The Rudolf Steiner Archive

You will have seen from these lectures, which lay down methods of teaching, that we are gradually nearing the mental insight from which should spring the actual timetable. Now I have told you on different occasions already that we must agree, with regard to what we accept in our school and how we accept it, to compromise with conditions already existing. For we cannot, for the time being, create for the Waldorf School the entire social world to which it really belongs. Consequently, from this surrounding social world there will radiate influences which will continually frustrate the ultimate ideal time-table of the Waldorf School. But we shall only be good teachers of the Waldorf School if we know in what relation the ideal time-table stands to the time-table which we will have to use at first because of the ascendancy of the social world outside. This will result for us in the most vital difficulties which we must therefore mention before going on, and these will arise in connection with the pupils, with the children, immediately at the beginning of the elementary school period and then again at the end. At the very beginning of the elementary school course there will, of course, be difficulties, because there exist the time-tables of the outside world. In these time-tables all kinds of educational aim are required, and we cannot risk letting our children, after the first or second year at school, fall short of the learning shown by the children educated and taught outside our school. After nine years of age, of course, by our methods our children should have far surpassed them, but in the intermediate stage it might happen that our children were required to show in some way, let us say, at the end of the first year in school, before a board of external commissioners, what they can do. Now it is not a good thing for the children that they should be able to do just what is demanded to-day by an external commission. And our ideal time-table would really have to have other aims than those set by a commission of this kind. In this way the dictates of the outside world partially frustrate the ideal time-table. This is the case with the beginning of our course in the Waldorf School. In the upper classes¹ of the Waldorf School, of course, we are concerned with children, with pupils who have come in from other educational institutions, and who have not been taught on the methods on which they should have been taught.

The chief mistake attendant to-day on the teaching of children between seven and twelve is, of course, the fact that they are taught far too intellectually. However much people may hold forth against intellectualism, the intellect is considered far too much. We shall consequently get children coming in with already far more pronounced characteristics of old age—even senility—than children between twelve and fourteen should show. That is why when, in these days, our youth itself appears in a reforming capacity, as with the Scouts (Pfadfinder) and similar movements, where it makes its own demands as to how it is to be educated and taught, it reveals the most appalling abstractness, that is, senility. And particularly when youth desires, as do the “Wandervögel,” to be taught really youthfully, it craves to be taught on senile principles. That is an actual fact to-day. We came up against it very sharply ourselves in a commission on culture, where a young Wandervögel, or member of some youth movement, got up to speak. He began to read off his very tedious abstract statements of how modern youth desires to be taught and educated. They were too boring for some people because they were nothing but platitudes; moreover, they were platitudes afflicted with senile decay. The audience grew restless, and the young orator hurled into its midst: “I declare that the old folks to-day do not understand youth.” The only fact in evidence, however, was that this half-child was too much of an old man because of a thwarted education and perverted teaching.

Now this will have to be taken most seriously into account with the children who come into the school at twelve to fourteen, and to whom, for the time being, we are to give, as it were, the finishing touch. The great problems for us arise at the beginning and end of the school years. We must do our utmost to do justice to our ideal time-table, and we must do our utmost not to estrange children too greatly from modern life.

But above all we must seek to include in the first school year a great deal of simple talking with the children. We read to them as little as possible, but prepare our lessons so well that we can tell them everything that we want to teach them. We aim at getting the children to tell again what they have heard us tell them. But we do not adapt reading-passages which do not fire the fantasy; we use, wherever possible, reading-passages which excite the imagination profoundly; that is, fairy tales. As many fairy tales as possible. And after practising for some time with the child this telling of stories and retelling of them, we encourage him a little to tell very shortly his own experiences. We let him tell us, for instance, about something which he himself likes to tell about. In all this telling of stories, and telling them over, and telling about personal experiences, we guide, quite un-pedantically, the dialect into the way of educated speech, by simply correcting the mistakes which the child makes—at first he will do nothing but make mistakes, of course; later on, fewer and fewer. We show him, by telling stories and having them retold, the way from dialect to educated conversation. We can do all this, and in spite of it the child will have reached the standard demanded of him at the end of the first school year.

Then, indeed, we must make room for something which would be best absent from the very first year of school and which is only a burden on the child's soul: we shall have to teach him what a vowel is, and what a consonant is. If we could follow the ideal time-table we would not do this in the first school year. But then some inspector might turn up at the end of the first year and ask the child what “i” is, what “l” is, and the child would not know that one is a vowel and the other a consonant. And we should be told: “Well, you see, this ignorance comes of Anthroposophy.” For this reason we must take care that the child can distinguish vowels from consonants. We must also teach him what a noun is, what an article is. And here we find ourselves in a real dilemma. For according to the prevailing time-table we ought to use German terms and not say “artikel.” We have to talk to the child, according to current regulations, of “Geschlechtswort” (gender-words) instead of “artikel,” and here, of course, we find ourselves in the dilemma. It would be better at this point not to be pedantic and to retain the word “artikel.” Now I have already indicated how a noun should be distinguished from an adjective by showing the child that a noun refers to objects in space around him, to self-contained objects. You must try here to say to him: “Now take a tree: a tree is a thing which goes on standing in space. But look at a tree in winter, look at a tree in spring, and look at a tree in summer. The tree is always there, but it looks different in winter, in summer, in spring. In winter we say: ‘It is brown.’ In spring we say: ‘It is green.’ In summer we say: ‘It is leafy.’ These are its attributes.” In this way we first show the child the difference between something which endures and its attributes, and say: “When we use a word for what persists, it is a noun; when we use a word for the changing quality of something that endures it is an adjective.” Then we give the child an idea of activity: “Just sit down on your chair. You are a good child. Good is an adjective. But now stand up and run. You are doing something. That is an action.” We describe this action by a verb. That is, we try to draw the child up to the thing, and then we go from the thing over to the words. In this way, without doing the child too much harm, we shall be able to teach him what a noun is, an article, an adjective, a verb. The hardest of all, of course, is to understand what an article is, because the child cannot yet properly understand the connection of the article with the noun. We shall flounder fairly badly in an abstraction when we try to teach him what an article is. But he has to learn it. And it is far better to flounder in abstractions over it because it is unnatural in any case, than to contrive all kinds of artificial devices for making clear to the child the significance and the nature of the article, which is, of course, impossible.

In short, it will be a good thing for us to teach with complete awareness that we are introducing something new into teaching. The first school year will afford us plenty of opportunity for this. Even in the second year a good deal of this awareness will invade our teaching. But the first year will include much that is of great benefit to the growing child. The first school year will include not only writing, but an elementary, primitive kind of painting-drawing, for this is, of course, our point of departure for teaching writing. The first school year will include not only singing, but also an elementary training in the playing of a musical instrument. From the first we shall not only let the child sing, but we shall take him to the instrument. This, again, will prove a great boon to the child. We teach him the elements of listening by means of sound-combinations. And we try to preserve the balance between the production of music from within by song, and the hearing of sounds from outside, or by making them on the instrument.

These elements, painting-drawing, drawing with colours, finding the way into music, will provide for us, particularly in the first school year, a wonderful element of that will-formation which is almost quite foreign to the school of to-day. And if we further transform the little mite's physical training into Eurhythmy we shall contribute in a quite exceptional degree to the formation of the will.

I have been presented with the usual time-table for the first school year. It consists of:

Religion—two hours a week.

The mother tongue—eleven hours a week.

Writing—there is no figure given for the number of hours, for it is included in the mother tongue.

Then:

Local geography—two hours² a week.

Arithmetic—four hours a week.

Singing and gymnastics together—one hour a week.

We shall not be guilty of this, for we should then sin too gravely against the well-being of the growing child. But we shall arrange, as far as ever it is in our power, for the singing and music and the gymnastics and Eurhythmy to be in the afternoon, and the rest in the morning, and we shall take, in moderation—until we think they have had enough—singing and music and gymnastics and Eurhythmy with the children in the afternoon. For to devote one hour a week to these subjects is quite ludicrous. That alone proves to you how the whole of teaching is now directed towards the intellect.

In the first year in the elementary school we are concerned, after all, with six-year-old children or with children at the most a few months over six. With such children you can quite well study the elements of painting and drawing, of music, and even of gymnastics and Eurhythmy; but if you take religion with them in the modern manner you do not teach them religion at all; you simply train their memory and that is the best that can be said about it. For it is absolutely senseless to talk to children of six to seven of ideas which play a part in religion. They can only be stamped on his memory. Memory training, of course, is quite good, but one must be aware that it here involves introducing the child to all kinds of things which have no meaning for the child at this age.

Another feature of the time-table for the first year will provoke us to an opinion different from the usual one, at least in practice. This feature reappears in the second year in a quite peculiar guise, even as a separate subject, as Schönschreiben (literally, pretty writing = calligraphy). In evolving writing from “painting-drawing” we shall obviously not need to cultivate “ugly writing” and “pretty writing” as separate subjects. We shall take pains to draw no distinction between ugly writing and pretty writing and to arrange all written work—and we shall be able to do this in spite of the outside time-table—so that the child always writes beautifully, as beautifully as he can, never suggesting to him the distinction between good writing and bad writing. And if we take pains to tell the child stories for a fairly long time, and to let him repeat them, and pay attention all the time to correct speaking on our part, we shall only need to take spelling at first from the point of view of correcting mistakes. That is, we shall not need to introduce correct writing, Rechtschreiben (spelling), and incorrect writing as two separate branches of the writing lesson.

You see in this connection we must naturally pay great attention to our own accuracy. This is especially difficult for us Austrians in teaching. For in Austria, besides the two languages, the dialect and the educated everyday speech, there was a third. This was the specific “Austrian School Language.” In this all long vowels were pronounced short and all short vowels long, and whereas the dialect quite correctly talked of “Die Sonne” (the sun), the Austrian school language did not say “Die Sonne” but “Die Sohne,” and this habit of talking becomes involuntary; one is constantly relapsing into it, as a cat lands on his paws. But it is very unsettling for the teacher too. The further one travels from north to south the more does one sink in the slough of this evil. It rages most virulently in Southern Austria. The dialect talks rightly of “Der SÅ«Å«n”; the school language teaches us to say “Der Son.” So that we say “Der Son” for a boy and “Die Sohne” for what shines in the sky. That is only the most extreme case. But if we take care, in telling stories, to keep all really long sounds long and all short ones short, all sharp ones sharp, all drawn-out ones prolonged, and all soft ones soft, and to take notice of the child's pronunciation, and to correct it constantly, so that he speaks correctly, we shall be laying the foundations for correct writing. In the first year we do not need to do much more than lay right foundations. Thus, in dealing with spelling, we do not yet need to let the child write lengthening or shortening signs, as even permitted in the usual school time-table—we can spend as long as we like over speaking, and only in the last instance introduce the various rules of spelling. This is the kind of thing to which we must pay heed when we are concerned with the right treatment of children at the beginning of their school life.

The children near the end of the school life, at the age of thirteen to fourteen, come to us maltreated by the intellectual process. The teaching they have received has been too much concerned with the intellect. They have experienced far too few of the benefits of will- and feeling-training. Consequently, we shall have to make up for lost ground, particularly in these last years. We shall have to attempt, whenever opportunity offers, to introduce will and feeling into the exclusively intellectual approach, by transforming much of what the children have absorbed purely intellectually into an appeal to the will and feelings. We can assume at any rate that the children whom we get at this age have learnt, for instance, the theorem of Pythagoras the wrong way, that they have not learnt it in the way we have discussed. The question is how to contrive in this case not only to give the child what he has missed but to give him over and above that, so that certain powers which are already dried up and withered are stimulated afresh as far as they can be revived. So we shall try, for instance, to recall to the child's mind the theorem of Pythagoras. We shall say: “You have learnt it. Can you tell me how it goes? Now you have said the theorem of Pythagoras to me. The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.”

But it is absolutely certain that the child has not had the experience which learning this should give his soul. So I do something more. I do not only demonstrate the theorem to him in a picture, but I show how it develops. I let him see it in a quite special way. I say: “Now three of you come out here. One of you is to cover this surface with chalk: all of you see that he only uses enough chalk to cover the surface. The next one is to cover this surface with chalk; he will have to take another piece of chalk. The third will cover this, again with another piece of chalk.” And now I say to the boy or girl who has covered the square on the hypotenuse: “You see, you have used just as much chalk as both the others together. You have spread just as much on your square as the other two together, because the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.” That is, I make it vivid for him by the use of chalk. It sinks deeper still into his soul when he reflects that some of the chalk has been ground down and is no longer on the piece of chalk but is on the board. And now I go on to say: “Look, I will divide the squares; one into sixteen, the other into nine, the other into twenty-five squares. Now I am going to put one of you into the middle of each square, and you are to think that it is a field and you have to dig it up. The children who have worked at the twenty-five little squares in this piece will then have done just as much work as the children who have turned over the piece with sixteen squares and the children who have turned over the piece with nine squares together. But the square on the hypotenuse has been dug up by your labour; you, by your work, have dug up the square on one of the two sides, and you, by your work, have dug up the square on the other side.” In this way I connect the child's will with the theorem of Pythagoras. I connect at least the idea with an exercise rooted significantly in his will in the outside world, and I again bring to life what his cranium had imbibed more or less dead.

Now let us suppose the child has already learnt Latin or Greek. I try to make the children not only speak Latin and Greek but listen to one another as well, listen to each systematically when one speaks Latin, another Greek. And I try to make the difference live vividly for them which exists between the nature of the Greek and Latin languages. I should not need to do this in the ordinary course of teaching, for this realization would result of itself with the ideal time-table. But we need it with the children from outside, because the child must feel: when he speaks Greek he really only speaks with the larynx and chest; when he speaks Latin there is something of the whole being accompanying the sound of the language. I must draw the child's attention to this. Then I will point out to him the living quality of French when he speaks that, and how it resembles Latin very closely. When he talks English he almost spits the sounds out. The chest is less active in English than in French. In English a tremendous amount is thrown away and sacrificed. In fact, many syllables are literally spat out before they work. You need not say “spat out” to the children, but make them understand how, in the English language particularly, the word is dying towards its end. You will try like this to emphasize the introduction of the element of articulation into your language teaching with those children of twelve to fourteen whom you have taken over from the schools of to-day.

• 1. Dr. Steiner refers to the beginning of the Waldorf School when the higher classes were from the ages of 12 to 14.
• 2. The word hours is the translation of Schulstunden—50 mts. with intervals between.

If you were to look back at the time-tables which were issued fifty or sixty years ago, you would see that they were comparatively short. A few short sentences summarized the ground to be covered in every school year in the different subjects. The time-tables were at the most two or three or four pages long—all the rest in those days was left to the actual process of teaching itself, for this out of its own powers should stimulate teachers to do the part left to them by the curricula. To-day things are different. To-day the syllabus for the schools has more and more increased. The Official Gazette has become a collection of books. And in this book there is not only a suggestion of what is required, but there are all kinds of instructions as to how things should be taught at school. That is, in the last decades people were on the way to letting State legislation swallow up the theory of education. And perhaps it is an ideal of many a legislator gradually to issue as “Official Publication,” as “Decrees and Regulations” all the material formerly contained in old literary works on pedagogy. The Socialist leaders quite definitely feel this subconscious impulse—however ashamed they may be to admit it; their ideal is to introduce in the form of decrees what was until recently common spiritual property even in the sphere of education.

For this reason those of us here who wish to preserve the educational and teaching system from the collapse which has overtaken it under Lenin—and which might overtake Central Europe—must approach the curriculum with a quite different understanding from that in which the ordinary teacher approaches the Official Gazette. This, even in the days of the monarchy and in the days of ordinary democratic Parliamentarianism, he has solemnly studied, but he will study it with feelings of greater obedience if it is sent to his house by his Dictator-Comrades. The potential tyranny of socialism would be felt quite particularly in the sphere of teaching and education. We have had to approach the curriculum differently.

That is, it has been incumbent on us to approach this curriculum with an attitude of mind which enabled us really to create it for ourselves at every turn, so that we learnt to tell the needs of all children at any age. Let us put side by side this ideal curriculum and the curriculum at present in use in other schools of Central Europe. This we shall do and we shall have prepared ourselves thoroughly for this estimate if we have really assimilated into our feelings all that we should absorb on the way to an understanding of a curriculum.

