The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In today’s lecture we shall consider how the content of a lesson may be adapted to the life of the children. There can be no doubt whatsoever that an education that is not based on a true understanding of the human being cannot possibly succeed in adapting the content of a lesson to the reality of human life.

The spiritual aspect of the human being is not recognized today; it is really only the physical body that is considered. There are some, perhaps, who admit to something of a soul nature that, in a vague way, influences the physical body. But even they do not consider the inner concrete nature of soul and spirit. It is exactly this consideration that anthroposophy is to contribute toward an understanding of the human being. It is only this that will, in a conscious way, make the adaptation of our lessons to the human life processes possible.

Let us assume—it will not be difficult to imagine it—that the children are listening to a story you tell them, or that they are looking at a picture you drew for them on the blackboard, or that they are looking at a diagram of an experiment, or that they are listening to a piece of music you play for them. In each of these activities you are initially in a relation to the outer physical reality of the children. But what you are inserting into the children in a roundabout way through the physical reality—be it through the eyes, the ears, or the comprehending intellect—everything that is thus placed into the children very soon assumes a quite different form of life.

The children go home, they go to bed, they go to sleep; their egos and astral bodies are outside their etheric and physical bodies. What you did with the children in this roundabout way through the physical body and also the etheric body continues in the astral body and the ego. But the latter two are now, during sleep, in a quite different environment. They experience something that can only be experienced during sleep, and everything you taught the children participates in the experience. The effects of the lesson that remain in the astral body and ego are part of the experience during sleep. You must know that you let flow into the astral body and ego what you teach the children through this detour of the physical body and that you thus affect the children’s sleep experience. The children will present to you on the following morning the results of what they experience between falling asleep and waking.

A simple example will clarify this for you. Let us think of a child who is doing eurythmy or singing. The physical body is active, and the active physical body and the etheric body impress this activity on the astral body and ego. The ego and astral body are forced into participating in the movements of the physical and etheric bodies. But they resist, because actually they have other forces to concentrate on. These forces must now, in a way, be subdued. And although the ego and astral body resist, they must accept what their own physical and etheric bodies mediate to them—in eurythmy it is more the physical body; in listening to a piece of music, it is more the etheric body.

Ego and astral body then enter the world we live in between falling asleep and waking up. Everything that has been impressed on them continues during sleep to vibrate in them. Ego and astral body actually repeat—in the more intricate and spiritualized way peculiar to their nature—what they experienced in eurythmy and music. They repeat all of it. And what they thus experience during sleep, this the children take with them to school on the following day. The children incorporate the experience into their etheric and physical bodies, and we have to reckon with that.

Considered in totality, the human being presents an extraordinarily complicated structure for us to come to terms with in our lessons. Let us now take a closer look at these processes. Let us consider a child who is doing eurythmy. The physical body is in movement, and the movements of the physical are transferred to the etheric body. Astral body and ego initially resist, but the activities of the physical and etheric bodies are impressed on them. Astral body and ego then separate during sleep and connect the impressions to spiritual forces that are quite different. On the following morning astral body and ego return the impressions to the etheric and physical bodies. We can then see a remarkable harmony between that which was received from the spiritual world during sleep and what the etheric and physical bodies experienced during eurythmy. The effect shows itself in the way the sleep experiences adjust to what was prepared and carried out on the previous day. It is only in this complementing of the physical/etheric by the spiritual that we can see the special healing element of eurythmy.

Indeed, spiritual substantiality is brought to the human being upon awakening in the morning after a day including eurythmy. It is similar in singing. When we let a child sing, the essential activity is that of the etheric body. The astral body must strongly adapt to this activity and, again, initially resists before taking it into the spiritual world. The astral body returns, and what it brings back again expresses itself in effectively healing forces. We may say that in eurythmy we have a force that mainly affects the health of the child’s physical body, while in singing a force expresses itself that mainly affects the child’s mechanism of movement and, through movements, then again the health of the physical body.

We can make very good use of these connections in education. If we organize our curriculum—this is an ideal, but the teachers could at least try to come close to it—so that the eurythmy lesson is given in the afternoon, it will be allowed to continue its life during the following night. On the next day, we can teach a physical education lesson in the way I outlined yesterday. The experience then penetrates the body in such a way that the movements made in physical education have a healing effect. Much can be achieved by this alternation of eurythmy and physical education.

Or again, much can be achieved on any one day when we let the children sing. They take this experience into the spiritual world during sleep. On the following day we let them listen to music—we let them listen to rather than make music. What was done on the previous day is then consolidated in the listening to music—an extraordinary healing process. You can see that under ideal conditions—that is, a curriculum structured to adapt to the conditions of life—we can affect the children’s health in an extraordinary way. We shall do still far more in this regard.

Let us take the physics lesson as another example. We make an experiment. Remember what I said yesterday: Our thinking, our mental pictures, are head processes, while it is the rhythmic human being who judges, and the metabolic human being who draws conclusions. It is especially our legs and feet that draw conclusions. If you keep this in mind, if you think of the processes of perception in this way, you will tell yourselves that everything connected with the will, everything we produce out of ourselves during the process of perceiving, is deeply connected to the drawing of conclusions and not only to the forming of mental pictures or ideas. When I look at my body, then this body is itself a conclusion. The idea, the mental image, arises only because I am looking at my body, but in carrying out a definite half-conscious or unconscious procedure, I synthesize the parts in a way, akin to the forming of judgments, that allows me to experience the totality. I then express the experience in the sentence: This is my body. But this is already the perception of a conclusion. As I perceive, perceive intelligently, I am drawing conclusions. And the whole of the human being is within these conclusions.

This is so during an experiment, because in experimenting the whole of the human being is active, receiving information. Conclusions are continuously drawn during the process. Judgments are generally not perceived; they are predominantly inner processes. We may thus say that the whole of the human being is occupied during an experiment.

From an educational point of view, children do not really benefit much at all from such experiments. They may be interested in what they see, but their normal organization as human beings is as such not strong enough for them to exert themselves continuously in every part of their being. That is not possible. I always ask too much of them when I ask them to exert themselves totally. The children always get too far outside themselves when I ask them to observe an experiment or something in the environment. The important aspect in education consists in really paying attention to the three parts of the threefold human being—in allowing each part to receive its due, but also in getting all to the point where they can correspondingly interact.

Let us return to the physics lesson. I make an experiment. The whole of the human being is occupied, is asked to make an effort. This is quite enough to begin with. I then draw the children’s attention away from the instruments I experimented with and repeat the various stages. Here I am appealing to their memory of the direct experience. During such a review or recapitulation—without the presence of the apparati, purely in the mind—the rhythmic system is especially enlivened. After having engrossed the whole of the human being, I now appeal to the rhythmic system, and to the head system, because the head naturally participates during recapitulation. The lesson can then be concluded. After first having occupied the whole of the human being, then mainly the rhythmic system, I dismiss the children. They go to bed and sleep. What I activated in the whole of their being, then in their rhythmic system, now during sleep continues to live in their limbs when astral body and ego are outside the body.

Let us now regard what remains lying on the bed, what allows the content of the lesson to keep on working. Everything that has developed in the rhythmic system and the whole of the human being now streams upward into the head. Pictures of these experiences now form themselves in the head. And it is these pictures that the children find on waking up and going to school. Indeed, it is so. When the children arrive at school on the following morning they have, without knowing it, pictures of the previous day’s experiments in their heads, as well as pictures of what—in as imaginative a way as possible—I repeated, recapitulated after the experiment. The children I then confront have photographs of the previous day’s experiment in their heads. And I shall now reflect on yesterday’s lesson in a contemplative way. Yesterday I experimented, and in reviewing the experiment I then appealed to the children’s imagination. In today’s lesson I add the contemplative element. In doing so, I not only meet the pictures in the children’s heads, but also help to bring the pictures into their consciousness.

Remember the progression: I teach a physics lesson, make an experiment, then recapitulate the stages of the experiment without the apparatus. On the following day, we discuss the previous experiment, contemplate it, reflect on it. The children are to learn the inherent laws. The cognitive element, thinking, is now employed. I do not force the children to have mere pictures in their heads, pictures they have brought with them from sleep, pictures without substance, without meaning. Just imagine the children coming to school with these pictures in their heads, of which they have no knowledge. If I were to immediately start with a new experiment, without first nourishing them with the cognitive, contemplative element, I would again occupy the whole of their being, and the effort they would have to make would stir up these pictures; I would create chaos in their heads. No, above all, what I must do first is consolidate what wishes to be there, provide nourishment. These sequences are important; they adapt to, are in tune with, the life processes.

Let us take another example, a history lesson. In the teaching of history there is no apparatus, no experiment. I must find a way of again adapting the lesson to the life processes, and I can do this as follows. I give the children the mere facts that occur in space and time. The whole being is again addressed just as during an experiment, because the children are called upon to make themselves a mental picture of space. We should see to it that they do this, that they see what we tell them, in their minds. They should also have a mental picture of the corresponding time. When I have brought this about, I shall try to add details about the people and events—not in a narrative way, but merely by characterization. I now describe and draw the children’s attention to what they heard in the first part of the lesson. In the first part, I occupied their whole being; in the second, it is the rhythmic part of their being that must make an effort. I then dismiss them.

When they return on the following day they again have the spiritual photographs of the previous day’s lesson in their heads. I connect today’s lesson with them by a reflective, contemplative approach—for example, a discussion on whether Alcibiades or Mithradates was a decent or an immoral person. When I make an objective, characterizing approach on the first day, followed on the next day by reflection, by judgments, I shall allow the three parts of the threefold human being to interact, to harmonize in the right way.

These examples show what can be done if the lessons are properly structured, if they are adapted to life conditions. The structuring and adaptation are only possible in our curriculum, which allows the teaching of a subject for several weeks. They are not possible in the traditional schedule, wherein physics is taught on one day and, perhaps, religion on the next. How could one thus consider what the children bring with them? It is difficult, of course, to structure all the lessons in this way, but one can at least come close to doing so. And by taking a good look at our schedule, you will see that we have attempted to make that possible.

It is furthermore also important to have an overview of all these connections. If you remember what I said yesterday—that it is not only the head but the whole human being who is a logician—you will learn to appreciate the significance of activities that require skills. It really was not a mere whim on our part when we introduced knitting also for boys. The faculty of judgment is indeed essentially enhanced by this activity of the hands. It is least developed through mere logical exercises. Logical exercises actually do very little for the development of the faculty of judging, of forming opinions. By connecting predicate to subject we contribute nothing to that faculty. What we actually do in that instance is make the faculty of judgment rigid. Children so exercised will grow into adults who can only judge according to patterns or schemes. Too many intellectual exercises result in schematic individuals. Another result of such exercises is too much salt deposit; the human being is permeated by salt and tends toward perspiring. We can easily observe this in children whose judgments have been unduly taxed: they perspire too much during the night.

Indeed, it is true. When we are too strongly and one-sidedly intellectual/spiritual—without knowing that the physical/corporeal is the pure expression of the spiritual—we usually affect the body, and mostly in the wrong way. Herbart’s education, as well as that of others—education that is predominantly based on developing the faculty of forming mental images and ideas—results in the destruction of the body. It is important for teachers to know this.

You can see the significance of what I have told you in other areas of life. Every decent human being is supposed to listen to sermons in church. This is certainly a good tradition. The usual sermons are rather abstract. In fact, the preacher is trying to direct his congregation from everyday life to higher regions. They are to be edified and so on. It is all quite justified. Still we must understand what is actually happening during today’s sermons, preached by people who are living in abstractions, who are ignorant of the connections in nature, whose thoughts do not contain such connections, who in fact do not even enjoy natural phenomena.

Let us now assume that the faithful attend such sermons that are not connected to everyday life. There are many such sermons nowadays. The faithful listen. Initially we do not notice anything amiss. But they do get physically ill, albeit only to a slight degree that is outwardly not noticeable. The effect of such sermons is the breeding of slight illnesses. A few hours after such a sermon, the listeners are subjected to the processes of an illness. The pain is consciously experienced to only a half or even a quarter degree. The inevitable effect is the feeling of one’s miserable body. But surely the cause cannot possibly be in the sermon that has raised one to higher, more spiritual regions! One then analyzes one’s feelings, becomes contrite, and realizes: I am a sinner. This is the interpretation of the illness that follows a sermon. And this—making the congregation experience themselves as sinners—may even have been intended by a certain unconscious shrewdness on the part of the sermonizer.

This phenomenon, quite general in our time, is connected with the other phenomena of decadence. I have mentioned it in order to show you that a wrong preoccupation with the spirit does not affect the spirit but rather the body, and quite concretely; I have mentioned the phenomenon so that you may understand that we ought to educate our children from a knowledge of this accord of the spirit with the physical body.

Sometimes curious events are not noticed, although they greatly influence the whole of our cultural life. During the last third of the nineteenth century less attention was given to the teaching of geography. The subject of geography played an ever diminishing role in teachers colleges. It was given an unimportant place in the curriculum, to be taught as a secondary subject by either the teacher of history or the teacher of the natural sciences. But take another good look at our diagram of the human being on the blackboard. When we see the human as a being who draws conclusions, who is placed within the world and does not separate from it through the head, we cannot think of him or her without the surrounding space. Space is part of the human being. Insofar as we have feet and legs, we are a part of the world of space. And the teaching of geography is, spatially considered, for the astral body a “being-put-on-itslegs.” The astral body actually grows denser and thicker lower down. We teach about space and in so doing increase the density of spirit and soul in the lower astral body, toward the ground. In other words, we consolidate, we bring about a certain firmness in the human being when we teach geography in an imaginative way—always stressing the reality of space, making the children conscious of, for example, the distance between the River Thames and Niagara Falls.

If we teach geography clearly and graphically, we place the human being within space, and we especially cultivate an interest in the whole world. The effects will be seen in various ways. Individuals taught geography in this way will have a more loving relation with their fellow beings than those who have not learned about spatial relationships. They learn to take their place next to other human beings, learn to be considerate. These things strongly affect the moral life, whereas the neglect of geography results in an aversion to loving one’s fellow beings. Even a superficial observation will confirm this. The connections are there, even if they are not noticed. Today’s unhappy cultural phenomena are the effects of such follies.

The effects of the teaching of history are quite different. History is concerned with time. We only teach it correctly when we pay attention to this fact. If we merely concentrate on historical episodes, we do not consider the time element enough. If, for example, I speak about Charlemagne as though he were the children’s uncle who is still alive today, I give them a false picture. Whenever I speak of Charlemagne, I must give the children a clear and graphic experience of the distance in time. I can do this by saying: “Just imagine—you are a small child and you take your father’s hand.” The children will have no difficulty in imagining this. I now point out the difference between the child’s and the father’s ages. I continue: “Your father holds his father’s hand, then he your grandfather’s, and so on. Now imagine thirty people holding hands. The thirtieth could be Charlemagne.” In this way, the children get a feeling for the distance in time. It is important to teach history in this way—not placing isolated episodes next to each other but rather giving the children the feeling of distance in time.

It really is important to point out the characteristic differences [in consciousness—translator] when we deal with specific epochs in history, so that the children can have an idea of them. What matters is that historical events are seen to be living within the framework of time. Seeing historical events in this way strongly affects our inner life.

If, on the other hand, we teach history in a way that ignores the time element and also takes hold of the inner life too strongly—that is, if we concentrate on recent local history at the expense of events in the distant past, if (as it were) we put the emphasis in our lessons on cultivating a wrong patriotism (you will easily think of many such instances)—then we shall greatly engender obstinacy and willfulness of the inner life and a tendency toward moodiness. These are side effects, which will, above all, make people reluctant to observe world events objectively. And this is so terrible today. Neglecting geography and taking the wrong approach to history have greatly contributed to the serious illnesses of our time. You yourselves will admit to the problems you have in facing many a situation now, problems resulting from the way you were taught history in school.

The examples I have given you will illustrate the path our teaching must take if it is to connect to life conditions, to life impulses, in a healthy way. We cannot be satisfied simply with mediating facts; we must, above all, be aware of the life conditions of the human being in the physical, soul, and spiritual connections. We must always see the human being before us; and we must see the human being in his or her totality, as a being who is also extremely active during sleep. If we ignore this sleep activity—and this is ignored in today’s education, apart from the hygienic aspects of sleep—if we ignore the fact that the content of our lessons continues into sleep, develops further during sleep, we will have the quite definite effect of making the human being into a robot, an automaton.

We could, indeed, venture to say that today’s education is in many respects an education not toward humanness but toward the most obvious type of human automaton—namely, the bureaucrat. Our children are trained to become bureaucrats. Such people are no longer really human. They are fixed, they have an existence, they are finished. The human being is lost, is concealed behind the label. We have an appointment with an officer, be it a clerk or barrister, and it matters little who the actual person behind the label is.

Such is the result of only paying attention to daytime consciousness in education, of denying the spiritual element, of not considering the activities during sleep. We see this tendency in a frightening way in modern philosophy. Descartes and Bergson assert that the ego constitutes the continuity of the human being, that in the ego we can grasp the reality. I would like to point out to such people that they then cease to exist as soon as they fall asleep, that they always begin life anew on waking up. The dictum “I think, therefore I am” should really be changed to: “On June 2, 1867, I was from 6 A.M. to 8 P.M., because I thought during that time. Then again I was from 6 A.M. to 8 P.M. on the following day.” Life would then become rather complicated. What lies between 8 P.M. and 6 A.M. would have to be excluded. But this is not considered, because such people prefer all sorts of ideas and abstractions to the realities at the basis of the human being.

But we must deal with these realities in our education. Doing so will allow us to educate human beings again. Doing so we need not then worry about establishing the right social or economic conditions. People who have been educated as human beings will see to them. Clearly, cultural life must be autonomous and independent. We can educate human beings only when concentrating on their human aspects, when we think about social change merely as a consequence of such an education—that is, not as having been made by the government. Cultural life must not be an appendix of the state or of economic life but must develop out of its very own sphere.

Our talks so far will have shown you the necessity of including exact knowledge of the physical human being when you prepare your lessons. The reason we consider such apparently remote matters is the important step our school is taking in adding a tenth grade class to the present elementary grades. In the tenth grade class we shall have girls and boys who are already more mature, who are at an age that will have to be treated especially carefully. I would like to spend the next few days in giving you a thorough understanding of this age when, as you know, important developmental stages occur.

You may well say that this is surely the business only of those who teach at this level. But this is not so. The teachers in our school must develop ever more into a complete organism, and all of you will, directly or indirectly, be concerned with all age groups, with the total education of every child.

However, before I address myself to the needs of the fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-old students, I must today touch on some preliminary matters. During our meetings we shall then work on the tenth grade curriculum.

Let us, therefore, continue in the way we began during the last two days. I would like to impress on you the connection between the spirit/soul and the physical/corporeal aspects of the human being, especially of the child. Today’s culture regards spirit and soul merely intellectually. Our cultural life does not include an actual and living spiritual life. And in the mainly Catholic central European countries, Catholicism has assumed forms that are no longer true, so that even there one cannot expect any help regarding the religious mediation of spiritual life. The Protestant spiritual life has become more or less fully intellectualistic. As far as our school is concerned, the actual spiritual life can be present only because its staff consists of anthroposophists. We do not teach anthroposophy—our school must not represent a world conception—but through the way the teachers are acting, through their inner life, the soul and spirit elements enter the school as though through the imponderables of the soul.

