not already exist in life. This is something that proves itself to be active during the most important developmental years. Spiritual research brings it forth again to become the basis of insight into the spiritual world.

Because they remain hidden from observation, the most difficult forces to bring forth are those forces that are active in human nature between birth, we can even say between conception, and the change of teeth. Those forces find their conclusion in the permanent teeth and later completely withdraw into the human organic system. Nevertheless, we can bring these forces forth after we have called forth the others.

We see that we now connect ourselves with these forces when we grasp them with our full being, these forces that actually gave us the life impulse. In a certain sense, we unroll in the first seven years of our life—we bring forth out of our deepest souls the actual impulse, which we recognize as spirit, that we received in the first stage of life. When we bring into our consciousness what has receded, then we have Intuitive cognition. We do not connect ourselves only with our own being, but with something in comparison to which our normal thoughts are absurdities. We connect ourselves with something that is one and the same as the Being of the World. We then recognize the spirit in us as connected to the Spirit of the World.

You see, teachers who understand human beings through spiritual science, who have the developing human before them, look at what the spirit forms out of this developing human. The teachers meet this developing human with their educational skills. The teacher working from spiritual science does not have in mind a pedagogy used to educate children according to abstract rules, as is normal today. For this teacher, each child is a riddle. What should come to life in each child is something the teacher must solve in a living way every day, in every hour. However, when the teacher acquires the viewpoint of this living, working spirit in the living development of the child, he or she absorbs a recognition of reality that does not remain in concepts, does not remain in abstract generalities, but permeates the will with spirit. Such a teacher really becomes a pillar of knowledge, and he or she will develop a truly living pedagogy because it comes from an understanding of the human being, from a recognition of the complete, whole person.

Spiritual science is nothing other than what we can create out of the forces that are spiritually active in the stages of human development. It is not some fantasy. The source for the development of higher spiritual powers does not come from just anything that might arise in people, but from the conscious apprehension of what works in the healthiest forces of growth and life in the first three stages of human development. In that we become spiritual researchers, we raise into the consciousness of our understanding of the world and of people what really causes our growth and development as human beings.

So closely related is Anthroposophy to the spiritual sword and shield of cognition! For that reason, spiritual science is not something we can take up simply through our intellect. Since we bring it forth out of the being and growth forces of the whole human, it permeates our whole being, our feeling and will. It becomes a basic human force. Immaturity and unconsciousness are concepts that lose their relevance through the activity of the spirit in human beings. We may not say that people lose their instinctive, basic forces when they consciously develop the spirit. No, this remains. The same basic strength that is otherwise present only in instinctive actions is present when the spirit permeates people in this way. The spirit really enters into the being of the teacher, into the effectiveness of the teacher, into those who are to develop social pedagogical forces in youth. What spiritual science is comes from the same source from which people themselves grow. Self-development is only a transformation of our growth forces.

You see, these are things, at least in their underlying principles, that modern people often regard much as people once viewed the science of Copernicus and Galileo. What most people once viewed as an absurdity has now become a matter of course. In the same way, the knowledge of the three stages of life, their basic forces and their transformation into Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition through spiritual science will become a matter of course.

Our age can notice that modern intellectual life (I have shown this in two examples) has become powerless in the face of social life and social desires. When modern people see that the intellectualism developed in the last centuries (abstract, foreign and removed from life) is not the only possibility, that there is also a science that comes from the transformation of growth forces, they will develop sympathy and interest. This spiritual science can understand the living spirit that does not play guest roles in life, but is present and active in life; and the human spirit, by connecting itself with that living spirit, develops social pedagogical strength.

Why (again we put this question) are we so seldom able to transform into social will what we receive in ideas, what we develop in ideas? How is it that such disbelief has arisen that people speak only of ideology when they refer to the power of the spirit?

The period that is just behind us was a time of great triumphs for modern science. Those great scientific triumphs could arise only when people first turned away from what was within them and devoted themselves to the activities of nature and to the scientific method. Those who are spiritual researchers will certainly recognize the conscientiousness, the exactitude, of modern scientific methods, and will also recognize the fertility of these methods within their areas. They will certainly not go into a simplistic, unsympathetic criticism of limited and bounded material knowledge. However, we must be clear about one fact of experience that people do not observe today. People do not observe it because they can see, completely correctly from at least one point of view, that scientific methods are well suited to give a picture of natural phenomena. Because scientific methods work so well in this realm, people are not inclined to ask how this experience, derived in this way, affects the whole essence of humanity.

Concerning observations of nature and the recognition of natural laws, people accept only what their senses believe and their intellect can process. They consciously shut out everything that comes from their feeling and will life. What they understand about nature does not affect the will and feeling life. Thus, many people who view the entire situation without prejudice speak about modern science and its effects differently than those who simply accept all the great scientific triumphs.

If we look at the human essence, the picture we can achieve through the scientific method has something fatalistic about it—it is something that fills only our intellect, but does not touch our will. If we use the scientific method in popular or scientific thinking about social life, then social life in a sense ebbs away, falls apart. Just as something finely ground runs through a sieve, true social life slips past our observation when we approach it only with modern scientific methods. We can see how strict causal scientific thinking fails the moment it is applied to the social realm or general external society. I want to give an example of this: There is perhaps no other book in a much-debated area that so beautifully develops exact scientific thinking as Das Werden der Organismen, eine Widerlegung der Darwinschen Zufallstheorie (The development of the organism—a rebuttal of the Darwinian theory of chance), by the well-known biologist, Oskar Hertwig. We can offer only the highest praise for this book’s attempt to characterize conventional scientific insights into the theory of evolution.

A short time after Hertwig’s book appeared, he also published something about social, legal and political issues, issues concerning general society. It would be impossible to think of something more dilettantish and incompetent than this firstrate biologist’s stroll through an area generally encompassed by the concept “social life”!

There are hundreds, thousands, of such examples. They all show what we can directly observe, namely, that even the highest devotion to natural scientific knowledge causes us to fill our consciousness with ideas that are actually the content of an ideology that cannot pulse into our feeling and will. These ideas remain unfruitful in feeling and willing.

I want to expressly emphasize that in considering such things, it is not my intention to go in the reverse direction. I do not wish to contend that the way of thinking of the vast majority of modern people is simply the outcome of the scientific way of thinking. No, quite the opposite. The last centuries have brought forth a certain kind of common thinking. Those who really study history, not simply a fable convenue, a convenient story, see how human life, particularly social life right down to the peasantry, has changed in the last three or four centuries. What has come forth as natural scientific thinking is, in my opinion, only an external expression of what has generally taken hold of human soul life. I do not wish to call human thinking and feeling a product of modern scientific attitude and knowledge, but just the opposite. I see in the scientific attitude and knowledge only the external symbol, the revelation, of what is the general direction of human thinking, the general attitude toward life and external reality.

What has developed is the basis for a thinking and feeling foreign to life, for a spiritual life foreign to life. If, on the other hand, you consider what forms the basis of spiritual science (I have just shown that this spiritual science is only a transformation of the human forces of growth and development), then you can rise to see a real world in these things. Then what we take in with spiritual knowledge enters into our powers of feeling and will. This is the only healthy way for people now and in the near future to come to a truly social willing. It is necessary for the future to infuse this social willing with the knowledge that can come from the spiritual.

We would not say that everyone can effortlessly achieve the development of higher spiritual powers. We certainly do not at all contend that. Certainly, only a few people will be able to recognize the secrets of spiritual life through direct vision of the highest spiritual facts. This recognition is first connected to a certain inner courage, a certain boldness. Human will, human intellectual power, all human soul forces must develop so that they extend beyond the normal level of strength. These soul forces must grow so they can grasp the spiritual world that flits past ordinary human cognition, the spiritual world people cannot usually perceive. In a certain sense, we must reach for the finest among everyday capacities. The spirit does not come in the same way that external realities come. The spirit comes when you connect yourself with it in the same way that you feel pain, that you feel desire and distress that flood through your soul, as something very real. In this way you will feel, experience and recognize the spiritual through a flooding in your soul, only you know that it is not something simply subjective like desire and distress. It is so intimately connected with the soul, like desire and distress, joy and sorrow, yet it streams into our souls as something foreign, something spiritual. At first, it will be something unexpected. We expect something quite different in external life. Thus, we must accept this spiritual life in sorrow and pain, since we receive and perceive around us a life that we do not expect. No one comes into the spiritual world who does not struggle for this entrance, step by step, through sorrow and pain. This, though, only concerns research of the spiritual world.