Here, again, is a very important aspect which is falsely estimated in these days in official pedagogy. I concluded my last lecture¹ with a direct talk on the “Morality of Educational Theory;” the moral tendencies which must be the basis of all pedagogy. It will only result in the practice of teaching if the many examples given in modern books on didactics are ignored. These speak of “object lessons.” They are quite sound, and we have referred to the way in which they should be conducted. But we have constantly had to emphasize the fact that these object lessons should never become trivial, that they should never exceed a certain limit. This eternal cross-questioning of the child on self-evident things in the form of object lessons simply extends a pall of weariness over the whole of teaching, and this should not be. And it robs teaching of precisely what I emphasized at the end of my last lecture² as so necessary: the cultivation of the child's imaginative faculty or the faculty of fantasy. If, for the sake of giving an object lesson, you discuss with the children the shape of any cooking utensil you like to choose, you undermine his imagination. If you describe the shape or origin of a Greek vase, you may do more for his understanding of what he finds around him in daily life. Object lessons, as given to-day, literally stifle the imagination. And you do not do amiss in teaching if you simply remember to leave many things unspoken, so that the child is induced to continue working with his own soul-force on what he has learnt in the lesson. It is not at all a good thing to want to explain everything down to the last dot on the “i.” The child simply leaves the school feeling that he has learnt everything already, and looking out for other things to do. Whereas if you have sown his imagination with seeds of life he remains fascinated by what the lesson offered him and is less ready to be distracted. That our children to-day are such rough tomboys is simply due to the fact that we go in for far too much false object teaching and too little training of the will and the feelings.

But in still another respect we really need to identify ourselves quite inwardly in our souls with the curriculum.

When you receive a child in the first years at the elementary school he is quite a different being from the same child in the last years of the school course. In his first years he is still very much immersed in his body, he is still very much part of his body. When the child leaves school you must have enabled him to cling no longer to his body with all the fibres of his soul, but to be independent of his body in thinking, feeling, and willing. Try to penetrate rather more deeply into the nature of the growing being and you will find, relatively speaking, particularly when the children have not been spoilt in their very first years, that they still have very sound instincts. They have then not acquired the craving to stuff themselves with sweets and so on. They still have certain sound instincts with regard to their food, as, of course, the animal too, because he is still very much dominated by his body, has very good instincts in the matter of his own nourishment. The animal, just because he is limited to his body, avoids what is hurtful to him. The animal world is not likely to be overrun by any evil like the spreading of alcoholic consumption in the human world. The spread of evils such as alcohol is due to the fact that man is so much a spiritual being that he can become independent of his bodily nature. For physical nature, in its reasonableness, is never tempted to become alcoholic, for instance. Comparatively sound food instincts are active in the first years at school. These cease in the interests of human development with the last years of school life. When puberty comes upon the individual he loses his food-instincts; he must find in his reason a substitute for his earlier instincts. That is why you can still intercept, as it were, the last manifestations of the food and health instincts in the last school years of the growing being. Here you can still steal a march on the last manifestations of the sound food-instincts, of the instinct of growth, etc. Later you can no longer find an inner feeling for the right care of food and health. That is why particularly the last years of the elementary school course should include instruction in nourishment and the care of personal health. Precisely in this connection object lessons should be given. For these object lessons can reinforce the fantasy or imagination quite considerably. Put before the child three different substances; place these before him, or remind him of them, for he has, of course, already seen them: any substance which is composed primarily of starch or sugar, a substance composed primarily of fat, a substance composed primarily of albumen. The child knows these. But remind him that the human body owes its activity primarily to these three constituents. From this explain to him in his last years of school the secrets of nutrition. Then give him an accurate description of the breathing and enlarge on every aspect of nutrition and breathing connected with the care of personal health. You will gain an enormous amount in your education and teaching if you undertake this instruction precisely in these years. At this stage you are just in time to intercept the last instinctive manifestations of the health and food instincts. That is why you can teach the child in these years about the conditions of nutrition and health without making him egoistic for the rest of his life. It is still natural to him to satisfy instinctively the conditions of health and nutrition. That is why he can be talked to about these things and why they still strike a chord in the natural life of the human being and so do not make him egoistical. If the children are not taught in these years about matters of nutrition and health they will have to inform themselves later from reading or from other people. What the child learns later, after puberty, about matters of nutrition and health, makes him egoistic. It cannot but produce egoism. If you read about nutrition in physiology, if you read a synopsis of rules about the care of the health, in the very nature of the case this information makes you more egoistic than you were before. This egoism, which continually proceeds from a rationalized knowledge of how to take personal care of oneself, has to be combated by morality. If we had not to care for ourselves physically we should not need to have a morality of the soul. But the human being is less exposed to the dangers of egoism in later life if he is instructed in nutrition and health in his last years at the elementary school, where the teaching is concerned with questions of nutrition and health rules, and not with egoism—but with what is natural to man.

You see what very far-reaching problems of life are involved in teaching a particular thing at the right moment. You really provide for the whole of his life if you teach a child what is right at his particular age. Of course, if one could imbue children of seven or eight with precepts of nutrition, with precepts of health, that would be the best way of all. They would then absorb these rules of nutrition and health in the most unegoistic way, for they are hardly aware at that moment that the rules refer to themselves. They would see themselves as objects, not as subjects. But they cannot understand it so early. Their power of judgement is not yet sufficiently developed to be able to understand it. For this reason you cannot take rules for nutrition and health at this age, and you must save them up for the last school years, when the fire of the inner instinct of food and health is already dying down, and when, in contrast to these dying instincts, there has already emerged the power to comprehend what comes into consideration. At every turn it is possible to intermingle for the older children some reference to rules of health and nutrition. In natural history, in physics, in the lessons which expand geography to its full scope, even in history lessons, every moment lends itself to an opportunity of instruction in dietetics and health. You will see from this that we do not need to accept it as a subject in the school time-table, but that much of our teaching must contain such vitality that it absorbs this with it. If we have a right feeling for what the child is to learn—then the child himself, or the community of children in school, will remind us every day of what we have to introduce into the rest of our teaching. And for this purpose we have to cultivate and practise, because we are teachers, a certain alertness of mind. If we are drilled as specialists in geography or history we shall not develop this mental alertness, for then we are exclusively concerned, from the beginning of the history lesson to the end of the history lesson, with teaching history. And then there can come into play those extraordinarily unnatural conditions whose injurious effects on life are not by any means fully appreciated.

It is profoundly true that we do the human being a service, and one that discourages his egoism, when we teach him the rules of dietetics and health, as I have explained, in the last years at the elementary school.

But here, too, it is possible to refer to many aspects which permeate the whole of teaching with feeling. And if you attach a certain amount of feeling to every step of your teaching, the results at which you are aiming will persist throughout life. But if in the last years at the elementary school you only teach things of interest to the reason, to the intellect, very little lasting impression will be made. You will have to permeate your own self with feeling whenever you give something to the children in the years from twelve to fourteen. You must try to teach, not only graphically, but with vivid feeling, geography, history, natural history, in the last school years. Imagination or fantasy is not enough without feeling.

Now in actual fact the curriculum for the elementary school (aged seven to fourteen) falls into three distinct periods which we have traced: first, up to nine years of age, when we introduce to the growing child chiefly conventionalities, writing, reading; then up to twelve, when we introduce to him the uses of this conventionality, and on the other hand to all learning based on the individual power of judgement. And you have seen that into this school period we put the study of animals, and nature-study, because the individual at this stage still has a certain instinctive feeling for the relationships here involved. I laid down lines for you on which to develop, from the cuttle-fish, the mouse, the lamb, and the human being, a feeling of the relationship of man with the whole of the world of nature. We have taken great pains, too—and I hope not in vain, for they will flower and come to fruition in the teaching of botany—to develop man's relation to the plant world. These ideas of things must be rooted in feeling during the middle period of the elementary school course, when the instincts are still alive to this feeling of intimacy with the animals, with the plants, and when, after all, even if the experience never emerges into the ordinary light of reasoning consciousness, the child feels himself now a cat, now a wolf, now a lion or an eagle. This identification of oneself now with one animal, now with the other, only occurs up to about the age of nine. Before this age it is even more profound, but it cannot be used, because the power to grasp it consciously is non-existent. If children are very precocious and talk a great deal about themselves when they are still only four or five, their comparisons of themselves with the eagle, with the mouse, etc., are very common indeed. But if we start at the ninth year to teach natural history on the lines I have suggested, we come upon a good deal of the child's instinctive feeling of relationship with animals. Later this instinctive feeling ripens into a feeling of relationship with the plant world. Therefore, first of all the natural history of the animal kingdom, then the natural history of the plant kingdom. We leave the minerals till the last because they require almost exclusively the power of judgement. So it is in accordance with human nature to arrange the curriculum as I have suggested. The intermediate school period, from eight to eleven, presents a fine balance between the instincts and the powers of discernment. We can always assume that the child will respond intelligently if we rely on a certain instinctive understanding, if we are not—especially in natural history and botany—too obvious. We must avoid drawing external analogies particularly with the plant world, for that is really contrary to natural feeling. Natural feeling is itself predisposed to seek psychic qualities in plants; not the external physical form of man in this tree or that, but soul-relations such as we tried to discover in the plant system.³

And the actual power of discernment, the rational, intellectual comprehension of the human being which can be relied on, belongs to the last school period. For this reason we employ precisely the twelfth year in the child's life, when he is gravitating in the direction of the power of discernment, for merging this power of judgement in the activities still partly prompted by instinct, but already very thickly overlaid with discerning power. These are, as it were, the twilight instincts of the soul, which we must overcome by the power of judgement.

At this stage it must be remembered that man has an instinct for gain, for profiteering, for the principle of discount, etc., which appeals to the instincts. But we must be sure to impose the power of discernment very forcibly upon this, and consequently we must use this stage of development for studying the relations existing between calculation and the circulation of commodities and finance, that is, for doing percentage sums, interest sums, discount sums, etc.

It is very important not to give the child these ideas too late, for that would really be appealing to his egoism. We are not yet reckoning on his egoism if we teach him at about the age of twelve to grasp to some extent the principle of promissory notes and so on, commercial calculations, etc. Actual book-keeping could be studied later; this already requires more intelligence. But it is very important to bring out these ideas at this stage. For the inner selfish appetite for interest, bills of exchange, promissory notes, and so on, is not yet awake in the child at this tender age. These things are more serious in the commercial schools when he is older.

You must absorb these facts quite completely into your being as instructors, as teachers. Try not to do too much, whatever your inclination may be, let us say, in describing plants. Try to teach about plants so that a great deal is left to the child's imagination, that the child can still imagine for himself, in terms of his own feeling, the psychic relations prevailing between the human soul and the plant world. The person who enthuses too freely on object lessons does not know that there are things to be taught which cannot be studied externally. And when people try to teach the child by object lessons things which ought only to be taught through moral influence and through the feelings, this very object teaching does him harm. We must never forget, you see, that mere observation and illustration are a very pronounced by-product of the materialistic spirit of our age. Naturally, observation must be cultivated in its proper place, but you must not apply the method when it would only spoil the intimate relation between the child and the world in the sphere of his imaginative mind.

• 1. See Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Pädagogik, Lecture 14.
• 2. Ibid.
• 3. See The Art of Education (“Erziehungskunst”), No. 7; Rudolf Steiner, The Training of Teachers (“Pädagogisches Seminar”).

RUDOLF STEINER: It is most important that, along with all our other work, we should cultivate clear articulation. This has a kind of influence, a certain effect. I have here some sentences that I formulated for another occasion; they have no especially profound meaning, but are constructed so that the speech organs are activated in every kind of movement, organically. I would like you to pass these sentences around and repeat them in turn without embarrassment so that by constant practice they may make our speech organs flexible; we can have these organs do gymnastics, so to speak. Mrs. Steiner will say the sentences first as it should be done artistically, and I will ask each one of you to repeat them after her. These sentences are not composed according to sense and meaning, but in order to “do gymnastics” with the speech organs.¹

Dart may these boats through darkening gloaming
Name neat Norman on nimble moody mules

The N is constantly repeated, but in different combinations of letters, and so the speech organ can do the right gymnastic exercises. At one point two Ns come together; you must stop longer over the first N in “on nimble.”

Rattle me more and more rattles now rightly

In this way you can activate the speech organs with the right gymnastics.

I would recommend that you take particular care to find your way into the very forms of the sounds and the forms of the syllables; see that you really grow into these forms, so that you consciously speak each sound, that you lift each sound into consciousness. It is a common weakness in speech that people just glide over the sounds, whereas speech is there to be understood. It would even be better to first bring an element of caricature into your speech by emphasizing syllables that should not be emphasized at all. Actors, for example, practice saying friendly instead of friendly! You must pronounce each letter consciously. It would even be good for you to do something like Demosthenes did, though perhaps not regularly. You know that, when he could not make any progress with his speaking, he put pebbles on his tongue and through practice strengthened his voice to the degree that it could be heard over a rushing river; this he did to acquire a delivery that the Athenians could hear.

I will now ask Miss B. to introduce the question of temperaments. Since the individual child must be our primary consideration in teaching, it is proper that we study the basis of the temperaments with the maximum care. Naturally when we have a class it is not possible to treat each child individually. But you can give much individual treatment by having on one side, let’s say, the phlegmatics and melancholics, and the sanguine and choleric children on the other side; you can have them take part in a lively interchange, turning now to the group of one temperament, and then calling on another group for answers, saying this to one group and that to another. In this way individualization happens on its own in the class.

A comprehensive picture was presented of the temperaments and their treatment.

RUDOLF STEINER: You have given a good account of what was spoken of in our conversations together on this subject. But you may be going too far when you assert, with regard to the melancholic temperament, that it has a decided inclination toward piety. There is only one little word lacking: “often.” It is also just possible that the melancholic disposition in children is rooted in pronounced egoism, and in no way has a religious tendency. With adults you can leave out the little word “often,” but in young children the melancholic element often masks a pronounced egoism. Melancholic children are often dependent on atmospheric conditions; the weather often effects the melancholic temperament. The sanguine children are also dependent on atmospheric conditions, but more in their moods, in the soul, whereas the melancholic children are affected more unconsciously by the weather in the physical body.

If I were to go into this question in detail from the standpoint of spiritual science, I would have to show you how the childish temperament is actually connected with karma, how in the child’s temperament something really appears that could be described as the consequence of experiences in previous lives on Earth. Let’s take the concrete example of a man who is obliged in one life to be very interested in himself. He is lonely and is thus forced to be interested in himself. Because he is frequently absorbed in himself, the force of circumstances causes him to be inclined to unite his soul very closely with the structure of his physical body, and in the next incarnation he brings with him a bodily nature keenly alive to the conditions of the outer world. He becomes a sanguine individual. Thus, it can happen that when someone has been compelled to live alone in one incarnation, which would have retarded the person’s progress, this is adjusted in the next life through becoming a sanguine, with the ability to notice everything in the surroundings. We must not view karma from a moral but from a causal perspective. When a child is properly educated, it may be of great benefit to the child’s life to be a sanguine, capable of observing the outer world. Temperament is connected, to a remarkable degree, with the whole life and soul of a person’s previous incarnation.

Dr. Steiner was asked to explain the changes of temperaments that can occur during life, from youth to maturity.

RUDOLF STEINER: If you remember a course of lectures that I once gave in Cassel about the Gospel of St. John, you will recall the remarks I made concerning the relationship of a child to his or her parents.² It was stated there that the father-principle works very strongly in the physical body and the I, and that the mother-principle predominates in the etheric and astral bodies. Goethe divined this truth when he wrote the beautiful words:

From my father I have my stature [connected with the physical body] and the serious conduct of life [connected with the I], from my dear mother my happy nature [connected with the etheric body] and joy in creative fantasy [connected with the astral body].

There is extraordinary wisdom in these words. What lives in the human being is mixed and mingled in a remarkable way. Humankind is an extremely complicated being. A definite relationship exists in human beings between the I and the physical body, and again a relationship between the etheric body and the astral body. Thus, the predominance of one can pass over into the predominance of another during the course of life. For example, in the melancholic temperament the predominance of the I passes into the predominance of the physical body, and in a choleric person it even cuts across inheritance and passes from the mother element to the father element, because the preponderance of the astral passes over into a preponderance of the I.

In the melancholic temperament the I predominates in the child, the physical body in the adult. In the sanguine temperament the etheric body predominates in the child and the astral body in the adult. In the phlegmatic temperament the physical body predominates in the child and the etheric body in the adult. In the choleric temperament the astral body predominates in the child, the I in the adult. But you can only arrive at a true view of such things when you strictly remember that you cannot arrange them in a tabulated form, and the higher you come into spiritual regions, the less this will be possible.

The observation was expressed that a similar change can be found in the sequence of names of the characters in The Guardian of the Threshold and The Souls’ Awakening.³

RUDOLF STEINER: There is a change there that is definitely in accordance with the facts; these Mystery Plays must be taken theoretically as little as possible. I cannot say anything if the question is put theoretically, because I have always had these characters before me just as they are, purely objectively. They have all been taken from real life. Recently, on another occasion, I said here that Felix Balde⁴ was a real person living in Trumau, and the old shoemaker who had known the archetype of Felix is called Scharinger, from Münchendorf. Felix still lives in the tradition of the village there. In the same way all these characters whom you find in my Mystery Plays are actual individual personalities.

Question: In speaking of a folk temperament can you also speak of someone as belonging to the temperament of one’s nation? And a further question: Is the folk temperament expressed in the language?