When we now teach the various subjects expected of a school—reading, the thought processes in arithmetic, those in the natural sciences, everything that is of a cognitive nature—we give the children ideas and mental pictures. The ideas and mental images are for the child’s organism an activity that is quite different from physical/corporeal instruction—which, although it participates in the education of the thought processes, is also carried out independently. Physical/corporeal instruction is carried out quite independently in eurythmy, in physical education, and in instrumental music, but no longer in singing. Everything is, of course, relative. But there is a great difference, a polarity, between what the children are asked to do in these subjects—and also when they are learning reading and writing, when we strongly appeal to the physical activity—and what they are asked to do in subjects such as arithmetic, in which case the physical activity plays a subordinate role. In handwriting, on the other hand, physical activity plays a predominant part.

We should really go into details. Let me single out the subject of writing and show you the role physical activity plays. There are two types of people in regard to writing. (I believe I have already mentioned this to those of you who have attended previous lectures.) There are those who write as though the writing is flowing from their wrists. The forming of the letters is carried out from the wrist. Future business people are actually trained to write in this way. Their writing flows from their wrists, and this is all there is to it. That is one of the two types of people in regard to writing. The other type is disposed to looking at the letters. These people always contemplate what they write, deriving an almost aesthetic pleasure from it. These are the painter type, and they do not so much write from the wrist. Those of the first type do not paint.

I actually got to know the special training for people who are prepared for business. They are encouraged to put a kind of flourish to the letters. Their writing is characterized by continuous flourishes emanating from a certain swinging motion of the wrist. Taken to an extreme, this kind of writing will lead to something that is really quite awful. I know people who carry out all sorts of swinging motions with their pens in the air before they begin to write—a quite terrible thing when taken to an extreme.

We really ought to get people to write in a way that is akin to painting. Writing in that way is far more hygienic. When writing is accompanied by an aesthetic pleasure, the mechanical aspect is pushed into the body. It is the inner organism rather than the wrist that is writing. And this is most important, because the mechanical aspect is then diverted from the periphery to the whole of the human being. You will notice that when you teach children to write in this painting way, they will also be able to write with their toes. This would, in fact, constitute a triumph, a success—when a child is able to hold a pencil between the toes and form adequate letters. I do not say that this ability should be developed artistically. But we do have in such an instance a shifting of the mechanical activity to the whole human being. You will agree that in this regard most of us are extremely clumsy. Can you think of anyone who is able to pick up a piece of soap from the floor with his or her toes? To do this at least should be possible. It sounds grotesque, but it points to something of great significance.

We should cultivate this painting-like writing. It pushes the actual mechanical activity into the body, and the writer’s connection to the writing is brought to and beyond the surface. The human being is imparted into his or her environment. We should really get used to seeing everything we do, rather than doing things thoughtlessly, mechanically. Most people do write mechanically, thoughtlessly. Because writing is thus a manysided activity, we can, in a certain way, consider it as a significant aspect in our lessons. In arithmetic, on the other hand, the actual writing has a subordinate position, because with that subject it is the thinking that preoccupies the student.

We must now be quite clear about the processes taking place during reading. The activity of reading is initially spiritual and then continues into the physical body. It is especially the activities that are of a cognitive, mental/spiritual nature that considerably tax the delicate parts of the physical organization. You can picture, physiologically, the deeper parts of the brain, the white matter. The white matter is the actual, the more perfectly organized part of the brain. It is organized toward the more functional tasks, whereas the gray matter at the surface—which is especially well developed in humans—provides the brain’s nourishment. The gray matter has remained behind, in a very early stage of evolution. In regard to evolution, it is the deeper part of the brain that is more perfect.

If we teach a child to observe well, as in reading, we greatly tax the gray matter, engendering a very delicate metabolic process. And this delicate metabolic process then spreads throughout the organism. It is especially when we believe ourselves to be occupying the children mentally and spiritually that we affect their physical organism most strongly. The observation and comprehension during the reading of and listening to stories engender metabolic processes that tax the children to an inordinately strong degree. We could call what is happening the impression of the spiritual into the physical. A kind of incorporation of what we observe and comprehend during a story is necessary. Something akin to a physical phantom must develop and then impart itself into the whole organism. The organism is filled with delicate salt deposits. Not coarsely, of course. A salt phantom is imparted into the whole organism, and the necessity arises to dissolve it again through the metabolism.

This process takes place when the children read or listen to stories. When we believe ourselves to be occupying the mind and spirit in our lessons, we really evoke metabolic processes. And this must be considered. We cannot do anything else but to see to it that our stories and reading material are faultless in two respects. First, the children must be interested in the subject. Genuine interest is connected with a delicate feeling of pleasure that must always be present. That feeling expresses itself physically in very subtle glandular secretions that absorb the salt deposits caused during reading and listening. We must endeavor never to bore the children. Lack of interest, boredom, leads to all sorts of metabolic problems. This is especially the case with girls. Migraine-like conditions are the result of a one-sided stuffing of material that must be learned without pleasure. The children are then filled with tiny spikes that do not get dissolved. They tend toward developing such spikes. Yes—we must be aware of these problems.

Second, immediately connected with the metabolic problems arising from boredom is the unhappy situation that does not allow us enough time for everything we ought to do. We should really see to it that the currently available readers—which can drive you up the wall—are not used. The books I have seen in the classrooms are really quite awful.

We must not forget that we are preparing the children’s physical constitutions for the rest of their lives. If we make them read the trivial stuff contained in most readers we affect their delicate organs accordingly. The children will turn into philistines rather than into complete human beings. We must know that the reading material we give our children strongly affects their development. The results are unavoidable in later life.

I really would like to ask you to compile your own anthologies, including the classics and other worthwhile authors, and to refrain from using the available books. This additional effort is necessary. We must do something. It is, after all, the task of the Waldorf school to use methods different from those practiced elsewhere. What matters is that in reading or storytelling, and also in the presentation of the natural sciences, we take great care not to harm the children in these two ways.

Eurythmy and singing lessons can be said to be working in the opposite direction, engendering an organic process that is quite different. All the organs connected with these activities contain spirit. When the children are doing eurythmy they move, and during the moving the spirit in the limbs is streaming upward. When we ask the children to do eurythmy or to sing, we liberate the spirit. The spiritual, of which the limbs abound, is liberated—a very real process. In our singing and eurythmy lessons we release the spiritual from the children. As a consequence, the released or liberated spirit expects to be made use of after these exercises. I explained this to you in yesterday’s lecture in another connection. The spirit now also waits to be consolidated.

In singing, eurythmy, and physical education we spiritualize the children. They are quite different beings at the end of the lesson; there is much more spirit in them. But this spirit wishes to consolidate, wishes to remain with the children. We must not allow it to dissipate. We can prevent it from dissipating quite simply and effectively by making the children sit or stand quietly at the end of the lesson. We should try to maintain this calm for a few minutes. The older the children, the more important this will be. We should pay attention to these things if we wish to prepare the children in the best possible way for the following day. It is not in the children’s interest for us to let them rush out of the room immediately after a gym, singing, or eurythmy lesson. We should, instead, let them calm down and sit quietly for a few minutes.

In considering such matters we really touch on a cosmic principle. There are many and diverse theories about matter and spirit. But both, matter and spirit, contain something that is more than either of them, a higher element. We may say that if this higher element is brought to a state of calm, it is matter; if it is brought into movement, it is spirit. This being a high principle, we can apply it to the human being. Through the short period of calm following a gym, singing, or eurythmy lesson or other such activity, we produce in ourselves—for the spirit we have liberated—a delicate physical phantom, which then deposits itself in our organism for us to make use of. Knowing about this process can help us make discoveries that will have corresponding effects in our other interactions with the children.

We shall now consider further uses for this knowledge. There are children in our school with a very vivid imagination, and there are children with very little imagination. We need not jump to the conclusion that half of our students are poets and the other half not. We notice the difference not so much in the actual way the imagination shows itself but rather in the way memory develops. Memory is strongly related to imagination. We have some children—and we should notice them—who quickly forget what they have experienced and heard during a lesson, who cannot hold on to the pictures of what they have experienced, for whom the pictures disappear. And we have other children for whom the pictures remain, assume an independent life of their own, and surface continuously, cannot be controlled. We should be well aware of these two types of children. There is, of course, a whole range between these extremes. For children with a vivid imagination, memory causes the pictures to surface in a changed form. Most frequently, however, the pictures surface unchanged, as reminiscences. The children are then slaves to what they have experienced during their lessons. And then there are the children for whom everything disappears, evaporates.

It is now a matter of dealing with these two types of children appropriately. It is possible to occupy groups of children in the most diverse ways if we develop a routine in the best sense of the word—a routine in a spiritual sense. Children with poor memory, who have difficulty in getting the pictures to surface, should be made to observe better during reading. We should try to get them to listen better. With children who are slaves to their mental pictures, we should see to it that they become more physically active, mobile; we should make them concentrate more on writing. We could have two groups in the class—giving the children who are poor in imagination the opportunity for cultivating their reading and observation, while for the other group, the children with a vivid imagination, we could especially cultivate painting and writing. Naturally, it is a matter of degree, because everything is relative.

We can take this distinction further. (But the following observation is especially important: We can only gradually learn these things; we cannot cover everything during the first year.) Children who are poor in imagination—that is, children who cannot easily remember—should be asked to do eurythmy standing up, mainly with their arms. Children with a vivid imagination who are tormented by their mental pictures will benefit by moving the whole body, be it by running or by walking. This we can encourage. It really is very important that we pay attention to such matters.

In addition, we ought to know the value of the consonants for phlegmatic children who find it difficult to recall mental pictures, whereas the children who are tormented by their ever-surfacing mental pictures will greatly benefit from eurythmy exercises that concentrate mainly on vowel sounds. It can indeed be observed that vowel exercises have a calming effect on the rising mental pictures, while consonant exercises engender them. Acting on this knowledge can help both groups.

The same distinction applies to music lessons. Children poor in imagination and memory should be encouraged to play musical instruments; children with a vivid imagination should be occupied with singing. It would be ideal—if we had the necessary rooms—to teach both groups simultaneously, one in singing, the other in instrumental music. If we could practice a twofold method—listening to and making music—this would have a tremendously harmonizing effect on the children. It would be most valuable if we could make it possible to alternate between singing and listening: to let half the class sing and the other half listen, and then vice versa. This practice should really be cultivated, because listening to music has a hygienic, a healing effect on what the head is to do in the human organism; singing has a healing effect on what the body is to do in the head. If we carried out everything that we could in this way, we would have far healthier people about.

We are not really aware of the fact that we have regressed in human evolution. In the past, children were allowed to grow up without being educated; their freedom was not invaded. Now we violate this freedom when we begin to educate them in the sixth or seventh year. We must make up for this crime, this destruction of freedom, by educating them correctly. We must be quite clear that it is the manner of education, the “how,” that we have to improve if we wish to avoid a terrible future situation. It does not matter how much today people insist on stressing the cultural progress, the dwindling number of illiterates—they themselves are no more than imprints, the automata made by the schools. We must avoid this end, must not produce mere imprints in our schools. We must allow our children to develop in their individuality.

This issue becomes especially important when we make use of artificial methods such as learning by rote or by heart. In repeating something in this way the children transmit the content of what they have learned from the soul and spirit to the physical organism. What is learned by heart must first be understood. But during the process of learning by heart the children gradually slither into an ever more mechanical, physical way of learning. This is the way along which the content of learning is taken—from the initial subjective element to the objective element.

We must be honest in such matters. When the content is taken to the objective level, we must make the children listen to themselves, must make them aware that they are hearing themselves speak. We must bring the children to the point that, to the same extent as they recite the lines, they listen to themselves. We can succeed in this if, for example, the children differentiate the sounds they produce. We tell them: “What you are speaking is all about you, and you can hear it.” We must try to get the children to the point that they can hear themselves speak.

But this is not enough. Something else is even more important. We shall never succeed in letting the children find the transition from having the content of the words in their thoughts and feelings to learning it by heart if we do not appeal most strongly to their feelings before the memorizing begins. The children must never be asked to learn anything by heart before they have a deep feeling for all the details contained in the words—especially a feeling that allows them to relate to the content in the right way.

Let us consider an extreme case. Let us think of a prayer. The children should, when asked to learn a prayer, be urged to be in a mood of devotion. It is up to us to see to this. We must almost feel a horror if we teach the children a prayer without first establishing this mood of reverence or devotion. And they should never say a prayer without this mood. We should thus not make the children recite a lovely poem without first arousing in them a faint smile, a pleasure or joy; we should not order them to have these feelings but rather allow the content of the poem to awaken them. This principle applies to other subjects as well.

Much harm has been done to humankind during the course of evolution. Certainly, things have improved a little in this respect. But my generation remembers the way children were made to memorize, for example, historical dates and other facts. I myself remember history lessons during which teacher and children read a paragraph in a textbook and the children were afterward supposed to remember it; they simply learned it by heart. I heard an intelligent boy speak of the “Car of Jerusalem” instead of the “Czar of Russia”! He did not notice the gaffe during his mechanical recital of a passage in the book. This is not an isolated case. This method of learning things by heart in such subjects as geography and history has greatly contributed to our present cultural decadence.

It is essential to prepare the children correctly for such things that are to be learned by heart: prayers and poems. Their feelings must be engendered, the feelings they must have when they listen to themselves. Especially during the saying of a prayer, the children must have the feeling: “I grow above myself. I am saying something that makes me grow above myself.” This mood must apply to everything that is beautiful and graceful.

The mood also affects the physical organism, has a hygienic significance, because every time we teach something of a tragic or exalted nature we affect the metabolism. Every time we teach something of a graceful, dainty nature we affect the head, the nerve-sense organism. We can thus proceed in a hygienic way. Children who are flippant, light-headed, who are always bent on sensations, we shall try to cure by producing in them the mood they must have for something of a sublime, tragic nature. This will already be beneficial. We must pay attention to such matters in our lessons.

You will be able to do this if you yourselves have the right attitude to your teaching. Every now and then, in an almost meditative way, you ought to answer the question: How does my teaching of history or geography affect the children? It is necessary for us as teachers to know what we are doing. We have spoken about the way history and geography ought to be taught, but it is not enough to know it; it must be recalled in brief meditations. Does the teacher of eurythmy, for example, know that he releases the spirit from the children’s limbs? Does the teacher, during a reading lesson, know that she incorporates the spirit in the children?

If the teacher becomes aware of these things, she will almost see that when she is reading in the wrong way, when she bores the children, they will tend toward metabolic illness; she will feel that by making a child read a boring piece of literature, she actually produces a diabetic in later life. She will then develop the right sense of responsibility. By occupying the children continuously with boring material, you produce diabetics. If you don’t calm the released spirit after a physical exercise or a singing lesson, you produce people who lose themselves in life.

It is extraordinarily important that teachers thus occasionally reflect on what they are doing. But the reflection need not be oppressive. The teacher who is primarily concerned with reading will through it develop the feeling that she is actually continuously incorporating something, that she is working at the physical organism, and that she makes the children, through the way they are reading, into physically strong or weak adults. The teacher of handwork or crafts will be able to say to himself that he affects especially the spiritual in the children. If we let the children do things in handwork or crafts that are meaningful, we shall do more for the spirit than if we let them do things that are generally believed to be spiritual.

Much can be done in this direction, because much of what the children are doing nowadays in handwork is quite wrong. We can work in a more positive way that will have especially good results. I immediately noticed the children in Dornach making pillows, little cushions, which they then embroidered. If the embroidery is merely arbitrary, it isn’t really a cushion. The embroidery must be such that it invites the ear to lie on the cushion. The children seemed to especially enjoy making tea cosies. But they must be made properly. If I am to open the cosy at the bottom, the movement of my hands must be continued in the embroidery; the embroidery must indicate the opening of the cosy. But the children have been so ruined by the conditions of our time that they embroider the bottom of their cosies like this:

This is the wrong way round. The drawing must show where the opening is. When embroidering the top of a blouse or shirt, the children must learn that the embroidered band at the throat must widen toward the bottom and narrow toward the top. An embroidery on a belt must immediately show that it opens to both sides simultaneously; it must be widest at the center. Everywhere the children should learn to find the correct form.

Very much can be achieved by these things if we do not so much bother about the eye, but produce them in the feeling. You must get the children to feel what their design indicates: it widens at the bottom, it presses down from above. This must be translated into feeling; we must get, what the hands are supposed to do, into the hands. The human being is here essentially fully occupied in his whole being, thinks with his whole body. We really must try to see to it that such things are felt. The handwork lessons must be directed to feeling. The child should, when embroidering a corner, have the feeling: this corner must be embroidered in such a way that, when I put my finger into it, it can’t get through. If it happens to be something else, the embroidery must indicate this. This is the way we ought to teach. The handwork teacher can then say: I teach in a way that I especially engender the children’s spiritual activity. No teacher needs to feel that he or she occupies an inferior position in the school.

Today we shall take a look at the characteristic features of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old children and then, during the following days, concentrate more on the corresponding practical educational aspects. And we shall consider the impact the education of this age group has on the whole school.

We know from our anthroposophical studies that the astral body is born at this age—that it comes into its own at this time. Just as the physical body is especially active from birth to the seventh year, and the etheric body from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year, the astral body (strongly connected with the ego) is active from the fourteenth to the twentieth or twenty-first year, when the ego can be said to be born.

The fourteenth and fifteenth years are especially important in child development. You can see this importance in the looser connection between the astral body and the etheric and physical bodies. Every night, during sleep, we leave our physical and etheric bodies with our astral body and ego. On the one side, our physical and etheric bodies are then closely linked; on the other side, we have a close connection between astral body and ego. Because of this alternating separation and rejoining, there is a looser connection, on the one hand, between the astral and etheric bodies and, on the other hand, between the ego and the physical body.

The transition for the human being at age fourteen or fifteen (earlier for girls) is different from the transition that takes place at seven years. At the change of teeth, when the children are ready for the elementary school, we have a situation that arises, as it were, quite objectively in the physical/corporeal outer nature of the human being, in that part that separates every day during sleep—an objective happening. During the transition at sexual maturity, the adolescent now relates his or her subjective life—the ego and the astral body—to the objective sphere, to the etheric and physical bodies. In this transition, the inner (soul) life is affected quite differently than it is during the transition at the change of teeth. During the earlier transition, a physical/etheric connection takes place—which affects the subjective life. During the transition at puberty, the physical and etheric bodies remain as they are, and the astral body and ego remain as they are, but there is now, in a certain sense, a different interaction between the two pairs. The physical/corporeal and the etheric bodies, on the one hand, and the astral body and the ego, on the other hand, participate in this transition with equal strength: The inner subjective qualities of the human being participate directly in this process.

The nature of this process accounts for the dramatic changes in character after puberty. The changes can be seen outwardly in a matured capacity for love, which does not immediately show itself in its full sexual form but does show itself, in a general way, in the more intimate, inner relationships in which the children attract each other. Friendships are formed between girls and boys in which the sexual aspects do not initially play a role; rather, the friendships show the beginning of a more conscious development of the forces of love, of the forces needed for relating to and caring for another being at this new stage in development.

We can then see, beginning at puberty, in the outer behavior of both girls and boys, something that often baffles their parents and teachers, something that contradicts their previous character: the teenagers’ loutish behavior (especially in boys, differently in girls). This behavior is caused by the feelings of the astral body (which encloses the not yet fully developed ego) as it struggles to experience a right relation to the physical body and, through it, to the whole of the environment. Because of the need to discover a relation between the objective and the subjective, this inner struggle is unavoidable. It expresses itself in a denial, as it were, of what the adolescent has so far developed. We sometimes do not recognize the teenagers—they are so different from what they used to be.

I need not go into detailed descriptions; we are all familiar with teenage behavior. But we must understand its nature, because of its significance for education.