In contrast, we must say that the capacities to understand what spiritual research has to say comprise only ordinary healthy common sense. For spiritual researchers, it is unimportant simply to assure others that they love truth and see what they speak of as spiritual. Rather, spiritual researchers can speak so that people with healthy common sense can understand their path of thinking. Of course, their thinking is formed from spiritual vision. However, people can recognize that it has the same inner logic they learn from external, sense-perceptible reality. Thus, if it is not limited by opposing prejudices, healthy common sense can judge whether spiritual researchers talk nonsense. Healthy common sense can judge from the way spiritual researchers speak whether the spiritual world is open to them, whether they really see into it. Thus, what individual spiritual researchers bring into social life is itself a social pedagogical force.

If people accustom themselves to acquiring understanding, to acquiring the healthy common sense to be able to perceive the convincing power of what spiritual science reveals as the true reality of human life, then they will develop another social force. This social force will lead people to one another and will bring into the structure of the social organism things that cannot come into it any other way. These things form a more intimate recognition of one person by another, an ability to accept other people, a germination of true social impulses.

This is what develops in human interactions based upon true spiritual cognition and everything connected with it. People will feel how social pedagogical forces can enter social will when they begin to extend what we can draw from human growth and development into the living social organism. Only then will they understand that human essence embodies social organs. People will be able to bring into the social organism what they understand of the spirit working in the natural organism.

People will not come to true social pedagogical strength until they are able to draw social pedagogical forces from the motives, from the impulses, of spiritual knowledge!

Where does our understanding of spiritual scientific knowledge come from? It comes from those diminished forces that made physical and spiritual adults from little children. We do not need to let those forces lie fallow, we need to use them. We need only to apply our own humanity to external social order for a true social pedagogical strength to develop in the education of children. Then, too, that indefinable but very real activity in education that lies in human relationships, in human interactions, will develop between us. If we will only understand what meets us from the personality of the whole person, if we will only understand what mysterious things lie in each person, how individuals can, in their sub- and superconsciousness, grow beyond themselves, then a social pedagogical strength will exist in human interactions. We will so interact with one another that the being of one raises and carries the being of the other. In short, social pedagogical strength flows out of spiritual recognition, not only for the education of children, but for the totality of human life.

You see, the idea of the threefold social organism does not, in truth, come from some program, like so many social ideas. It comes from a new spiritual direction for which, on the one side, modern people have only very little sympathy. But, on the other side, they yearn for it with all of their subconscious desires and instincts. They thirst for it. Much more than people consciously believe, they carry in their subconscious a thirst for the spiritual. Today we see that people clothe their social desires in all sorts of formulas, forms and demands. What is characteristic about them, if you look at what meets us from people’s well-meaning will forces, from correct rightful needs, is that they cannot generally be understood. They cannot be so understood that genuinely constructive activity could arise from them.

This is quite characteristic, and it is very remarkable the way those people who have worked for years on ideas and programs for social reform, the way all their thinking, everything they have derived from their spiritual life, fails. Recently a letter from a well-known social revolutionary appeared in the newspapers, a letter from Kropotkin to George Brandes. In it Kropotkin describes the bleak situation in eastern Europe. In his way, he really describes the whole European situation, and concludes, “Yes, the only thing we can hope for is that we are given bread and tools to produce bread.”

You see a social revolutionary, who has for years attempted to think about his ideas, has come so far as to state that the world is to be organized so that the tools to produce bread shall be properly provided, so that people can be fed. In the end, only an abstract cry for bread and tools results! Disbelief in abstract spirituality, in his own spirituality!

We have to see through the cry for bread, to see that it is nothing other than a modern cry for the spirit. Only out of an understanding of the true spirit can come the social strength of will that can properly provide tools for bread production. The point is not to cry for programs, but to turn rightly to human faculties, to turn to the strength of human activity. That means to correctly understand people, so that they find their proper place in life and can work in the most efficient way to feed their families, to work for the whole life of their fellow human beings.

We must make the social question a question of humanity in the broadest sense. Otherwise, no good will come of it. It is possible to improve things when we recognize that the social question is complete only when we perceive it out of the spirit.

What we strive for in the threefolding of the social organism arises out of a new spiritual direction, out of a recognition of the demands that are so nebulous today. Although they are correct, they are nonetheless nebulous. What we strive for arises out of the recognition that an unconscious longing for this new spirituality lives in these demands. Everything we recognize as decadence in the striving for spirituality is an expression of people’s still clumsy search for the spirit. Certainly, one of the most decadent forms of this search is spiritism, or false mystical paths. This decadent direction has come out of centuries, we can even say in this case millennia, of education through which people have not learned to search for the spirit in reality itself, in the reality to which they belong. The striving toward spirituality has been carried to such abstract heights because dogmatic monopolies wanted to usurp it.

Spiritual science wants to prove that the same powers that can grasp external nature, if we develop them further as I described today, can also penetrate spiritual life. Then people will not strive toward an abstract spirit, toward a spirit created for the occasional gratification of human consciousness, but toward a spirit that is in reality, that is ome with material life. We do not recognize the spirit when we look at matter simply as matter, and say that it is only matter and the spirit is somewhere else. No. Those who seek the spirit through abstract formulations and think they should seek it along the path of spiritism, for instance, in the dark corners of life, have not yet achieved the correct human relationship to the spirit.

We have achieved the proper human relationship to spiritual life only if we seek such a spirit as we can see in nature around us, particularly in human life itself, in the life of children, in social connections. We have achieved the correct relationship when we know that in everything around us, even in economic life, the spirit is active, and when we search in such a way that we connect this spiritual activity to ourselves. A proper seeking of the spirit exists only when people want to understand the spirit, only when they love the spirit that is active in themselves. It exists only when people can form a bridge between the spiritual reality in themselves and the spiritual reality in the world. Only through such a spirit and through the knowledge of such a spirit can we develop the social pedagogical strength that we need for human life now and in the near future.

Thus, we can only repeat time and again:

May the dark unconscious desires living in human hearts and minds flame up into the conscious life of soul, so that humanity may find, in this age when social concern has become so bright, the true spiritual power of the world with which inner spiritual powers of humans can connect.

Out of this union between the World Spirit and the human spirit will flow the best source of social pedagogical strength for human life.

After a short discussion, Dr. Steiner concluded with the following:

Now, of course, those who speak out of spiritual science will not be of the opinion that what has come forth recently as science, philosophy or art needs to be thrown away simply because it has led to the false path mentioned by the previous speaker. However, the essence of spiritual science should be that the one-sided human activities that arose in the last centuries out of modern scientific assumptions should give up their one-sidedness and merge into a general stream of all-encompassing life.

You will not expect that I am in any way against what science, philosophy or the arts have generated within their rightful boundaries, if you follow not only my spiritual scientific books but also, for example, my description of the progress of philosophy in The Riddles of Philosophy. 1f you look at the way I have interpreted the essence of art—the Goetheanum in Dornach that houses the School for Spiritual Science, which, in its external appearance, attempts to represent spiritual science—you will not see an opposition to the modern developments in science, philosophy or art, to the extent that they occur within their proper limits. The one-sidedness that has come forth in these areas seems to me even to be something necessary. Life develops in contradictions, even polar contradictions. Thus, if we introspectively consider history, we can see that periods when certain activities were one-sided alternate with periods when these activities flow into a certain universal, consonant, harmonious life activity. However, it is the fructification of modern scientific views, of philosophical considerations and modern artistic trends that spiritual science should particularly accentuate.

Let us take, for example, to use something that I could barely mention in the lecture, many of the more modern trends in art. Certainly, we can easily make fun of such trends in art. But, you see, even though certain things like expressionist art appear incomplete to our souls, nevertheless we must say that they are only a preliminary, often clumsy attempt to come to something that is really in accordance with life. In the last century, we have slipped into a kind of intellectuality. Intellectuality is unfruitful. In social life and in art, what has been the consequence? The necessary consequence has been that although people have wanted to be artistically active, they have slipped into naturalism, into the simple imitation of nature.

The simple imitation of nature can never be art in an absolute sense. I say that not in deference to the art critics, but simply because when someone so strongly imitates what they see in external nature, they will never reach nature. If you have a sense for it, you will always prefer nature over what simply imitates nature.

An outrageously inept thing often occurs (you will excuse me if I bring up this trivial example) that is the expression of outrageously bad taste. You show people, let’s say, an apple that you find particularly pleasing, beautifully polished, and so forth. Then, you say, “It’s as though it were made out of wax!” It is impossible to think of something more outrageously inept than when someone compares something from nature with an artificial thing, regardless of how good this artificial thing is! For the simple reason that we can never reach true nature in art, we must reject absolute naturalism.

It is something quite different if, in the expressionist manner, the artist wants to embody something that people experience beyond what is simply natural—even though the embodiment may be clumsy. However, to recognize that clumsy beginnings should be neither over- nor undervalued, you must be open to what is today often expressed by a slogan, but which, in connection with human life, people do not correctly understand.