RUDOLF STEINER: What you said first is right, but your second suggestion is not quite correct. It is possible to speak of a folk temperament in a real sense. Nations really have their own temperaments, but the individual can very well rise above the national temperament; one is not necessarily predisposed to it. You must be careful not to identify the individuality of the particular person with the temperament of his whole nation. For example, it would be wrong to identify the individual Russian of today with the temperament of the Russian nation. The latter would be melancholic while the individual Russian of today is inclined to be sanguine.

The quality of the national temperament is expressed in the various languages, so one could certainly say that the language of one nation is like this, and the language of another nation is like that. It is true to say that the English language is thoroughly phlegmatic and Greek exceptionally sanguine. Such things can be said as indications of real facts. The German language, being two-sided in nature, has very strongly melancholic and also very strongly sanguine characteristics. You can see this when the German language appears in its original form, particularly in the language of philosophy. Let me remind you of the wonderful quality of Fichte’s philosophical language or of some passages in Hegel’s Aesthetics, where you find the fundamental character of German language expressed with unusual clarity. The Italian folk-spirit has a special relationship to air, the French a special connection with fluids, the English and American, especially the English, with the solid earth, the American even with the sub-earthly—that is, with earth magnetism and earth electricity. Then we have the Russian who is connected with the light—that is, with earth’s light that rays back from plants. The German folk-spirit is connected with warmth, and you see at once that this has a double character—inner and outer, warmth of the blood and warmth of the atmosphere. Here again you find a polaric character even in the distribution of these elementary conditions. You see this polarity at once—this cleavage in the German nature, which can be found there in everything.

Question: Should the children know anything about this classification according to temperament?

RUDOLF STEINER: This is something that must be kept from the children. Much depends on whether the teacher has the right and tactful feeling about what should be kept hidden. The purpose of all these things we have spoken of here is to give the teacher authority. The teacher who doesn’t use discretion in what to say cannot be successful.

Students should not be seated according to their attainments, and you will find it advantageous to refuse requests from children to sit together.

Question: Is there a connection between the temperaments and the choice of foreign languages for the different temperaments of the children?

RUDOLF STEINER: Theoretically that would be correct, but it would not be advisable to consider it given current conditions. It will never be possible to be guided only by what is right according to the child’s disposition; we have to remember also that children must make their way in the world, and we have to give them what they need to do that. If in the near future, for example, it appeared as if a great many German children had no aptitude for learning English, it would not be good to give in to this weakness. Just those who show a weakness of this kind may be the first to need to know English.

There was a discussion on the task given the previous day: to consider the case of a whole class that, incited by one child, was guilty of very bad behavior; for example, they had been spitting on the ceiling. Some views were expressed on this matter.

RUDOLF STEINER interjected various remarks: It is a very practical method to wait for something like this to wear out, so that the children stop doing it on their own. You should always be able to distinguish whether something is done out of malice or high spirits.

One thing I would like to say: Even the best teacher will have naughtiness in the class, but if a whole class takes part it is usually the teacher’s fault. If it isn’t the teacher’s fault, you will always find that a group of children are on the teacher’s side and will be a support. Only when the teacher has failed will the whole class take part in insubordination.

If there has been any damage, then of course it is proper that it should be corrected, and the children themselves must do this—not by paying for it, but with their own hands. You could use a Sunday, or even two or three Sundays to repair any damage. And remember, humor is also a good method of reducing things to an absurdity, especially minor faults.

I gave you this problem to think on to help you see how to tackle something that occurs when one child incites the others. To demonstrate where the crux of the matter lies, I will tell you a story of something that actually occurred. In a class where things of this kind often happened, and where the teachers could not cope with them, one of the boys between ten and twelve years old went up to the front during the interval between two lessons and said, “Ladies and gentlemen! Aren’t you ashamed of always doing things like this, you good-fornothings? Just remember, you would all remain completely stupid if the teachers didn’t teach you anything.” This had the most wonderful effect.

We can learn something from this episode: When a large proportion of the class does something like this because of the instigation of one or more of the children, it may very well happen that, also through the influence of a few, order may be restored. If a few children have been instigators there will be others, two or three perhaps, who express disapproval. There are almost always leaders among the children, so the teacher should pick out two or three considered suitable and arrange a conversation with them. The teacher would have to make it clear that behavior of this kind makes teaching impossible, and that they should recognize this and make their influence felt in the class. These children will then have just as much influence as the instigators, and they can make things clear to their classmates. In any situation like this you must consider how the children affect one another.

The most important thing here is that you should evoke feelings that will lead them away from naughtiness. A harsh punishment on the part of the teacher would only cause fear and so on. It would never inspire the children to do better. The teacher must remain as calm as possible and adopt an objective attitude. That does not mean lessening the teacher’s own authority. The teacher could certainly be the one to say, “Without your teachers you would learn nothing and remain stupid.” But the teacher should allow the correction be carried out by the other children, leaving it to them to make their schoolmates feel ashamed.

We thus appeal to feelings rather than to judgment. But when the whole class is repeatedly against the teacher, then the fault must be looked for in the teacher. Most naughtiness arises because the children are bored and lack a relationship with their teacher.

When a fault is not too serious it can certainly be very good for the teacher to do just what the pupils are doing—to say, for example, when the pupils are grumbling, “Well I can certainly grumble too!” In this way the matter is treated homeopathically, as it were. Homeopathic treatment is excellent for moral education. It’s also a good way to divert the children’s attention to something else (although I would never appeal to their ambition). In general, however, we seldom have to complain of such misdemeanors. Whenever you allow mischievousness of this kind to be corrected by other children in the class, you work on the feelings to reestablish weakened authority. When another pupil stresses that gratitude must be felt toward the teacher, then the respect for authority will be restored again. It is important to choose the right children; you must know your class and pick those suited to the task.

If I taught a class I could venture to do this. I would try to find the ringleader, whom I would compel to denounce, as much as possible, such conduct, to say as many bad things about it as possible, and I would ignore the fact that it was this student who had done it. I would then bring the matter quickly to a close so that a sense of uncertainty would be left in the minds of the children, and you will come to see that much can be gained from this element of uncertainty. And to make one of the rascals involved describe the incident correctly and objectively will not in any way lead to hypocrisy. I would consider any actual punishment superfluous, even harmful. The essential thing is to arouse a feeling for the objective damage that has been caused and the necessity of correcting it. If teaching time has been lost in dealing with this matter, then it must be made good after school hours, not as a punishment but simply to make up the time lost.

I will now present a problem of a more psychological nature: if you have some rather unhealthy “goody-goodies” in the class—children who try to curry favor in various ways, who have a habit of continually coming to the teacher about this, that, and the other, how would you treat them? Of course you can treat the matter extremely simply. You could say: I am simply not going to bother with them. But then this peculiarity will be turned into other channels: these “good” children will gradually become a harmful element in the class.

• 1. Elsewhere, Steiner stated: “In giving artistic shape and form to speech, healthy cooperation and harmonization of body, soul, and spirit manifests. The body shows whether it can incorporate the spirit correctly; the soul reveals whether the spirit truly lives in it; and the spirit is vividly present, working directly into the physical.” Creative Speech, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1978, p. 33. The original German speech exercises may be found in the appendix.
• 2. The Gospel of St. John: And Its Relation to the Other Gospels, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1982.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner, The Four Mystery Plays: The Portal of Initiation, The Soul’s Probation, The Guardian of the Threshold, and The Souls’ Awakening, trans. Adam Bittleston, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1983. The four plays will be published individually; see The Souls’ Awakening: Soul and Spiritual Events in Dramatic Scenes, trans. Ruth and Hans Pusch, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1995 (the other plays will follow).
• 4. Felix Balde is a character in the Mystery Plays.

Speech Exercise:

In the vast unmeasured world-wide spaces,
In the endless stream of time,
In the depths of human soul-life,
In the world’s great revelations:
Seek the unfolding of life’s great mystery.

RUDOLF STEINER: The first four sentences have a ring of expectation, and the last line is a complete fulfillment of the first four. Now let’s return to the other speech exercise:

Proxy prized
bather broomstick
polka pushing
beady basket
prudent pertness
bearskin bristled

RUDOLF STEINER: You can learn a great deal from this. And now we will repeat the sentence:

Dart may these boats through darkening gloaming

RUDOLF STEINER: Also there is a similar exercise I would like to point out that has more feeling in it. It consists of four lines, which I will dictate to you later. The touch of feeling should be expressed more in the first line:

Lulling leader limply
liplessly laughing
loppety lumpety
lackety lout

RUDOLF STEINER: You must imagine that you have a green frog in front of you, and it is looking at you with lips apart, with its mouth wide open, and you speak to the frog in the words of the last three lines. In the first line, however, you tell it to lisp the lovely lyrics “Lulling leader limply.” This line must be spoken with humorous feeling; you really expect this of the frog.

And now I will read you a piece of prose, one of Lessing’s fables.¹

The Oak

One stormy night the raging north wind pitted its strength against a magnificent oak, which now lay on the ground. A number of low bushes lay shattered beneath it. A fox, whose lair was not far away, saw it next morning. “What a tree!” he cried, “I never would have thought it had been so big!”

RUDOLF STEINER: What is the moral of this fable?

Someone suggested: That it is not until someone is dead that we see how great that person was. Another suggested: That, until the great are overthrown, the small do not recognize what they were.

Rudolf Steiner: But why then choose the fox, who is so cunning?

Because the cunning of the fox cannot compare with the magnificence of the tree.

RUDOLF STEINER: In which sentence would you find the moral of the fable in relation to the cunning of the fox? “I never would have thought it was so big!” The point is, he had never even looked up; he had run round the bottom of the trunk, which was the only part of the tree he had noticed, and here the tree had only taken up a small space. Despite cunning, the fox had only seen what is visible around the foot of the tree.

Please notice that fables—which by their very nature are enacted in their own special world—can be read realistically, but poems never.

Now the problem I placed before you yesterday brings us something of tremendous importance, because now we must consider what measures to take when we notice that one group of children is less capable than another in one or another subject or lesson. I will ask you to choose from any part of the period between six and fourteen, and to think especially of, let’s say, a group of children who cannot learn to read and write properly, or those who cannot learn natural history or arithmetic, or geometry or singing. Consider what course you will pursue in the class, or in your general treatment of the children, both now and later on, so that you can correct such shortcomings as much as possible.

Several teachers contributed detailed suggestions.

RUDOLF STEINER: The examples you mention might arise partially from general incompetence. On the other hand, it could also be a question of a particular lack of talent. You could have children who are perhaps extraordinarily good at reading and writing, but as soon as they come to arithmetic they do not demonstrate any gift at all for it. Then there are those who are not so bad at arithmetic, but the moment you begin to call on their power of judgment, such as in natural science, their powers are at an end. Then again there are children who have no desire to learn history. It is important to notice these specific difficulties.

Perhaps you can find a remedy in this way: When you notice that a child, right from the beginning, has little talent for reading and writing, you would do well, anyway, to get in touch with the parents and ask them immediately to keep the child off eggs, puddings, and pastry as much as possible. The rest of the diet can remain more or less as it was. When the parents agree to try to provide the child with a really good wholesome diet, however—omitting the items of food mentioned above—they might even cut down on the meat for awhile and give the child plenty of vegetables and nourishing salads. You will then notice that, through a diet like this, the child will make considerable gains in ability. You must take advantage of this improvement, and keep the child very busy when the diet is first changed.

But if you notice that a mere change of diet doesn’t help much, then, after you have talked it over with the parents, try for a short while, perhaps a week, to keep the child entirely without food for the whole morning, or at least the first part of the morning when the child should be learning to read and write—to allow learning on an empty stomach—or maybe give the child the minimum of food. (You should not continue too long with this method; you must alternate it with normal eating.) You must make good use of this time, however, when the capacities will most certainly be revealed, and the child will show greater ability and be more receptive to what you are teaching. If you repeat a cure of this kind several times over the year, you will see that the powers of a fairly young child undergo a change. This applies to the first years of school life. I ask you to consider this very seriously.

Generally speaking, you should be very aware that the foolish ways many parents feed their young children contributes greatly to the lessening of their faculties, especially with phlegmatic and sanguine children. Perpetually overfeeding children—and this is somewhat different at the present time,² but you should know these things—stuffing them with eggs, puddings, and starchy foods is one of the things that makes children unwilling to learn and incapable of doing so during the early years of their school life.

A teacher asked about cocoa.

RUDOLF STEINER: Why should children drink cocoa at all? It is not the least bit necessary except to regulate digestion. Things like this are needed sometimes for this purpose, and cocoa is better than other remedies for children whose digestion works too quickly, but it should not be included otherwise in children’s diet. These days children are given many things that are unsuitable for them.

You can experience some very strange things in regard to this. When I was a teacher in the eighties, there was a young child in the house; I did not actually teach him, since I had only the older children; he was a little cousin. He was really a nice lovable child with bright ideas. He could have become a gifted pupil. I saw him a good deal and could observe for myself how witty and gifted the child was. One day at table this little fellow—although he was scarcely two years old—had two little dumplings, and when someone said to him, “Look Hans, now you already have two dumplings,” he was clever enough to answer, “And the third will follow in a minute.” That’s what the little tyke said!

Then another thing: he was very fond of calling people bad names. This did not seem very important to me in a child of that age—he would soon grow out of it. He had gotten into the habit of being particularly abusive to me. One day as I was coming in the door (he was a little older by this time) he stood there and blocked the way. He couldn’t think of any name bad enough for me, so he said: “Here come two donkeys!” That was really very smart of him, wasn’t it?

But the boy was pale; he had very little appetite and was rather thin. So, on the advice of an otherwise excellent doctor, this child was given a small glass of red wine with every meal. I was not responsible for him and had no influence in this extraordinary way of treating a child’s health, but I was very concerned about it. Then in his thirty-second or thirty-third year I saw this individual again; he was a terribly nervous man. When he was not present I enquired what he had been like as a schoolboy. This restless man, although only in his thirties, had become very nervous, and demonstrated the lamentable results of that little glass of red wine given to him with his meals as a boy. He was a gifted child, for a child who says “Here come two donkeys” really shows talent.

Frau Steiner interjected, “What an impudent boy!”

RUDOLF STEINER: We needn’t bother with impudence, but how does this really come about? It’s amazing. He can find no word bad enough, and so he makes use of number to help him. That shows extraordinary talent. But he became a poor scholar and never wanted to learn properly. Thus, because of this method of treatment—giving him wine as a young child—he was completely ruined by the time he was seven years old.

This is what I want to impress upon you at the beginning of our talk today—that, in relation to a child’s gifts and abilities, it is not the least unimportant to consider how to regulate the diet. I would especially ask you, however, to see that the child’s digestion does not suffer. So when it strikes you that there is something wrong with a child’s capacities, you must in some tactful way find out from the parents whether or not the child’s digestion is working properly, and if not you should try to put it in order.

Someone spoke about the children who are not good at arithmetic.

Rudolf Steiner: When you discover a special weakness in arithmetic, it would be good to do this: generally, the other children will have two gymnastics lessons during the week, or one eurythmy lesson and one gymnastics lesson; you can take a group of the children who are not good at arithmetic, and allow them an extra hour or half-hour of eurythmy or gymnastics. This doesn’t have to mean a lot of extra work for you: you can take them with others who are doing the same kind of exercises, but you must try to improve these children’s capacities through gymnastics and eurythmy. First give them rod exercises. Say to them, “Hold the rod in your hand, first in front counting 1, 2, 3, and then behind 1, 2, 3, 4." Each time the child must change the position of the rod, moving it from front to back. A great effort will be made in some way to get the rod around behind at the count of 3. Then add walking: say, 3 steps forward, 5 steps back; 3 steps forward, 4 steps back; 5 steps forward, 3 steps back, and so on. In gymnastics, and also perhaps in eurythmy, try to combine numbers with the children’s movements, so they are required to count while moving. You will find this effective. I have frequently done this with pupils.

But now tell me, why does it have an effect? From what you have already learned, you should be able to form some ideas on this subject.

A teacher commented: Eurythmy movements must be a great help in teaching geometry.

RUDOLF STEINER: But I did not mean geometry. What I said applied to arithmetic, because at the root of arithmetic is consciously willed movement, the sense of movement. When you activate the sense of movement in this way, you quicken a child’s arithmetical powers. You bring something up out of the subconscious that, in such a child, is unwilling to be brought up. Generally speaking, when a child is bad both at arithmetic and geometry, this should be remedied by movement exercises. You can do a great deal for a child’s progress in geometry with varied and inventive eurythmy exercises, and also through rod exercises.

Comment: Where difficulties exist in pronunciation, the connection between speech and music should be considered.

RUDOLF STEINER: Most cases of poor pronunciation are due to defective hearing.

Comment: Sanguine students do not follow geography lessons very well because their ideas are vague. I recommend taking small portions of a map as subjects for drawing.