What we see initially is that the astral body has a stronger influence in girls than in boys. Throughout life the astral body of women plays a more important role than that of men. The whole of the female organism is organized toward the cosmos through the astral body. Much of what are really cosmic mysteries is unveiled and revealed through the female constitution. The female astral body is more differentiated, essentially more richly structured, than that of the male. Men’s astral bodies are less differentiated, less finely structured, coarser. Girls between the ages of thirteen or fourteen and twenty or twenty-one develop in such a way that their egos are strongly influenced by what goes on in their astral bodies. We can see how the ego of a girl is, one could say, gradually absorbed by the astral body, with the result that during her twentieth and twenty-first years there is a strong counter-pressure, a strong effort to come to grips with the ego.

The process is essentially different in boys. Their astral bodies do not absorb their egos so strongly. Their egos are more concealed, are not as effective. The ego of the boy between the ages of thirteen or fourteen and twenty or twenty-one remains without the strong influence of the astral body. Because of this, because the ego of the boy is not absorbed by the astral body and yet lacks independence, boys at this age are less forward than girls. Girls are freer at this age, more at ease in their outer confrontation with the world than are boys. We can notice in those boys especially endowed with these qualities a reserve, a withdrawal from life, the result of this special relation between astral body and ego.

Certainly, boys are looking for friendship, for some connection. But they also feel the need to hide their thoughts and feelings. This is characteristic of boys whose egos are connected to their astral bodies in this way. Teachers who can empathize with this situation that is present in boys, who can meet it in a subtle, delicate way, will do much to help them. It is this manner of the teacher rather than a direct, crude approach that has a beneficial effect. The boy has a certain love of withdrawal into himself; if this love of withdrawing into himself is not present at this age in a boy we really ought to be cautious. A good teacher will notice this, and he or she will then take care. The teacher will reflect: “There is something I have to look for, something that isn’t quite right, something that could cause problems and abnormalities in later life.”

It is different with girls. With girls, there are delicate differences, for which it is necessary to develop a certain skill in observation. The girl’s ego is more or less absorbed by the astrality. Because of this, the girl lives less strongly in her inner being. She takes her ego-permeated astral body into her etheric body. Her etheric body—that is, her behavior, her outer mobility—is strongly affected. We can observe in real girls—that is, in girls whose egos are absorbed by their astral bodies, who develop in a healthy, correct way—a courageous, firm demeanor during this time. They accentuate their personalities, are self-assured, do not withdraw into themselves. It is natural for them to confront the world freely and unashamedly.

If this demeanor is accompanied by even faint egotistical feelings, it can express itself in showing off, in a wish to display character and personality. But it is characteristic for girls during this time to wish to confront the world in this free uninhibited way and to show their worth. Taken to an extreme, this wish can lead to coquetry and vanity, not only to the display of inner (soul) life but also to self-adornment with jewelry. It is extraordinarily interesting to observe how what later leads to an addiction to makeup and a trivial love of finery can show itself as a delicate aesthetic sense during this time. All this is certainly the outward expression of the special relation of the ego-permeated astral body to the etheric body: The girls walk differently, their posture changes, they hold their heads more freely. Again, taken to an extreme, they become supercilious, and so on. We should indeed observe these things artistically.

If we bear in mind these differences between boys and girls we shall understand that the blessing of coeducation allows us to achieve much by a tactful treatment of both sexes in the same room. A conscientious teacher who is aware of his or her tasks in approaching such a coeducational situation will still differentiate between girls and boys. We must thus also differentiate with regard to what is so important at this age, what I just now characterized—namely, the way the subjective element has developed in its relation to the outer world. At this age, we are to relate the subjective element to our own body, to the etheric and physical bodies. The condition for doing so is one’s relation to the outer world as such.

This can be prepared during the whole of elementary education. It is the task of every teacher; it concerns every teacher. We must, in our lessons, see to it that the children experience the beautiful, artistic, and aesthetic conception of the world; and their ideas and mental pictures should be permeated by a religious /moral feeling. Such feelings, when they are cultivated throughout the elementary school years, will make all the difference during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth years. For a child whose feelings for the beautiful, for the aesthetic conception of the world, have not been stimulated will during puberty easily become overly sensual, even perhaps erotic. There is no better way of counteracting the erotic feelings than through the healthy development of the aesthetic sense for the sublime and beautiful in nature. If you succeed in making the children feel deeply the beauty, the colors, in sunrise and sunset, in the flowers, experience the sublime splendor of a thunderstorm—if, as it were, you cultivate in them the aesthetic sense—you will do more for them than is done by the often absurdly practiced sex education given to children at an ever younger age. It is the feeling for the beautiful, an aesthetic confrontation with the world, that counteracts the erotic feeling. By experiencing the world as beautiful, the human being will also attain the right, healthy relation to his or her body, will not be tormented by it, as happens in eroticism.

It is most important during puberty that the children have developed certain moral, religious feelings. Such feelings also strengthen the astral body and ego. They become weak if the religious, moral feelings and impulses have been neglected. The children then turn indolent, as though physically paralyzed. This will show itself especially during the years we are now discussing. The lack of moral and ethical impulses also leads to irregularities in the sexual life.

We must consider the differences between girls and boys in our education leading up to this age. We must make the effort to develop the girls’ moral and ethical feelings in a way that they are directed toward the aesthetic life. We must take special care that the girls especially enjoy the moral, the religious, and the good in what they hear in the lessons. They should take pleasure in the knowledge that the world is permeated by the supersensible; they should be given pictures that are rich in imagination, that express the world as permeated by the divine, that show the beautiful aspects of the good and moral human being.

In regard to boys, it will be necessary to provide them with ideas and mental pictures that tend toward strength and affect the religious and ethical life. With girls, we should bring the religious and moral life to their very eyes, while with boys we should bring the religious and beautiful predominantly into the heart, the mind, stressing the feeling of strength that radiates from them. Naturally, we must not take these things to an extreme, should not think of making the girls into aesthetic kittens that regard everything merely aesthetically. Nor should the boys be made into mere louts, as would be the inevitable result of their egotisms being engendered through an unduly strong feeling of their strength—which we ought to awaken, but only by connecting it to the good, the beautiful, and the religious. We must prevent the girls from becoming superficial, from becoming unhealthy, sentimental connoisseurs of beauty during their teenage years. And we must prevent the boys from turning into hooligans. These dangers do exist. We must know the reality of these tendencies and must, during the whole of elementary education, see to it that the girls are directed to experience pleasure in the beautiful, to be impressed by the religious and aesthetic aspects of the lessons; and we must see to it that the boys are told: “If you do this, your muscles will grow taut, you will become a strong, efficient young man!” The sense of being permeated by the divine must really be kindled in boys in this way.

These now emerging special qualities are indeed founded—very delicately—in human nature. With regard to girls, the ego is absorbed in the astral body. This, of course, expresses the situation in a radical and extreme way, but doing so will help you to have a picture of it. There is something in this spiritual/soul process that is akin to physical blushing. The whole development during this time is really a blushing of spirit and soul. The ego’s invasion of the astral body is a kind of blushing.

The situation is different in boys. The boy’s ego is less mobile, does not absorb itself; we are dealing with a spirit and soul growing pale. This situation is easily noticed, is always present. The physical aspects must not deceive us here. When a girl is chlorotic (maid-pale), the condition fully corresponds to the blushing of spirit and soul. When a boy turns into a real lout who easily gets excited, this behavior does not contradict the fact that his soul and spirit are growing pale.

This is basically the expression of a new experience or feeling that takes hold of the whole being: the feeling of shame or embarrassment. It permeates the whole being and consists of the feeling: “I must have something in my individual, inner life that is mine, that I do not wish to share with anyone else; I must have secrets.” This is the nature of shame or embarrassment. And this feeling reaches every part of the spiritual life and the soul, as far as the most unconscious regions.

If, as teachers and educators, we can feel this development, if we can respect this in our own inner life, and if we then walk past a girl or boy with this delicate feeling in us, a feeling that respects this inwardly reposing feeling of shame—this will already have an effect. There is no need for words. When we move among a group of children with the feeling that there is something in them they wish to conceal, to preserve—like an unopened flower—then the unspoken effect of one person on another will be soon noticed. To live with just such a feeling will already have a tremendous educational effect.

It is a strange fact that in spite of the children’s outer manifestations and behavior, everything they do is nothing other than a modified feeling of shame or embarrassment. A girl who blushes in soul and spirit, has an air of confidence, shows herself to the world, confronts it unabashedly. It is peculiar to human nature that the outer manifestation contradicts the inner disposition during this time—this unabashed bearing, this bold confrontation with the world, this rebellious nature, this demand: “I will be treated fairly!” Anyone familiar with girls’ boarding schools can tell you this. They don’t accept unfair treatment; they insist on being treated fairly. They can now confront a teacher, will show her or him what’s what. “We shall not be made use of!” All this is basically nothing other than—let me say—the other side of what reposes quite unconsciously deep down in their soul life as a kind of feeling of shame.

And the boys: The loutish behavior at first, then their rudeness and churlishness during the later teenage years are really nothing other than their reluctance to show the world what they actually are. Wishing to make contact, they move clumsily, lounge about, behave differently from what they actually are. This we ought to consider—boys at this age, due to their special constitution, behave differently from what they really are. They copy other people. While the child during the first seven years imitates naturally, the teenager does so consciously. He imitates somebody in his walk, in his speech, in his rudeness, makes an effort to copy a gentleman. All this expresses his wish to make contact with the world outside—a special characteristic of teenagers. It is basically the embarrassment of revealing their own being, the withdrawal into themselves, the pretense of being different from what they really are.

The worst thing a teacher can do at this time is to confront teenage boys without humor. The proper humor consists in showing an interest in what they are up to, yet making it clear to them that you, the teacher, do not take it too seriously. You ought to develop these two ways of dealing with the situation. If you allow yourselves to be nettled by the boys’ behavior, if you get into a rage, you will lose their respect. If you behave like the teacher who reacted to the boorish behavior of the boys by starting to shout: “If you don’t shut up, I’ll throw the duster at you!”—the children will no longer respect you.

A different method applies to the girls. The teacher ought to react to their coquetry with a certain delicate grace and then, speaking metaphorically, turn away: gracefully to pay attention, as it were, to what they are doing and, at the same time not to let them notice that one is affected by it. We allow them to exhaust their rage, especially the saucy, impertinent ones. We then leave them to themselves. With the boys, we empathize more with their loutish, rude behavior, at the same time showing them that we don’t take it all too seriously, that we laugh a little, but not too much, so that they do not need to be cross.

What matters is that we develop a feeling for meeting the children’s needs at this age and that we realize that each child is different. The outer manifestations are those of a metamorphosed feeling of shame or embarrassment that permeates the whole being. We prepare—and we must do so—the children correctly for their life in their twenties by recognizing the fact that the subjective element connects with the astral body in an independent way. Just as the human body needs a solid bone system to prevent it from sagging, so does the astral body, with its enclosed ego, need ideals at this age if it is to develop in a healthy way. We must take this seriously. Ideals, strong concepts that are permeated with will, these we must impart into the astral body as a firm, solid support.

We can notice that boys especially feel a strong need at this age—we only have to discover this and understand it correctly—for: “Everybody must choose his own hero, whom he has to follow on his way to Mt. Olympus.” And it is especially important for us to present to the boys a fine ideal, a picturesque personality, be it a mythical character or a merely imaginative one, and to elaborate it, together with the boys, or to provide the elements for such elaboration. During a field trip we could have a conversation with the one or another of the boys, entering his particular needs. We could say to him: “How would you do this or that?” We point to the future, introduce the idea of purpose, of the aims in life. We, as it were, stiffen the astral body, make it firm—and this is important at this age.

The same applies to girls. If we make use of this knowledge, we shall also educate the girls correctly by recognizing the fact that they are more inclined to the cosmos and boys more inclined to the earth. Girls incline more toward the cosmic, and this means that their ideals are heroes and heroines; we should tell the girls about them, about their lives and deeds, about actual experiences. Boys need to hear about character, about complete human beings. This is essential; we must differentiate the needs of girls and boys.

It is important during this age to introduce to the students the world outside, so that they come to grips with and understand life as such. It is especially important for us to know this at the time when we are adding the tenth grade class to our school. Our lessons must be directed to the point at which the subjective may connect with the objective. And this is certainly not possible if we limit ourselves to the curricula currently practiced in the conventional high schools—because their curricula are the result of the influence of the intellectual world conception. You see, this merely formalistic way of educating our high school students, this one-sidedly cognitive, intellectual approach, this is something we should not continue with in our curriculum. And in not continuing this approach we shall not sin against progress in civilization.

Our curriculum should be such that it allows the children to become practical in life; it should connect them with the world. Our curriculum for the tenth grade class will, therefore, be based on the following: We must, in order to do justice to the social life, have girls and boys together in the room; but we must differentiate by giving them activities suited to their sex. We must not separate them. The boys should watch the girls during their activities and vice versa. There should be a social communication. We should also include the process that takes the thoughts from the head into the movements of the hand, even if this happens to be merely learned or theoretical. It must, as it were, be then a theory of the practical. It is, therefore, necessary to give the boys something that is appropriate for this age: lessons in mechanics—not only theory, as in physics, but practical mechanics, leading to the making of machines. Our curriculum for the tenth grade class must include the basic elements of practical mechanics.

In regard to the girls, we must provide them with something that allows them to have clear ideas of the skills involved in spinning and weaving. Girls must learn to understand the processes in spinning and weaving, must learn how spun and woven material is produced; they must learn to recognize a material that was mechanically produced, must be introduced to the mechanical processes and learn to relate to them. This belongs to this age group.

The boys, on the other hand, must, even if only in an elementary way that allows them to understand it, be taught the principles of surveying and mapping a pasture or forest. This is again essential for this age. Girls must learn the basic elements of hygiene and first aid, the different ways of bandaging.

Both sexes must participate in all these activities. Spinning, weaving, hygiene, and first aid are taught to the girls; the boys will do this later. And the girls must observe the boys handling the surveyance instruments. We can do this in the Waldorf School, can get the boys to draw a precise map of a certain area.

In short, we shall awaken in our students an understanding of what must be done in life if it is to go on. Without such an understanding, we continue to live in a foreign environment.

This, in fact, is the terrible characteristic of our time—that people are living in an environment that is foreign to them. You only have to walk into the street and take a good look at the people boarding a street car or bus. How many of them actually know how this street car is set in motion, know about the natural forces necessary for it? This has an effect on the whole human constitution—spirit, soul, and body. There is a great difference between having at least an elementary knowledge of the things we use in daily life and not having such knowledge. Traveling in a car, plane, or bus, using an electrical gadget without understanding at least the underlying principles, means blindness of soul and spirit. Just as a blind person is moving through life without experiencing the effects of light, so do people move blindly through the cultural life, because they cannot see, did not have the opportunity to learn to see and understand, the objects around them. This is a defect of spirit and soul. And the damages we see in our advanced civilizations are the result of people’s blindness in regard to their environment.

There is something else we have to consider: There is a great difference between learning something before and learning something after the age of nineteen or twenty. People generally learn a trade like surveying at nineteen or later. High school education, especially in grammar schools, does not include such practical subjects. But the long-term effect depends on it. What we learn after the nineteenth year impresses itself more outwardly; what we learn and experience at fifteen permeates our whole being, becomes as one with the human spirit, so that it is not merely a job we can manage, but a job we can identify with, in which our entire being participates. This applies also to the elementary aspects of mechanics, engineering, and the subjects I mentioned in regard to the education of girls.

We must insist on cultivating in our students such feelings and inner qualities that can then live and grow as their limbs are growing. Human development does not proceed by fixing two arms to the body—during the third seven-year period—two arms that then remain the way they are; they must continue to grow. Today’s endeavors are such that the students are instructed in a way that what they are learning cannot continue to live but remains unchanged throughout life. The things we learn must continue to live in us. This is only possible if they are learned at the right age. And we have to admit that somebody whose specific skills direct him or her to a certain occupation and who then bases his training on something he already knows—this building on something one already knows will have a tremendous significance for the whole of life.

I have always valued the lectures given by the anatomist Hyrtl. His subject was descriptive and topographical anatomy. Hyrtl belonged to the older generation. He demanded that his students read the relevant chapters in his excellent books prior to the lectures, and he emphasized the fact that he did not wish to lecture on a subject the students had not previously read about. He did this with so much charm that he managed to make his students see the value of this method, and even the lazier ones among them conformed to his wishes—a remarkable achievement, as most of you will appreciate.

As we consider the education of the older children, it will be especially necessary to address ourselves to the deeper aspects of human life and the cosmos. Without such a deeper understanding of life, we cannot really in good conscience accept the tasks connected with the high school.

We must understand that life is actually a totality, a oneness, and that by removing any one part of it, we do harm to it. As children, we grow into this life as we find it. We are placed into it by, in a way, sleeping into it. Just think of the absolutely unconscious way children confront the world during their first years. They then gradually increase their consciousness. But what does this mean? It means that the children learn to adapt their inner life to the world outside, to connect the outer world to the inner, the inner to the outer. They also learn to be conscious of the outer objects and to differentiate themselves from those objects.

This dichotomy between inner and outer grows ever stronger. The children look up, beyond the horizon, at the sky, they perceive the cosmos, they may even sense the existence of cosmic laws; but as a rule, the children grow into the totality of the world, into which they are received, without in any way getting close to the mystery of the connection between the human being and the cosmos.

The children continue to grow, they are cared for by the people around them, they are educated and instructed. The children develop in such a way that the necessity of participating in world events in some form or other rises from their whole individuality.

We prepare the children for world events by letting them play during the early years, thus awakening their activity. We make every effort to do things with them that meet and satisfy their needs, to educate them healthfully, hygienically—body, soul, and spirit. We try to do something else. We try to adapt them to the demands of the social and technological life. The attempt is made to educate the children in a way that allows them, later in life, to work, to participate in events, to interact with other people. We try to teach them skills and facts that allow them to participate in the technological life, so that their work can be meaningful and valuable for society, so that they themselves may find their place in life, their connection to the social life, to other people.

We do all of this. And in order that we do this in the right way, so that we, on the one hand, really meet the needs of human nature, so that we do not place human beings into the world with spiritually, psychologically (soul), and physically sick or stunted organisms, we must, on the other hand, admit to ourselves that human beings must grow into the social life in such a way that they can do something by which they may advance both themselves and the world. We must see to meeting both these demands.

And yet we have to tell ourselves that it is not easy today to accomplish this, to give the children what they need in these two areas. And if we take an unbiased look at our situation as teachers, it even causes us a certain skepticism, a certain doubt. We can easily understand today’s concerns and the many discussions on the subject. How should our children be educated? What should we do?

All these questions and problems that arise in our culture with such vehemence did not exist in older civilizations. You only need to study these old cultures without bias. Of course, there were a lot of things in those cultures that are incomprehensible to us today. We quite justifiably reject the slave and helot system of ancient Greece. But when we study the Greeks’ views on education, we shall soon see that such discussions as we have today—discussions in which so many diverse and opposing opinions are thrown about—would have been unthinkable then.

Beyond the effort we put into teaching, we need educational methods, and we need to develop teaching skills. But when we watch the heated discussions and see the impossibility of agreement—some emphasize the physical, some the mental-academic aspects, some these, some those methods—we arrive at the conclusion not only that teaching has become difficult but that in regard to our position as teachers and educators we cannot break away from being ignoramuses.

We should really have this feeling of helplessness; and it will, I believe, be even more pronounced if we take a wider view of the situation. You will get this wider view when you study how the current outpouring of educational principles and ideas has its roots in central European culture. I suggest that you make yourselves familiar with everything that was said about spiritual, psychological, and physical education by individuals steeped in central European cultural life. Read the books by Dittes and Diesterweg; read about their views on education.