The following may sound like a paradox. I certainly belong among those who have the highest admiration for Raphael. However, from my point of view the only people who have a right to admire Raphael are those who are convinced that if someone today were to paint just as Raphael painted, it would be impossible and inconsistent with modern times. It would not be art that we could accept today as contemporary art. This may sound paradoxical. However, what has occurred during human development belongs to its particular stage. You must really take this whole idea of development seriously. What developed since the middle of the fifteenth century in science, philosophy and art is completely justifiable as an educational impulse in developing humanity. However, human development has today reached a stage where it must strive for the other pole. As humans, we needed to go through a one-sided science for a time. We needed to absorb the thoughts of this science, to come to a mood of soul brought about by our noticing the powerlessness of these scientific thoughts. This powerlessness calls forth a counterforce in the active soul life, the counterforce toward spiritual recognition, toward a spiritual viewpoint.

If you take Lessing’s thoughts earnestly, that history is an education of humanity, then you can best come to grips with such things. Thus, today in certain areas people’s prejudices allow what spiritual science has to offer to enter directly into social pedagogy, that is, into external reality.

It has been possible to make artistically visible in the Dornach building what moves us inwardly, to express in forms what moves us inwardly. I might also mention that only very recently has it been possible to attempt to found a school upon real pedagogy. Our friend Emil Molt integrated the founding of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart into a modern industrial undertaking (people are beside themselves in ridicule over this), into the Waldorf cigarette factory in Stuttgart. Here we can now build a unified elementary school upon what can result for pedagogy from an understanding of the spiritual point of view. I held the pedagogical seminar for the faculty of the Waldorf School, and I must say that this belongs among the most beautiful of things I could imagine as a task for myself. There, a pedagogy was founded that does not exist to fulfill norms imagined as necessary to train people, but rather a pedagogy that results from a true understanding of the whole person, that is, the body, soul and spirit of human beings. This is a pedagogy that paradoxically makes life more difficult for the teacher than it would be with simple, normative education.

Those who believe in standardized education, who preach programs, who give educational principles, know how to instruct. However, those who teach directly from life can only receive impulses to observe what really occurs in the developing human being, from year to year, from week to week, from month to month. Even though it may be a large class, you must continuously be in living interactions. You must understand what it means not to practice a learned pedagogy from memory, but to invent at each moment the individual methods that this child needs.

What is effective in life cannot be based in memory or in habit. What we have in our memory, what we practice from memory in our human activities, what we practice out of habit is something that in all cases is simply a cliché. What results from spiritual life can never be a cliché!

There have been times, and probably still will be, when I have lectured on the same theme week after week. I do not think anyone can say I have ever spoken about the same theme in exactly the same way. When you speak from the spirit, your concern is to create something immediate. It is not at all possible in the normal sense to memorize what comes from the spirit, because it must continuously develop in direct contact with life. For those who are active out of the spirit, the simple memorization of spiritual knowledge is about the same as if someone were to say, “I am not going to eat today because I ate yesterday; why should I eat again today? My body will continue simply on the basis of what I ate yesterday.” Yes, our physical organism is such that it continuously renews itself. This is also true for the spirit. The spirit must also be within this vigorous life. The true spirit must at all times be a creator. In the same way, education carried by the spirit must be a continuously creative art.

There will be no blessing upon our elementary schools, and there will also be no healing in our school systems, until education becomes a continuously living, creating art, carried by true love and those intangibles of which I have spoken.

We can see in all areas how necessary it is in the face of the unconscious and subconscious demands of modern humanity (and in the near future it will be even more necessary) to take what people wish to make into a comfortable intellectual program and go from that to a truly productive experience of the spirit. This will be much less comfortably achieved than a great deal of what people today call spiritual life. However, this will become the social pedagogical force that we need. On the one hand, it is true that after so many years of devotion to scientific thinking the innermost souls of modern people long for a direct recognition of the spirit. It is on the other hand true that social demands cry for a spiritual deepening. It is true that the subject of my lecture is not something thought of haphazardly, but something heard from contemporary human development. However, you must first educate yourselves to it and connect yourselves with it.

In conclusion, I would like to point out one other thing that is particularly necessary now. Because everyone thinks that some fruitful philosophical life can result from subjective opinions, we must indicate how to understand questions today. I want to do that with an example.

Many years ago I held a lecture in a southern German city in which I spoke about the Christian saints. There were two priests at the lecture. Since they could say nothing against the content of the lecture, they came to me and said, “We don't have anything to say against the content of what you said today. However, we do want to say something about the fact that you claim to speak for people whose path leads them to your way of thinking. We, however, speak for all people.” This is what they said. I, of course, addressed them with their proper title. You must always be polite. I said, “You see, Reverend, you believe that you speak for all people. I find that natural and reasonable since, subjectively, that is the case. However, whether I speak, or whether you believe that you speak, for all people doesn't mean anything, particularly not in the present when individual human lives exist so much in the whole of society. Today we must learn not to define our tasks by subjective arbitrariness, but to develop them individually out of objectivity and objective facts. And so I ask you, Reverend, if you think that you speak for all people, then look at the facts. Does everyone go to church?” There they could not say yes! You see, thus speak the facts. I then said to them, “I speak for those who no longer come to you in the church.” That is what the facts teach us today.

Things do not merely guide us in the direction of an objection. Rather, we must see the facts as they are and let them form the argument. It is something quite natural that people think that they speak for everyone.

What is important today is that (although we can know that the majority of people consciously resist real spiritual scientific impulses) if we can understand the revelation, we can also know that these impulses have the effect of a subconscious cry, “Make whole again what has split into philosophy, science, art, religion and the other areas, especially the social areas, of culture!”

However, we can only make these things whole according to their own spirit. Only then do things speak to us not out of the abstract, but out of a concrete unity where the true spirit that we find in all individual things is the one spirit in everything.

However, because the unifying spirit is something concretely alive, we cannot understand it by encompassing it with abstract concepts, with ideology. We must resolve to seek the living spirit. We can only seek it, though, if, with a certain intellectual modesty, we find the bridge between the sleeping inner human forces that are of a spiritual nature, and the spirit that lives in nature, in human life, in the whole cosmos. Thus, in concluding, I wish to emphasize once again that we must take into account the longing that lives in the depths of the human soul to bind the human spirit with the Spirit of the World. Much of the solution to humanity’s burning questions lies in this bond between human spirit and World Spirit.

I do not want to arouse the belief that we can solve every problem. However, humanity is on the path to a partial resolution of riddles that have always been presented to it. In this partial resolution lies true human progress in that we recognize how the spirit lives in everything, and how this spirit can light the way if we awaken the spirit in ourselves. The greatest, most important contemporary social tasks live in this recognition, and it will lead to healing when wider and wider circles realize this.

I consider it a particular honor to be able to speak to you about the relationship of my work in spiritual science to your pedagogical work. You will allow me to make two introductory remarks. The first is that I will, of course, need to clothe my thoughts in apparently theoretical words and ideas, since to discuss points of view, we need words. However, I expressly note that I do not speak theoretically. I would not even speak about today’s topic if I did not direct a portion of my activity toward the practical, particularly concerning educational methods and their effectiveness. Thus, what I wish to bring to you today comes directly from practice.

The second thing I would like to say is that at present spiritual science is extremely controversial. I therefore can quite understand (especially because I represent spiritual science) that there may be many objections today because its methods are, in many cases, foreign to modern points of view. Perhaps we can help make spiritual science more understandable through the way we introduce it and attempt to make it a true living force in such an important practical area as education.

Can we name any areas of life that are unaffected by pedagogical activities and interests? At an age when children can develop themselves into everything possible, we entrust them to those who act as teachers. Teachers can provide what humanity needs only through the warmest participation in the totality of human life. When I speak about the special topic of spiritual science and pedagogy, I do this because, particularly now, the science of the spirit should become an active part of life. Spiritual science should be present to reunite the separate human cultural interests that have been driven apart in the last centuries, particularly in the nineteenth century. Through spiritual science, through a concrete point of view, we can unite the specialties without becoming paralyzed by the requirements of specialization. Today, there is also a very important reason to think about the relationship of spiritual science to pedagogy: education has influenced all human thinking and activity, including modern science and its great achievements.

More than people know, the scientific way of thinking that has led to such glorious results in science has won influence over everything we do, particularly over what we do in education. Although I am unable to develop the foundations of spiritual science here, I wish to take note of one thing, namely, the relationship of the scientific method to life.

Think, for example, about the human eye, this marvel through which we experience the outside world in a particular realm of the senses. The eye, this marvelous organ, is constructed so as to see the world and at the same time (I speak comparatively) always to forget itself in this seeing. In a sense, when we really want to investigate this instrument of external vision, we must completely reverse the standpoint of observation that modern science can only approximate. While seeing, we cannot at the same time look back at the essence of our eyes. We can use this picture to relate the scientific method to life. In modern times we have carefully and conscientiously developed the scientific method so that it gives the different sciences an objective picture of the external world. In doing this, we have formed a basic mood of soul such that we forget the human self in the scientific observation of the world, such that we forget everything directly connected with human life. Thus, it has come about that the more we develop in a modern scientific sense, the less we can use this science to see what is human.