RUDOLF STEINER: When you make your geography lessons truly graphic, when you describe the countries clearly and show the distribution of vegetation, and describe the products of the earth in the different countries, making your lessons thoroughly alive in this way, you are not likely to find your students dull in this subject. And when you further enliven the geography lessons by first describing a country, then drawing it—allowing the children, to draw it on the board and sketch in the rivers, mountains, distribution of vegetation, forest, and meadow land, and then read travel books with your pupils—when you do all this you find that you usually have very few dull scholars; and what’s more, you can use your geography lessons to arouse the enthusiasm of your pupils and to stir up new capacities within them. If you can make geography itself interesting you will indeed notice that other capacities are aroused also in your pupils.

Comment: I have been thinking about this problem in relation to the first three grades. I would be strict with lazy children and try to awaken their ambition. In certain cases children must be told that they might have to go through the year’s work a second time. Emulation and ambition must be aroused.

RUDOLF STEINER: I wouldn’t recommend you to give much credit to ambition, which cannot generally be aroused in children. In the earliest school years you can make good use of the methods you suggest, but without overemphasizing ambition, because you would then later have to help the child to get rid of it again. But you must primarily consider food and diet, and I need to say this again and again.

Perhaps the friends who speak next will consider the fact that there are many children who in later life have no power of perceiving or remembering natural objects properly. A teacher may despair over some pupils who can never remember which among a number of minerals is a malachite or a hornblende, or even an emerald—who really have no idea of how to comprehend natural objects and recognize them again. The same is true also in relation to plants and animals. Please keep this in mind also.

Comment: I have noticed that with the youngest children you often find some who are backward in arithmetic. I like best to illustrate everything to them with the fingers, or pieces of paper, balls, or buttons. One can also divide the class without the children knowing anything about it; they are divided into two groups, the gifted ones and the weaker ones. We then take the weaker ones alone so that the gifted children are not kept back.

RUDOLF STEINER: In that case, Newton, Helmholtz, and Julius Robert Mayer would have been among the backward ones!

That doesn’t matter.

RUDOLF STEINER: You are right. It doesn’t matter at all. Even Schiller would have been among the weaker ones. And according to Robert Hamerling’s teaching certificate, he passed well in practically everything except German composition; his marks for that subject were below average!³

We have heard how eurythmy can help, and now Miss F. will tell us how she thinks eurythmy can be developed for the obstinate children, for they too must learn eurythmy.

RUDOLF STEINER: These suggestions are all very good. With regard to the children who resist doing eurythmy, there is still another way to get them to take pleasure in it. Besides allowing them to watch eurythmy frequently, try to take photographs of various eurythmy positions. These must be simplified so that the child will get visual images of the human being doing eurythmy forms. Pictures of this kind will make an impression on the children and kindle their abilities in eurythmy. That was why I asked Miss W. to take pictures of this kind (I don’t mean mere reproductions of eurythmy positions, but transformed into simple patterns of movement that have an artistic effect). These could be combined to show children the beauty of line. You would then discover an exceptionally interesting psychological fact—that children could perceive the beauty of line that they produced themselves in eurythmy, without becoming vain and coy. Although children are likely to become vain if their attention is drawn to what they have themselves done, this is not the case in eurythmy. In eurythmy, therefore, you can also cultivate a perception of line that can be used to enhance the feeling of self without awakening vanity and coquettishness.

Someone spoke of how he would explain the electric generator to children. He would try to emphasize in every possible way what would show the fundamental phenomenon most clearly.

RUDOLF STEINER: That is a very important principle, and it is also applicable to other subjects. It is a good principle for teaching, but to a certain extent it applies to all children in the physics lessons. It has no direct connection with the question of dealing with backward pupils. In physics the backward ones, especially the girls, are certain to put up a certain amount of opposition, even when you show them a process of this kind.

Question: Since food plays such a very important role, would Dr. Steiner tell us more about the effect of different foods on the body.

RUDOLF STEINER: I have already spoken of this, and you can also find many references in my lectures. It would perhaps lead us too far afield today to go into all the details of this subject, but most of all one should avoid giving children such things as tea and coffee.

The effect of tea on our thoughts is that they do not want to cohere; they flee from one another. For this reason tea is very good for diplomats, whose job in life is just to keep talking, with no desire to develop one thought logically out of another. You should avoid sending children’s thoughts into flight by allowing them to indulge in tea.

Neither is coffee good for children, because it disposes them to become too pedantic. Coffee is a well-known expedient for journalists, because with its help they can squeeze one thought out of another, as it were. This would not be the right thing for children, because their thoughts should arise naturally, one from another. Coffee and tea are among the things to be avoided. The green parts of a plant and also milk may be considered especially important food for children, and they should have white meat only, as far as possible.

Comment: When a child has difficulty in understanding, the teacher should offer a great deal of individual help, and should also inquire about how the child does in other subjects; but if too much time is spent with the duller children, the difficulty would arise that the others are left unoccupied.

RUDOLF STEINER: Please do not overestimate what the other children lose because of your work with the less gifted ones. As a rule, not much is lost provided that, while you present a subject properly for the duller children, you also succeed in getting the brighter ones to pay attention to it also. There is really then no serious loss for the more talented children. When you have a right feeling for the way in which a subject should be introduced for the weaker ones, then in one way or another the others will profit by it.

Comment: Whenever there is lack of interest, I would always have recourse to artistic impressions. I know of one child who cannot remember the forms of different minerals—in fact he finds it difficult to form a mental image of any type of formation. Such children cannot remember melodies either.

RUDOLF STEINER: You have discovered the particular difficulty found in children who have no perception of forms and no power of retaining them in memory. But you must distinguish between forms related to the organic world and those connected with minerals, which in fact run parallel to the forms of melodies. The important thing is that here we touch on a very, very radical defect, a great defect in the development of the child, and you must consider seriously how this defect can be fundamentally healed. There is an excellent way of helping these children to remember organic forms in nature—the forms of plants and animals; draw caricatures for them that emphasize the characteristics of a particular animal or plant. These drawings must not be ugly or in bad taste, but artistic and striking; now have the children try to remember these caricatures so that, in this roundabout way through caricature, they begin to find it easier to remember the actual forms. You could, for example, draw a mouse for them like this. Give it teeth and whiskers too if you like!

Then there is also another way of possibly helping children to grasp forms: have them understand from inside what they cannot grasp from outside. Let’s suppose, for example, that a child cannot understand a parallelepiped from outside.⁴ The child cannot remember this form. You say to the child: imagine you are a tiny little elf, and that you could stand inside of this form as if it were a room. You allow the child to grasp from inside what cannot be understood from outside. This the child can do. But you must repeat this again and again.

With forms of this kind, which also appear in minerals, this is relatively easy to do, but it is not as easy when it comes to perceiving color or any other quality of the mineral. In that case you can help the child to understand merely by letting the imagination see that a small thing is very large indeed. Have the child repeatedly try to picture some little yellow crystal as a gigantic crystallized form.

When you are dealing with the element of time, however—in music, for example—it is not such an easy matter. Let us for the moment suppose that you have not yet made any progress in improving the children’s grasp of spatial forms. Now, however, if you want to use caricature in musical form, you will only succeed when you introduce an arithmetical process, making the intervals infinitely larger and drawing out each sound for a very long time; thus by greatly increasing the time between each sound, you can produce the melody on a much larger scale, which will have an astonishing effect on the children. In this way you will achieve something, but otherwise you will not be able to effect much improvement.

Questions for tomorrow:

1. How can I treat the higher plants from a natural-scientific viewpoint in the same spirit shown yesterday for the animals, for cuttlefish, mouse, and human beings?⁵

2. How can I introduce mushrooms, mosses, and lichens into these lessons?

These two questions can perhaps be answered together. It is a case of applying the same methods for the plants as those I spoke of yesterday. It is not a question of object lessons, but of the proper teaching after the ninth year, when natural history is introduced into the curriculum.

• 1. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), German dramatist, poet, critic, editor, and translator.
• 2. Due to the food shortages in Germany in 1919.
• 3. Robert Hamerling (1830–1889) was a distinguished German poet and a personal friend of Rudolf Steiner.
• 4. A parallelepiped is a solid with six sides, all of which are parallelograms.
• 5. See Practical Advice to Teachers, lecture 7.

Speech exercise.

Deprive me not of what, when I give it to you freely, pleases you.

Rudolf Steiner: This sentence is constructed chiefly to show the break in the sense, so that it runs as follows: First the phrase “Deprive me not of what,” and then the phrase “pleases you,” but the latter is interrupted by the other phrase, “when I give it to you freely.” This must be expressed by the way you say it. You must notice that the emphasis you dropped on the word “what” you pick up again at “pleases you.”

Rateless ration
roosted roomily
reason wretched
ruined Roland
royalty roster

Name neat Norman on nimble moody mules

Piffling fifer
prefacing feather
phlegma fluting
fairground piercing

Weekly verse from The Calendar of the Soul:

I feel a strange power bearing fruit,
Gaining strength, bestowing me on myself,
I sense the seed ripening
And presentiment weaving, full of Light,
Within me on my selfhood’s power.¹

RUDOLF STEINER: Now we arrive at the difficult task before us today. Yesterday I asked you to consider how you would prepare the lessons in order to teach the children about the lower and higher plants, making use of some sort of illustration or example. I have shown you how this can be done in the case of animals—with a cuttlefish, a mouse, a horse, and a person—and your botany lessons must be prepared in the same spirit. But let me first say that the correct procedure is to study the animal world before coming to terms with the natural conditions of the plants. In the efforts necessary to characterize the form of your botany lessons—finding whatever examples you can from one plant or another—you will become clear why the animal period must come first.

Perhaps it would be a good idea if we first ask who has already given botany lessons. That person could speak first and the others can follow.

Comment: The plant has something like an instinctive longing for the Sun. The blossoms turn toward the Sun even before it has risen. Point out the difference between the life of desire in animals and people, and the pure effort of the plant to turn toward the Sun. Then give the children a clear idea of how the plant exists between Sun and Earth. At every opportunity mention the relation of the plant to its surroundings, especially the contrast between plants and human beings, and plants and animals. Talk about the outbreathing and in-breathing of the plant. Allow the children to experience how “bad” air is the very thing used by the plant, through the power of the Sun, to build up again what later serves as food for people. When speaking of human dependence on food you can point to the importance of a good harvest, and so on. With regard to the process of growth it should be made clear that each plant, even the leaf, grows only at the base and not at the tip. The actual process of growth is always concealed.

RUDOLF STEINER: What does it actually mean that a leaf only grows at the base? This is also true of our fingernails, and if you take other parts of the human being, the skin, the surfaces of the hands, and the deeper layers, the same thing applies. What actually constitutes growth?

Comment: Growth occurs when dead matter is “pushed out” of what is living.

RUDOLF STEINER: Yes, that’s right. All growth is life being pushed out from inside, and the dying and gradual peeling off of the outside. That is why nothing can ever grow on the outside. There must always be a pushing of substance from within outward, and then a scaling off from the surface. That is the universal law of growth—that is, the connection between growth and matter.

RUDOLF STEINER: Much of what you have said is good, but it would also be good in the course of your description to acquaint your students with the different parts of a single plant, because you will continually have to speak about the parts of the plant—leaf, blossom, and so on. It would therefore be good for the pupil to get to know certain parts of a plant, always following the principle that you have rightly chosen—that is, the study of the plant in relation to Sun and Earth. That will bring some life to your study of the plants; from there you should build the bridge to human beings. You have not yet succeeded in making this connection, because everything you said was more or less utilitarian—how plants are useful to people, for example—and other external comparisons.

There is something else that must be worked out before these lessons can be of real value to the children; after you have made clear the connection between animal and human being, you must also try to show the connection between plant and human being. Most of the children are in their eleventh year when we begin this subject, and at this point the time is ripe to consider what the children have already learned—or rather, we must keep in mind that the children have already learned things in a certain way, which they must now put to good use. Then too you must not forget to give the children the kind of image of the plant’s actual form that they can understand.

Comment: The germinating process should be demonstrated to the children—for example, in the bean. First the bean as a seed and then an embryo in its different stages. We could show the children how the plant changes through the various seasons of the year.

RUDOLF STEINER: This should not really be given to your students until they are fifteen or sixteen years old. If you did take it earlier you would see for yourself that the children who are still in the lower grades cannot yet fully understand the germinating process. It would be premature to develop this germinating process with younger children—your example of the bean and so on. That is foreign to the child’s inner nature.

I only meant to point out to the children the similarity between the young plant and the young animal, and the differences as well. The animal is cared for by its mother, and the plant comes into the world alone. My idea was to treat the subject in a way that would appeal more to the feelings.

RUDOLF STEINER: Even so, this kind of presentation is not suitable for children; you would find that they could not understand it.

Question: Can one compare the different parts of the plant with a human being? The root with the head, for example?

RUDOLF STEINER: As Mr. T. correctly described, you must give plants their place in nature as a whole—Sun, Earth, and so on—and always remember to speak of them in relation to the universe. Then when you give the proper form to your lesson you will find that the children meet what you present with a certain understanding.

Someone described how plants and human beings can be compared—a tree with a person, for example: human trunk = tree trunk; arms and fingers = branches and twigs; head = root. When a person eats, the food goes from above downward, whereas in a tree the nourishment goes from below upward. There is also a difference: whereas people and animals can move around freely and feel pleasure and pain, plants cannot do this. Each type of plant corresponds to some human characteristic, but only externally. An oak is proud, while lichens and mosses are modest and retiring.

RUDOLF STEINER: There is much in what you say, but no one has tried to give the children an understanding of the plant itself in its various forms. What would it be like if, for example, you perhaps ask, “Haven’t you ever been for a walk during the summer and seen flowers growing in the fields, and parts of them fly away when you blow on them? They have little ‘fans’ that fly away. And you have probably seen these same flowers a little earlier, when summer was not quite so near; then you saw only the yellow leaf shapes at the top of the stem; and even earlier, in the spring, there were only green leaves with sharp jagged edges. But remember, what we see at these three different times is all exactly the same plant! Except that, to begin with, it is mainly a green leaf; later on it is mainly blossom; and still later it is primarily fruit. Those are only the fruits that fly around. And the whole is a dandelion! First it has leaves—green ones; then it presents its blossoms, and after that, it gets its fruit.

“How does all this happen? How does it happen that this dandelion, which you all know, shows itself at one time with nothing but green leaves, another time with flowers, and later with tiny fruits?

“This is how it comes about. When the green leaves grow out of the earth it is not yet the hot part of the year. Warmth does not yet have as much effect. But what is around the green leaves? You know what it is. It is something you only notice when the wind passes by, but it is always there, around you: the air. You know about that because we have already talked about it. It is mainly the air that makes the green leaves sprout, and then, when the air has more warmth in it, when it is hotter, the leaves no longer remain as leaves; the leaves at the top of the stem turn into flowers. But the warmth does not just go to the plant; it also goes down into the earth and then back again. I’m sure that at one time or another you have seen a little piece of tin lying on the ground, and have noticed that the tin first receives the warmth from the Sun and then radiates it out again. That is really what every object does. And so it is also with warmth. When it is streaming downward, before the soil itself has become very warm, it forms the blossom. And when the warmth radiates back again from the earth up to the plant, it is working more to form the fruit. And so the fruit must wait until the autumn.”

This is how you should introduce the organs of the plant, at the same time relating these organs to the conditions of air and heat. You can now go further, and try to elaborate the thoughts that were touched on when we began today, showing the plants in relation to the outer elements. In this way you can also connect morphology, the aspect of the plant’s form, with the external world. Try this.

Someone spoke about plant-teaching.

RUDOLF STEINER: Some of the thoughts you have expressed are excellent, but your primary goal must be to give the children a comprehensive picture of the plant world as a whole: first the lower plants, then those in between, and finally the higher plants. Cut out all the scientific facts and give them a pictorial survey, because this can be tremendously significant in your teaching, and such a method can very well be worked out concerning the plant world.

Several teachers spoke at length on this subject. One of them remarked that “the root serves to feed the plant.”

RUDOLF STEINER: You should avoid the term serves. It’s not that the root “serves” the plant, but that the root is related to the watery life of earth, with the life of juices. It is however not what the plant draws out of the ground that makes up its main nourishment, but rather the carbon from the air.

Children cannot have a direct perception of a metamorphosis theory, but they can understand the relationship between water and root, air and leaves, warmth and blossoms.

It is not good to speak about the plants’ fertilization process too soon—at any rate, not at the age when you begin to teach botany—because children do not yet have a real understanding of the fertilization process. You can describe it, but you’ll find that they do not understand it inwardly.