I recommend to you the interesting essay in Karl Julius Schroer’s book Aspects of Education [Unterrichtsfragen], in which—quite correctly, I believe—he speaks of the place of physical education in the curriculum and offers a detailed program for this subject. During your perusal, I would like for you to consider the mode of thinking and the attitudes from which the thoughts arise. Consider how despite the real understanding of physical human nature and of the need to prepare the children for becoming practical and efficient adults, there is nonetheless also a strong consciousness of the reality of the soul and of the necessity to consider the human soul in all aspects of education.

Then compare—not the outward features; as anthroposophists you ought to be above doing that—compare what lies embedded in the depths of the soul, compare the basic attitudes contained in any of the numerous treatises on education in the Anglo-American literature. Everywhere in this literature you will find chapters on intellectual, aesthetic, and physical education. Think of the deeply held conviction from which they are written. You will get the feeling that the word “education” no longer applies. Everywhere in this culture—even when spiritual or intellectual education is mentioned—the human being is thought of as a kind of mechanism; it is thought that if the physical/corporeal organism, or mechanism, is properly developed, all the moral and intellectual development will follow as though by itself. We have with this view a much stronger inclination to the physical/corporeal in the human being.

I would like to suggest that the central European writers assume that it is possible to include soul and spirit in education and that by doing this the correct treatment of the physical will follow. The Anglo-Saxon idea emphasizes physical education. One then ignores a kind of tiny room inside the human being; one “educates” around the physical, along the periphery, and assumes that there is a tiny room in which the intellect and the moral and religious life are locked up, a kind of instinctive and logical religious and moral life. Once the physical body has been sufficiently educated, its forces will spread to within and dissolve the walls of this room, and the intellectual, moral, and religious life will by itself rush out. We must learn to read between the lines when we study these books and thus discover the underlying reasons and attitudes.

It is necessary to pay attention to these differentiations across the world today. It is much more important than merely observing superficially, in the modern fashion, when one considers these symptoms. Try to understand these symptoms of our transitional culture by following the extraordinarily important debates that have taken place in England during recent weeks. The debates have been triggered by the worsening social conditions and by the general industrial actions (strikes) that have threatened the whole social life. The press was reporting these discussions in full. And then, suddenly, a complete change of interest. Why? A season of ball games has begun, and interest in sport overshadows the interest in the most important social matters. Those involved in the discussions try to get away from the debating rooms as quickly as possible, rushing to the tennis courts, the football fields, and so on, with the feeling: “I want to move in a way that my muscles can grow as strongly as possible; I am interested in such important things.” I am probably describing the feeling in an amateurish way, but I cannot be bothered about detailed facts in this cultural phenomenon: “I am interested in such important matters as watching how somebody throws a ball-like object and how somebody else can catch it correctly with his big toe or another part of his body.”

The picture we get from studying these differentiations is indeed a peculiar one. Reading the papers is of little use. What the journalists are writing is of little significance. It is far more important to discover their reasons for writing about a subject. To enter a discussion with people, to listen to their opinions, is quite useless today. It is far more profitable to discover what is living deep down in their souls, to discover what induces them to act in a certain way, to have this or that opinion. It is this that matters today. What the French and German ministers are saying to each other, if one agrees with either the one or the other, is of no importance whatsoever. It cannot be the concern of someone who wishes to participate in the progress of our civilization. What matters is to discover the differing nature of the untruths expressed by these individuals. We must keep in mind the intentions behind the lies of both speakers.

We must know that we are living at a time when the words people are speaking have no longer any meaning; the forces behind and between the words are significant. A teacher wishing to educate modern youths must understand this, must become part of his or her age in this way, must do so in an ever deeper sense. But the teacher must not share the current basic characteristic attitudes and mode of thinking. When we today—permeated even a little with anthroposophical consciousness—take a walk in the streets, we no longer see human people; rather we see moles that move about in the smallest of circles, circles into which they were placed, moles whose thinking is limited to these narrow circles, cannot reach beyond them, moles who take no interest in what is happening outside these circles. If we do not succeed in growing beyond this molelike existence, if we cannot do more than reproduce the judgments and opinions—from various points of view—to which we have been conditioned through the events at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, then we cannot positively participate in what ought to be done, in order to overcome this unhappy situation.

If there is anyone who ought to be gripped by what I have just outlined, it is the teacher in charge of the young, who wishes especially to help the students to come to terms with their more mature age in the ninth and tenth grade classes. The whole school must be so structured that such ideas can be included. To do this, it is necessary to understand them even better, so that all of us, not only those directly involved in the higher classes, but all the teachers, can say to ourselves that what matters is that we have an elementary feeling for the whole of education and its practical application, that we experience the whole weight and force of our task—to place human beings into the world. Without this experience of our task, our Waldorf School will be no more than a phrase. We shall say all sorts of beautiful things about it, until the holes have become so large that we shall lose the ground under our feet. We must make it inwardly true, and we can do this only by getting ourselves to the stage at which we can have a thorough understanding of the teaching profession.

As we do this, the question will surely arise: As human beings at the present time, what are we really? We were placed into our age through the way we were brought up, conditioned by the events during the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. And what are you today, my dear friends? Some of you have studied philosophy or history in the way these subjects were taught in the high schools and universities at the beginning of this century. Some of you have studied mathematics or other practical subjects. Some of you have become teachers of singing or physical education. Various methods were used in teaching these subjects. There are those among you who, according to the predilection of the staff, accepted the model of the gentleman or lady, but with a physical/corporeal understanding. There are those of you who have preferred what could be called a more inward path, but a path made inward through intellectualism. We are the sum total, the result of the ways we were conditioned—as far as into our fingertips and toes.

We must be quite clear about our task today—namely, to take full charge of what has been implanted in us through our education. This is possible only through a timely exploration of conscience that extends beyond the individual aspects. Without such exploration we cannot grow beyond what our time can provide us with. And we must grow beyond what our time can give us. We must not become puppets of the trends developed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Above all, we must admit to the limitations of what is given us by today’s culture; through a comprehensive exploration of conscience, we must attain the correct knowledge, knowledge that will allow us to find our place in life.

At this point we ask: Has not everything that has made us the way we are been infected by the materialistic attitudes of our time? Certainly, there is no shortage of goodwill. But even this goodwill has been infected by the views that are the result of the natural-scientific world conception. And our knowledge of physical education has emerged from such views.

Humankind has really always wanted to hide from, to avoid, the necessity of exploring its conscience. Humankind has wanted to avoid the exploration that would thoroughly stir up its inner life by asking: How do we older people confront the young? When we look at the girls and boys reaching the age of sexual maturity, when we see them coming to us after having attained this maturity—if we wish to be honest with ourselves, we can only have one answer to the question: We don’t know what we should do for them, unless we educate and teach on the basis of fundamentally new concepts. Otherwise, we produce nothing but a wide gap between the young and ourselves.

This great question has practical dimensions. Take a good look at the youth movements as they have developed today. They are nothing else but documentation that our various experimentations have resulted in the loss of our leadership in education. Just look at what has happened. At the age we are now discussing, the young feel inwardly urged to withdraw from the leadership of the old, to take their guidance into their own hands; this happened with tremendous rapidity. We cannot fault the young for this. Discussion of this phenomenon is of great spiritual-scientific interest but not initially of pedagogical interest. Our pedagogical interest must be limited to the fact that the old have been responsible for their loss of leadership and understanding of the young.

Since the old no longer have anything of substance to give to the young, the teenagers and adolescents have formed themselves into groups [Wandervögel] that traverse the countryside with singing and conversing, searching in a vague way for what the older generation has failed to provide. Thoughts and words have become hollow; the older generation having nothing to give to the young, the young then roam the woods, searching among themselves for what they cannot receive from the words and models of their elders. It is one of the most significant phenomena of the present time. The young find themselves confronted by the great question that used to be answered in the past by the older generation but that now can no longer be answered by them, because their language is no longer comprehensible.

Remember your own youth? You had, perhaps, more courage than the members of such groups, took less interest in traipsing through the countryside. You managed to survive somehow. You pretended to listen to the older generation and adhered to the status quo. But the Wandervögel do not pretend. They have withdrawn from the older generation and have taken to the woods. We have seen this happen, and we have also witnessed the results of this youth movement. Not so long ago, they felt the need to make contact among themselves, wishing to discover for themselves what they could not get from their teachers, wishing to escape them and take refuge in nature. They mean to find their answers in some vague, undefined sphere. They make contact among themselves, forming small cliques.

It really is a strange phenomenon that is immensely instructive. The old have lost their leadership, have become philistines. They cannot accept the fact that this deep longing has awakened in the young, in the members of such groups. And how have the old reacted to this, those among them who are at least a little affected by modern times? They do not say to themselves: “We must advance to a deep exploration of conscience; we must from our mature stage of development find a way to the young.” No, they react differently: “Since the young,” they say, “do no longer wish to learn from us, we shall learn from them.” And you can see this happening in all our educational institutions—the old adapting to the will and demands of the young. When you look at this new phenomenon without prejudice, you will see that the old wish to be led by the young, that they have placed the leadership into their hands—representatives of the student body are now counselors and members of boards and trusts in educational institutions.

We must consider the deeper implications of this phase. What has it done to the young? They have passed from their need for contact, from their wish to find themselves in cliques, to searching for their inner (soul) life in a hermit existence. The final stage of this development is a kind of fear of contact, everyone feeling the necessity of relying only on himself or herself. The former certainty of finding answers in the world outside has given way to a kind of atomizing longing, a brooding: “What is the reason for my inability to do justice to the human being in me?” You can see this feeling spreading everywhere; you only need to be awake enough to see it. You can see this growing uncertainty in the fragmentation of soul forces. You can perceive a special fear, a horror vacui, that makes the young shudder and feel scared in view of their future. They are fearful of the life ahead of them. There is basically only one answer, one remedy—the deep exploration of conscience. And this cannot limit itself to externalities but must lead to the question: How has it come to pass that we, when we wish to lead and guide the young, no longer understand them with the forces of the old?

Let us, by contrast, take a look at a distant age, such as that of the ancient Greeks. The older Greeks, as we know from history, still had a certain understanding for the young. If you try to understand Greek culture, you will find a peculiar and very definite relation between the period from the thirteenth or fourteenth to the twentieth or twenty-first year and the period from the twenty-eighth to the thirty-fifth year. This is characteristic of both the Greek and Roman cultures—that people in their late thirties had a fine understanding for children between seven and fourteen and that people in their early thirties felt a special affinity for, an understanding for the needs of, teenagers and adolescents. There was this relation according to different age groups—a relation of those in the third seven-year period with those in the fifth and a relation of those in the second seven-year period with those in the sixth.

It really is not easy to see behind the mysteries of human evolution. But we can indeed clearly feel that for the Greeks when the girls and boys arrived at sexual maturity they looked up to the twenty-eight- and twenty-nine-year-olds, choosing the ones they liked best, the ones they wished to emulate in freedom. They could no longer obey an authority as such, only one of their choosing in this specific age group. As humanity evolved through the Middle Ages to our time, this relation became ever weaker until it disappeared altogether. People were thrown together in a helter-skelter way; a spiritually given structure gave way to chaos. This very real situation has, then, prompted a social problem in our world; in education, it has prompted a pedagogical/didactic problem. Without keeping in mind the whole of evolution, we cannot make any progress.

I would like to show you the cause for this phenomenon by pointing to a concrete fact. All you have then to do is to generalize this concrete fact in order to discover the causes for this lack of understanding between the old and the young. You see, during our current preparation for life, during our education, we are, for example, taught that there are some one hundred elements. We learn this, and when we become teachers we are, as a rule, aware of these chemical elements—that they exist, even though this theory has recently come under attack. But we have absorbed this knowledge, carry it within us, the knowledge that there are these one hundred or so elements, that through their synthesis and analysis everything in the world comes about. We even develop a world conception on this basis. And this is the farce, that during the last third of the nineteenth century a world conception was constructed on the basis of the then seventy chemical elements. This prompted the question: How could the planets, everything that solidified, arise through chemical and physical changes? How did abiogenesis come about through an especially complicated chemical synthesis? It was the wish to comprehend the whole world with thoughts that had their roots in such elements.

The Greeks would have thought of this one-sided intellectual (head) approach to the world as nonsense, as inhuman. If they had been told to imagine the world as the result of the synthesis and analysis of these one hundred elements, they would have felt, deep down, as though the human being would disintegrate into dust during the process. The Greeks would not have been able to comprehend it. What indeed would a human being do with such a world that consists of these elements that synthesize and analyze? What does it mean? What would happen? The world could well be there, be a gigantic cosmic test tube, but the human being, how would the human being exist in it? Is is as though we were to put a large test tube in a room, allow all sorts of elements to boil in it, and then open a door and push a human being through an opening into the tube, into this mixture of salts and acids. This the Greeks would have imagined if they had been asked to think of the world as structured by these elements. They would not have accepted this idea, their feelings would have resisted it. The picture I have just characterized would have arisen instinctively in their minds.

But we are not merely heads. It was only at fairgrounds that living, talking heads used to be shown as exhibits. No, we don’t exist as head only but as complete human beings. And if we wish to develop such ideas with only the head, if our life of feeling, of will, and of the whole physical organism were to be so constituted that we could believe in a world made up of such stuff, we would have to feel very differently, would have something different in our fingertips than what the Greeks had, the Greeks who would have dismissed such a notion as pure nonsense. One feels differently about, places oneself differently into, a world if one believes that the world is something that is fit for a test tube but not for the universe. The same point applies with regard to the social life in ancient Greece. We must consider these things.

We don’t just think that the world consists of one hundred elements. We carry this feeling into everything we do during the day—even when we wash and dry our hands. The fact that it is possible for our head to have such an inhuman world conception while we wash ourselves—thinking in this way impresses a definite quality into our feelings. And then—when we can think and feel in this way, when there is no room for the human being in such a world conception—when we then confront the fifteen-year-old girls and boys with this thinking and feeling, it should come as no surprise that we cannot reach them, that we don’t know what to do with our feeling and thinking. With this world conception we can lecture in universities and colleges, teaching what we believe to be right, but we cannot live with it. The graduates of our universities then become teachers who have no idea of their connection with the young. This is the terrible abyss that has opened up before us.

But as far as human beings are concerned, there is something in us at the age of fifty or fifty-five that bears a certain resemblance to today’s teaching of chemistry and physics. We then have become sclerosed to the extent that our inner organism faintly resembles the world outside. The cosmic powers are gradually doing something with us during the course of our lives on earth. We, too, harden in our physical organism in older age. At about fifty, we become dissociated; we, as it were, disintegrate inwardly into dust. But this dissolution is a gradual, slow process, not as cruel as what would be happening to us in a test tube. Neither does it go that far—although it has the same tendency; it is a more humane process. But at the age when we approach death something does begin to be active in us that is synonymous with the teaching of modern science. Our world conception is such that only the very old may comprehend it. Nature is kind. It compensates the old by making them childish.

Talking about such things in this way may make it seem as though one wishes to poke fun at the world. No, it is not a matter of humor; it is a matter of the deepest tragedy. It is true. We are describing the world today as processes that are synonymous with those in human corpses, no more. After our death something similar takes place. In older age, we have a presentiment of the processes in our physical body after death. And we describe nothing else in our modern sciences. Our cultural institutions are full with such knowledge that applies to the physical human being after death. But such knowledge does not live in our limbs. Such are the feelings we absorb from the thoughts given us today. And the traditional theological beliefs have become mere words, because they have no place in the teaching of natural science about the human corpse.

As long as we limit this teaching to a theory of knowledge, it is more or less harmless. If, however, we consider the human being as a totality and ask what happens to the human being when he or she is influenced by such a life, the question is one of life and death. And this we must not ignore, must not evade. The forces active in the children in our classrooms are quite different from those we learned about. We no longer know anything of what is active in them; we are separated from them by a gulf.

Yes, the Greeks would have considered our talk about the elements nonsensical. What did they say? They believed not that the structure of the world consists of some one hundred elements but that four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—are interacting in it. Our academics, our professors, the leaders of our culture and education will tell us: “This is a childish world conception. We left it behind and no longer bother with it.” Someone who has begun to think a little will tell us: “Oh well, we too are working with these things. Today we call them aggregate conditions—solid, gaseous, liquid. We see warmth differently from the naive way the Greeks did. Yes, we have them all, but we have developed them correctly. Of course, we admire the Greeks for their knowledge.” This is a benevolent, patronizing, condescending attitude: “We are fortunate in having progressed so far, in having discovered all these elements, whereas the ancients used to practice all sorts of animism and talked of earth, air, fire, and water.”

But these leaders are wrong. There is a deeper meaning to the conception of the Greeks. When the Greeks spoke of earth, air, fire, and water, they did not look at them as we do today. If you had asked one of those people who lived within the Greek world conception—and there were still a good number of them in the fifteenth century, the later ones having read about it in books; our modern people sometimes take a look at it without understanding it—if you had asked one of them: “What is your idea of fire, of warmth?” the Greek would have answered: “I think of fire as being warm and dry.” “What about air?” “I see air as warm and damp.” The Greek did not think of the physical properties in fire and air but rather formed an idea. This idea contained the sub-ideas: warm and dry, warm and damp. The Greeks did not limit themselves to the physical appearance but imagined the elements as inner qualities. One had to raise oneself to something that could not be seen by physical eyes, that had to be grasped by thinking, in order to get to a knowledge of the elements, of what one then called the elements.

What did they achieve by this? They arrived at an understanding that corresponded to the etheric in the human being—the etheric body in its effectiveness. This understanding of the elements as inner qualities allowed them to experience the etheric body. Their experience was not that of being in the etheric body but rather in how the etheric body worked in the physical. It is not possible to achieve this understanding merely by studying the interactions of oxygen and carbon intellectually. It is impossible to arrive at an understanding of the way the etheric body is working in the physical if one only studies the interactions of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. Such studies take one away from the activities of the etheric, keep one within the physical. This means that one remains in the sphere in which the processes in the human being take place after death. The life processes, in which the etheric body is working in the physical, can only be understood by imagining warm and dry, cold and damp, warm and damp—by inwardly grasping the qualities with which the etheric body takes hold of the physical, by having this living comprehension of nature in the four elements. This is not a childish idea that regards only the physical but one that regards the working of the etheric. And this idea was lost in later times. But this has an effect on the whole of the human being. Think about it. People are growing up, are told that the world consists of one hundred or so elements—iodine, sulfur, selenium, tellurium, and so forth—all whirling into each other. This affects our feelings, to the extent that we, as human beings, are removed from the process. The elements are there, and we are not part of any of them.

One could have the justified idea of being a part of the other way of looking at the world, of looking at the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—in the ancient Greek way: earth as cold and dry, air as warm and damp, fire as warm and dry, water as cold and damp. When one imagines these qualities and makes them live in oneself, they grip one—qualitatively. One becomes permeated by them, they take hold of the limbs; they take hold of us. Such ideas that reach as far as into the limbs make us into beings different from beings for whom the ideas affect the limbs only after death. The corpses in the graves may well feel in line with the one hundred or so elements that combine according to chemical laws. But such a concept does not do anything for the life of human beings. By contrast, in having this idea of the four elements, we perceive ourselves in our etheric bodies.

You see from such reflections that education has really become quite unnecessary today for us human beings. We have a culture, an education, that at best prepares us to be able to function outwardly, mechanically, to maintain the status quo in society. For this we are prepared. As human beings we get nothing. Our education does not reach our limbs but remains stuck in the intellect. It does not affect our feelings and will.