The desire of spiritual science to bring about that reversal of observation that again turns to human beings arises from an understanding of science that goes beyond the understanding conventional science has of itself. This reversal can only occur when people go through those stages of soul life that I have described in How 7o Know Higher Worlds, and in an abbreviated form have indicated in the second part of An Outline of Occult Science.These are the processes that really carry this life of the human soul beyond normal life, and beyond the normal scientific world.

To come to such a manner of looking at things, you must have what I would like to call intellectual modesty. In a recent public lecture here, I gave a picture of what is necessary. Suppose, for example, we observe a five-year-old child. Suppose we put a book of Goethe’s lyrical poetry in the hands of a fiveyear-old child. This book of Goethe’s poems contains a whole world. The child will take the book in hand and play around with it, but will not perceive anything that actually speaks to people from this volume. However, we can develop the child, that is, we can develop the soul powers sleeping in the child, so that in ten or twelve years the child can really take from the volume what it contains. We need this attitude if we are to find our way to the science of the spirit. We must be able to say to ourselves that even the most careful education of our intellect, of our methods of observation and experimentation, brings us only so far. From there on, we can take over our own development. From that stage on, we can develop the previously sleeping forces ourselves. Then we will become aware that previously we stood in the same relationship to the external nature of our spirit-soul being, particularly the essence of our humanity, as the five-year-old child to the volume of Goethe's lyrical poetry. In essence and in principle, everything depends upon a decision for intellectual modesty, so that we can find our way to the science of the spirit.

We achieve the capacity to really observe ourselves, to observe the human being, when we practice specific thinking, feeling and willing exercises developed to make thinking independent, to train the will, when we become increasingly independent from physical willing and thinking. If we can observe the human being, then we can also observe what is so extremely important, the developing human. Today, there is certainly much talk about the spirit, talk about independent thinking. The science of the spirit cannot agree with this talk for a simple reason. Spiritual science develops inner spiritual techniques to grasp and understand concrete spirituality, not the spirit about which people speak nebulously as forming the basis of things and people. Spiritual science must go into detail concerning the essence of the human being.

Today, we want to speak about the essence of the developing human. I would say that people speak quite abstractly about human individuality and its development. However, they are quite correctly conscious that the teacher especially needs to take the development of this human individuality into account. I only wish to point out that insightful teachers are very clear about how little our modern science of education is able to identify the orderly stages of human development. I would like to give two examples. The oft-mentioned Viennese educator Theodor Vogt represented the reformed Herbartian school of thought. He said that we are not advanced enough in our understanding of human history to derive a view of child development from human historical development in the same way biologists derive the individual human embryonic development from the development of the species. The pedagogue Rein repeated this point of view. It culminates in accepting that today we do not have research methods of any sort that could identify the basis of human development. The development of such capacities as those I have just cursorily mentioned (you can read more in my books) enables us to approach the riddle that meets us so wonderfully when we observe how, from birth onward, an inner human force increasingly appears in every gesture. In particular, we can see how it manifests through speech, through the relationships of people with their surroundings, and so forth. Usually people observe the different manifestations of human life much too superficially, both physiologically and biologically. People do not form a picture of the whole human being in which the body, soul and spirit intertwiningly affect one another. If you wish to teach and educate children as they need, you must form such a picture.

Now those who, strengthened by spiritual scientific methods, observe the developing child will find an important developmental juncture at approximately the time of the change of teeth, around six or seven years of age. There is an oft-quoted saying that nature makes no leaps. To a certain degree, this is quite correct. However, all such views are basically one-sided. You can see their correctness only if you recognize their one-sidedness, for nature continuously makes leaps. Think about a growing plant, to name only one example. Fine. You can use this saying, nature makes no leaps. However, in the sense of Goethe’s law of metamorphosis, we must say that, despite the fact that the green leaf is the same as the colorful flower petal, nature does make a leap from the leaf to the colorful petal, and yet another leap from the petal to the stamen, and another quite special leap to the fruit. We do not get along well in life if we abstractly adopt the point of view that nature, or life in general, does not make leaps. And this is particularly true with people. Human life flows along without leaps, but in this other sense, there are such leaps everywhere.

Around the age of six or seven there is a particularly important turning point that has far-reaching consequences for human structure and function. Modern physiology does not yet have a correct picture of this. Something also occurs in people in the spirit-soul realm. Until this time, human beings are fundamentally imitative beings. The constitution of their body and soul is such that they totally devote themselves to their surroundings. They feel their way into the surroundings. They develop themselves from the center of their will so that they mold the force lines and force rays of their will exactly to what occurs in their surroundings. More important than everything that we can bring to the child through reprimanding words, through preaching in this stage, is the way in which we ourselves behave in the presence of the child. Since the intangibles of life act much more strongly than what we can clearly observe on the surface, we must say that what the child imitates does not depend only upon the observable behavior of people. In every tone of speech, in every gesture that we as teachers use in the presence of the child during this stage, lies something to which the child adapts itself. As human beings we are much more than we know by the external reflection of our thoughts. In life we pay little attention to how we move a hand, but the way we move a hand is the faithful reflection of the whole state of our souls, the whole reflection of our inner mood. As adults with developed soul lives we pay little attention to the connection between the way we step forward with our legs, the way we gesture with our hands, the expressions on our faces, and the will and feeling impulses that lie in our souls. The child, however, lives into these intangibles. We do not exaggerate when we say that those in the young child’s surroundings who inwardly strive to be good, to be moral, who in their thinking and feeling consciously intend to do the child no wrong, even in what is not spoken—such people affect the child in the strongest possible manner through the intangibles of life.

In this connection we must pay attention to what, if I may express myself so, actually lies between the lines of life. In that we slowly find ourselves caught in the web of a more materialistic life, particularly in relation to the intimacies of existence, we become accustomed to paying relatively little attention to such things. Only when we value such things again will a certain impulse enter pedagogy, an impulse particularly necessary in a time that refers to itself as social, as a socially minded period.

You see, people cannot correctly value certain experiences if they do not take into account observations of the spirit-soul nature that is the foundation of human beings. I am speaking to you about everyday events. A despairing father comes, for example, and says, “What shall I do? My child has stolen something!” We can, of course, understand how a father can despair about such things. But, now we attempt to understand the situation better. We can say, “Yes, but what were the complete circumstances?” The child simply took some money from the drawer. What did the child do with the money? The child bought something for a friend, candy, for instance. So, the child did not steal for selfish reasons. Thus, we might possibly say the child did not steal at all. There can be no talk about the child having stolen. Every day the child has seen that Mother goes to the drawer and takes money out. The child has seen that as something normal and has only imitated. This is something that has resulted from the forces that are the most important at this stage, imitation and mimicking. If you direct the child properly in this sense, if you know how to properly direct the child’s attention, then this attention will be brought to all sorts of things that will have an important influence at this stage.

We must be quite conscious that reprimands and preaching at this stage do not help. Only what affects the will can help. This human characteristic exists until the moment when the remarkable physiological conclusion of childhood occurs, when “hardening” makes its final push and the permanent teeth crystallize out of the human organism. It is extremely interesting to use spiritual scientific methods to look at what lies at the basis of the developing organism, what forms the conclusion, the change of teeth. However, it is more important to follow what I have just described, the parallel spirit-soul development that arises completely from imitation.

Around the age of seven, a clear change in the spirit-soul constitution of the child begins. We could say that at this age the capacity to react to something quite differently than before emerges. Previously, the child’s eye was intent upon imitating, the child’s ear was intent upon imitating. Now the child begins to concentrate upon what adults radiate as opinion, as points of view. The child transforms its desire to imitate into devotion to authority. 1 know how unpleasant it is for many modern people when we make authority an important factor in education. However, if we wish to represent the facts openly and seriously, programs and slogans cannot direct us. Only empirical facts, only experience can be our guides. We need to see what it means when children have been guided by a teacher they can look up to because this teacher is a natural authority for them. That the developing human can take something into its thoughts, can live into something, because the respected adult has these thoughts and feelings, because there is a “growing together” between the developing being and the adult being, is of great importance in the development of the child. You can know what it means for the whole later life of the child only when you (I want to say this explicitly) have had the luck of having been able to devote yourself to a natural authority in the time between the transformation at around six or seven years of age and the last great transformation around the time of puberty, at about fourteen or fifteen years of age.