Related to this is the fact that fertilization in plants does not play as prominent a part as generally assumed in our modernday, abstract, scientific age. You should read Goethe’s beautiful essays, written in the 1820s, where he speaks of pollination and so on. There he defends the theory of metamorphosis over the actual process of fertilization, and strongly protests the way people consider it so terribly important to describe a meadow as a perpetual, continuous “bridal bed!” Goethe strongly disapproved of giving such a prominent place to this process in plants. Metamorphosis was far more important to him than the matter of fertilization. In our present age it is impossible to share Goethe’s belief that fertilization is of secondary importance, and that the plant grows primarily on its own through metamorphosis; even though, according to modern advanced knowledge, you must accept the importance of the fertilization process, it still remains true, however, that we are doing the wrong thing when we give it the prominence that is customary today. We must allow it to retire more into the background, and in its place we must talk about the relationship between the plant and the surrounding world. It is far more important to describe the way air, heat, light, and water work on the plant, than to dwell on the abstract fertilization process, which is so prominent today. I want to really emphasize this; and because this is a very serious matter and particularly important, I would like you to cross this Rubicon, to delve further into the matter, so that you find the proper method of dealing with plants and the right way to teach children about them.

Please note that it is easy enough to ask what similarities there are between animal and humankind; you will discover this from many and diverse aspects. But when you look for similarities between plants and humankind, this external method of comparison quickly falls apart. But let’s ask ourselves: Are we perhaps on the wrong path in looking for relationships of this kind at all?

Mr. R. came closest to where we should begin, but he only touched on it, and he did not work it out any further.

We can now begin with something you yourselves know, but you cannot teach this to a young child. Before we meet again, however, perhaps you can think about how to clothe, in language suited to children, things you know very well yourselves in a more theoretical way.

We cannot just take human beings as we see them in life and compare them with the plant; nevertheless there are certain resemblances. Yesterday I tried to draw the human trunk as a kind of imperfect sphere.² The other part that belongs to it—which you would get if you completed the sphere—indeed has a certain likeness to the plant when you consider the mutual relationship between plants and human beings. You could even go further and say that if you were to “stuff ” a person (forgive the comparison—you will find the right way of changing it for children) especially in relation to the middle senses, the sense of warmth, the sense of sight, the sense of taste, the sense of smell, then you would get all kinds of plant forms.³ If you simply “stuffed” some soft substance into the human being, it would assume plant forms. The plant world, in a certain sense, is a kind of “negative” of the human being; it is the complement.

In other words, when you fall asleep everything related to your soul passes out of your body; these soul elements (the I and the actual soul) reenter your body when you awaken. You cannot very well compare the plant world with the body that remains lying in your bed; but you can truthfully compare it with the soul itself, which passes in and out. And when you walk through fields or meadows and see plants in all the brightness and radiance of their blossoms, you can certainly ask yourselves: What temperament is revealed here? It is a fiery temperament! The exuberant forces that come to meet you from flowers can be compared to qualities of soul. Or perhaps you walk through the woods and see mushrooms or fungi and ask: What temperament is revealed here? Why are they not growing in the sunlight? These are the phlegmatics, these mushrooms and fungi.

So you see, when you begin to consider the human element of soul, you find relationships with the plant world everywhere, and you must try to work out and develop these things further. You could compare the animal world to the human body, but the plant world can be compared more to the soul, to the part of a human being that enters and “fills out” a person when awaking in the morning. If we could “cast” these soul forms we would have the forms of the plants before us. Moreover, if you could succeed in preserving a person like a mummy, leaving spaces empty by removing all the paths of the blood vessels and nerves, and pouring into these spaces some very soft substance, then you would get all kinds of forms from these hollow shapes in the human body.

The plant world is related to human beings as I have just shown, and you must try to make it clear to the children that the roots are more closely related to human thoughts, and the flowers more related to feelings—even to passions and emotions. And so it happens that the most perfect plants—the higher, flowering plants—have the least animal nature within them; the mushrooms and the lowest types of plant are most closely akin to animals, and it is particularly these plants that can be compared least to the human soul.

You can now develop this idea of beginning with the soul element and looking for the characteristics of the plants, and you can extend it to all the varieties of the plant world. You can characterize the plants by saying that some develop more of the fruit nature—the mushrooms, for example—and others more of the leaf nature, such as ferns and the lower plants, and the palms, too, with their gigantic leaves. These organs, however, are developed differently. A cactus is a cactus because of the rampant growth of its leaves; its blossom and fruit are merely interspersed among the luxuriant leaves.

Try now to translate the thought I indicated to you into language suited for children. Exert your fantasy so that by next time you can give us a vivid description of the plant world all over the Earth, showing it as something that shoots forth into herb and flower, like the soul of the Earth, the visible soul, the soul made manifest.

Then try to bring some fruitful thoughts about how to distinguish between annuals and perennials, or between the flora of western, central, and eastern European countries. Another fruitful thought that you could come to is about how the whole Earth is actually asleep in summer and awake in winter.

You see, when you work in this way you awaken in the child a real feeling for intimacy of soul and for the truth of the spirit. Later, when the children are grown, they will much more easily understand how senseless it is to believe that human existence, as far as the soul is concerned, ceases every evening and begins again each morning. Thus they will see, when you have shown them, that the relationship between the human body and soul can be compared to the interrelationship between the human world and the plant world. How then does the Earth affect the plant? Just as the human body works, so when you come to the plant world you have to compare the human body with the Earth—and with something else, as you will discover for yourselves.

I only wanted to give you certain suggestions so that you, yourselves, using all your best powers of invention, can discover even more before next time. You will then see that you greatly benefit the children when you do not give them external comparisons, but those belonging to the inner life.

• 1. Verse for August 25–31 (twenty-first week); see Rudolf Steiner, The Calendar of the Soul, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1988.
• 2. See Practical Advice to Teachers, lecture 7.
• 3. See The Foundations of Human Experience, lecture 8.

Speech Exercises:

Children chiding
Chaffinch chirping
Choking chimneys
Cheerfully chattering

Children chiding and fetching
Chaffinch chirping switching
Choking chimneys hitching
Cheerfully chattering twitching

Beach children chiding and fetching
Reach chaffinch chirping switching
Birches choking chimneys hitching
Perches cheerfully chattering twitching

RUDOLF STEINER: The “ch” should be sounded in a thoroughly active way, like a gymnastic exercise.¹

The following is a piece in which you have to pay attention both to the form and the content.

From “Galgenlieder” by Christian Morgenstern:

The Does’ Prayer

The does, as the hour grows late,
Med-it-ate;
Med-it-nine;
Med-i-ten;
Med-eleven;
Med-twelve;
Mednight!
The does, as the hour grows late,
Meditate,
They fold their little toesies,
the doesies.²

RUDOLF STEINER: Now we will continue our talk about the plant world.

Various contributions were offered by those present.

RUDOLF STEINER: Later there will be students in the school who will study the plant kingdom on a more scientific basis, in which case they would learn to distinguish mosses, lichens, algae, monocotyledons, dicotyledons, and so on. All children, who in their youth learn to know plants according to scientific principles, should first learn about them as we have described—that is, by comparing them with soul qualities. Later they can study the plant system more scientifically. It makes a difference whether we try first to describe the plants and then later study them scientifically, or vice versa. You can do much harm by teaching scientific botany first, instead of first presenting ideas that relate to the feeling life, as I have tried to show you. In the latter case the children can tackle the study of scientific botanical systems with a truly human understanding.

The plant realm is the soul world of the Earth made visible. The carnation is a flirt. The sunflower an old peasant. The sunflower’s shining face is like a jolly old country rustic. Plants with very big leaves would express, in terms of soul life, lack of success in a job, taking a long time with everything, clumsiness, and especially an inability to finish anything; we think that someone has finished, but the person is still at it. Look for the soul element in the plant forms!

When summer approaches, or even earlier, sleep spreads over the Earth; this sleep becomes heavier and heavier, but it only spreads out spatially, and in autumn passes away again. The plants are no longer there, and sleep no longer spreads over the Earth. The feelings, passions, and emotions of people pass with them into sleep, but once they are there, those feelings have the appearance of plants. What we have invisible within the soul, our hidden qualities—flirtatiousness, for example—become visible in plants. We don’t see this in a person who is awake, but it can be observed clairvoyantly in people who are sleeping. Flirtation, for example, looks like a carnation. A flirt continually produces carnations from the nose! A tedious, boring person produces gigantic leaves from the whole body, if you could see them.

When we express the thought that the Earth sleeps, we must go further: the plant world grows in the summer. Earth sleeps in the summer and is awake during winter. The plant world is the Earth’s soul. Human soul life ceases during sleep, but when the Earth goes to sleep its soul life actually begins. But the human soul does not express itself in a sleeping person. How are we going to get over this difficulty with children?

One of the teachers suggested that plants could be considered the Earth’s dreams.

RUDOLF STEINER: But plants during high summer are not the Earth’s dreams, because the Earth is in a deep sleep in the summer. It is only how the plant world appears during spring and autumn that you can call dreams. Only when the flowers are first beginning to sprout—when the March violet, for example, is still green, before flowers appear, and again when leaves are falling—that the plant world can be compared to dreams. With this in mind, try to make the transition to a real understanding of the plant.

For example, you can begin by saying, “Look at this buttercup,” or any plant we can dig out of the soil, showing the root below, the stalk, leaves, blossoms, and then the stamens and pistil, from which the fruit will develop. Let the child look at a plant like this. Then show a tree and say, “Imagine this tree next to the plant. What can you tell me about the tree? Yes, it also has roots below of course; but instead of a stalk, it has a trunk. Then it spreads its branches, and it’s as if the real plants grew on these branches, because many leaves and flowers can be found there; it’s as if little plants were growing on the branches above. So, we could actually look at a meadow this way: We see yellow buttercups growing all over the meadow; it is covered with individual plants with their roots in the Earth, and they cover the whole meadow. But when we look at the tree, it’s as if someone had taken the meadow, lifted it up, and rounded it into an arch; only then do we find many flowers growing very high all over it. The trunk is a bit of the Earth itself. So we may say that the tree is the same as the meadow where the flowers grow.

“Now we go from the tree to the dandelion or daisy. Here there is a root-like form in the soil, and from it grows something like a stalk and leaves, but at the top there is a little basket of flowers, tiny little blossoms close together. It’s as though the dandelion made a little basket up there with nothing in it but little flowers, perfect flowers that can be found in the dandelion-head. So we have the tree, the little ‘basket-bloomers,’ and the ordinary plant, a plant with a stalk. In the tree it’s as though the plants were only high up on the branches; in the compound flowers the blossom is at the top of the plant, except that these are not petals, but countless fully-developed flowers.

“Now imagine that the plant kept everything down in the Earth; suppose it wanted to develop roots, but that it was unsuccessful—or perhaps leaves, but could not do this either; imagine that the only thing to unfold above ground were what one usually finds in the blossom; you would then have a mushroom. At least, if the roots down below fail and only leaves come up, you would then have ferns. So you find all kinds of different forms, but they are all plants.”

Show the children the buttercup, how it spreads its little roots, how it has its five yellow-fringed petals, then show them the tree, where the “plant” only grows on it, then the composite flowers, the mushroom, and the fern; do not do this in a very scientific way, but so that the children get to know the form in general.

Then you can say, “Why do you think the mushroom remained a mushroom, and why did the tree become a tree? Let’s compare the mushroom with the tree. What is the difference between them? Take the tree. Isn’t it as though the Earth had pushed itself out with all its might—as though the inner being of the tree had forced its way up into the outside world in order to develop its blossoms and fruits away from the Earth? But in the mushroom the Earth has kept within itself what usually grows up out of it, and only the uppermost parts of the plant appear in the form of mushrooms. In the mushroom the ‘tree’ is below the soil and only exists as forces. In the mushroom itself we find something similar to the tree’s outermost part. When lots and lots of mushrooms are spread over the Earth, it is as though you had a tree growing down below them, inside the Earth. And when we look at a tree it is as though the Earth had forced itself up, turning itself inside out, as it were, bringing its inner self into the outer world.”

Now you are coming nearer to the reality: “When you see mushrooms growing you know that the Earth is holding something within itself that, in the case of a growing tree, it pushes up outside itself. So in producing mushrooms the Earth keeps the force of the growing tree within itself. But when the Earth lets the trees grow it turns the growing-force of the tree outward.” Now here you have something not found within the Earth during summer, because it rises out of the Earth then and when winter comes it goes down into the Earth again. “During summer the Earth, through the force of the tree, sends its own force up into the blossoms, causing them to unfold, and in winter it draws this force back again into itself. Now let us think of this force, which during the summer circles up in the trees—a force so small and delicate in the violet but so powerful in the tree. Where can it be found in winter? It is under the surface of the Earth. What happens during the depth of winter to all these plants—the trees, the composite flowers, and all the others? They unfold right under the Earth’s surface; they are there within the Earth and develop the Earth’s soul life. This was known to the people of ancient times, and that was why they placed Christmas—the time when we look for soul life—not in the summer, but during winter.

“Just as a person’s soul life passes out of the body when falling asleep, and again turns inward when a person wakens, so it is also for the Earth. During summer while asleep it sends its sap-bearing force out, and during winter takes it back again when it awakens—that is, it gathers all its various forces into itself. Just think, children, our Earth feels and experiences everything that happens within it; what you see all the summer long in flowers and leaves, the abundance of growth and blossom, in the daisies, the roses, or the carnations—this all dwells under the Earth during winter, and there it has feelings like you have, and can be angry or happy like you.”

In this way you gradually form a view of life lived under the Earth during winter. That is the truth. And it is good to tell the children these things. This is something that even materialists could not argue with or consider an extravagant flight of fancy. But now you can continue from this and consider the whole plant. The children are led away from a subjective attitude toward plants, and they are shown what drives the sap over the Earth during summer heat and draws it back again into itself in winter; they come to see the ebb and flow in plant life. In this way you find the Earth’s real soul life mirrored in plants. Beneath the Earth ferns, mosses, and fungi unfold all that they fail to develop as growing plants, but this all remains etheric substance and does not become physical. When this etheric plant appears above the Earth’s surface, the external forces work on it and transform it into the rudiments of leaves we find in fungi, mosses, and ferns. But under a patch of moss or mushrooms there is something like a gigantic tree, and if the Earth cannot absorb it, cannot keep it within itself, then it pushes up into the outer world.

The tree is a little piece of the Earth itself. But what remains underground in mushrooms and ferns is now raised out of the Earth, so that if the tree were slowly pushed down into the Earth everything would be different, and if it were to be thus submerged then ferns, mosses, and mushrooms would appear; for the tree it would be a kind of winter. But the tree withdraws from this experience of winter. It is the nature of a tree to avoid the experience of winter to some extent, but if I could take hold of a fern or a mushroom by the head and draw it further and further out of the Earth so that the etheric element in it reached the air, then I would draw out a whole tree, and what would otherwise become a mushroom would now turn into a tree. Annual plants are midway between these two. A composite flower is merely another form of what happens in a tree. If I could press a composite flower down into the Earth it would bear only single blossoms. A composite flower could almost be called a tree that has shot up too quickly.

And so we can also find a wish, a desire, living in the Earth. The Earth feels compelled to let this wish sink into sleep. The Earth puts it to sleep in summer, and then the wish rises as a plant. It is not visible above the Earth until it appears as a water-lily. Down below it lives as a wish in the Earth, and then up above it becomes a plant.

The plant world is the Earth’s soul world made visible, and this is why we can compare it with human beings. But you should not merely make comparisons; you must also teach the children about the actual forms of the plants. Starting with a general comparison you can then lead to the single plant species.

Light sleep can be compared with ordinary plants, a kind of waking during sleep with mushrooms (where there are very many mushrooms, the Earth is awake during the summer), and you can compare really sound deep sleep with the trees.

From this you see that the Earth does not sleep as people do, but in one part it is more asleep and in another more awake; here more asleep, there more awake. People, in their eyes and other sense organs, also have sleeping, waking, and, dreaming side by side, all at the same time.

Now here is your task for tomorrow. Please make out a table; on the left place a list of the human soul characteristics, from thoughts down through all the emotions of the soul—feelings of pleasure and displeasure, actively violent emotions, anger, grief, and so on, right down to the will; certain specific plant forms can be compared with the human soul realm. On the right you can then fill in the corresponding plant species, so that in the table you have the thought plants above, the will plants below, and all the others in between.

Rudolf Steiner then gave a graphic explanation of the Pythagorean theorem and referred to an article by Dr. Ernst Müller in Ostwald’s magazine for natural philosophy, Annalen der Naturphilosophie, entitled “Some Observations on a Theory of Knowledge underlying the Pythagorean theorem.”

In the drawing, the red parts of the two smaller squares already lie within the square on the hypotenuse. By moving the blue and the green triangles in the direction of the arrows, the remaining parts of the two smaller squares will cover those parts of the square on the hypotenuse still uncovered.

You should cut out the whole thing in cardboard and then you can see it clearly.³

• 1. The original German exercise (which appears in the appendix) uses the “pf ” sound; the “ch” sound has been substituted in the English version.
• 2. Max Knight, trans., University of California Press, Berkeley, 1964.
• 3. The Pythagorean theorem states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. For another brief discussion of the Pythagorean theorem in teaching see Rudolf Steiner, The Kingdom of Childhood: Introductory Talks on Waldorf Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1995, pp. 85–90.

Speech Exercises:

Clip plop pluck cluck
clinked clapper richly
knotted trappings
rosily tripled

RUDOLF STEINER: Memorize this before you practice it!