If we wish to have any effect at all, we must resort to sermons and the like. We must approach people from without. But we do not give them anything that affects their inner life. The way we deal with the young today involves a terrible untruth. We tell them to be good without providing the means whereby they can be good. All they can do is to obey us as their authority. If we can manage to cow people throughout their lives in one way or another, some order can be maintained. The police will deal with the recalcitrants.

Head knowledge has no meaning for the inner life. This is the reason for our impotence in relating to the young at the important time in their lives when they are supposed to connect the spirit and soul to the physical/corporeal, to bring them into a reciprocal relationship. What indeed are today’s adults to do with the young who wish to relate spirit and soul to the physical, to the life around them?

This is the situation we shall take as our starting point in tomorrow’s talk, when we shall further acquaint ourselves with this problem. My intention today has been to evoke in you the feeling that as soon as we are supposed to find a way to the hearts of children at a definite and important time in their lives, we are dealing with the important issue of a world conception.

Yesterday we began with a subject I referred to as a kind of exploration of conscience that is appropriate for our time and especially necessary for the teacher of children in their fourteenth and fifteenth years. Not only ought this age that outwardly manifests in sexual maturity to be dealt with at the actual time; it ought to be kept in mind throughout the school years. Because our own education—or miseducation—was such that as a result there can be no real understanding of children, especially children in this age group, this kind of higher exploration of conscience has become essential.

We can visualize this situation by proceeding as follows. Let us consider the human being between twenty-one and twentyeight years. Spiritual science speaks of the birth of the ego, the time when the ego actually comes fully into its own in life. We emphasized the fact that the ego of the girl at about the fourteenth or fifteenth year is absorbed into the astral body, is therefore not yet independent, while the girl’s astral body has already attained a certain independence at this age. The ego of the boy, we said, is not absorbed into the astral body; it leads a kind of withdrawn life. And I explained that both these tendencies, these characteristics, can indeed be seen as the result of the inner human development.

But when the I, the ego, fully comes into its own at about the twenty-first year, this shows itself in one human being looking for and finding others, and this in the fullest sense of the word: other human beings. This is such a specific characteristic of this age. When, let’s say, a twenty-four-year-old finds a twenty-one-year-old—but not younger than twentyone or older than twenty-eight—the two will be in an equal, reciprocal relationship in all areas: spirit, soul, body. During this age, we really interact with, relate to others in this age group as equals.

This observation is of special significance for anyone who wishes to be involved in education. All the psychological fiddle- faddle that is frequently practiced is a mere playing with clever words. If we today wish to understand life, we have to observe such things as this special nuance that is present in human beings when they meet one another between their twenty-first and twenty-eighth years.

Let us now consider other age groups: a youth between the age of fourteen and twenty-one and someone between twentyeight and thirty-five. Regardless of their sexes, it will not be possible for them to relate fully as equals. And yet, provided certain conditions we shall presently discuss are met, a significant relationship can be established between them. If a youth aged fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen meets a twenty-eight-, twentynine-, or thirty-year-old person, the matter is as follows. Engendered by the astral body, the physical development between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, the characteristic outer behavior, the improving skills, the ideals, the way the young find their way into outer life—this is subject to unconsciousness, just as the physical life proceeds unconsciously when developing to the outside.

The same development emerges as a soul form in the inner life of those between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five. This is the reason why persons in this age group are especially predestined for understanding, for feeling, the processes taking place in adolescents. And adolescents are especially suited to look up to people between the ages of twenty-eight and thirtyfive, because they can see inwardly active in those between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five what is in themselves more or less unconsciously manifesting physically in connection to the world outside.

The knowledge of the connection between these age groups was still very much present in ancient Greece. It was instinctively experienced. When Greek children looked up to the older ones they felt instinctively, not fully consciously: “They have in their souls what we have in our bodies; we see something coming to us from them in a refined way, what we have in our physical bodies.” And the twenty-eight or twenty-nine-year- old Greeks took immense pleasure in what they saw developing and manifesting in the fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen- year-olds. There was this real relation between age groups, this instinctive life—not as in our culture, where people only relate in an abstract way—in which one was important for the other person by virtue of one’s age. The Greeks still experienced this instinctive relationship in an extraordinarily strong way, and it really affected their social life.

Try to visualize this situation in Greece. The child grew up, revered a person in his or her early thirties. On reaching the age of twenty-one, the child strongly felt: “Now I have to find someone of my own age.” This resulted in a manifoldness and also an inwardness.

It also gave the social life a certain structure. We must emphasize this point especially today, when this instinctive life is no longer present in human beings, when especially the teachers of adolescents do not know what to do with them. We cannot find answers to this problem because—as I said yesterday—we were not given such ideas and concepts that could affect our feelings to the extent that the instincts we lost during the natural course of evolution could in a more conscious way be revived.

Without our preoccupation with anthroposophical spiritual science, by which such feelings, such refined feelings, can again be stimulated, we would gradually produce even deeper gulfs between the older children and ourselves. All we could then do is to command, to order them, to do this or that. Should we fail in this we could have recourse to the police or some other authority who would then threaten the disobedient. We cannot establish an inner relationship between teachers and students unless—however theoretical this may sound—we stimulate such thoughts in our whole being that can again awaken in us, but now consciously, what the instinctive life used to provide for people in the past.

Because of this difference in world conception, as I told you yesterday, what we are learning today about our world—that the different substances and properties in nature are combinations of some one hundred or so elements—is valid for us only after death, for our corpses in their graves. The chemical and physical interactions concern not the living human being but only the corpse, which disintegrates according to the laws we find in the combinations of these elements.

By contrast we can point to the views held especially by the ancient Greeks, and still by people as late as the fourth century—views that are today dismissed as childish, as I said yesterday. But these views, correctly understood, provided the people with something else: the way they regarded the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water. As I pointed out, they did not regard the four elements as pictures of coarse sense impressions, coarse physical matter; they regarded them qualitatively. Fire contained at the same time the qualities warm and dry; they thought of water as cold and damp. These living concepts that they connected to the elements could then be applied in several ways.

They applied them in the way they thought about their connection to earth, air, fire, and water—in which they saw pictures, quite definite pictures. They could apply them to the way, in the human being, that the etheric body activates the mixing and demixing, synthesis and analysis of matter. They could understand how the etheric body is working in the physical between birth and death. All we can do, by contrast, is to limit our thinking to the processes in our corpses after death, processes in keeping with the physical and chemical laws. The Greeks and their followers, as far as into the fifteenth century, could think of the working of the etheric in the physical body, by developing qualitatively the properties of fire as warm and dry, of water as cold and damp, of earth as cold and dry, and so on.

By applying these four elements to the human being, one works in a far more living, inner way, which enables one to imagine the etheric body’s participation in the physical substances. By imagining this participation as living processes one becomes inwardly much more mobile, more alive, especially if one adds to one’s imagination something else the Greeks still understood in a living way. They imagined the following [a drawing is made].

You see, today we have the surface of the earth, on it the green plants. How do we today imagine the processes taking place in the world of plants? Here, too, our knowledge is limited to the explanations of the chemical analyses and syntheses taking place in the one hundred or so elements. Anything else is denied, or the attempt is made to see it according to the analogy with reciprocal mineral interaction. One would like to see the interaction of chlorophyll, the green color of the plant, with some outer entities during the plant’s growth as a process similar to that taking place in a test tube. This is not actually said in so many words, but this mode of thinking has become widespread. The plants are being studied according to their mineral properties.

The Greeks, on the other hand, even though they did not express it concisely, said: “When a plant grows, the cold and dry qualities of the earth are working from below upward. Once the plant has emerged from the earth, when it grows leaves and blossoms with their beautiful colors, we see all this as the effect of water and air, in the way we imagine their qualities; and permeating all of it is the effect of fire. Everywhere in the environment there is this interaction, this intermingling of warm and dry, cold and damp, warm and damp, and all of it, all this qualitative interweaving and inter-whirling of dry, cold, damp, and warm across the surface of the earth affects the plant life.”

We just have to see this. If we do, and then if we look away from the plants to the human being, to the way the etheric body is active within the human being, we shall there see something that is similar to plant life. When we look at the total life of the plant, we are inwardly stirred and stimulated, let me say, to participate in this life of the plant, in this objective life. The Greeks felt this. Outside, they said, “everything is blossoming, thriving, growing, and ever changing. All this is also working in me.” The activity of the Greek’s own etheric body, imagined in this way, was not beyond experience. The Greek reflected: “I am no stranger to what constitutes the etheric body in me. Certainly, I cannot see it. But by looking at everything that is growing around me, I experience these activities also within me.”

And if such a Greek—not in a present incarnation but as an ancient Greek—were alive today, and if a modern chemist were to tell him: “Your ideas are nonsensical, childish ones. We have left them behind, discovered not four, but some one hundred elements—hydrogen, oxygen, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and so on”—the Greek would have responded by saying: “I have no quarrel with this, there is no harm in it. But it is no more than a specialized, detailed study of my understanding of the cold and dry qualities of the earth. You have not got beyond the knowledge of the cold and dry properties of the earth. You know nothing of water, fire, and air. You haven’t got the faintest idea of what goes on in the world of plants, of the etheric life in yourself. You cannot even speak about the plants, because your knowledge of the elements cannot give you any idea of life, of what is working in the life of plants.”

Try to feel another ring to our words, how they will be living, as soon as we experience within us the greening, growing processes in the world around us, once these processes cease to be incomprehensible to us. And I can assure you that once it has again become a living experience, incorporated into education, this inner nuance permeating our words will not be limited to affecting the soul abstractly but will put color into faces again. It will transform the whole human being, will have a harmonizing effect. The teacher’s words will have a healthy ring to them, will have a different effect, regardless of anything else. All the other theories that tell us what to do, how things ought to be, are basically nothing but plants cultivated in conservatories. Real education must grow naturally. It must be absorbed into our mental images and feelings in the same way that nourishment is absorbed by the processes active in our blood and nerves, thus growing together with us in our organism.

It is essentially the beginning of folly to tell someone what to do. It is as if we were to say to a stove, “You were put into the room, and it is your duty as a stove to warm the room.” A stove is filled with firewood, which is then lit, but education needs a true knowledge of the human being that can then come alive in the whole person, that can reach our feelings and also our will. It is necessary for us to develop such a knowledge.

The Greeks, though, did not limit themselves to the observation of the life in plants. They looked up to the cosmos, where initially they perceived the circling planets—from the moon to Saturn, as they said.

The Greeks observed the stars and felt: “Here on earth, where I am surrounded by the plants, I am permeated by the effects of fire, air, and water. The plants are permeated by fire, air, and water. What I see there also works rhythmically in me. I actually bear the whole year in me. As the processes of dry and damp and of cold and warm harmonize in the greening and decaying plants, so my etheric body works in me. The only difference is the fact that I have in me a whole world, so that what happens outside during the course of a year takes place within me in shorter rhythms.”

The Greeks felt themselves as living beings within the world, felt themselves belonging to the earth beings. But then they said: “As far as the plants are concerned I can see the beginning of the interaction of earth, air, fire, and water. The etheric then extends upward with its effects. It is now met by the cosmos, by the effects of the stars, initially by the effects of the planets, on fire, air, and water. Without the planets, I would have an etheric body, the plants would exist. But I would not, for example, be able to develop the front part of my brain without the forces of Saturn, working from without. I would not have a larynx without the Mars forces, working from without. I would not have a heart without the forces raying in from without.”

These thoughts prompted the further reflection: “Forces are raying in from without. The etheric is raying outward. But the forces that constitute me are raying in from indefinite cosmic distances—forces that are modified through the influence of the planets, forces extending inward from beyond the plant world.” The Greeks felt: “I could not have the front part of my brain, could not have a larynx, heart, or stomach without Saturn, Mars, the sun, or Mercury.” Through their organs, the Greeks felt themselves as much a part of the wide cosmos as they felt themselves part of earth, air, fire, and water in the etheric body. And they saw the cosmic forces whirling through each other in earth, air, fire, and water in a way that allowed the heart, the lungs, and the other organs to develop.

The Greeks felt themselves to be physical products not just of the earth but of the whole cosmos. “Here I am.” they could say, “standing beside a plant. But cosmic forces are active in me. These forces also affect the plants, but merely from without. They cannot enter the plants, cannot produce organs in them. But they penetrate me and produce in me everything I share with the animals. In regard to my organizing the effects of the cosmos, I can reach as far as the zodiac. There I have exhausted the sphere in which I can observe everything that extends into my animal nature and into the animals around me. I see the animals in their characteristic forms—I see a lion, for example. In the lion I can see a definite interaction between the planets and the fixed stars, which allows me to understand why a lion has this particular shape and these particular features. The same applies to the other animals. Learning to understand the nature of the animals around me, I learn to understand the astral body. I also experience the astral body within myself, just as I experience the etheric—what is in the plants—within myself. Together with the animals of the earth, I am not merely a creature of earth but a member of the cosmos, of that which pulsates through the cosmos as a result of the existence of the stars.”

Such a perception of the world can indeed permeate a human being, permeate one’s feelings, so that one may say: “Certainly, I can see objects formed according to mineral laws. But these do not include me. Neither am I a part of the plant world. And I am certainly not part of the animal world. I cannot live on the earth merely through the forces rising from the earth.” Feeling oneself within the whole of the universe essentially constituted the element in which the Greeks used to live, albeit yet instinctively.

The ego was then sought outside the circle of the zodiac, in a sphere that was pure spirit, for which a physical correlate could not be found except in its outer picture, the sun. This is the idea of the sun held by the people of still earlier times; it had become somewhat decadent during the Greek cultural period.

Our physicists and astronomers imagine the sun as a huge gaseous ball some twenty million miles away in the universe. This huge cosmic gas stove—without walls—radiates light and warmth in all directions. It is the only explanation, the sole idea for us—if we wish to be experts and not naive dilettantes. Indeed it is only an “expert,” a “specialist,” who could hold such a view. You will get closer to the truth by imagining the following. Imagine yourself surrounded by light. Light is everywhere. But nowhere is there an object that reflects this light. The light will then not be reflected to you; the light-filled space will be dark. You will not see anything; you will be surrounded by total darkness. Were there nothing but light, we would experience total darkness. Light only returns to us if it is caught by something; otherwise we cannot see it. In a light-filled room is total darkness.

A better age than ours certainly entertained this idea. Its people knew that the sun was not a gigantic gas stove, that there was not merely an empty space up there, but less than space, a negative space. Our physicists would get the surprise of their lives if they were to travel to the sun. They would not find the imagined gas ball, would perceive nothing, not even space, but merely left-out space, an energy or force that absorbs space. This force exists. Space is everywhere. We just have to be able to imagine the “less-than-space.” In the meantime, we at least know that “less-than-no-money” means debts.

Space has its boundaries, and negative space collects the light, which cannot pass through the negative emptiness, but is rayed back. Thus the sun becomes visible. Light is everywhere. What we see as the sun is only an entity that rays back, an apparatus that reflects the light. The origin of this light is, according to the Greeks, beyond the region of the zodiac. The light enters from cosmic distances and not from perceptible space. But it is collected, made visible, through the sun.

This, so the Greeks said, is connected with the development of the ego, whose origin is in regions higher than the planets. The sun is connected with the ego by virtue of the fact that the sun is less than space, emptier than space—at the place of the sun all matter ceases to be and spirituality can enter. It was because the Greeks understood the spiritual nature of the sun that they felt themselves so very much related to it.

Something of this living feeling, of this entering into the spirit by looking up to the cosmos, was still consciously experienced as late as the sixth century, especially during the middle of the fourth century. And because of the living feeling, events were described as resulting from the influence not of the planets but of the hierarchical beings who move what can be outwardly perceived as the planets. This living idea is necessary if we wish to arrive at a different experience of ourselves, imparted into the world as human beings.

If now we take a look at the animal kingdom from this point of view, we may say that this is also within us. It produces our organs. But the animals I see are enclosed in definite forms. I have not become such a form. I do not look like a lion, a bull, an ox, or a pig. I have in me all the animals as synthesis; I have within me the disposition for all of them. If the effect of the sun had not equalized it all, I should be somebody in whom the whole of the animal kingdom were thrown together, whirling, all the animals rooting into each other. It is the effect of the sun that equalizes it, that brings it to a state of balance.

And what is the result of this fact—that I bear within me the dispositions for all the animals, but in a suppressed way? It allows me to think forms, imaginations. The animals are outwardly shaped according to their imaginations; they are living imaginations, move about as imaginations. Looking at the animals I can see the world of imagination. The same forms are in me. They have become thought pictures in me, because I have not assumed their outer shape, have not made them spatial.

If we were to go even further back in time, before Thales, we would find an exact knowledge taught in mystery centers. Plato recorded this knowledge in his esoteric writings. We may describe it as follows. What is logic? Living logic is zoology! What comes to expression in the animal kingdom harmonizes itself in us and, according to our predisposition, assumes a spiritually abstract form, thus producing in us living thought activity. It is the animal kingdom that is active in our life of thoughts. Ergo, logic is zoology.

This knowledge was later replaced by the Socratism of Aristotle, and the consciousness was lost. The beginning of abstract logic came when the living relation of elective affinities gave way to the relation of judgment, the abstract connection of concepts—as we see them expressed in Aristotle’s logic, a logic that can drive the student preoccupied with it to despair, because in it can be found nothing concrete on which to build, nothing to hang on to.

We feel, we think, we develop concepts because we have within us what is spread out, outside of us, in the animal kingdom. If we develop this view, we impart ourselves into the world in a way that is quite different. Will and feelings are then vitalized in a way that is quite different. We feel ourselves related to the nature kingdoms. And we gradually experience not only the etheric but also the astral activity in ourselves.

If we are not limited by the abstract concepts taught everywhere today, but if we are inwardly stimulated by positive forms, and if we are then confronted by the fourteen- and fifteen- year-old children, we learn to observe them. What we inwardly receive will then direct our eyes and ears to the way we ought to conduct the next lesson. Our eyes are led and guided, our ears are led and guided, and only in this way will our observation of what is going on in the fourteen- and fifteen- year old students be stimulated. If we do not have this stimulation, if we do not permeate ourselves with such a spiritual science that enters our life of feelings, we confront these youngsters—as people used to say when I was young—“as the ox confronts Sunday, after having eaten grass all week.”

It is this that we must give our culture, our civilization, our sciences, so that they can become real, and not only a sum total of names, a mere nominalism, so that they can kindle in us something that has meaning and reality. This will allow us to observe human beings. I do not mean that we ought to proceed craftily, recording their behavior in notebooks. No, the positive forms will come to us as though by themselves when we observe in this way. We shall arrive at a judgment of each child, need not speak about it, because it will be mobile within us. We can then raise it to consciousness, and we shall conduct our lessons according to the numerous judgments that live and surge in us, as the whole of the animal kingdom is living in true thought forms.

Just think what it would mean if we had to know everything, if we had to have a clear notion of how the lion is eating a lamb, if we had to be fully conscious of that. By the same token, we cannot judge everything in our environment, cannot raise everything to an explicit consciousness. But it can be there; we can act accordingly. If we have not taken our starting point from the knowledge that only reckons with abstract concepts and abstract natural laws and that cannot possibly raise itself to such positive thought forms, then we can stand among our students and act appropriately. But how can we have anything other than such a starting point if we imagine the big gas stove without walls boiling away in the universe. Such a concept cannot lead to a better understanding of human beings.

All of this must lead to the deep exploration of conscience, to our telling ourselves that unless we make every effort to permeate our life of instincts and feelings with spiritual science, we can no longer understand children in their fourteenth and fifteenth years. We learn to understand them only by progressing to such a knowledge. This is what is meant by our ever emphasizing that anthroposophy is pedagogy. In other words, anthroposophy becomes pedagogy when one gets to the stage at which one can educate. All that is needed is to take from the depths of the soul what has been put into it through anthroposophy, if it is to be applied to education. What I mean to say is that if the qualities present in each human being are given a pedagogical direction, the anthroposophical understanding of the human being will also become a true pedagogy.