The main thing is not to become mired in such abstractions, but instead to enter into this very important stage of life that begins around the age of six or seven years and concludes with puberty. At this age the child, having been properly raised or spoiled through imitation, is turned over to the school by the parents. The most important things for the child’s life occur in this period. This is quite true if we keep in mind that not only each year, but each month, the teacher must carefully discover the real essence of developing children. This discovery must be not only general, but as far as possible in large classes, the teacher should also carefully consider each individual child. After the child enters school, we see the residual effects of the desire to imitate alongside the beginning devotion to authority until around the age of nine (these things are all only approximate, of course). If we can properly observe the interaction of these two basic forces in the growing child, then the living result of this observation forms the proper basis not only for the teaching method, but also for the curriculum.

Excuse me if I interject a personal remark, but I encountered this very question when the Waldorf School was formed this year. Through the understanding accommodation of our friend Emil Molt and the Waldorf-Astoria firm in Stuttgart, we were able to bring a complete unified elementary school to life. We were able to bring to life a school that, in its teaching methods and in the ordering of its curriculum, is to result entirely from what the science of the spirit can say about education. In September of this year it was my pleasure to hold a seminar for the faculty I assembled for this school. All of these questions came to me in a form very fitting to our times. What I want to talk to you about now is essentially an extract of everything given to the faculty during that seminar. These teachers are to guide this truly unified elementary school according to the needs of spiritual science and contemporary society.¹

We concerned ourselves not only with teaching methods, but particularly with creating the curriculum and teaching goals from a living observation of growing children. If we look at the growing child, we will find that after the age of six or seven much still comes from that particular kind of will that alone makes the child’s desire to imitate possible to the degree I described previously. It is the will that forms the basis of this desire to imitate, not the intellect. In principle, the intellect develops from the will much later. That intimate bond between one human being, the adult teacher, and another human being, the growing child, is expressed in a relationship between will and will. Thus, we can best reach the child in these first elementary school years when we are able to properly affect the will.

How can we best affect the will? We cannot affect the will if during these years we emphasize outer appearances too strongly, if we turn the child’s attention too strongly to material life. It turns out that we come particularly close to the will if in these first years we allow education to be permeated by a certain aesthetic artistry. We can really begin from this aesthetic artistry. We cannot, for example, begin with that teaching of reading and writing that does not arise from the proper connection between what we teach and the powers that come from the core of the child’s soul. The letters and characters used in reading and writing consist of something quite removed from life. You need only look back at earlier characters (not those of primitive peoples, but, for example, those of the highly developed Egyptian culture) to see that writing was still quite artistically formed. In the course of time, this has been lost. Our characters have become conventions. On the other hand, we can go back to the direct primary relationship that people once had to what has become writing. In other words, instead of giving abstract instruction in writing, we can begin to teach writing through drawing. We should not, however, teach through just any drawings, but through the real artistic feeling in people that we can later transform into artistically formed abstract characters for the growing child. Thus, you would begin with a kind of “written drawing” or “drawn writing,” and extend that by bringing the child true elements of the visual arts of painting and sculpture.

Psychologists who are genuinely concerned with the life of the soul know that what we bring to the child in this way does not reach simply the head, it reaches the whole person. What is of an intellectual color, what we permeate only with intellect, and particularly with convention, like the normal letters of reading and writing, reaches only the head. If we surround the instruction of these things with an artistic element, then we reach the whole person. Thus, a future pedagogy will attempt first to derive the intellectual element and the illustrative material from the artistic.

We can best take into account the interaction of the principles of authority and imitation if we approach the child artistically. Something of the imitative lies in the artistic. There is also something in the artistic that goes directly from subjective person to subjective person. What should act artistically must go through the subjectivity of people. As people with our own inner essence, we face the child quite differently when what we are to bring acquires an artistic form. In that way, we first pour our substance into what must naturally appear as authority. This enables us not to appear as a simple copy of conventional culture and the like, but humanly brings us closer to the child. Under the influence of this artistic education, the child will live into a recognition of the authority of the teacher as a matter of course.

At the same time, this indicates that spirit must prevail since we can teach in this way only when we allow what we have to convey to be permeated by spirit. This indicates that spirit must prevail in the entire manner of instruction, that we must live in what we have to convey. Here again I come to something that belongs to the intangibles of teaching life. People so easily believe that when they face the child they appear as the knowing, superior person before the simple, naive child. This can have very important consequences for teaching. I will show this with a specific example I have used in another connection in my lectures. Suppose I want to convey the concept of the immortality of the soul to a child. Conforming myself to the child’s mood of soul, I give the example by presenting a picture. I describe a cocoon and a butterfly creeping from it in a very pictorial way. Now, I make clear to the child, “In the same way that the butterfly rests in this cocoon, invisible to the eye, your immortal soul rests in your body. Just as the butterfly leaves the cocoon, in the same way, when you go through the gates of death, your immortal soul leaves your body and rises to a world that is just as different as the butterfly’s.”

Well, we can do that, of course. We think out such a picture with our intellect. However, when we bring this to the child, as “reasonable” people we do not easily believe it ourselves. This affects everything in teaching. One of the intangibles of education is that, through unknown forces working between the soul of the child and the soul of the teacher, the child accepts only what I, myself, believe.

Spiritual science guides us so that the picture I just described is not simply a clever intellectual creation.We can recognize that the divine powers of creation put this picture into nature. It is there not to symbolize arbitrarily the immortality of the soul in people, but because at a lower level the same thing occurs that occurs when the immortal soul leaves the body. We can bring ourselves to believe in the direct content of this picture as much as we want, or better, as much as we should want the child to believe it. When the powers of belief prevail in the soul of the teacher, then the teacher affects the child properly. Then the effectiveness of authority does not have a disadvantage, but instead becomes a major, an important, advantage.

When we mention such things, we must always note that human life is a whole. What we plant into the human life of a child often first appears after many, many years as a fitness for life, or as a conviction in life. We take so little note of this because it emerges transformed. Let us assume we succeed in arousing a quite necessary feeling capacity in a child, namely the ability to honor. Let us assume we succeed in developing in the child a feeling for what we can honor as divine in the world, a feeling of awe. Those who have learned to see life’s connections know that this feeling of awe later reappears transformed, metamorphosed. We need only recognize it again in its transformed appearance as an inner soul force that can affect other people in a healthy, in a blessed, manner. Adults who have not learned to pray as children will not have the powers of soul that can convey to children or younger people a blessing in their reprimands or facial expressions. What we received as the effect of grace during childhood transforms itself through various, largely unnoticed, phases. In the more mature stages of life it becomes something that can give forth blessing.

All kinds of forces transform themselves in this way. If we do not pay attention to these connections, if, in the art of teaching, we do not bring out the whole, wide, spiritually enlightened view of life, then education will not achieve what it should achieve. Namely, it will not be able to work with human developmental forces, but will work against them.

When people have reached approximately nine years of age, they enter a new stage that is not quite so clearly marked as the one around the age of seven years. It is, however, still quite clear. The aftereffects of the desire to imitate slowly subside, and something occurs in the growing child that, if we want to see it, can be quite closely observed. Children enter into a specific relationship to their own I. Of course, what we could call the soul relationship to the I occurs much earlier. It occurs in each persons life at the earliest moment he or she can remember. This is approximately the time when the child goes from saying, “Johnny wants this,” “Mary wants this,” to saying “I want this.” Later, people remember back to this moment. Earlier events normally completely disappear from memory. This is when the ensouled I enters the human being. However, it has not completely entered spiritually. We see what enters the human soul constitution spiritually as the experiencing of the I that occurs in the child approximately between nine and ten years of age. People who are observers of the soul have at times mentioned this important moment in human life. Jean Paul once so beautifully said that he could remember it quite exactly. As a young boy, he was standing before a barn in the courtyard of his parents’ home, so clearly could he recall it. There, the consciousness of his I awoke in him. He would never forget, so he told, how he looked through the veil at the holy of holies of the human soul.

Such a change occurs around the age of nine, in one case clearly, in another case less clearly. This moment is extremely important for the teacher. If you have previously been able to arouse in the growing child feelings tending in those directions of the will called religious or moral that you can bring forth through all your teaching, then you need only be a good observer of children to allow your authority to be effective when this stage appears. When you can observe that what you have previously prepared in the way of religious sensitivities is solidly in place and comes alive, you can meet the child with your authority.

This is the time that determines whether people can honestly and truly look from their innermost depths to something that divinely courses through the spirit and soul of the world and human life. At this point, those who can place themselves into human life through a spiritual point of view will, as teachers, be intuitively led to find the right words and the right behavior. In truth, education is something artistic. We must approach children not with a standardized pedagogy, but with an artistic pedagogy. In the same way that artists must be in control of their materials, must understand them exactly and intimately, those who work from the spiritual point of view must know the symptoms that arise around the age of nine. This is the time when people deepen their inner consciousness so that their Iconsciousness becomes spiritual, whereas previously it was soulful. Then the teacher will be able to change to an objective observation of things, whereas previously the child required a connection to human subjectivity. You will know, when you can correctly judge this moment, that prior to this you should, for example, speak to children about scientific things, about things that occur in nature, by clothing them in tales, in fables, in parables. You will know that all natural objects are to be treated as having, in a sense, human characteristics. In short, you will know that you do not separate people from their natural surroundings. At that moment around the age of nine when the I awakens, human beings separate themselves from the natural environment and become mature enough to objectively compare the relationships of natural occurrences. Thus, we should not begin to objectively describe nature before this moment in the child’s life. It is more important that we develop a sense, a spiritual instinct, for this important change.