An attempt was made to illustrate the concept of a surface area for nine-year-old children; have the children cut out squares to measure from larger squares and copy them.

RUDOLF STEINER: It is certainly good to make it clear to children that, if the length of one side of a square is 3 feet, the area of the surface is 9 square feet, but this limits us to an area of thought where a whole is built from its parts, and this will not help children to gain a true concept of what a surface area really is. What I meant was: What is the right way to proceed, and at what age, in order to actually discover what a surface really is, and that it is obtained by multiplying length by breadth. How can you manage to awaken this concept of a surface in the child? This depends on when you begin teaching children about surface areas. It doesn’t make sense to teach them about surface areas until after you teach them some algebra. The answer, therefore, is to wait for lessons on surface areas until after we deal with algebra.

Now comes another question: How do you make the transition from ordinary problems with figures to problems with letters—that is, algebra? I will give you a suggestion about how to begin, and then you can work it out for yourselves. Before you move on to algebra you must have already worked on interest with the children; interest is principal multiplied by rate percent multiplied by time, divided by 100.

Interest = Principal × Rate × Time

To arrive at this formula, begin with ordinary numbers, and children understand principal, rate percent, time, and so on, relatively easily. So you will try to make this process clear and assure yourself that most of the children have understood it; from there you should move on to the formula, and always make sure that you work according to rule.

\(P\) = principal; \(R\) = rate; \(T\) = time; and \(I\) = interest. What I gave you is a formula I view merely as a basic formula, and with this formula I have taken the first step in moving to algebra. When the children have this formula they merely need to substitute figures for the letters, and then they will always get the right answer.

Now if you have the following formula derived from the first:

you can see that you can change about the 3 letters \(P\), \(R\), \(T\), however you wish, so that the following are also possibilities:

In this way we have taught the children how to work with\(\) interest, and now we can go on to algebra. You can simply say, “We have learned that a sum of \(25\) was equal to \(8\), then \(7\) and \(5\), and another \(5\): that is, \(25 = 8 + 7 + 5 + 5\).” The children will already have understood. Now after you have explained this, you can say, “Here, instead of 25 you could have a different number, and, instead of \(8\), \(7\), \(5\), \(5\) you could have other numbers; in fact, you could tell them that any number could be there. You could have \(s\), for example, as a total, and then you could have \(a + b + c + c\); but if c represents the first \(5\), then \(c\) must also represent the second 5. Just as I put P in place of principal, so in the same place I put the lettecr .

After having shown in a concrete example the transition from number to letter you can now explain the concept of multiplication, and out of this concrete \(g × g\) you can develop \(a × a\), or from \(a × 2\) you can evolve \(a × b\), and so on. This then would be the way to progress from the numbers in arithmetic to algebra with its letters, and from algebra to the calculation of surface areas; \(a × a = a^2\).

Now here is your task for tomorrow. Try to find a truly enlightened way to present to children of ten and eleven the concept of interest and everything associated with it, as well as inverse calculations of rate, time, and principal; then from there demonstrate how to deal with discount—how to teach a child the discounting of bills and the cost of packing and conveyancing, and then continue on to bills of exchange and how to figure them out. That belongs to the twelfth and thirteenth year, and if it is taught at this time it will be retained for the rest of life; otherwise it is always forgotten again. It is possible to deal with it in a simpler form, but it should be done at this age. Anyone who can do this properly has mastered the fundamental method of all computation. Compound interest is not involved at this time. You should therefore go over algebra in an organic way until multiplication, and then continue on to surface area calculation.

Now let’s proceed to the other questions from yesterday, because here it is important also that you should engender presence of mind in the children by assigning them problems.

Someone proposed setting up a little stall with fruit, vegetables, potatoes, and so on, so that the children would have to buy and sell, pay for their purchases, and actually figure out everything for themselves.

RUDOLF STEINER: This idea of buying and selling is very good for the second grade. Also, you should insist that those who have been assigned a problem should really work it out for themselves; you must not allow anyone else do it for them. Keep their interest awake and alive at every point!

Mental arithmetic was discussed.

RUDOLF STEINER related how Gauss¹ as a boy of six arrived at the following solution to a problem he had to do: all of the numbers from 1 to 100 had to be added together. Gauss thought about the problem and concluded it would be a simpler and easier to get a quick answer by taking the same numbers twice, arranging them in the first row in the usual order from left to right—1, 2, 3, 4, 5... up to 100, and beneath that a second row in the reverse order—100, 99, 98, 97, 96 ... and so on to 1; thus 100 was under the 1, 99 under the 2, 98 under the 3, and so on. Then each of these 2 numbers would in every case add up to the whole. This sum would then have to be taken 100 times, which makes 10,100; then, because you have added each of the numbers from 1 to 100 twice (once forward and once backward) this sum would then be halved, and the answer is 5,050. In this way Gauss, to the great astonishment of his teacher, solved the problem in his head.

RUDOLF STEINER: You can use your imagination in making up arithmetical problems, and you can engender presence of mind through problems that deal with movement. With yesterday's example you can progress to practical life by saying, “I sent an express messenger with a letter. Because of certain circumstances the letter was no longer valid. So I sent another messenger. How quickly must the second messenger travel to arrive before the letter had caused any harm? The children should be able to figure this out at least approximately, which is good for them.

One of the teachers spoke of errors in calculation.

RUDOLF STEINER: These kinds of errors in calculations are usual. It is very common to figure the errors into the whole. There is one such mistake made these days that will at sometime or another have to be corrected. When Copernicus formulated his “Copernican system” he proposed three laws. If all three were to be used to describe the Earth’s course through space we would get a very different movement from what is now accepted by astronomers and taught in schools. This elliptic movement would only be possible if the third law were disregarded. When the astronomer uses the telescope, these things do not add up. Because of this, corrections are inserted into the calculations; through the use of Bessel's equations, corrections are introduced every year to account for what does not accord with reality.² In Bessel’s corrections there is the third law of Copernicus.

Your method must never be simply to occupy the children with examples you figure out for them, but you should give them practical examples from real life; you must let everything lead into practical life. In this way you can always demonstrate how what you begin with is fructified by what follows and vice versa.

How would you resolve all these problems? (the flow of fluids slowly through small holes, quickly through large holes; rates of circular motion in machines with wheels of different sizes, and so on.)

The best way would be to proceed at this point to the explanation of what a clock is in its various forms—pendulumclocks, watches, and so on.

These are your tasks for tomorrow:

1. Some historical subject related to the history of civilization to be worked out on the lines of the example.

2. The treatment of some subject taken from nature—sunrise and sunset, seasons of the year and so on—whatever may suggest itself to you, something out of the great universe. The point is to show your method of teaching.

3. The principles of music for the first school year.

4. What form would you give to teaching the poetry of other languages? How would you give the children a feeling for what is poetic in other tongues?

5. How can you provide children with an idea of the ellipse, hyperbola, circle, and lemniscate; also the concept of geometrical locus? The children must be taught all this just before they leave our school at fourteen.

• 1. Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), German mathematician and astronomer. He demonstrated that a circle can be divided into seventeen equal arcs through elementary geometry and developed a new technique for calculating the orbits of asteroids. He is also the originator of the Gaussian error curve in statistics and is considered the founder of the mathematical theory of electricity, from which derives the gaussmeter.
• 2. Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784–1846), German astronomer; he calculated the orbit of Halley’s comet in 1804 and made the first “authenticated” calculation of a star’s distance from Earth. He also calculated the elliptical nature of Earth’s orbit.

Now it’s time to divide up the rest of the subjects and distribute them among the various grades.

It should be very clear that when the children are going on nine—that is, in the third grade—they should begin to study an appropriate selection of animals, which we must always relate to the human being, as in the example I presented to you.¹ This should be continued in the fourth grade, so that during the third and fourth grades we consider the animal kingdom scientifically in its relationship to the human being.

In the fifth grade, we begin to add less familiar animals. We also begin the study of botany as I described it in the theoretical portion of our seminar.² In the sixth grade, we continue with botany and begin the study of minerals, which should definitely be done in conjunction with geography.

In the seventh grade we return to the human being and attempt to teach what I pointed to yesterday with regard to what people need to learn about health and nutrition. We also attempt to apply the concepts the children have acquired in the fields of physics and chemistry to developing a comprehensive view of some specific commercial or industrial processes. All this should be developed out of science, in connection with what we are teaching in physics, chemistry, and geography.

In the eighth grade you will have to construct the human being by showing what is built in from the outside—the mechanics of the bones and muscles, the inner structure of the eye, and so on. Once again, you present a comprehensive picture of industrial and commercial relationships as they relate to physics, chemistry, and geography. If you build up your science lessons as we have just described, you will be able to make them incredibly lively and use them to awaken the children’s interest in everything present in the world and in the human being.

Instruction in physics begins in the sixth grade and is linked to what the children have learned in music. We begin the study of physics by allowing acoustics to be born out of music. You should link acoustics to music theory and then go on to discuss the physiology of the human larynx from the viewpoint of physics. You cannot discuss the human eye yet, but you can discuss the larynx. Then, taking up only the most salient aspects, you go on to optics and thermodynamics. You should also introduce the basic concepts of electricity and magnetism now.

The following year, in the seventh grade, you expand on your studies of acoustics, thermodynamics, optics, electricity, and magnetism. Only then do you proceed to cover the most important basic concepts of mechanics—the lever, rollers, wheel and axle, pulleys, block and tackle, the inclined plane, the screw, and so on. After that you start from an everyday process such as combustion and try to make the transition to simple concepts of chemistry.

In the eighth grade you review and expand upon what was done in the seventh and then proceed to the study of hydraulics, of the forces that work through water. You cover everything belonging to hydraulics—water pressure, buoyancy, Archimedes’ principle.

It would be great if we could stay here for three years giving lectures on education and providing examples of all the things you will have to figure out how to do yourselves out of your own inventiveness, but that can’t be. We will have to be content with what has already been presented.

You conclude your study of physics, so to speak, with aerodynamics—that is, the mechanics of gases—discussing everything related to climatology, weather, and barometric pressure. You continue to develop simple concepts of chemistry so that the children also learn to grasp how industrial processes are related to chemical ones. In connection with chemical concepts, you also attempt to develop what needs to be said about the substances that build up organic bodies—starch, sugar, protein, and fat.

We must still apportion everything related to arithmetic, mathematics, and geometry and distribute it among the eight grades.

You know that standard superficial methodology dictates that in the first grade we should deal primarily with numbers up to 100. We can also go along with this, because the range of numbers doesn’t really matter in the first grade, where we stick with simpler numbers. The main issue, regardless of what range of numbers you use, is to teach the arithmetical operations in a way that does justice to what I said before: Develop addition out of the sum, subtraction out of the remainder, multiplication out of the product and division out of the quotient—that is, exactly the opposite of how it’s usually done. Only after you have demonstrated that 5 is 3 plus 2, do you demonstrate the reverse—that adding 2 and 3 yields 5. You must arouse in the children the powerful idea that 5 equals 3 plus 2, but that it also equals 4 plus 1, and so on. Thus, addition is the second step after separating the sum into parts, and subtraction is the second step after asking “What must I take away from a minuend to leave a specific difference?” and so on. As I said before, it goes without saying that you do this with simpler numbers in the first grade, but whether you chose a range of up to 95 or 100 or 105 is basically beside the point.

After that, however, when the second dentition is over, we can immediately begin to teach the children the times tables—even addition, as far as I’m concerned. The point is that children should memorize their times tables and addition facts as soon as possible after you have explained to them in principle what these actually mean—after you have explained this in principle using simple multiplication that you approach in the way we have discussed. That is, as soon as you’ve managed to teach the children the concept of multiplication, you can also expect them to learn the times tables by heart.

Then in the second grade you continue with the arithmetical operations using a greater range of numbers. You try to get the students to solve simple problems orally, in their heads, without any writing. You attempt to introduce unknown numbers by using concrete objects—I told you how you could approach unknown numbers using beans or whatever else is available. However, you should also not lose sight of doing arithmetic with known quantities.

In the third grade everything is continued with more complicated numbers, and the four arithmetical operations practiced during the second grade are applied to certain simple things in everyday life.

In the fourth grade we continue with what was done in the earlier grades, but we must now also make the transition to fractions and especially to decimal fractions.

In the fifth grade, we continue with fractions and decimals and present everything the children need to do independent calculations involving whole numbers, fractions, and decimals.

In the sixth grade we move on to calculating percentages, interest, discounts and the interest on promissory notes, which then forms the basis for algebra, as we have already seen.

I ask you to observe that, until the sixth grade, we have been deriving the geometric shapes—circle, triangle, and so on—from drawing, after having done drawing for the sake of writing in the first few years. Then we gradually made the transition from drawing done for the sake of writing to developing more complicated forms for their own sake—that is, for the sake of drawing, and also to do painting for the sake of painting. We guide instruction in drawing and painting into this area in the fourth grade, and in drawing we teach what a circle is, what an ellipse is, and so on. We develop this out of drawing. We continue this by moving on to three-dimensional forms, using plasticine if it’s available, and whatever else you can get if it isn’t—even if it’s mud from the street, it doesn’t matter! The point is to develop the ability to see and sense forms.

Mathematics instruction, geometry instruction, then picks up on what has been taught in this way in the drawing classes. Only then do we begin to explain in geometrical terms what a triangle, a square, or a circle is, and so on. That is, the children’s spatial grasp of form develops through drawing. We begin to apply geometrical concepts to what they have learned in this way only once they are in the sixth grade. Then we have to make sure that we do something different in drawing.

In the seventh grade, after making the transition to algebra, we teach raising numbers to powers and extracting roots, and also what is known as calculating with positive and negative numbers. Above all, we try to introduce the children to what we might call practical, real-life applications of solving equations.

We continue this in the eighth grade and take the children as far as they can get with it. We also add calculating areas and volumes and the theory of geometrical loci, which we at least touched upon yesterday.

This gives you a picture of what you have to do with the children in mathematics and geometry.

As we have already seen, in the drawing lessons in the first few grades, we first teach the children to have a specific feeling for rounded or angular forms, and so on. From these forms, we develop what we need for teaching writing. In these very elementary stages of teaching drawing, we avoid imitating anything. As much as possible, you should initially avoid allowing the children to copy a chair or a flower or anything else. As much as possible, you should have them produce linear forms—forms that are round, pointed, semicircular, elliptical, straight, and so on. Awaken in the children a feeling for the difference between the curve of a circle and the curve of an ellipse. In short, awaken their feeling for form before their urge to imitate wakes up! Wait until later before allowing them to apply what they have practiced in drawing forms to imitating actual objects. First have them draw angles so that they understand what an angle is through its shape. Then you show them a chair and say, “Look, here’s an angle, and here’s another angle,” and so on. Do not let the children imitate anything until you have cultivated their feeling for independent forms which can be imitated later. Stick to this principle even when you move on to a more independent and creative treatment of drawing and painting.

Then in the sixth grade you introduce simple projection exercises and drawing shadows, both freehand and with a ruler and compass and the like. Make sure that the children have a good grasp of the concept and can reproduce in their drawings what the shadow of a sphere looks like on the surface of a cylinder if the cylinder is here and the sphere here and a light is shining on the sphere:

Yes, how shadows are cast! So a simple study of projection and shadows must take place in the sixth grade. The children must get a conception of it and must be able to imitate how more or less regular shapes or physical objects cast their shadows on flat and curved surfaces. In their sixth school year the children must acquire a concept of how the technical aspect unites with the element of beauty, of how a chair can be technically suited for a certain purpose while also having a beautiful form. The children must acquire both a concept and a handson grasp of this union of the technical and the beautiful.

Then, in the seventh grade, everything having to do with one object penetrating another should be covered. As a simple example, you might say, “Here we have a cylinder with a post running through it. The post has to go through the cylinder.” You must demonstrate what kind of a shape the post cuts in the surface of the cylinder when it enters and exits. This is something to learn together with the children. They must learn what happens when objects or surfaces interpenetrate, so that they know that it makes a difference whether a stovepipe goes through the ceiling at a right angle, in which case their intersection is a circle, or at an angle, in which case it is an ellipse. In addition, this is the year when the children must be taught a good conception of perspective. So you do simple perspective drawing with objects foreshortened in the distance and elongated in the foreground, and you draw objects that are partially concealed and so on. Once again, you combine the technical aspect with beauty, so that you awaken in the children an idea of whether or not it is beautiful when some portion of a wall of a house is concealed by a projection, let’s say. Some such projections are beautiful and others are not. These things have a pronounced effect when they are taught to seventh graders in particular—that is, to thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds.

In the eighth grade, all this is raised to an artistic level. All the other subjects must be handled similarly to the ones we have discussed. We will come back to this in the afternoon and still add a few things to complete our curriculum. Above all, we will have to see how music is developed in the first grade out of elements that are as simple and elementary as possible, and how from the third grade on the transition is made to more complicated things. The point is that the children should be able to take in those aspects of playing an instrument—especially of playing an instrument, but also of singing—that have a creative and formative effect on their capabilities.