Yesterday I said to the teachers of the tenth grade that they should begin with a certain knowledge of the human being. Such a knowledge wishes to make us understand that we ought to place the human being again into the whole universe, according to body, soul, and spirit. We really should—if we are true teachers working on the basis of this knowledge of the human being—study anatomy and physiology, learn everything that has been produced in these fields by centuries of spiritless work. But these books should be no more than sources of information, and we should never omit to pour into them the knowledge we can gain from anthroposophy.

Only this approach will shed light on the information that emerges from such books, on what is generally held to be true today. You must have a different attitude toward this literature than other people. Certainly you will be called arrogant and worse, but you will have to accept this treatment today. You will have to live with it. You will have to see in the offerings of modern science merely the source for information—just as a member of the ancient Greek culture, if such a one were to come to life today and read a book on chemistry, would say: “The things I know about the earth, that it is dry and cold, that it affects plant growth, this you specialize for me. To learn about the details is interesting. But you have no knowledge of the totality of life; you merely know a quarter of it.”

We must return to a knowledge that enters our feelings and will, that permeates our whole being, that is for soul and spirit similar to the blood for the physical. Then becoming different human beings, we shall also become true teachers. The teaching profession cannot tolerate the automatization of the human being, which is the result of the various artificially grown greenhouse plants in educational theories. There are even experiments today that are supposed to lead to new concepts—experiments that show how memory works, how the will and even the thoughts are developing and running their course, harmless games that might even produce results. We need not be against games, those of children or those of the laboratory. What matters, however, is that we oppose the narrowing of the horizon that such experiments produce.

During our reflections on education, we have had to emphasize that our work as teachers depends on the manner in which we ourselves develop and find our way to the world. And we have had to single out the frequently characterized age of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years—for which our own correct preparation for our lessons is especially important.

But we also have to organize all our educational activities in such a way that we prepare the children for this age. Everything depends on their developing a definite relation to the world. This relation to the world announces itself especially at the age we are now discussing, when both girls and boys begin to incline toward ideals, toward something in life that is to be added to the physical, sense-perceptible world. Even in their obnoxious teenage behavior we can see this inclination toward a supersensible, ideal life—toward, as it were, a higher idea of purpose: Life must have a meaning! This is a deeply seated conviction for the human being. And we have to reckon with this “Life must have a meaning, a purpose!”

It is especially important at this age that we do not channel this basic inner maxim—life must have a purpose—into the wrong direction. Boys at this age are often seen as being filled with all sorts of ideas and hope for life, so that they easily get the notion that this or that has to be so or so. Girls get into the habit of making certain judgments about life. They are, especially at this age, sharply critical of life, convinced that they know what is right and wrong, fair and unfair. They make definite judgments and are convinced that life has to offer something that, coming from ideas deep down in human nature, must then be realized in the world. This inclination toward ideals and ideas is indeed strongly present at this age.

It is up to us whether, during the whole of the elementary school years beginning in first grade, we manage to allow the children to grow into this life of ideals, this imaginative life. A necessary condition is that we ourselves be able to permeate our whole being with such principles that allow us a correct understanding of the way children develop. Through anthroposophy we get a theoretical knowledge of the three most important aspects. Up to the seventh year, when the change of teeth occurs, children are essentially imitators. They develop, we may say, by doing what they see done in their environment. All their activities are basically imitations. Then during the time of the change of teeth, children begin to feel the need for an authority, the need to be told what to do. Thus, while before the change of teeth children accept the things that are done in the environment as a matter of course, copying the good and the bad, the true and the false, now they no longer feel the need to imitate but know that they can carry out what they are told to do and not to do. Then again, at puberty the children begin to feel that they can now make judgments themselves, but they still want to be supported by authorities of their own choosing: “This person may be listened to; I can accept his or her opinions and judgments.”

It is important that we allow the children to grow into this natural relation to authority in the right way. To do this we must understand the meaning and significance of the imitative instinct. What does it actually tell us? The imitative instinct cannot be understood if we do not see children as coming from the spiritual world. An age that limits itself to seeing children as the result of hereditary traits cannot really understand the nature of imitation. It cannot arrive at the simplest living concepts, concepts capable of life.

The science of this age sees the chemical, the physical world, how the elements, enumerated in chemistry, analyze and synthesize; it discovers, in progressing to the sphere of life—but working with it in a synthetic and analytic way—processes that correspond identically with those in the human corpse. Such a science, applying the same process that can be observed during the natural decomposing of the corpse, finds the same elements in the living organism: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and the rest. And it discovers these elements living in the form we know as albumen. The scientists now try to discover how the carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen in the albumen can be synthesized in a living way. And they hope to discover one day how these elements—\(C\), \(N\), \(H\), and \(O\)—develop a definite structure by virtue of being together in albumen.

But this procedure will never lead to an understanding of albumen as the basis of life. In characterizing albumen in the cell in this way we follow a wrong direction. The reality is quite different. The natural, instinctive forces that hold the substances together, that bring about specific forms in, for example, a mountain crystal, a cube of pyrite, or other minerals, change to a chaotic condition during the creation of albumen. We should, in our study of albumen, instead of paying attention to more complicated laws, observe how these forces in their reciprocal relation paralyze themselves, cease to be active in the albumen, are no longer in it. Instead of structure, we should look for chaos, dissolution. We should tell ourselves: The substances in their reciprocal activities change to a chaotic condition when they pass to the stage in which they appear as albumen; then they enter an undefined, vague stage, cease to influence one another, enter a stage in which they become open to another influence.

In the general life processes, this chaotic condition is still kept somewhat in check through the mineral processes in the organism. The cells in our brain, lungs, and liver, as far as they are albumen, are still affected by the forces we receive from our food. There the chaotic condition is not present. But in the cells that later become our reproductive cells, the cell substance is protected from the influence of food, protected from the forces we receive from food. In our reproductive cells there is almost complete chaos; all mineral substances are completely destroyed, ruined. Reproductive cells are produced in human beings, in animals, and in plants by virtue of the fact that the terrestrial effects, the mineral activities, are through a laborious process destroyed, ruined. This process allows the organism to become receptive to the work of the cosmos. Cosmic forces can now work into the organism from every direction. These cosmic forces are initially influenced by the reproductive cells of the other sex, adding the astral to the etheric. We may say that as the mineral elements demineralize themselves, the possibility arises for the cosmic laws to enter on this detour through the chaotic condition of the albumen, whereas ordinarily in the mineral world we find the terrestrial influencing the terrestrial.

Natural science will never comprehend the nature of albumen as long as it endeavors to find in the organic molecule a structure that is simply more complicated than that which occurs in the inorganic molecule. Today’s chemistry and physiology are mainly concerned with discovering the structure of atoms in different bodies, atoms which assume ever more complex forms, culminating in that of the albumen. The molecule of albumen does not tend toward greater complexity, however, but toward the dissolution of mineral structure, so that extraterrestrial—and not terrestrial—forces can influence it.

Our thinking is here confused by modern science. We are led to a thinking that is—in its most important aspects—in no way connected to reality. Our modern knowledge of the properties of albumen prevents us from raising our thoughts to the reality that something enters the human being that does not come from heredity but via the detour from the cosmos. Today’s idea of albumen leaves no room for the concept of the pre-existence of the human being.

We have to understand the tremendous importance of learning, as teachers, to distance ourselves from the basic tenets of modern science. With the basic tenets of modern science one can bamboozle people, but one cannot teach with them. Our universities do not teach at all. What do they do? There is a faculty that enforces its position through the power of unions or associations. The students have to congregate there, in order to prepare themselves for life. Nobody would do this. Neither the old nor the young would do this, if it were left to them to develop their innate forces and potential. In order to make them study, compulsion is necessary. They are forced into this situation, incarcerated for a while, if they wish to prepare themselves for a profession. And because of this, these institutions do not think of relaxing their power. It is a childish notion to believe such institutions, the last outposts at which compulsory membership clings—the compulsory membership of all the other unions no longer existing—it is hard to believe such institutions are in the forefront of progress. They are the last place of recourse for finding answers. Everywhere else the enforced measures and rules of the Middle Ages have been done away with. In the way today’s universities are conducted, they are in no way different from the guilds of the Middle Ages. Our universities are the last remnants of the guilds. And since those concerned with these things have no longer any knowledge, any feeling about this development, they enlist the help of show business, especially during such highlights as graduation ceremonies—caps, gowns, and so forth. It is important to see behind these things.

One who today wishes to educate and teach must find other ways in which to become a true human being; one must acquire new ideas of the basic principles. Then one will arrive at the correct understanding of the nature of imitation during early childhood.

During the time in the spiritual world, before conception, the child’s soul accepts everything from its spiritual surroundings as a matter of course. After birth the child continues this activity that the soul became used to in the spiritual world. In the child’s imitating we can see that this habit from before birth has not been lost; it has only taken a different turn. Before conception the child was concerned with development from within; now the world outside is confronted. We may use the following picture to help us understand this difference. Before conception the child was as though within a ball; now the child looks at this ball from outside. The world one sees with one’s physical eyes is the outside of what one saw previously from within. Imitation is an instinctive urge for the child in all activities, a continuation of the child’s experience in the spiritual world; it is through imitation that the child develops an initial relation to the spiritual world in the physical world.

Just think what this means! Keep in mind that the very young child wants to face the outer world according to the principles that are valid in the spiritual world. During these early years, the child develops a sense for the true and, connecting to the world in this way, arrives at the conviction: “Everything around me is as true as the things I so clearly perceived in the spiritual world.” The child develops the sense for the true before beginning school. We still observe the last phases of this conviction when the child enters school, and we must receive the child’s sense for the true in the right way. Otherwise we blunt it instead of developing it further.

Consider now the situation of children entering first grade and forced to adapt to the conventional way people read and write today—an activity that is external to human nature. Our modern way of reading and writing is abstract, external to human nature. Not so long ago, the forms of the letters were quite different. They were pictures—that is, they did not remind one of the reality, but they depicted the reality. But by teaching the Roman alphabet, we take the children into a quite foreign element, which they can no longer imitate.

If we show the children pictures, teach them how to draw artistic, picture-like forms, encourage them to make themselves into pictures of the world through a musical element that is adapted to child nature, we then continue what they had been doing by themselves before starting school. If, on the other hand, we teach by instructing them to copy an abstract “I” or “O,” the children will have no cause to be interested, no cause for inwardly connecting with our teaching. The children must in a certain way be connected with what they are doing. And the sense of imitation must now be replaced by the sense of beauty. We must begin to work from all directions toward the healthy separation from imitation, to allow the children’s imitation to give way to a correct, more outer relation to the world. The children must grow into beings who copy the outer world beautifully. And we must now begin to consider two as yet rather undifferentiated aspects—namely, the teaching of physical skills and the teaching of such things that are more concerned with knowledge, with the development of concepts.

What are children actually doing when they sing or make eurythmic movements? They disengage themselves from imitating, yet the imitating activity continues in a certain way. The children move. Singing and listening to music are essentially inner movements—the same process as in imitation. And when we let children do eurythmy, what are we actually doing then? Instead of giving them sticks of crayon with which to write an “A” or an “E”—an activity with which they have a purely cognitive connection—we let the children write into the world, through their own human form, what constitutes the content of language. The human being is not directed to abstract symbols but allowed to write into the world what can be inscribed through his or her organism. We thus allow the human being to continue the activity of prenatal life. And if we then do not take recourse to abstract symbols when we teach reading and writing, but do this through pictures, we do not distance ourselves from the real being when we must activate it, we do not let the human being get fully away from it. Through effort and practice we employ the whole of the human being.

I want you to be aware of what we are doing with the children in regard to their activities. On the one hand, we have the purely physiological physical education lessons. There the children are trained and tamed—we merely use different methods—as animals are. But spirit and soul are excluded from our considerations. On the other hand, we have lessons that are unconnected with the human body. We have progressed to the point at which, in writing and reading, the more delicate movements of the fingers, arms, and eyes are made so active that the rest of the organism is not participating in them. We literally cut the human being in half.

But when we teach eurythmy, when the movements contain the things the children are to learn in writing, we bring these two parts—body and soul/spirit—closer together. And in the children’s artistic activities, when the letters emerge from pictures, we have one and the same activity—now, however, tinged by soul and spirit—as in eurythmic movements or in listening to singing, a process in which the children’s own consciousness is employed. We join body, soul, and spirit, allowing the child to be a totality.

By proceeding in this way, we shall, of course, find ourselves reproached by parents in parent/teacher meetings. We only have to learn to deal with them appropriately when they ask us, for example, to transfer their sons to a class with a male teacher. They would, so they say, have a greater respect for a male teacher. “My son is already eight years old and cannot spell correctly.” They blame the female teacher for that, believing that a male teacher would be more likely to drill the child in this subject.

Such erroneous opinions, which keep being voiced in our school community, must be checked; we have to correct them and enlighten the parents. But we must not shock them. We cannot speak to them in the way we speak among ourselves. We cannot say to them: “You ought to be grateful for the fact that your son cannot read and write fluently at the age of nine. He will as a result read and write far better later on. If he could read and write to perfection already at age nine, he would later turn into an automaton, because he would have been inoculated with a foreign element. He would turn into an automaton, a robot.”

Children whose writing and reading activities are balanced by something else will grow into full human beings. We have to be gentle with today’s grown-ups, who have been influenced by modern culture. We must not shock them; that would not help our cause at all. But we must, tactfully and gently, find a way to convince them that if their child cannot yet read and write fluently at the age of nine, this does not constitute a sin against the child’s holy spirit.

If in this way, we guide the child correctly into life—if we don’t “cut the child in half” but leave the child’s whole being intact, we shall observe an extraordinarily important point in the child’s life at the age of nine. The child will relate quite differently to the world outside. It is as though the child were waking up, were beginning to have a new connection to the ego. We should pay attention to this change, at the very beginning. In our time, it is possible for this change to happen earlier. We should observe the new relation to the environment—the child showing surprise, astonishment. Normally this change occurs between the ninth and the tenth years.

If, thoughtfully and inwardly, we ask ourselves what it is that has led to this condition, we shall receive an answer that cannot be accurately expressed in words but can be conveyed by the following analogy. Previously, had we given the child a mirror and had the child seen his or her reflection in it, the child would not have seen it very differently from any other object, would not have been especially affected by it. Imagine a monkey to whom you give a mirror. Have you observed this? The monkey takes hold of the mirror and runs to a place where it can look at it undisturbed, quite calmly. The monkey becomes fascinated by its reflection. Should you try to take the mirror away, that would not be to your advantage. The monkey is absolutely bent on coming to grips with what it sees in the mirror. But you will not notice the slightest change in the monkey afterward. It will not have become vain as a result; the experience does not influence the monkey in this way. The immediate sense impression of the reflected picture fascinates the monkey, but the experience does not metamorphose into anything. As soon as the mirror is taken away, the monkey forgets the whole thing; the experience certainly does not produce vanity.

But a child at the characterized age looking at his or her reflection would be tempted to transform his or her previous way of feeling, to become vain and coquettish. This is the difference between the monkey, satisfied with just seeing itself in the mirror, and the child. Regarding the monkey, the experience does not permanently affect its feeling and will. But for the nine-and-one-half-year-old child, the experience of seeing himself or herself in the mirror produces lasting impressions, influences his or her character in a certain way.

An actual experiment would confirm this result. And a time that wishes to make education into an experimental science—because it cannot think of any other way of dealing with it, because it has lost all inner connection to it—could well feel inclined to make experiments in order to discover the nature of the transition from the ninth to the tenth year. Children would be given mirrors, their reactions would be recorded, learned books would be written, and so forth. But such a procedure is no different for the soul and spirit than the assumption that our ordinary methods cannot solve the mystery of the human being. In order to get answers, we must decide on killing somebody every year, in order to discover the secrets of life at the moment of death. Such scientific experiments are not yet permitted in the physical, sense-perceptible world. But in the realm of soul and spirit, we have progressed to the point that experiments are allowed which paralyze the unhappy victims, paralyze them for life—experiments that ought to be avoided.

Take any of the available books on education and you will find thoughts the very opposite of ours. You will, for example, read things about memory and the nature of sensation, the application of which you ought to avoid in your lessons. Experimental pedagogy occupies itself precisely with such experiments that should be abolished. Everything that should be avoided is experimented with. This is the destructive practice of our current civilization—the wish to discover the processes in the corpse rather than those in life. It is the death processes that experimental pedagogy wishes to study, instead of making the effort to observe life: the way children, in a delicate, subtle way arrive at being astonished at what they see around them, because they are beginning to see themselves placed into the world. It is only at this stage that one arrives at self consciousness, the awareness of one’s ego. When one sees it reflected, rayed back from everywhere in the environment, from plants and animals, when one begins to experience them in one’s feeling, one relates consciously to them, develops a knowledge through one’s own efforts.

This awareness begins to awaken in children at the age of nine and ten. It does not awaken if we avoid the formative activities, if we avoid the meaningful movements in, for example, eurythmy. This is not done today. Children are not educated to do meaningful, sensible things. Like little lambs in a pasture, they are taken to the gymnasium, ordered to move their arms in a certain way, told how to use the various apparati. There is nothing of a spiritual element in such activities—or have you noticed any? Certainly, many beautiful things are said about such activities, but they are not permeated by spirit.

What is the result? At an age that affords the best opportunities for infusing the sense of beauty in children, they do not receive it. The children wish so very much to stand in awe, to be astonished, but the forces for this response are squashed. Take a book on current curricula and their tendencies. The six- and seven-year-old children, on entering school, are treated in a way that makes them impervious to the experiences they ought to have in their tenth year. They don’t experience anything. Consequently, the experiences they ought to have pass into the body, instead of into the consciousness. They rumble deep down in the unconscious regions and transform into feelings and instincts of which individuals have no knowledge. People move about in life without being able to connect with it, without discovering anything in it. This is the characteristic of our time. People do not observe anything meaningful in life, because they did not learn as children to see the beautiful in it. All they are to discover are things that in the driest possible sense somehow increase their knowledge. But they cannot find the hidden, mysterious beauty that is present everywhere, and the real connection to life dies away.

This is the course culture is taking. The connection of human beings to nature dies away. If one is permeated by this, if one observes this, then one knows how everything depends on finding the right words, words that will allow children at the age of nine to be astonished. The children expect this from us. If we do not deliver, we really destroy a great deal.

We must learn to observe children, must grow into them with our feelings, be inside them and not rest content with outer experimentation. The situation is really such that we have to say that the development of the human being includes a definite course of life that begins at the moment when in a lower region, as it were, from language, there emerge the words: “I am an ‘I.’” One learns to say “I” to oneself at a relatively early age in childhood, but the experience is dreamlike and continues in this dreamy way. The child then enters school. And it is now our task to change this experience. The child wishes, after all, to take a different direction. We must direct the child to artistic activities. When we have done this for a while, the child retraces his or her life and arrives again at the moment of learning to say “I” to himself or herself. The child then continues the process and later, through the event of puberty, again passes through this moment.

We prepare the children for this process by getting them at the age of nine and ten to the point that they can look at the world in wonder, astonishment, and admiration. If we make their sense of beauty more conscious, we prepare the children for the time at and after puberty in such a way that they learn to love correctly, that they develop love in the right way. Love is not limited to sex; sex is merely a special aspect of love. Love is something that extends to everything, is the innermost impetus for action. We ought to do what we love to do. Duty is to merge with love; we should like what we are duty-bound to do. And this love develops in the right way only if we go along with the child’s inner development. We must, therefore, pay attention to the correct cultivation of the sense of beauty throughout the elementary school years. The sense of truth the children have brought with them; the sense of beauty we have to develop in the way I have described.