Another such change occurs around eleven or twelve years of age. While the child is still completely under the influence of authority, something begins to shine into life that is fully formed only after sexual maturity. The child’s developing capacity to judge begins to shine in at this time. Thus, as teachers we work so that we appeal to the child’s capacity for judgment, and we allow the principle of authority to recede into the background. After about twelve years of age, the child’s developing capacity for judgment already plays a role. If we correctly see the changing condition of the child’s soul constitution, then we can also see that the child develops new interests. The child previously had the greatest interest, for example, in what we (of course, in a manner understandable to a child) brought in describing natural sciences. Only after this change, around eleven or twelve years of age, does this interest (I understand exactly the importance of what I say) develop into a true possibility of understanding physical phenomena, of understanding even the simplest physical concepts.

There can be no real pedagogical art without the observation of these basic underlying rhythms of human life. This art of education requires that we fit it exactly to what develops in a human being. We should derive what we call the curriculum and educational goals from that. What we teach and how we teach should flow from an understanding of human beings. However, we cannot gain this understanding of human beings if we are not able to turn our view of the world to seeing the spiritual that forms the basis of sensible facts. Then it will become clear to us that the intangibles that I have already mentioned really play a role, particularly in the pedagogical art.

Today, where our pedagogical art has developed more from the underlying scientific point of view, we place much value upon so-called visual aids (this is the case, although we are seldom conscious of it).² I would ask you not to understand the things I say as though I want to be polemic, as though I want to preach or derogatorily criticize. This is not at all the case. I only wish to characterize the role that the science of the spirit can have in the formation of a pedagogical art. That we emphasize visual aids beyond their bounds is only a result of the common way of thinking that has developed from a scientific point of view, from scientific methods. However (I will say this expressly), regardless of how justified it is to present illustrative materials at the proper time and with the proper subjects, it is just as important to ask if everything we should convey to the child can be conveyed by demonstration. We must ask if there are no other ways in which we can bring things from the soul of the teacher to the soul of the child. We must certainly mention that there are other ways. I have, in fact, mentioned the all-encompassing principle of authority that is active from the change of teeth until puberty. The child accepts the teacher’s opinion and feeling because they live in the teacher. There must be something in the way the teacher meets the child that acts as an intangible. There must be something that really flows from an all-encompassing understanding of life and from the interest in an all-encompassing understanding of life. I have characterized it by saying that what we impart to children often reveals itself in a metamorphosed form only in the adult, or even in old age.

For example, there is one thing people often do not observe because it goes beyond the boundaries of visual aids. You can reduce what you visually present the child down to the level the child can comprehend. You can reduce it to only what the child can comprehend, or at least what you believe the child can comprehend. Those who carry this to an extreme do not notice an important rule of life, namely, that it is a source of power and strength in life if you can reach a point, for example at the age of thirty-five, when you say to yourself that as a child you learned something once from your teacher, from the person who educated you. You took it into your memory and you remembered it. Why did you remember it? Because you loved the teacher as an authority, because the essence of the teacher so stood before you that it was clear to you when that teacher truly believed something, you must learn it. This is something you did instinctively. Now you have realized something, now that you are mature. You understand it in the way I have described it—"I learned something that I learned because of a love for an authority. Now the strength of maturity arises through which I can recall it again, and I can recognize it in a new sense. Only now do I understand it.”

Those who laugh at such a source of strength have no interest in real human life, they do not know that human life is a unity, that everything is connected. Thus, they cannot value what it means to go beyond normal visual aids, which are completely justifiable within their boundaries. Such people cannot value the need for their teaching to sink deeply into the child’s soul so that at each new level of maturity it will always return. Why do we meet so many inwardly broken people these days? Why do our hearts bleed when we look at the broad areas in need of such tremendous undertakings, while people nonetheless wander around aimlessly? Because no one has attended to developing in growing children those capacities that later in life become a pillar of strength to enable them really to enter into life.

These are the things that we must thoroughly consider when we change from simple conventional pedagogical science to a true art of education. In order for pedagogy to be general for humanity, teachers must practice it as an individual and personal art. We must have insight into certain inner connections if we want to understand clearly what people often say instinctively but without clear understanding. Today, with some justification, people demand that we should not only educate the intellect. They say it is not so important that growing children receive knowledge or understanding. What is important is that they become industrious people, that the element of will be formed, that real dexterity be developed, and so forth. Certainly, such demands are quite justifiable. What we need to realize though, is that we cannot meet such demands with general pedagogical phrases or standards; we can only meet them when we really enter into the concrete details of human developmental stages. We must know that it is the artistic aesthetic factor that fires the will, and we must be able to bring this artistic aesthetic factor to the will. We must not simply seek an external gateway to the will. That is what we would seek if we sought out people only through physiology and biology. That is what we would seek if we were not to seek them through the spiritual element that expresses itself in their being and expresses itself distinctly, particularly in childhood. There is much to be ensouled, to be spiritualized.

In our Waldorf School in Stuttgart, we have attempted for the first time to create something from what is usually based only upon the physiological, at least in its inner strength and its methods. Namely, we have attempted to transform gymnastics into the art of eurythmy. Almost every Saturday and Sunday in Dornach you can see a eurythmy performance. Eurythmy is an art form in which we use the human organism, with its possibilities for inner movement, as an instrument. What you see as an art form also has the possibility of ensouling and spiritualizing human movements that otherwise occur only in gymnastics.

Thus, people not only do what may affect this or that muscle, they also do what naturally flows from this or that feeling of the soul into the movement of the muscles, into the movement of the limbs.

Because it is based upon a spiritual scientific vitalization of life, we are convinced eurythmy will be significant for both pedagogy and healing. We are seeking the necessary healthy relationship between inner experiencing, feeling and expression of soul, and what we can develop in people as movement. We seek to develop these natural connections. We seek through the recognition of the ensouled and spiritualized human being what people usually seek only through physiology or other external facts. We can also affect the will not only when we apply the most common of arts to the principles of teaching in the early elementary school years. We can equally affect the will in a very special way when we allow soul-spirituality to permeate something also thought to cultivate the will, namely, gymnastics. However, we must recognize soul-spirituality in its concrete possibility of effectiveness, in its concrete form.

Thus, we must recognize the connections between two capacities of the human soul. Modern psychology cannot see this because it is not permeated by spiritual science. If we can look objectively at that important moment that I have described as occurring around nine years of age, we will see, on the one hand, that something important happens that is connected with the feeling capacity, the feeling life of the child. People look inwardly. Quite different feeling nuances occur. In a certain sense, the inner life of the soul becomes more independent from external nature in its feeling nuances. On the other hand, something else occurs that we can see only through a truly intimate observation of the soul. Namely, we learn because we still have what we might call an organically developed memory. Jean Paul noticed this and expressed it brilliantly when he said that we certainly learn more in the first three years of our life than in three years at the university. This is so because memory still works organically. We certainly learn more for living. However, around the age of nine a particular relationship forms between the life of feeling and the life of memory that plays more into conscious life.

We need only to see such things. If we cannot see them, then we think they are not there. If you can really see this intimate relationship between the life of feeling and memory, then you will find, if you pay attention, the proper standpoint from which to appeal to memory in your teaching. You should not appeal to memory any differently than you appeal to feeling. You will find the proper nuances, particularly for teaching history, for everything you have to say about history, if you know that you must permeate your presentation of what you want the children to remember with something that plays into their independent feelings. You will also be able to properly order the teaching of history in the curriculum if you know these connections. In this way, you can also gain a proper point of view about what the children should generally remember. You will be able to affect the feeling to the same extent you intend to affect the memory, in the same way you previously affected the will through artistic activity. Slowly, you will gain the possibility, following this stage of life, of allowing will and feeling to affect the intellect. If, in education, we do not develop the intellect in the proper way out of will and feeling, then we work in a manner opposing human developmental forces, rather than supporting them.

You can see that this whole lecture revolves around the relationship of spiritual science to pedagogical art, and how important it is to use spiritual science to provide a true understanding of human beings. In this way we obtain something from spiritual science that enters our will in the same way that artistic talents enter the human will. In this way we can remove ourselves from a pedagogy that is simply a science of convention, that always tells us to teach in this or that manner, according to some rules. We can transplant into the essence of our humanity what we must have in our will, the spiritual permeation of the will, so that from our will we can affect the developmental capacities of the growing child. In this manner, a truly effective understanding of human beings should support education in the spiritual scientific sense. The developing human thus becomes a divine riddle for us, a divine riddle that we wish to solve at every hour. If, with our art of teaching, we so place ourselves in the service of humanity, then we serve this life from our great interest in life.