As special cases among all the other artistic subjects, we will have to emphasize gymnastics and eurythmy, which must both be developed out of the element of music and the other arts.

• 1. See Practical Advice to Teachers, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1988, lecture 7.
• 2. See discussion 9, page 114.

Ladies and gentlemen! I would like to warmly welcome you here to this room, where we are gathered for the second time to relate important issues in the life of our Waldorf School. We are especially glad that so many of you have come. The theme I have chosen for tonight’s lecture is “Educational Practices in an Age of Decline, and the Educational Practices of the Day to Come.”

This is no mere theoretical problem for you, now that our Waldorf School has come into being. All the more reason for choosing a theme such as this, so it seemed to me. My remarks today are intended as an introductory formulation of this theme, which for you is not merely an intellectual problem but an issue in which you discover real possibilities of entering into debate with our present times. Having decided, in the course of this debate, to send your children to the Waldorf school, you demonstrated your confidence in the new things this school is trying out. Taking your confidence as a basis, I would like to try to come to a conclusion of sorts by undertaking to illuminate everything that is falling away and dying off and now lies behind us, and by attempting to keep in mind the encouraging things that are coming towards us out of the work of the school up to this point.

In looking at this issue, it will be useful to keep in mind what the moment in which a child first enters school signifies under present circumstances. Circumstances being what they are today, we might say that the freshness and immediacy that are available to growing children at home have escaped from the compartmentalization and limitations that characterize our public life. The possibility for free human expression does exist at home, in the nursery. Not many contemporary children still have the possibility to give their energies free play in a way that corresponds to the deep urges of the individual nature of their will. That they will never again be able to do this is something that has developed over the last two centuries.

When children are sent out of this home environment to go to school, something happens that is very significant, of serious consequence in this day and age. No matter how much of the above-mentioned compartmentalized life we have been able to keep out of the nursery, it all lies in wait for the young person who is growing up. It begins to take effect on the very first day of school; it becomes relevant in the very moment the child enters school. Its effect is so great that it is no exaggeration to speak of a significant crisis in the life of the child.

This crisis consists of the child being confronted with a ready-made system of old educational practices that are in possession of something that is presented to the children in the form of a curriculum that is already worked out. This is fixed in the form of a comprehensive method that has been passed down to us, and in connection with its educational goals there is also a very specific way of enforcing discipline in school.

All of this is unfortunately structured in such a way that we cannot say that the actual driving forces of the present, especially the deeper currents of social change in the immediate past and in the present, have flowed into these structures at all. With regard to the curriculum, until just a few years ago it was generally the case that it existed in the form in which it had been drawn up fifty years ago. This contributed to lessening some negative consequences that could have proceeded from the curriculum. This will be touched on later.

Something was present in finished form, and we cannot say that the experience of people active in education had been able to flow into making it, since the people whose office entitled them to establish it may perhaps [only] have had a specific connection to the schools in the early stages of their development. Very soon this connection was severed, perhaps not by virtue of their outstanding quality as teachers, but because they had proven very adept at finding places in the school system’s administration as up-and-coming officials who awakened hope. The so-called drawing-up of the curriculum as administered by these bureaucrats was cut off from the actual development of the schools themselves, although in fact we can hardly call it that. We might better speak of developmental forces being held back, as an attentive observer would have had to see.

From day one, the child was confronted with this curriculum, with something foreign and cold that determined with unrelenting strictness everything comprising the child’s life of soul and spirit from the first day on. Not only the entire goal of teaching was already set, but in the last few decades it had even been determined at what stage instruction was supposed to be and at what date, from class to class and from week to week.

And how to reach this goal had been prescribed in detail through what was known as the state-approved method. This method was such that it was not possible for the individual teacher to freely disregard it. This would have been only briefly possible before he or she came into conflict with the officials who had to administrate this.

Now, how did this method work its way in? This method stems from presuppositions about human life that have basically been outdated for a long time. In the Middle Ages, schools developed under the sovereignty of the church. Then the states took over the ecclesiastical school system in its entirety and the state schools consolidated their position. The more their basis was prescribed in detail, the less possibility for evolution remained, we might say; the more the modern primary school was flaunted outwardly, the greater the gaping emptiness within this school system became. And the reason for this great emptiness was that the method of teaching stemmed from the old church schools, the Latin schools, whether directly transplanted into the modern Gymnasiunr² or adapted in some way. The old legalistic Latin method of teaching was still to be found in schools of all sorts. Combatting this and attempting partial reforms may have had historical significance, but did not release any forces of transformation.

So now we have the curriculum as it has been passed down to us, and we have the method. In what way were both of these presented to the children? Were there other assumptions, not purely instructional in character, that influenced the children’s lives and destinies? All our schools are based on separation by social class. A lot has been said about comprehensive schools, but nothing was actually done in this direction until we founded the Waldorf School. This was done out of the recognition that we were meant to take on a great social mission.

Children coming to class on their very first day experienced not only the crisis we have described as a soul and spiritual one, but also a social crisis. On that day, children coming home from primary school or from the Gymnasium and meeting their playmates necessarily became aware of so-called class differences. From the very first day, they were fed this poison produced by the separation of the different classes of society. This is the crisis in social feeling, in the child’s naive feeling-life as a whole, that confronted the child on the very first day.

What is the outcome of something like this? We can know what modern spiritual science has worked out on the subject. We can see that what develops into a formative force in teaching children around the age of seven can be effective and can set itself certain tasks because at this point certain forces have been set free in the child as a result of an organic development that has already been completed. These are forces we can work with. We can work with them in such a way that they bring about the inner development and education of the human being and leave their imprint on the further course of organic development. Spiritual science, whose methods we are trying to incorporate, supplies this basic way of looking at the matter.

If we contrast this to old school practices, it must be said that the old school had no connection to the forces that are freed up organically and that come under consideration at this stage of life. Thus it sinned in failing to acknowledge a view such as this, which it would have had to discover if its instructional practices had been sound. On the one hand, because the old school was not able to shape these freed-up forces, they began to run rampant, so that urges developed that were not guided into the developmental direction laid out for them. On the other hand, organic forces that should be freed up only much later, that wanted to become free only much later (if we understand the nature of the child), were pressed into service from the very first day of school.

This brought about what you can observe in the skeletal system. Inner support was weakened; the skeleton was weakened. Certain possibilities of standing upright in life were taken from the children because they were presented from the very first day with an education that addressed only their heads, that spoke only to their understanding. It could not or did not want to penetrate any deeper.

Facts such as these are often reflected in small symptoms. In this connection, it was interesting to find the statement in Haug’s book that French, which we introduce in the first grade, as you know, should not be taught at that stage because it is an irrational language.

What is revealed in this characteristic statement? We can clearly see here that what is standing in front of the child is not a living person but a big fat book entitled Grammar; a fateful book for all of us. Grammar cannot be presented to children at this grade level; this is an impossibility tantamount to the impossibility for people with old-school habits of letting the living power of language play into the child’s development. In the Gymnasium, this book stands there, and in the primary schools something else replaces the living personality who is actually meant to bring life’s contents to the children. In the primary schools we have gotten away from the big book; instead, there are many more cards, charts and tables, all of which are supposed to be presented to the children so that they will learn to form judgments and conclusions.

If we understand the nature of the child correctly, we will be forced to admit that children have subtle reasons for not paying attention when they are confronted with a lesson of this sort. The power of wisdom that wants to protect them from harm makes them resist the big book, resist an intellectual way of looking at things. The inattentiveness that appears is a means of self-defense for them. They are evading the leveling influences of a lesson of this sort. If you teach like this from the first hour to the last, then the children attempt to escape from the lesson by being inattentive.

But how can this attempt possibly succeed in a school with any form of discipline? Not only is the material presented in the way described above, but the children are also expected to adjust to a different subject matter three or four times in the course of a morning, so they are thrown from one level to another. Those who know how to follow the school’s development clearly realize that most recently the attempt was made to shorten the lessons still further, to 45 minutes each, to have the subject matter flow past in a movie-like fashion. This division was then extended to the individual lessons. How was that done? The formal stages of instruction established by Ziller are a masterpiece of modern methodology, and have been universally accepted in the primary schools.³ Let me make it clear to you what a teacher of this sort has to accomplish in a single 45 minute lesson. The material is supposed to be presented to the children in six stages: First, the introduction. Second, consolidation. Third, enlivening the subject matter. Then comes the stage of making the subject accessible. This stage is not very extensive. Then comes the stage of mastering the material, and last the stage of putting it to use, all in the same lesson. But this is repeated four times in the same morning in different subject areas.

You will have to admit that I am right in saying that our children cannot be dealt with according to this abusive method. But what happened when these mistreated children tried to evade the effects of the methodology and curriculum that required that on Tuesday, May 11, this particular goal must have been achieved in all classes at this grade level? What happened then?

This is where discipline came into effect. From the very first lesson, it worked with means that inevitably poisoned the children’s entire moral life. Children who had been accustomed to expressing themselves freely and naturally found themselves confronted with praise or blame at every turn. Schematization set in. From the very beginning, the children adapted to the possibility of being called upon, so only in some cases did they participate attentively in the lesson. If they had been accustomed to expressing themselves freely and tried to do the same in school, they found themselves reprimanded and cut off whenever they tried to approach the teacher in this way, and had to be prepared for punishments that must have occasioned grave misgivings in their naive soul life. They then had to complete specific assignments rather than having the attitude awakened in them that it is a pleasure to be permitted to do schoolwork. Homework received the stamp of a punishment. The children got a very strange impression of lessons of this sort. Instruction as a whole had something to do with a system of punishment, and this was expressed in organic impairments that stunted their young growth and allowed certain things in them to grow rampant that would otherwise have unfolded in a healthy way.

I would like to point out that this is related to a very specific phenomenon that occurs in the later grades. Students deal with the school system as a whole with a sarcasm that pervades all of their behavior toward their teachers and their schools. You all know from your own school days what fun it was to be critical of the teachers. Add to that the phenomenon of suicides among children of school age. These ominous phenomena are becoming ever more pronounced, and school administrators are ever more helpless in the face of them. Real life forces that want to become active in a natural and appropriate form of instruction have been dammed up. Everything that has been held back in this way then causes the nervousness that we see as a typical ailment of the times manifesting in the school system.

Now let us ask ourselves what has been accomplished, what has been brought to a conclusion of sorts, when grade school has been completed. Our primary-school students leave school in their fifteenth year. People who have had a lot to do with the proletariat and who have often had to look working people in the face will notice the phenomenon of a harshness of sorts that leaves its mark on these people’s faces. Much has been said about this, but little thought has been given to it. It has not been observed, however, that this is inevitable, an unavoidable consequence of the fact that the life of feeling is set free in the fourteenth year, and for the majority of our compatriots, their education has been cut off at this point. How could anything different come of it, if feeling abilities are not able to become formative forces in these people’s destiny?

Those who continued on were now seriously introduced to the old Latin method I spoke about in the beginning. The study of classical languages was emphasized more, or alternatively the study of the sciences, which in a certain respect are also only the heritage of the Roman Empire and of Roman law.

The consequence of this was that if people leaving primary school had inevitably been restricted in their development, the people leaving the humanistic Gymnasium were supposed to represent the ideal of humanistic education. Being able to speak languages that were studied for their own sake was regarded as an accomplishment. People failed to notice, however, that being preoccupied with such languages reflected back on the entire being of the person in question, and that people who had spent many hours in the study of ancient Greek had become incapable of understanding the language of everyday facts. And the people coming out of the Realschule⁴ later became the practitioners of Realpolitik, always insisting on facts and on laws of all sorts, but failing to see that reality is influenced by trends totally different from the ones they call their laws.

Keeping this in mind, we can see the fateful consequences of graduating from all three of these types of schools—forces were held back that could have worked to form organs, influencing education in the deepest sense of the word,⁵ while on the other hand forces that were not able to flow in had to run rampant. If left uncultivated, the life of feeling has the tendency to fall into sentimentality at every turn.

And what happened to the will? Either it was so broken that we now have human wrecks serving in responsible positions, or on the other hand we have those brutal and violent human beings who come out trampling everything under their feet as a consequence of not having been able to cultivate their will.

These phenomena have been frequently summed up and abundantly criticized. During the revolutionary period, the opinion arose that now, out of the foul-smelling vapor of new forces brewing, something like a new stream of life would be able to flow into the school system as such; it would be possible to whip up criticism to the point of doing something constructive. Since then we have not grown tired of using the term “comprehensive school” over and over again to label efforts that thought to get in touch with the times. But when we look at the legislature’s omissions, we will not be able to avoid seeing the great danger that confronts us. Although the traditional structure of the schools has been changed outwardly, we see that because of the desire to expand the so-called “school franchise,” the danger is imminent. We are seeing that primary schools can turn into denominational schools, party schools, or schools of specific economic groups. Even less thought than before is being given to the universal human aspect, and this is now happening at the insistence of a legally functioning bureaucratic apparatus.

You will find that the relevance of bureaucrats has not been reduced under recent conditions. On the contrary, they are able to have a much greater effect and to subvert much more than they could under the old system. Just observe how jealously they make sure that all regulations are observed. In the face of this brutal will, we will not be able to avoid the conclusion that it will not be easily possible to realize our educational ideal. We must be prepared for the possibility that the instructional content we are supposed to bring to the children will be regulated to an even greater extent than it was previously, especially in the subject of history.

What will the further consequence of this be? The result will be that the bureaucratic character of teaching will become even more pronounced. All of this stands in contrast to our world of today, to the needs of our times, which are asking for something totally different from the pale glimmer of things to come that people want to spread over the school system and beyond it. Why is it impossible for existing innovations to lead to that goal? Here we come upon a very strange law: If something is conceived of somewhere and it is not able to pour itself out fully into the object of its concern because people are not putting all their energy into it, its effect is not to decrease the negative circumstances, but to unite with them. Beneath the surface, it flows over to join them. Lichtwark put it like this: “Partial reforms accomplish only an intensification of existing tendencies.”⁵ What we must expect in this case is anything but a restructuring. We can only expect a further intensification of efforts that are already present.

Now, I have spread out this picture before you to clarify something that does not seem exaggerated to me, something that many teachers would like to see eliminated from their lives and destinies, because if we want to have the efforts of our independent school flow into the public life of our times in the right way, we must know the danger that threatens us from the old school system. It cannot be the task of my remarks today to describe these efforts again.

Even if the prescriptions that legally regulated the old school system are lacking in our school, that does not mean that we have made our task any easier. In fact, we have made it more difficult. Our times require us to take up heavy burdens for the sake of the evolution on which we base our hopes for the future. Having taken up these heavy burdens, we will be able to carry them only with the help of all those who have lent us their confidence. They must be aware that the smallest results are of significance; they must follow the progress of our life in the school with great seriousness. Not a single lesson, not a single other undertaking that belongs to the school, is envisaged in the way in which it would result from old educational practices.

What is being accomplished here is a life-force for our nation itself. It is a force whose effects we need. Our times are thirsting for them. We must bring about a totally different encounter between home and school than was the case under the old school practices. Either there was a conflict, or the children were thrown back and forth between home and school, so to speak. We often encounter the opinion that parents are happy once the children are in school; they want them to be in school all day long and are very upset by “unreasonable” demands that they should support the activity of the school. In a very subtle way, children pick up on all the nuances that are circulated in their environment. When the children can observe that their parents look at things in ways that differ from what is said in school, the children get involved in a conflict, and it becomes impossible to focus on the children to the intended effect.

Now that we have brought our school into existence, now that we have worked with all our might to realize a part of it, the old educational practices are still alive, and people who grew up under them are trying to introduce old requirements into this new thing. They would like to judge the whole thing according to a compartmentalized standard. It can happen that people are concerned when our school, which tries to develop all of a child’s forces, cannot show why a child has not yet learned this or that. They are very concerned about it. We must take into account that these concerns are not justified, or we would not be able to speak of a new school, but would simply have taken up old educational practices and repackaged them in some way. What deviates from the old practices in the Waldorf School is done out of educational practices that do not flow out of clever, rationally thought-out ways of looking at things.

Rather, it flows out of forces that are related to the developmental forces of young people and of our nation as a whole. Having assured you of this, we hope that you will feel sufficiently connected to what we are doing to grant us your confidence. You must have patience and wait for this to bear fruit.

Meanwhile, the mood that ensouls and enlivens all our children can be taken as an indication of what the fruit will be. They bring it to school with them; they realize that learning is not a punishment here. Take this mood, which is even evident in the fresh red cheeks of some of our pupils, as a sign that things are coming to fruition. Do not let yourselves be intimidated by the ghosts trying to take our declining times by storm. Tell yourselves that on stepping out into life as a mature person, a child who has grown up here shall be compared only to him or herself.