That the children have brought the sense of truth with them can be seen in the fact that they have learned to speak before entering school. Language, as it were, incorporates truth and knowledge. We need language if we wish to learn about the world. This fact has led people like Mauthner to assume that everything is already contained in language. People like Mauthner—who wrote the book Critique of Language—actually believe that we harm human beings by taking them beyond the point at which they learn to speak. Mauthner wrote his Critique of Language because he did not believe in the world, because of his conviction that human beings should be left at a childlike stage, at the time when they learn to speak. Were this idea to become generally accepted, we would be left with a spiritual life that corresponds to that of children at the time when they have learned to speak. This manner of thinking tends toward producing such human beings who remain at the stage of children who have just learned to speak. Everything else is nowadays rejected as ignorance.

What now matters is that we can enter the concept of imitation with our feeling and then to understand the concept of authority as the basis, between us and the children, for the development of the sense for the beautiful. If we manage to do this up to the time of puberty, then as the children are growing into their inclinations toward ideals, the sense for the good is correctly developed. Before puberty it is through us that the children are motivated to do the good; through the reciprocal relationship we must affect the children in this way. It is necessary for the eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-old girls and boys to have the teacher’s authority behind them, to feel their teacher’s pleasure and satisfaction when they are doing something that is good. And they should avoid bad actions because they feel their teacher would be disappointed. They should be aware of the teacher’s presence and in this way unite with him or her. Only at puberty should they emancipate themselves from the teacher.

If we consider the children to be already mature in first grade, if we encourage them to voice their opinions and judgments as soon as they have learned to speak—that is, if we base everything on direct perception [Anschauung]—we leave them at the stage of development at which they have just learned to speak, and we deny them any further development. If, in other words, we do not address ourselves to the very real changes at puberty—that the children then leave behind what they were used to doing through our authority—they will not be able later in life to do without it. Children must first experience authority. Then at puberty they must be able to grow beyond it and begin to make and depend on their own judgments.

At this time we really must establish such a connection to the students that each one of them may choose a “hero whose path to Mt. Olympus can be emulated.” This change is, of course, connected with some unhappiness and even pain. It is no longer up to the teacher to represent the ideal for the children. The teacher must recognize the change and act accordingly. Before puberty the teacher was able to tell the children what to do. Now the students become rather sensitive to their teachers in their judgments, perceive their weaknesses and shortcomings. We must consciously expose ourselves to this change, must be aware of the students’ criticism of their teachers’ unwarranted behavior. They become especially sensitive at this age to their teachers’ attitudes. If, however, our interest in the students is honest and not egotistical, we shall educate and teach with exactly these possibilities of their feelings in mind. And this will result in a free relationship between us and them.

The effect will be the students’ healthy growth into the true that was given to them by the spiritual world as a kind of inheritance, so that they can merge with, grow together with, the beautiful in the right way, so that they can learn the good in the world of the senses, the good they are to develop and bring to expression during their lives. It is really a sin to talk about the true, the beautiful, and the good in abstractions, without showing concretely their relation to the various ages.

Such a short reflection, my dear friends, can of course give us no more than a small segment of what the future holds for us. We can only gradually grow into the tasks we are given. But it really is true that we shall in a certain way grow into them as a matter of course, provided we let ourselves be guided in our work by the forces we can acquire if we see the physical, sense-perceptible world from the standpoint of soul and spirit and if, in observing the world, we do not forget the human being. These things we must do, especially as teachers to whom the young are entrusted.

We really must feel ourselves as a part of the whole universe, wherein the evolution of humankind is playing a major role. For this reason, I would always—at the beginning of the school year—like to see our feelings permeated, as it were, with a healthy sensing of our great task, so that we may in all humility feel ourselves as missionaries in human evolution. In this sense, I always wish such talks to contain also something of a prayer-like element by which we may raise ourselves to the spirit, so that we evoke it not merely intellectually but as a living reality. May we be conscious of the spirit spreading among us like a living cloud that is permeated by soul and spirit; may we feel that the living spirits themselves are called upon through the words we speak among ourselves at the beginning of a new school year, that these living spirits themselves are called forth when we beseech them: “Help us. Bring living spirituality among us. Insert it into our souls, our hearts, so that we may work in the right way.”

If you have the sensitivity to appreciate that our words at the beginning of the school year should also be a feeling experience, you will be open to the intention that is connected with our talks. So let me add for you this short meditative formula, to be spoken as follows:

We resolve to do our work by letting flow into it what from the spiritual world wishes to become human being in us, by way of the soul and spirit as well as of the corporealphysical organization.

[Wir wollen arbeiten, indem wir einfliessen lassen in unsere Arbeit dasjenige, was aus der geistigen Welt heraus auf seelisch-geistige Weise und auch auf leiblich-physische Weise in uns Mensch werden will.]

The impressions I have gathered here in the school have prompted me to use the short time I can be with you to say something that emerges directly out of these impressions. After all, the fruitfulness of our activity in an institution like the Waldorf School depends, as does indeed the art of education as a whole, on the ability of the teachers to develop the attitude that will enable them to carry through their work with assurance and be active in the right way. On this occasion, therefore, I would like to speak in particular about the teachers themselves. I would like to preface what I have to say with some brief remarks I made recently in a course for teachers in England, [Rudolf Steiner, A Modern Art of Education, London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972 (14 lectures given in Ilkley, England, August 5-17, 1923).] though from a somewhat different point of view. I then shall add a few things that will enable you, if you let them work in the right way on your souls, to develop this right attitude increasingly. The question of attitude, or mood of soul, is very much connected with the art of education. You may possess an admirable mastery of the principles of teaching; you may be able to work them out with intelligence and feeling; but what we are trying to do will fall on fertile soil only if the general attitude that we take with us into the school can be made into a harmonious whole.

Man is a threefold being not only from the many points of view we often have discussed but also from those that lie a little closer to the earthly than do the higher, spiritual viewpoints. This threefoldness reveals itself quite specifically if we focus on the way in which the human being has developed his educational activity. We need not go back very far; indeed, if we went back to very ancient times our view would have to alter somewhat. We have only to go back to the Greek era in human evolution to a period that still stirs the minds of those in our Western civilization. At that period we find that the educator was really the gymnast, intent above all upon molding his pupil into maturity through his outer, physical, bodily nature. However, we shall not properly understand the Greek gymnasts, especially the earlier ones, unless we realize that they were quite as much concerned with the development of the soul and spirit as of the body. It is true that the Greeks laid stress on bodily exercises, which were all formed in an artistic sense, as the means of bringing their pupils to maturity. What is so little realized nowadays, however, is that these bodily exercises, whether dance movements or some other rhythmical or gymnastic movements, were devised in such a way that through the unfolding and expression of rhythm, measure, and the like, spiritual beings were able to draw near, beings who lived in the movements, in the rhythm and measure in which the pupil was trained. While the pupil was doing something with his arms and legs, a spiritual influence passed from the limb system, including the metabolic system, into the rhythmic and the nerve-sense systems; in this way the whole human being was developed. One therefore should not say that in Greece primary importance was attached to the cultivation of gymnastics, for this gives the impression that they were cultivated then as they are nowadays, that is, mostly in an entirely outward and physical way. In fact, with the Greeks gymnastics also included the education of soul and spirit. The Greek educator was a gymnast; he educated the body, and along with the body the soul and spirit, because he had the capacity, as if by magic, to draw down the world of soul and spirit into bodily movements. The more ancient Greek gymnasts were perfectly conscious of this. They had no desire to educate human beings in an abstract, intellectual way or to teach their pupils in the way we do today. We speak exclusively to the head, even if we do not intend to do so. The Greeks brought their pupils into movement; they brought them into movement that was in harmony with the dynamic of the spiritual and physical cosmos.

In following the course of human evolution, we find that among the Romans the art of cultivating the soul and the spirit by way of the bodily nature had been forgotten. They approached the soul directly, and education took place especially through the medium of speech, the faculty lying nearest to the soul element in ordinary life. Roman education did, in fact, draw forth from speech that which was to form their pupils; the educator thus ceased to be a gymnast and became a rhetorician. Beauty of speech was from Roman times onward the essential element in education and actually remained so throughout the Middle Ages. Beauty of speech—in the forming of words and in the consciousness that the word is being sculpturally and musically formed—has its effect on the whole human being. The most important principles of education were derived from this consciousness. The Greek had gone right back to the bodily foundation of the human being, from there drawing everything into the realm of soul and spirit. The Roman concerned himself with the middle part of man, with the sublimated expression of the rhythmic system, with the musical speech of poetry. He trusted that if speech were handled properly, this musical and sculptural-painterly speech would work downward to the bodily and upward to the spiritual. In this form of education also, intellectual training played no part, but rather special importance was attached to speaking.

Then, from the fifteenth century onward, the rhetorician as educator was gradually superseded by the professor [Doktor]. [The German Doktor does not in this context refer to a medical doctor but to a scholar with a doctoral degree.] Even teachers who have passed through only a training college nowadays are in this sense really “professors.” Hitherto, there was some justification for this; if indeed the ideal of the professor was not held in the way it once was by a teacher pf gymnastics whom I knew well. He felt extremely uncomfortable on any gymnastic apparatus but loved to get up on a platform and hold forth theoretically about gymnastics. His pupils sat crouched and bent on their benches and listened to the gymnastics lectures. This sort of thing could not have happened in any other institution, but in this training college he could get up and lecture like this once a week. He felt quite learned he felt, in fact, like a real professor. The principle that the basis of education lies not in the rhythmic system but in the head, in the nerve-sense system, became more and more prominent as humanity evolved from the fifteenth century into the modern age. Hence it is not so easy today for teachers in the Waldorf School to adhere to the principle that they should have no desire to realize this ideal of the learned professor. I do not mean this outwardly but inwardly. It is not easy, because it is a normal part of the consciousness of modern humanity to believe that something is gained by becoming “learned.” In our civilization, however, a healthy condition will be achieved only when we realize that to be “learned” in this sense is actually harmful and, far from adding anything to a human being, it takes something away from him. Though I am always delighted when someone nods intelligent assent to the sort of thing about which I have been speaking, I am also a little uncomfortable about the nodding, because people take the matter much too lightly. There is little inclination inwardly to lay aside the doctorate, even if one does not have it oneself, even if one only carries the attitude in one's general consciousness. Furthermore, the trend that has caused the earlier gymnast and rhetorician to be superseded by the professor is so much part and parcel of modern civilization that it cannot easily be eradicated. It is in education, of course, that we notice most clearly the unfortunate effects upon a person who has gone through a doctoral training; yet that which has put the professor into a leading position in education has been necessary for the entire development of intellectualism in modern culture.

We have reached a point at which we must cultivate the synthesis of these three elements of the human being, for this division into gymnast, rhetorician, and professor is yet another example of the threefoldness of human nature, and it is above all in the realm of education that this synthesis should be achieved. If we could manage things ideally, the teacher should cultivate gymnastics in the noblest sense, rhetoric in the noblest sense—with all that was associated with it in ancient times—and also the professorial element in the noblest sense. Then these three elements should be integrated into a whole. I almost shudder at having to describe so dryly what you must know in this regard and must receive in your hearts' minds [die Gesinnung], because I am afraid that it may again get distorted, as happens with so much that must be said. It must not be distorted. The teacher should simply realize that for his own art of education he needs a synthesis of the spiritualized gymnast, of the ensouled rhetorician, and thirdly of the living, evolving spiritual element [das Geistige], not the dead and abstract spiritual element.

The whole faculty of the school ought to work together to assimilate these things, to develop gymnastics in the noblest sense and also what we have in eurythmy. If you really succeed in penetrating eurythmy inwardly, you will experience for yourselves that there is an active element of soul and spirit in every eurythmic movement. Every eurythmic movement calls forth an element of soul from the deepest foundations of the human being, and every gymnastic movement, if rightly executed, calls forth in the human being a spiritual atmosphere into which the spiritual element can penetrate livingly and not in a dead, abstract way.

The rhetorical element, in the noblest sense of the word, still has a particular significance for the teacher today. No educator, in whatever sphere of education he may be engaged, should fail to do his utmost to have his own speaking approach as closely as possible the ideal of an artistic speaking. The need for cultivating speech as such should always be kept in mind. This is something that has vanished so completely from man's consciousness that in this age of intellectualism professors of rhetoric are appointed at universities mainly out of an old habit. Curtius was professor of rhetoric at Berlin University, but he was not allowed to lecture on the subject, because lectures on the art of speech were felt to be superfluous at a place of higher education. He therefore had to discharge his duty in other ways than by lecturing about rhetoric, though in his official appointment he still bore the title of professor of rhetoric. This shows how we have ceased to attach any real value to the art of speech; this is connected with our ever-increasing disregard for the artistic element as such. Today we usually think because we do not know what else to do, and that is why we have so few real thoughts. The thoughts produced in the style of our modern thinking are the worst possible. The best are those that rise up out of an individual's humanness while he is engaged in some kind of action. Those thoughts are good that evolve out of beautifully formulated speech, when, out of such beautifully formulated speaking, thoughts rebound in us. Then something from the archangel lives in our thinking through the speaking, and it is far more significant that we be able to listen to this speaking than that we develop prosaic human thinking, however cleverly we might do so. This can be achieved, however, only if we, especially those engaged in education, clearly realize how remote modern thinking is from reality, from the world. We have, of course, produced a splendid science, but the sad thing is that this science knows nothing really and that, as a result of its knowing nothing, it is driving the very life out of human culture and civilization. We need not turn into revolutionaries for this reason or go about shouting such things indiscriminately in the world; what we need is to work in the school out of this consciousness.

Not only has thinking gradually become more and more abstract, but so has everything relating to the content of the human soul. At most man is still aware that his highest soul faculties originate in sudden flashes [einfällen], and he is especially proud when something occurs to him [einfällt] in this way. Since man experiences what may be the most valuable element in his soul as severed from the universe, he becomes inwardly barren and lifeless, alienated from reality. Our musicians compose music, they write melodies and harmonies, because these happen to˃ occur to them. Certainly one might think it quite a good thing if such things occur to someone frequently ini the realm of music; but why do they occur to him? Why should some melody suddenly occur to him out of nothingness? There appears to be neither human nor cosmic reason that a melody should occur suddenly to an individual who was born in and lives in this or that time or place. Why? There is meaning in it only when one has a connection with the cosmos in experiencing a melody, when one experiences the connection with the cosmos in experiencing a melody. One need not sail away into symbolism, but the connection with the cosmos must be experienced. The melody must really be “spoken” into us by the spirit of the world; then it has meaning and does something to promote progress in the world.

A great deal of Ahrimanic influence can be found in the world today. Indeed, the evolution of the world would be impossible without it. One of the worst instances of the Ahrimanic, however, is the fact that in order to become a qualified professor a thesis has to be written; there is no real connection between writing a thesis and becoming a professor. The only connection is purely external, Ahrimanized. Such things are taken seriously in our civilization today, however, and force their way into education, because educational institutions exert their influence from above downward, and the whole mode of their organization is totally unsound. Merely to say this sort of thing gets us nowhere, except to make us unpopular and create enemies for ourselves. In working here, however, we should be fully awake to the fact that we are called to work out of different premises.

Nowadays, for example, in lectures on the physiology of nutrition, we would be told that potatoes—carbohydrates—contain so much carbon, so much oxygen, and so on; that protein contains so and so much carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen; fats so and so much nitrogen, and so on; that the various “salts” man consumes are composed of what nowadays are called the chemical elements; and finally that the amounts of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so forth, that man needs can be calculated. The modern theory of nutrition is arrived at in this way. It is exactly as though someone wanting to know how a watch comes into existence were first to ascertain how gold is produced up to the moment when it is delivered to the watchmaker or how the glass for the watch is produced, and so on, with other parts of the watch. Such a person insists on getting to know the parts but never on knowing what the watchmaker does with them. In all eternity he will never really know anything about the watch. He may be well informed about the glass, the hands, the materials of which the watch is made, but he knows nothing about the watch itself. The same sort of thing is true if, regarding human nutrition, a person limits himself to the knowledge that the fats are constituted of such and such chemical elements, the carbohydrates of others, and so forth. We begin to know something about nutrition only if we can enter in a living way into the fact that what we eat in a potato, for example, is related to the root. If we eat something related to the root it is quite different from consuming in flour something that is related to the seed as in rye, corn, or wheat. What really matters is not how much carbohydrate there is in a potato or a kernel of corn. Rather, if I prepare a foodstuff from seeds, from corn, this foodstuff has to be digested in the area of the human being that extends to the lymph vessels and reaches the nerve-sense system in a condition in which it can provide the foundation for thinking. When I eat a potato, which is related to the root, it is not the human digestive tract or the lymphatic system that reduces the potato to a state where it can be assimilated by the human body. No, here the midbrain is required, and when we eat potatoes the task of digestion is imposed upon the midbrain. When we eat a different kind of food this burden is not present. If we eat potatoes in excess, we impose upon the midbrain the task of the primary digestion; that is to say, we undermine the real function of the midbrain in relation to the nerve-sense system, which is to permeate thoughts with feeling [Gemüt]. We thus thrust our thinking into the forebrain, where it becomes intellectual and to some extent actually animal-like.

The essential point is not whether a potato, or cabbage, or corn, is composed of such and such a percentage of carbohydrates. For a true physiology of nutrition all that is irrelevant. What we really need to know is how these things actually work within the human being. If we wish to develop a living grasp of what man needs today, we have the task of freeing ourselves from all these things that can never give us a true knowledge of man. The way we talk about nature nowadays not only is misleading: it leads us straight into emptiness of thought, emptiness of feeling.

Now you are all aware that there is a well-known process in the human being by means of which carbon combines with oxygen so that carbon dioxide is produced, that is, the mixture of carbon and oxygen that we exhale. You will often hear this process talked about as if it were a sort of inner burning, the same sort of thing as when a candle burns. There, too, carbon combines with oxygen, but to talk in this way is about as intelligent as to ask why the human being needs two lungs; we might just as well put two stones into him, two inorganic objects. If we mentally transfer into the human being the outer process of burning, we think in the same way as we would if we viewed the lungs as two stones. The burning that takes place outwardly in connection with oxygen is a dead burning, an inorganic burning. What takes place in the human being is a living burning, permeated with soul. Any process that takes place outside in nature changes when it occurs in the human being; in the human being it is permeated with soul; it is spiritual. What carbon together with oxygen does within the human organism bears the same relation to what happens outside as the living lungs bear to two stones. It is more important to guide one's whole life of feeling in this direction than to ponder over these things; then in all realms of the life of soul one would come to a direct experience of nature that could truly guide one from nature to the human being. Nowadays people remain with nature outside and do not at all reach the human being.

You will discover that if you speak to children with this kind of feeling and attitude [Gesinnung], they will understand the most difficult things as they need to be understood in their particular age. If you rely on the accursed textbooks that are so popular, the children really understand nothing; you torment the children, bore them, call forth their scorn. What you must do is to create a relationship to the world in yourselves that is both living and true to reality. That, above all, is what the teacher needs. I would like to emphasize strongly at the beginning that the teacher should strive continually to bring to life in himself what in the course of civilization has become dead. One of the chief tasks in Waldorf education is to bring life to knowledge and to feel a kind of repugnance for the way in which things are presented nowadays in so-called scientific textbooks. After having conquered this stage of repugnance, we should be able to develop what in reality lives in ourselves and that passes over to the children in a living way. We must begin at this point with ourselves and then look at nature itself in this way. A good deal of courage is needed, because much of what is true is regarded nowadays as sheer madness. Everything possible should be done to develop this courage.