Here at the conclusion, I wish to mention again the standpoint from which I began. Teachers work with people at that stage of life when we are to implant all the possibilities of life into human nature and, at the same time, to bring them forth from human nature. Then they can play a role in the whole remainder of human life and existence. For this reason we can say there is no area of life that should not, in some way or another, affect the teacher. However, only those who learn to understand life from a spiritual standpoint really understand life. To use Goethe’s expression, only those who can form life spiritually will be able to form life at all. It seems to me that the most necessary thing to achieve now is the shaping of life through a pedagogy practiced more and more in conformity with the spirit. Allow me to emphasize again that what I have said today was not said to be critical, to preach. I said it because, in my modest opinion, the science of the spirit and the understanding that can be gained through it, particularly about the essence of humanity, and thus about the essence of the growing child, can serve the art of education, can provide new sources of strength for the pedagogical art.

This is the goal of spiritual science. It does not desire to be something foreign and distant from this world. It desires to be a leaven that can permeate all the capacities and tasks of life. It is with this attitude that I attempt to speak from spiritual science about the various areas of life and attempt to affect them. Also, do not attribute to arrogance what I have said today about the relationship of spiritual science to pedagogy. Rather, attribute it to an attitude rooted in the conviction that, particularly now, we must learn much about the spirit if we are to be spiritually effective in life. Attribute it to an attitude that desires to work in an honest and upright manner in the differing areas of life, that wishes to work in the most magnificent, the most noble, the most important area of life—in the teaching and shaping of human beings.

Discussion Following the Lecture

W: The speaker says that he listened to Dr: Steiner’s explanation concerning pedagogy with great interest and that the same could be extended to art. He mentions Ferdinand Hodler’s words that what unites people is stronger than what divides them. He then continues—

What unites us all is just that spirituality of which Dr. Steiner has spoken. Modern art also seeks this spirituality again and will find it in spite of all opposition.

I would like to mention something else. We can follow the development of children through their pictures. We often see pictures that children have painted. These pictures tell us something, if we can understand them. I will relate an experience that L, as an art teacher, have had in teaching.

I had a class draw pictures of witches. Each child expressed in the picture of the witch the bad characteristic that he or she also had. Afterward, I discussed this with the class teacher, and he told me that what I saw in the pictures was completely correct. My judgment, based upon the pictures, was completely correct.

Now a short remark concerning the way we can view modern art, the way we must view it. I can show you by means of an example. In front of us we have a blackboard. I can view this blackboard with my intellect, which tells me that this blackboard has four corners with two pairs of parallel sides and a surface that is dark and somber. My feelings tell me something else. My feelings tell me that this black, hard angular form gives me the impression of something heavy, dark, harsh, disturbing. What I first think of in seeing this blackboard, what first comes to mind, is perhaps a coffin.

It is in this way that we must understand modern pictures, no longer through reasoning, but through feeling. What do I feel in this picture, and what thoughts come to mind? We must teach children not so much to see what is externally there, but more to feel.

X: I find myself speaking now due to an inner need. In particular, I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to the lecturer for his beautiful words and for the pictures, ideas and thoughts that he unrolled before our eyes. His words have affected me extremely positively because they come from ideas with which I have concerned myself time and again for many years.

I did not know what “spiritual science” meant. Now I see quite clearly that a close connection exists between spiritual science and pedagogy. This is now my complete conviction. His words have also quite positively affected me since he demonstrated a certain development throughout the complete presentation, the development we see in the Herbart-Ziller school to which the lecturer also made reference.

The lecturer also referred to certain stages of development in children, and this causes me to make a short remark.

He has described stages in such a way that I am convinced such stages really exist. We find that Herbart also defined such stages. Already in 1804 Herbart showed, in a very interesting work concerning aesthetic form in education, what should be, what must be really important in education. From this he created the theory of stages, which Ziller carried further. These stages were to a certain degree plausibly described by Vogt in Vienna.

However, reading about all these stages had still not convinced me of their reality, of their existence, as the lecturer, Dr. Steiner, did in speaking today. For that I wish to express particular thanks.

Now one thing more. You have certainly felt that everything depends upon one thing, upon something that surely must lie heavily upon our souls, including my own. Everything depends upon the personality of the teacher. This comes out quite clearly throughout the whole lecture, with warmth, depth and responsibility. Time and again it made me particularly happy that Dr. Steiner emphasized this with complete insight and certainty. Thus, he has also shown us what a great task and responsibility we have if we wish to continue in our profession as teachers. I am generally in complete agreement with all the pictures of life he has presented. You have spoken from what I myself have experienced, thought and felt for decades. I wish to again express my most heartfelt thanks to the lecturer for his remarks.

Y: The first speaker has already expressed to a large extent what I wanted to say about how we should live into the child through art.

Now, I would like to say something somewhat critical. Dr. Steiner said that we should replace gymnastics as we now have it in the school with eurythmy. I have seen some of the eurythmy performances and understand their intent. However, I do not believe that we may use eurythmy alone in the school. What does eurythmy develop? I think that all these dancing movements ignore the human upper body, the formation of muscles. However, it is precisely this that is important to working people, and most of our elementary school students will become working people. Through eurythmy we will produce undeveloped, weak muscles, weak chest muscles, weak back muscles. The leg muscles will be strongly developed, but not those of the upper arms. They will be undeveloped and weak. We see just this weakness already today in so-called girls gymnastics, where the tendency is already to lay too much value upon dancing. Where the strength of the upper arms is demanded, these muscles fail. These girls cannot even do the simplest exercises requiring support of the arms. However, this is much less important to girls than it is to boys in their later work. If we take eurythmy and leave aside physiological gymnastics—the parallel bars, the high bar, rope climbing—then I fear that the strength people need in their work may suffer. What I wish to say is that we can teach eurythmy, and the children will receive an aesthetic training, but it should not be eurythmy alone. What pleased me at the performances in Dornach was the beautiful play of lines, the harmony of the movements, the artistic, the aesthetic. However, I would doubt that these eurythmy exercises can really play a part in making the body suitable for working. I would like to hear a further explanation if Dr. Steiner desires to have only eurythmy exercise, if he desires to deny school gymnastics, based in physiological facts, its rightful place. If we were to deny those physical exercises based upon an understanding of the human body their rightful place, then I would be unable to agree completely with the introduction of eurythmy into the schools.

Dr. Steiner: I would first like to say a few words concerning the last point so that misunderstandings do not arise.

Perhaps I did not make this clear enough in the lecture, since I could only briefly discuss the subject. When we present eurythmy in Dornach, we do this, of course, as an artistic activity, in that we emphasize just what you referred to as being pleasant. In that we emphasize what can be pleasant, in Dornach we must, of course, present those things meant more for viewing, for an artistic presentation. In the lecture I wanted to indicate more that in viewing eurythmy people would recognize that what they normally think of as simply physiological (this is somewhat radically said, since gymnastics is not thought of as only physiological), what is primarily thought of as only physiological, can be spiritualized and ensouled. If you include eurythmy in the curriculum (when I introduce a eurythmy performance, I normally mention that eurythmy is only in its beginning stages), and if today it seems one-sided in that it particularly develops certain limbs, this will disappear when we develop eurythmy further. I need to mention this so as not to leave the impression that I believe we should drop gymnastics.

You see, in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, we have a period of normal gymnastics and a period of eurythmy, consisting of more than you see in an artistic presentation. Thus, we take into account the requirements that you justifiably presented.

What is important to me is that along with the physical, the physiological that forms the basis of gymnastics, we add the spirit and soul, so that both things are present. Just as people themselves consist of a totality in the interaction of body, soul and spirit, what is truly the soul, recognizable for itself, also works in the movements that people carry out in gymnastics and such. We are not at all concerned with eliminating gymnastics. Quite the opposite. It is my desire that gymnastics be enriched with eurythmy. We should not eliminate one single exercise on the parallel bars or high bar. We should leave out nothing in gymnastics. However, what eurythmy attempts is that instead of asking how we can handle this or that muscle from the physiological point of view, the question becomes how does a soul impulse work? In other words, alongside what already exists, we add something else. I do not at all wish to criticize what already exists, but rather to describe briefly what spiritual science fosters in the way of permeating things with spirit and soul. I agree with your objection, but it is my desire to show that bringing the soul element into gymnastics can originate from the science of the spirit.

Z: Mr. Z describes how the principle that Dr. Steiner has developed would be extremely educational and fruitful for the school.