When we apply this way of looking at things to the school, the creative joy that enlivens us will bear fruit, and we will see that contemporary life is forced to take the school into account. Creative forces can only come out of schools in which such forces are not held back but are developed, so that the children’s first day of school does not constitute a crisis. Instead, the children are introduced to school in a way that opens them up to their life to come. They leave school, not as violent individuals and not as people burdened merely with head-knowledge, but as individuals who can stand for an education of a new sort, the truly human education of a new age. Inherent in truly understanding the human being is a pledge to support our nation’s evolution in the future.

This task, too, is great, but harshness is a sign of our times. People do not want to see the face of our times so clearly that its embittered lines are visible. They want to avoid seeing it, to draw veil upon veil over this face because they are afraid of what it might say. The tasks that we have taken on are great and severe.

But we believe that there can be people who love these tasks doubly because of their very greatness and severity. We unite with you in the hope that you will learn to love them for this. Something new and fresh will be able to come from this severity.

What we have to stand for is harsh and severe, but this severity will give those of us who work out of the Independent Waldorf School the strength to inscribe a fiery sign on the brow of our declining age. May this school, as it lives out its life among hollow phrases, find the strength to die a mighty death so that the sun of the day to come may shine on it.

• 2. A classical German secondary school that prepares its pupils for university study.
• 3. Tuiskon Ziller, 1817-1882, a student of Herbart and author of Einleitung in die allgemeine Pädagogik [An Introduction to General Pedagogy], published in 1856, and Grundlegung zur Lehre vom erziehenden Unterricht [Laying the Foundations for a Theory of Educational Instruction], published in 1865.
• 4. A modern secondary school emphasizing modern languages, mathematics and science.
• 5. Translator’s note: there is a play on words in the German here—“forming” and “education” are the same word, “Bildung.”
• 5. Alfred Lichtwark, 1852-1914, art educator.

My dear friends,

At this point I would like to build a bridge, as it were, between the discussions in this course and the discussion in the previous course. We will study today the light spectrum, as it is called, and its relation to the heat and chemical effects that come to us with the light. The simplest way for us to bring before our minds what we are to deal with is first to make a spectrum and learn what we can from the behavior of its various components. We will, therefore, make a spectrum by throwing light through this opening—you can see it here. (The room was darkened and the spectrum shown.) It is to be seen on this screen. Now you can see that we have something hanging here in the red portion of the spectrum. Something is to be observed on this instrument hanging here. First we wish to show you especially how heat effects arise in the red portion of the spectrum. Something is to be observed on this instrument hanging here. These effects are to be observed by this expanding action of the energy cylinder on the air contained in the instrument, which expanding action in turn pushes the alcohol column down on this side and up on this one. This depression of the alcohol column shows us that there is a considerable heat effect in this part of the spectrum. It would be interesting also to show that when the spectrum is moved so as to bring the instrument into the blue-violet portion, the heat effect is not noticeable. It is essentially characteristic of the red portion. And now, having shown the occurrence of heat effects in the red portion of the spectrum by means of the alcohol column, let us show the chemical activity of the blue-violet end. We do this by allowing the blue portion to fall on a substance which you can see is brought into a state of phosphorescence. From the previous course you know that this is a form of chemical activity. Thus you see an essential difference between the portion of the spectrum that disappears on the unknown on this side and the portion that disappears on this other side; you see how the substance glows under the influence of the chemical rays, as they are called. Moreover, we can so arrange matters that the middle portion of the spectrum, the real light portion, is cut out. We cannot do this with absolute precision, but approximately we can make the middle portion dark by simply placing the path of the light a solution of iodine in carbon disulphate. This solution has the property of stopping the light. It is possible to demonstrate the chemical effect on one side and the heat effect on the other side of this dark band. Unfortunately we cannot carry out this experiment completely, but only mention it in passing. If I place an alum solution in the path of the light the heat effect disappears and you will see that the alcohol column is no longer displaced because the alum, or the solution of alum, to speak precisely, hinders its passage. Soon you will see the column equalize, now that we have placed alum in the path, because the heat is not present. We have here a cold spectrum.

Now let us place in the light path the solution of iodine in carbon disulphate, and the middle portion of the spectrum disappears. It is very interesting that a solution of esculin will cut out the chemical effect. Unfortunately we could not get this substance. In this case, the heat effect and the light remain, but the chemical effect ceases. With the carbon disulphide you see clearly the red portion—it would not be there if the experiment were an entire success—and the violet portion, but the middle portion is dark. We have succeeded partly in our attempt to eliminate the bright portion of the spectrum. By carrying out the experiment in a suitable way as certain experimenters have done (for instance, Dreher, 50 years ago) the two bright portions you see here can be done away with. Then the temperature effect may be demonstrated on the red side, and on the other side phosphorescence shows the presence of the chemically active rays. This has not yet been fully demonstrated and it is of very great importance. It shows us how that which we think of as active in the spectrum can be conceived in its general cosmic relations.

In the course that I gave here previously I showed how a powerful magnet works on the spectral relations. The force emanating from the magnet alters certain lines, changes the picture of the spectrum itself. It is only necessary for a person to extend the thought prompted by this in order to enter the physical processes in his thinking. You know from what we have already said that there is really a complete spectrum, a collection of all possible twelve colors; that we have a circular spectrum instead of the spectrum spread out in one dimension of space. We have (in the circular spectrum) here green, peach blossom here, here violet and here red with the other shades between. Twelve shades, clearly distinguishable from one another.

Now the fact is that under the conditions obtaining on the earth such a spectrum can only exist as a mental image. When we are dealing with this spectrum we can only do so by means of a mental picture. The spectrum we actually get is the well-known linear one extending as a straight line from red through the green to the blue and violet—thus we obtain a spectrum formed from the circular one, as I have often said, by making the circle larger and larger, so that the peach blossom disappears, violet shades off into infinity on one side and red shades off on the other, with green in the middle.

We may ask the question: how does this partial spectrum, this fragmentary color band arise from the complete series of color, the twelve color series which must be possible? Imagine to yourselves that you have the circular spectrum, and suppose forces to act on it to make the circle larger and larger and finally to break at this point (see drawing). Then, when it has opened, the action of these forces would make a straight line of the circle, a line extending apparently into infinity in each direction. (Fig. 1).

Now when we come upon this straight line spectrum here under our terrestrial conditions we feel obliged to ask the question: how can it arise? It can arise only in this way, that the seven known colors are separated out. They are, as it were, cut out of the complete spectrum by the forces that work into it. But we have already come upon these forces in the earth realm. We found them when we turned our attention to the forces of form. This too is a formative activity. The circular form is made over into the straight-line form. It is a form that we meet with here. And considering the fact that the structure of the spectrum is altered by magnetic forces, it becomes quite evident that forces making our spectrum possible are everywhere active. This being the case, we have to assume that our spectrum, which we consider a primary thing, has working within it certain forces. Not only must we consider light variation in our ordinary spectrum, but we have to think ofthis ordinary spectrum as including forces which render it necessary to represent the spectrum by a straight line. This idea we must link up with another, which comes to us when we go through the series, as we have frequently done before (Fig. 2), from solids, through fluids, to condensation and rarefaction, i.e. gases, to heat and then to that state we have called X, where we have materialization and dematerialization. Here we meet a higher stage of condensation and rarefaction, beyond the heat condition, just as condensation and rarefaction proper constitute a kind of fluidity of form.

When form itself becomes fluid, when we have a changing form in a gaseous body, that is a development from form as a definite thing. And what occurs here? A development of the condensation-rarefaction condition Keep this definitely in mind, that we enter a realm where we have a development of the condensation-rarefaction state.

What do we mean by a “development of rarefaction”? Well, matter itself informs us what happens to it when it becomes more and more rarefied. When I make matter more and more dense, it comes about that a light placed behind the matter does not shine through. When the matter becomes more and more rarefied, the light does pass through. When I rarefy enough, I finally come to a point where I obtain brightness as such. Therefore, what I bring into my understanding here in the material realm is empirically found to be the genesis of brightness or luminosity as a heightening of the condition of rarefaction; and darkening has to be thought of as a condensation, not yet intense enough to produce matter, but of such an intensity as to be just on the verge of becoming material.

Now you see how I place the realm of light above the heat realm and how the heat is related to the light in an entirely natural fashion. But when you recollect how a given realm always gives a sort of picture of the realm immediately above it, then you must look in the being of heat for something that foreshadows, as it were, the conditions of luminosity and darkening. Keep in mind that we do not always find only the upper condition in the lower, but also always the lower condition in the upper. When I have a solid, it foreshadows for me the fluid. What gives it solidity may extend over into the non-solid realm. I must make it clear to myself, if I wish to keep my concepts real, that there is a mutual interpenetration of actual qualities. For the realm of heat this principle takes on a certain form; namely this, that dematerialization works down into heat from above (see arrow). From the lower side, the tendency to materialization works up into the heat realm.

Thus you see that I draw near to the heat nature when I see in it a striving for dematerialization, on the one hand, and on the other a striving for materialization. (If I wish to grasp its nature I can do it only by conceiving a life, a living weaving, manifesting itself as a tendency to materialization penetrated by a tendency to dematerialization.) Note, now, what an essential distinction exists between this conception of heat based on reality and the nature of heat as outlined by the so-called mechanical theory of heat of Clausius. In the Clausius theory we have in a closed space atoms or molecules, little spheres moving in all directions, colliding with each other and with the walls of the vessel, carrying on an outer movement. (Fig. 3) And it is positively stated: heat consists in reality in this chaotic movement, in this chance collision of particles with each other and with the walls of the vessel. A great controversy arose as to whether the particles were elastic or non-elastic. This is of importance only as the phenomena can be better explained on the assumption of elasticity or on the assumption that the particles are hard, non-elastic bodies. This has given form to the conviction that heat is purely motion in space. Heat is motion. We must now say “heat is motion,” but in an entirely different sense. It is motion, but intensified motion. Wherever heat is manifest in space, there is a motion which creates the material state striving with a motion which destroys the material state. It is no wonder, my friends, that we need heat for an organism. We need heat in our organism simply to change continuously the spatially-extended into the spatially non-extended. When I simply walk through space, my will carries out a movement in space. When I think about it, something other than the spatial is present. What makes it possible for me as a human organism to be inserted into the form relationships of the earth? When I move over the earth, I change the entire terrestrial form. I change her form continually. What makes it possible that I am in relation to the other things of the earth, and that I can form ideas, outside of space, within myself as observer, of what is manifested in space? This is what makes it possible, my being exists in the heat medium and is thus continually enabled to transform material effects, spatial effects, into non-spatial ones that no longer partake of the space nature. In myself I experience in fact what heat really is, intensified motion. Motion that continually alternates between the sphere of pressure and the sphere of suction.

Assume that you have here (Fig. 4) the border between pressure and suction forces. The forces of pressure run their course in space, but the suction forces do not, as such, act in space—they operate outside of space. For my thoughts, resting on the forces of suction, are outside of space. Here on one side of this line (see figure) I have the non-spatial. And now when I conceive of that which takes place neither in the pressure nor in the suction realms, but on the border line between the two, then I am dealing with the things that take place in the realm of heat. I have a continually maintained equilibrium tendency between pressure effects of a material sort and suction effects of a spiritual sort. It is very significant that certain physicists have had these things right under their noses but refuse to consider them. Planck, the Berlin physicist, has made the following striking statement: if we wish to get a concept of what is called ether nowadays, the first requisite is to follow the only path open to us, in view of the knowledge of modern physics, and consider the ether non-material. This from the Berlin physicist, Planck. The ether, therefore, is not to be considered as a material substance. But now, what we are finding beyond the heat region, the realm wherein the effects of light take place, that we consider so little allied to the material that we are assuming the pressure effects—characteristic of matter—to be completely absent, and only suction effects active there. Stated otherwise, we may say: we leave the realm of ponderable matter and enter a realm which is naturally everywhere active, but which manifests itself in a manner diametrically opposite to the realm of the material. Its forces we must conceive of as suction forces while material things obviously manifest through pressure forces. Thus, indeed, we come to an immediate concept of the being of heat as intensified motion, as an alternation between pressure and suction effects, but in such a way that we do not have, on the one hand, suction spatially manifested and, on the other hand, pressure spatially manifested. Instead of this, we have to think of the being of heat as a region where we entirely leave the material world and with it three-dimensional space. If the physicist expresses by formulae certain processes, and he has in these formulae forces, in the case where these forces are given the negative sign—when pressure forces are made negative—they become suction forces. Attention must be paid to the fact that in such a case one leaves space entirely. This sort of consideration of such formulae leads us into the realm of heat and light. Heat is only half included, for in this realm we have both pressure and suction forces.

These facts, my dear friends, can be given, so to speak, only theoretically today in this presentation in an auditorium. It must not be forgotten that a large part of our technical achievement has arisen under the materialistic concepts of the second half of the 19^th century. It has not had such ideas as we are presenting and therefore such ideas cannot arise in it. If you think over the fruitfulness of the one-sided concepts for technology, you can picture to yourselves how many technical consequences might flow from adding to the modern technology, knowing only pressures—the possibility of also making fruitful these suction forces. (I mean not only spatially active suction which is a manifestation of pressure, but suction forces qualitatively opposite to pressure.)

Of course, much now incorporated in the body of knowledge known as physics will have to be discarded to make room for these ideas. For instance, the usual concepts of energy must be thrown out. This concept rests on the following very crude notions: when I have heat I can change it into work, as we saw from the up and down movement of the flask in the experiment resulting from the transformation of heat. But we saw at the same time that the heat was only partly changed and that a portion remained over of the total amount at hand. This was the principle that led Eduard von Hartmann to enunciate the second important law of the modern physics of heat—a perpetuum mobile of the second type is impossible.

Another physicist, Mach, well known in connection with modern developments in this field, has done quite fundamental thinking on the subject. He has thought along lines that show him to be a shrewd investigator, but one who can only bring his thinking into action in a purely materialistic way. Behind his concepts stands the materialistic point of view. He seeks cleverly to push forward the concepts and ideas available to him. His peculiarity is that when he comes to the limit of the usual physical concepts where doubts begin to arise, he writes the doubts down at once. This leads soon to a despairing condition, because he comes quickly to the limit where doubts appear, but his way of expressing the matter is extremely interesting. Consider how things stand when a man who has the whole of physics at his command is obliged to state his views as mach states them. He says (Ernst Mach, Die Prinzipien der Warme Lehre, p. 345): “There is no meaning in expressing as work a heat quantity which cannot be transformed into work.” (We have seen that there is such a residue.) “Thus it appears that the energy principle like other concepts of substance has validity for only a limited realm of facts. The existence of these limits is a matter about which we, by habit, gladly deceive ourselves.”

Consider a physicist who, upon thinking over the phenomena lying before him, is obliged to say the following: “Heat exists, in fact, that I cannot turn into work, but there is no meaning in simply thinking of this heat as potential energy, as work not visible. However, I can perhaps speak of the changing of heat into work within a certain region—beyond this it is not valid.” And in general it is said that every energy is transformable into another, but only by virtue of a certain habit of thinking about those limits about which we gladly deceive ourselves.

It is extremely interesting to pin physics down at the very point where doubts are expressed which must arise from a straightforward consideration of the facts.

Does this not clearly reveal the manner in which physics is overcome when physicists have been obliged to make such statements? For, fundamentally, this is nothing other than the following: one can no longer hold to the energy principle put forth as gospel by Helmoltz and his colleagues. There are realms in which this energy principle does hold.

Now let us consider the following: How can one make the attempt symbolically (for fundamentally it is symbolic when we try to set the outlines of something), how can we make the attempt to symbolize what occurs in the realm of heat? When you bring together all these ideas I have developed, and through which in a real sense I have tried to attain to the being of heat, then you can get a concept of this being in the following manner.

Picture this to yourselves (Fig. 5). Here is space (blue) filled with certain effects, pressure effects. Here is the non-spatial (red) filled with suction effects. Imagine that we have projected out into space what we considered as alternately spatial and non-spatial. The red portion must be thought of as non-spatial. Using this intermediate region as an image of what is alternately spatial and non-spatial, you have in it a region where something is appearing and disappearing. Think of something represented as extended and disappearing. As substance appears, there enters in something from the other side that annihilates it, and then we have a physical-spiritual vortex continually manifesting in such a manner that what is appearing as substance is annihilated by what appears at the same time as spirit. We have a continual sucking up of what is in space by the entity which is outside of space.

What I am outlining to you here, my dear friends, you must think of as similar to a vortex. But in this vortex you should see simply in extension that which is “intensive” in its nature. In this way we approach, I might say figuratively, the being of heat. We have yet to show how this being of heat works so as to bring about such phenomena as conduction, the lowering of the melting point of an alloy below the melting point of its constituents, and what it really means that we should have heat effects at one end of the spectrum and chemical effects at the other.

We must seek the deeds of heat as Goethe sought out the deeds of light. Then we must see how knowledge of the being of heat is related to the application of mathematics and how it affects the imponderable of physics. In other words, how are real formulae to be built, applicable to heat and optics.