If people were to consider how schools now handle things, they would have to say that this does not correspond to the stages described by Dr. Steiner. Goethe once said that children must go through the cultures of humanity to develop their feeling life. If we want to connect with these valuable words from Goethe and make them fruitful, we should have methods that are completely contrary to the ideas we have used for years. The second thing I would like to mention is that in drawing, we always begin with lines and figures. If we look at the drawings of the cave dwellers, we must realize that they did not have any instruction in drawing at all. I think that we can learn a great deal for teaching drawing to our children from the first drawings and paintings of those primitive people. Regarding singing, we now begin with the scale, as if that was the natural basis for singing in school. However, if we study the history of music, we will immediately see that the scale is an abstraction to which humanity has come only over many centuries. The primary thing in music is the triad, the chord in general. Thus, our singing instruction should much more properly begin with chords and only later come to scales. For other subjects, such as geography and history, I think we should pay much more attention to how primitive people first obtained this (I dare not say science), this knowledge. We could then continue in the same way. For example, we could present geography beginning with interesting drawings of the trips of discovery to the New World, and so forth. Then the children would show much, much more interest because we would have enlivened the subject instead of presenting them with the finished results as is done today in the dry textbooks and through the dry instructions—“obstructions.”³

Dr. Steiner: It is now much too late for me to attempt to give any real concluding remarks. I am touched with a deep sense of satisfaction that what has come forth from the various speakers in the discussion was extremely interesting, and fell very naturally into what I intended in the lecture. It’s true, isn't it, that you can comprehend in what, for example, you can see in Dornach, in what we present in the various artistic activities in Dornach, that something is given that reflects the fundamental conviction of spiritual science.

Now the gentleman who just spoke so beautifully about how we can educate for artistic feeling rather than mere viewing, would see that spiritual science artistically attempts to do justice to such things. He would see that in Dornach we attempt to paint purely from color, so that people also feel the inner content of the color, of the colored surface, and that what occurs as a line results from the colored area. In this regard, what is substantial in spiritual science can work to enliven much of what it touches today. The remarks about the Herbartian pedagogy were extremely interesting to me, since in both a positive and negative sense we can learn much from Herbart. This is particularly true when we see that in the Herbartian psychology, in spite of a methodical striving toward the formation of the will, intellectualism has played a major role. You must struggle past much in Herbartian pedagogy in order to come to the principles that result from my explanation today.

Regarding the last speaker, I agree with almost everything. He could convince himself that the kind of education he demands, in all its details, belongs to the principle direction of our Waldorf School, particularly concerning the methods of teaching drawing, music and geography. We have put forth much effort, particularly in these three areas, to bring into a practical form just what the speaker imagines. For instance, in the faculty seminar we did a practice presentation about the Mississippi Valley. I think the way we prepared this presentation of a living, vivid geography lesson that does not come from some theory or intellectuality, but from human experience, would have been very satisfactory to the speaker. In place of a closing word, I therefore only wish to say that I am extremely satisfied that so many people gave such encouraging and important additions to the lecture.

• 1. Translators’ note: The needs of society are to be understood as both the requirements of the Department of Education and the inherent needs of a more humanly formed social organization.
• 2. See note, p. 87.
• 3. Translators’ note: This is a word play in German: Lejtfiden—Leidfiden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The revelation of the divine from heavenly heights,
And peace to human beings on earth who are of good will!²

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

• 1. Ruprecht: in the European tradition, the Moorish helper of St. Nicholas, who carries a black sack and administers symbolic punishments to children who have been bad during the past year.
• 2. A free rendering of the angels’ words to the shepherds (Luke 2:14).

Dear children!¹ Last time I was able to be here, I told you how glad I am when our dear friend Herr Molt comes to pick me up in Dornach, where the school for big people, for grown-ups, is being built.² Then I can be with you again for a little while and see what you are doing.

And why am I so glad when Herr Molt comes to bring me here? Because it makes me think, “Now I am going to the school that was founded for our dear children”—that is, for you who are here because you long to become capable people who are ready for life.

Because I have only been here for a short time, I have not been able to see much yet—just the tiny little folks in the first grade, and the eighth grade—but what I did see gave me great pleasure. I saw how patiently and lovingly the first grade teacher had helped the children make some progress, and I was privileged to spend a very nice lesson with the eighth grade students. They were hearing about what human history tells us of how human beings on earth are involved in an evolution, an ongoing progress, that is driven by the spirit: Something that lives in human history gives us the desire to work on into the future. The spirit in which this was being conveyed to the souls of our dear young friends in the eighth grade was very beautiful. I am looking forward to seeing all the other classes, too. I am always pleased when I see how what our friend Herr Molt planted here is beginning to develop.

You entered this school when the fall was approaching. At that time we tried to think about what we would experience here and what we wanted to foster—love for each other, love for our teachers, love for God, who speaks to us from everything. And now, while you have been enjoying what your teachers presented to you each morning, you have also been experiencing what comes up out of the earth, what the spring draws out of it. You have seen the trees growing green. And now we remember what we hear when we go out into the woods. We hear the songbirds, and we are glad.

But today we have also heard something else, something for which I am especially thankful. We have heard you, under the direction of your teachers, express something that comes from inside of you. We can hear the birds singing out in the woods, and we can also hear what you have expressed to us, but there is a difference between them.

We are glad when we hear the little birds singing. But we know that something else is present when we hear what you perform for us. This is something that we call the human soul. It is your human souls that speak to us and sing to us. This is what human beings make out of what speaks to them out there in nature. In the woods, we hear the birds, but when you sing many other things that are heard come toward us out from the human soul.

But there are also other things out there in nature. You see how the plants grow and the trees turn green. All of this is called forth by the light. Light floods the entire universe. Light and warmth are what call everything up out of the earth, all those things that delight your eyes and hearts. What sounds in your ears, brought to you through the patience and persistence of your teachers, what travels through the world as light and then enters your eyes—we hear all of this resounding from you, not only when you sing and dance, but also when you tell what you have learned to calculate and what you have learned about everything that is human. In your souls, this turns to light. And just think what the plants would be without the sun. They would not be able to come out of the ground. They would always remain roots that would not be able to develop flowers, and it would be dark. This is what it would be like for you if you went through the world without ever finding a school where you could learn something. You would be like a plant that never finds the sun. The soul finds its sun in people from whom it can learn something.

This is why we are so glad that a school like this has been founded as a result of Herr Molt’s insight, and why you are so glad to be able to be in a school that you love. Seek the light of the soul, just as the plants seek the light and warmth of the sun!

I do not want to always say the same things to you, because I also do not want to always hear the same things when I come, but there is one thing that I want to hear from you again and again. You must answer me; this is what I am most curious about. And so I ask you, children, do you still love your teachers? [“Yes!” shout the children.] That is what I want to hear from the majority of you. That is what you are meant to take up into your souls. Love for your teachers will support you as you go out into life. Again and again, each time I come here, I would like to experience that you have made progress in learning, but I would also like you to show me that you have continued to love your teachers. You can be sure that in the great building that is being built for grown-ups in Dornach, where big people are meant to learn something, we all think about the Waldorf School here, and we think of it with love and joy. There are a lot of people who are thinking of the Waldorf School with love today, and they are thinking, “How good and capable these people will grow up to be, since as children they were filled with love for their teachers.”

Oh, there is something I must tell you—Frau Steiner sends her greetings, since she cannot be here today.

There is a spirit that is always meant to prevail here, a spirit that your teachers bring to this place. From the spirit of the cosmos, they learn to bring this spirit here to you; they take in what St. Paul said with all of their souls. The spirit of Christ prevails throughout our school; whether we are doing arithmetic, reading, writing, or whatever we do, we do it with the attitude that the Christ awakened in us:

“I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”³

This is the spirit that is meant to prevail here, and it will do so through what your teachers bring to you with love, patience and endurance. May it also prevail through what lives in your souls!

Be with this spirit when you are in your class, and think of it when you leave. Be glad in your souls that you are coming back to the Waldorf School where the sun is lit for you, the sun that people need for life.

If there is someone among you who does not pay attention, there should be one of you who can go to that person and lovingly say, “Hey, hard work and paying attention get us up the mountain of life. Upward, friend! You should always be going up the mountain of life.”⁴ This is how each of you should help the friend who falters a little—all of you for each one, all for one, one for all, lovingly. Love needs to be present among you, for each other and for your teachers. This is something we want to cultivate as part of the good spirit of the Waldorf School.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner had suggested that the students gather at the school for a brief celebration instead of the monthly day off from school that was the custom in Baden-Württemberg. The mood of the course of the year was to form the background for this event and the classes were to show each other what they had been working on in recitation, drama, music, and eurythmy, or in foreign languages, gymnastics, and so on. Rudolf Steiner also gave a talk at these assemblies whenever he could be in Stuttgart.
• 2. The wooden building of the Goetheanum, the Free School of Spiritual Science, was under construction from 1913-1921.
• 3. Matthew 28:20.
• 4. In the original German, this is a reference to a song sung by the students at the beginning of the assembly.