Think of a butterfly. It lays an egg, the caterpillar crawls out and spins its cocoon, becoming a chrysalis, and finally the butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. These things are described in the textbooks, but how? Without any consciousness whatever of the wonderful mystery that really lies here. The butterfly lays an egg, but it is essential that this egg be laid at the proper time of year and that it be receptive to everything that works as the earthy, as the solid or solid-fluid quality in nature. The most essential thing for the development of the egg is the “salty” element. Then comes the time when in addition to the earthy element, the fluid, and with the fluid the etheric, takes over. The fluid element, which becomes permeated with the etheric, passes over into the development of the caterpillar that crawls out of the egg. When we have the egg, we think primarily of the earth with the physical element. When we have the caterpillar that crawls out of the egg we see its shape. What crawls out is a being actually permeated with the etheric, fluid-watery element, and that is what makes the caterpillar into a caterpillar.

Now the caterpillar must develop its being in the air; the most important thing now for the caterpillar is that it come in contact with the light, so that it actually lives in the light-permeated air but at the same time expresses an inner relationship to the astral and, with this relationship to astrality, absorbs light. It is essential for the caterpillar to be exposed through its sensory system to the rays of the sun, to the radiating sun with its light. Next you see in the caterpillar what can be perceived in its most extreme form when you lie in bed with the lights still burning, and moths fly toward the light. There you have the apparently inexplicable urge of the moth to sacrifice itself. We shall hear why. The moth dashes into the light and is burnt up. Caterpillars have the same urge regarding the radiating light, but they are organized in such a way that they cannot hurl themselves into the sun. The moth can hurl itself into the light. The caterpillar has the same urge to give itself up to the light but cannot do so, for the sun is a long way off. The caterpillar develops this urge, goes out of itself, passes into the radiating light, gives itself up, spinning physical material out of its own body into the rays of the sun. The caterpillar sacrifices itself to the rays of the sun; it desires to destroy itself, but all destruction is birth. It spins its sheath during the day in the direction of the sun's rays and, when it rests at night, what has been spun hardens, so that these threads are spun rhythmically, day and night. These threads that the caterpillar spins are materialized, spun light.

Out of the threads that the light has formed, that it has materialized, the caterpillar spins its chrysalis, it passes wholly into the light. The light itself is the cause of the spinning of the chrysalis. The caterpillar cannot hurl itself into the light but gives itself up to it, creating the chamber in which the light is enclosed. The chrysalis is created from above downward in accordance with the laws of form of the primal wisdom. The butterfly is formed after the caterpillar has prepared the secluded chamber for the light. There you have the whole process from the egg to the brilliantly colored butterfly, which is born out of the light, as all colors are born out of the light. The whole process is born out of the cosmos.

If the process that we see extended into a fourfoldness—egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly—is in any way condensed, then the whole is changed. When the process occurs inwardly within the animal element, what remains is a being created out of the light. You see, the only way in which we can really get to the essence of the matter is to picture [vorstellen] the process artistically. It is impossible to picture this process whereby the butterfly forms itself from the chrysalis and is born out of the light unless we picture it artistically. If you picture the process in accordance with reality, you will find yourselves in a world of wonderful artistry. Just try for yourselves, and see how you receive an entirely different consciousness if you know something in this way. It is a consciousness entirely different from what you experience if you know something in the modern, outer way, which really gives no knowledge at all. Every detail becomes interesting if you allow yourselves, with soul and body, to grow together with the cosmos in its work of artistic creation.

Again, look at a tadpole with its resemblance to a fish; it breathes with gills and has a fish-like tail to swim with. The creature lives wholly in the watery element, the watery-earthly element. Then the tadpole develops into a frog. What happens? The blood vessels leading into the gills wither away, and the whole blood system is rounded off inwardly. Through this rounding off, the lung arises. The veins leading to the fishlike tail also wither away, but others elongate into legs so that the frog can hop about on land. This wonderful transformation of a system of blood vessels that at first feeds the gills and tail, this extraordinarily artistic transformation into lungs and limbs, is a truly marvelous process. How is it brought about? The first system of blood vessels, which feeds the gills and tail, is produced by the earthly-watery element; the second is produced by the watery-airy element that is permeated glitteringly with light.

You can learn to understand how the elements work together, but work together in an artistic way. If you reach this sort of understanding of the world of nature, you simply cannot help feeling as if you possessed the creative powers within yourselves. You cannot possibly be like most people nowadays when they study modern science. They are really not fully human. They just sit with their heads unhappily in their hands and strain their brains; study exhausts them. This is all unnatural; it is really nonsensical. It is just as if eating were to make us tired—but that happens only when we eat too much. Surely it is impossible to be wearied by anything that is so intimately bound up with man as this living-together of nature, spirit, and soul. Yet I have known many people who have been keen students, have written books, but who suffered from anæmia of the brain. It is really the same sort of thing as when a person suffers from anæmia in some other part of the organism. No one can suffer from anæmia of the brain who sees things in the way I have described it, in their true relation to reality. This is something that brings us to life inwardly, which is what we need above all else in our work as teachers. We must relate ourselves directly to life, and anything we are going to introduce in our teaching in school should sustain and uphold us inwardly, should truly enliven us. It is for this reason that no true teaching can ever be boring. How could it be? One might as well expect children to find eating and drinking boring, which usually does not happen unless a child is ill. If our teaching is boring there must be something wrong with it, and we ought to ask ourselves in every case (unless we are dealing with a really psychopathic child) what it is that is lacking in us when our teaching bores the children.

These are things that really matter, and we must realize, my dear friends, that we should neglect no single opportunity of quickening the inner life of soul and spirit. Otherwise we cannot teach. However erudite we may be, we cannot be good teachers. This is connected with what I described as our task to bring about the synthesis of what in successive stages of world evolution was separate: the gymnast, the rhetorician, and the professor. It is especially necessary today that we not allow the last relics that still live in the genius of our language, which can have an effect upon our whole human nature, to vanish, but that we try to bring a musical, sculptural-painterly quality into speech, so that what comes to expression in speech may again work back upon us. We therefore should make it one of the primary demands on ourselves never to speak in a slovenly way in the school but really to form and mold our speech so that as teachers our speech has something artistic about it. This may require some exertion, but it is of enormous significance. If it is achieved, there may flow out from the school an impulse for a revival, a renewal of civilization through the synthesis of gymnast, rhetorician, and professor. We must overcome the professorial quality—the learned knowledge, intellectual knowledge—which at the present time is the most disastrous of the three in all education. We can achieve something with children only by being human beings, not merely by being able to think.

This is the introduction I wished to give you today. I will add something in later talks about matters that fundamentally concern the teacher himself, for the educational problem is in many ways a problem of those who are actually teachers.

Today I wish to speak about the following question: with what forces are we really working when we work educationally? Actually, this question cannot be answered in any definite sense by the culture of today. We can say, of course, that the outer life within which human beings stand, making it possible for them to earn a living, requires them to have capacities that they cannot have yet as children. We must impart such capacities to them. The behavior proper for adults is also, perhaps, something that the child cannot acquire by himself; it must be imparted to him through education. But the answer to the question—why do we actually educate?—remains something rather superficial in modern culture, because the adult today does not really see anything of great value in what he became through the teaching and education he received. He does not look back with any particularly deep gratitude to what he has become through his education. Ask yourself in your own heart whether this gratitude is always alive in you. In individual cases, of course, it may be present on reflection, but on the whole we do not think with deep gratitude about our own education, because the human soul (Gemüt) does not have a full realization of what education actually means, nor which forces in human nature are quickened by it. That is why it is so difficult nowadays to arouse in people enthusiasm for education. All our methods, all our ingenious, formed, outer methods of education, are of little value in this respect. Answers to the question—how can this or that be achieved?—are of little use. What is of the greatest importance, however, is for a person to have enthusiasm in his work and to be able to develop this enthusiasm to the full if he is to be a true teacher. This enthusiasm is infectious, and it alone can work miracles in education. The child eagerly responds to enthusiasm, and, when there is no response on his part, it usually indicates a lack of this enthusiasm in the teacher.

As a kind of obvious secret, let me say that although a great deal has been said about enthusiasm here, when I go through the classes in the school I see a kind of depression, a kind of heaviness in the teachers. The lessons are really conducted with a certain heaviness. This heaviness must be eliminated. Actually, it may also express itself in artificial enthusiasm. Artificial enthusiasm can achieve nothing at all. The only enthusiasm capable of achieving anything is that kindled by our own living interest in the subjects with which we must deal in the classroom. Now, it is essential for you to realize that as teachers we need to develop a consciousness of our own. It is necessary for us to work at cultivating this consciousness. This work to develop our own consciousness is certainly made infinitely more difficult by the fact that in the higher grades we must take into account the impossible demands made upon our children from outside in preparation for graduation. This lies like a leaden burden upon the teaching in the higher grades. Nevertheless, it is essential not to lose sight of our own goal, and therefore we must work to develop this consciousness, the Waldorf teacher's consciousness, if I may so express it. This is only possible, however, when in the field of education we come to an actual experience of the spiritual. Such an experience of the spiritual is difficult to attain for modern humanity, and this fact must be faced and understood. We must realize that we really need something quite specific, something that is hardly present anywhere else in the world, if we are to be capable of mastering the task of the Waldorf school. In all humility, without any trace of pride or arrogance, we must become conscious of this, but conscious of it inwardly, deep in our hearts, not merely by talking about it; within our hearts we must be able to become conscious of it. This is possible, however, only if we have a clear understanding of what humanity has lost in this respect, has lost just in the last three or four centuries. It is this that we must find again.

What has been lost is the realization that when the human being enters the world out of his pre-earthly existence he is, compared with the actual forces of the being of man, a being who needs to be healed. This bond of education with the healing of man has been lost from sight. During a certain period of the Middle Ages, certainly, it was believed that the human being, as man on earth, was ill and that his health had to be restored; that the human being as he was on the earth actually stood below his proper level and that something real had to be done in order to make man truly man. This is often understood merely in a formal sense. It is said that the human being must evolve, must be brought to a higher level, but this is meant abstractly, not concretely. It will be interpreted concretely only when the activity of education is actually brought into connection with the activity of healing. In healing a sick person, one knows that something has actually been achieved: if the sick person has been made healthy, he has been raised to a higher level, to the level of the normal human being. In ancient times, those who knew the world mysteries regarded birth as synonymous with an illness, because, in fact, when the human being is born he falls in a certain sense below his proper level and is not the being he was in pre-earthly existence. In comparison with the higher human nature, it is really something abnormal for the human being to bear within him constituents of his body, to have to bear a certain heaviness. It would not be considered particularly intelligent today to say that, in comparison with the higher nature of man, it is of the nature of illness to have to struggle continually until death with the physical forces of the body. Without such radical conceptions, however, we cannot approach the reality of what education means. Education must have something of the process of healing. In order to make this clear, let me offer the following.

The human being really lives within four complexes of forces. In one he is active when he walks, moves his legs with a pendulum swing, or when he uses his legs in order to dance or make other movements. This movement, taking place in the outer, physical world of space, can also be pictured as bringing about changes of location in space. Similarly, other possibilities of human movement, of the arms, hands, head, eye muscles, and so forth, can be designated as changes in location of an ordinary inanimate body, that is to say, if we leave out of account the inner activity of the human being. This is one complex of forces within which the human being lives and is active.

The second is unfolded when man begins to work upon the physical substances that he absorbs into himself; in the widest sense this includes everything that belongs to the activity of nourishment. Whereas the limbs of man are the mediators of what man has in common with beings that change their physical location, there is another activity that man needs in order to continue the activity connected with the outer substances that man absorbs as nourishment. If you put a piece of sugar into your mouth, it dissolves. This is a continuation of what sugar is in the outer world. Sugar is hard and white. You dissolve it, and it becomes liquid, viscous, and then undergoes further changes. The chemist speaks of chemical changes, but that is not relevant here. The sugar continually changes. It is worked upon and absorbed into the whole organism. There you have a second kind of activity. This continues right into the rhythmic system, and then the rhythmic system takes over the activity of the digestive system. What happens in this second kind of activity of man, however, is very different from the human activity of moving the limbs or of moving the whole human body in the outer world. The activity of nourishment is quite different from the activity exercised when we move outwardly or, let us say, lift a weight. This activity of nourishment cannot proceed at all without the intervention, at every point of this activity, of the astral nature of the human being. The astral nature of the human being must permeate each individual part of this activity, of nourishment. In the activity that I have described as the activity of walking, grasping, and so on, we are dealing essentially with the same forces man makes use of that we can also verify physically. What really happens in these movements is that the etheric organism is set in motion and through its mediation arises a leverage movement that we can see in an act of grasping or walking. If we focus on the activity of walking or grasping, we need only consider that which we have in the physical world as it is inserted within the working of the etheric; then we have what happens in man. We never have this, however, if we consider the activity of nourishment. This can arise only if the astral body takes hold of processes that otherwise we have in the test tube. There astral forces above all must be at work, and a fact that is considered nary at all is that in this process physical forces no longer play a part. This is exceedingly interesting, because it is generally believed that in nourishment, for example, physical forces are at work. As soon as the human being no longer exists in relation to the outer world, the physical forces cease to have their raison d'etre; they are no longer active, no longer have any effect. In the activity of nourishment, the physical substances are worked upon by the astral and etheric. The physical effect of a piece of sulfur or salt outside the body has no significance within the body. Only the astral nature of a substance is seized hold of by the astral, and then the etheric-astral is the really active factor in nourishment.

Going further, we come to the activities taking place in the rhythmic nature of man, in the blood rhythm, in the breathing rhythm. In their inner constitution these activities are similar to the forces at work in the system of nourishment. They are the result of cooperation between the etheric and the astral, but in the activity of digestion the astral is in a certain respect weaker than the etheric, and in the rhythmic activity the astral becomes stronger than the etheric. In the rhythmic system the etheric withdraws more into the background (though actually only the etheric that is within the human being). The etheric outside the human being begins to take part again in the activity that is exercised in the rhythmic system of man, so that actually with the activity of breathing one has the force of man's inner etheric body, the force of the outer ether of the world, and the astral activity of man.

Now, picture to yourselves what is really going on when the human being breathes. The physical activity of carbon, oxygen, etc., is completely suppressed, but the combined working of the etheric outside, the etheric within, and the astral is a most important factor. This plays a great part. These are the forces, however, that we must know in any substance if we wish to speak of the healing effect of that substance. We cannot discover the extent to which a substance is a remedy if we do not know how that substance, when introduced into the body, is laid hold of by these three systems of forces. The whole of therapy depends upon knowledge of these three forces in connection with the substances used. Knowledge of the healing influence in the outer and inner etheric and in the astral is what constitutes therapy in the real sense. What does it mean when antimony, for example, is used as a remedy? It simply means that some form of antimony is introduced into the body; it is laid hold of in a certain way by the inner etheric forces, by the outer etheric forces that enter by way of the breathing, and by the astral forces in the human being. We realize the extent to which antimony is a remedy when we understand the effect of these three systems of forces on a substance within the human organism. [Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman, Fundamentals of Therapy, London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1967.]

In ascending to the rhythmic activity, therefore, we come to recognize a much more delicate process than exists, for example, in the activity of nourishment. It is essentially this rhythmic activity that must be considered if we wish to recognize the healing effects. Unless we know how a particular substance affects the rhythm of breathing or the blood circulation, we cannot understand the nature of this substance as a remedy.

Now the strange thing is this. Whereas the doctor brings into operation the therapeutic forces in the unconscious, in the rhythmic system of the blood circulation or the breathing, as teachers we must bring the next higher stage into operation: that which is connected with the activity in the nerves, in the senses. This is the next metamorphosis of the remedy. What we do as teachers, is really to work in such a way on the physical human being that the substances that are taken up are subjected to the etheric activity and to the outer physical activity—namely, to perception, whenever something is perceived—and to the inner physical activity, that is to say, to the inner changes of location brought about mechanically through the human being moving himself. Whereas in the remedy are contained the outer and inner etheric and the astral, in education are contained outer physical forces (as in gymnastics) and inner physical forces. When the human being bows his head, a change takes place in his entire dynamic system; the center of gravity shifts a little, and so forth. In the workings of light upon the eye we have recognized outer physical forces in their greatest delicacy and refinement. Moreover, outer physical forces are operating when pressure is made on an organ of touch. We therefore have etheric activity, outer physical forces, and inner physical forces, that is to say, physical changes in the nervous system, destruction in the nervous system. These are true physical processes that are actually present only in the nervous system of the human being. It is with these three systems that we are essentially dealing as a teacher with the child. This is the higher metamorphosis of what is done in healing.

What kinds of activity are present in the human being? There are the movements of walking, grasping, the movement of the limbs, outer changes of location, the activity in the process of nourishment, the rhythmic activity—which is through and through a healing activity—and the perceiving activity if we regard it from outside. Regarded from within, educational activity is entirely a perceiving activity.

This will now give you deeper insight into the nature of man. You will be able to say to yourselves that, since factors are active in the rhythmic system that are healing factors, there is a doctor (Arzt) continually present in the human being. In fact, the whole rhythmic system is a doctor. The function of a doctor is to heal something, however, and if healing is needed there must be illness. If that is so, walking, grasping, digesting must be continual processes of illness, and breathing and blood circulation a continual healing. This is indeed the case. In modern science, however, where discrimination is lacking, it is not realized that the human being is continually becoming ill. Eating and drinking, especially, are processes that continually create illness. We cannot avoid continually injuring our health through eating and drinking. Eating and drinking to excess merely injure us more seriously, but we are always injuring ourselves to a slight degree. The rhythmic system, however, is continually healing this illness. Human life on the earth is a continual process of becoming ill and a continual healing. This process of becoming ill brings about a genuinely physical illness. What the human being does in intercourse with the outer world, the consequences of walking, grasping, and the like, is a more intense but less noticeable process of becoming ill. We must counter it through a higher process of healing, through a process of education, which is a metamorphosis of the healing process.

The forces inherent in education are metamorphoses of therapeutic forces: they are therapeutic forces transformed. The goal of all our educational thinking must be to transform this thinking so as to rise fruitfully from the level of physical thinking to spiritual thinking. In physical thinking we have two categories which, in our academic age, give rise to a barren enthusiasm that has such a terrible influence. We have only two concepts: right-wrong, true-false. To discover whether something is “true” or “false” is the highest ideal of those whose entire lives are given up to the world of academia. In the concepts “true” and “false,” however, there is so little reality. They are something formal, established by mere logic, which actually does nothing but combine and separate. The concepts of “true” and “false” are dreadfully barren, prosaic, and formal. The moment we rise to the truths of the spiritual world we can no longer speak of “true” and “false,” for in the spiritual world that would be as nonsensical as saying that to drink such and such a quantity of wine every day is “false.” The expression “false” here is out of place. One says something real regarding this only by saying that such a thing gives rise to illness. Correct or incorrect are outer, formal concepts, even regarding the physical. Pertaining to the spiritual world, the concepts of “true” and “false” should be discarded altogether. As soon as we reach the spiritual world we must substitute “healthy” and “ill” for “true” and “false.” If someone said about a lecture such as the one I gave here yesterday evening, that is “right,” it would mean nothing at all. In the physical world things can be “right”; in the spiritual world nothing is “wrong” or “right.” There, things are reality. After all, is a hunchback “true” or “false”? In such a case we cannot speak of right or wrong. A drawing may be false or correct, but not a plant; a plant however, can be healthy or diseased. In the spiritual world things are either healthy or ill, fruitful or unfruitful. In what one does there must be reality. If someone considers that a lecture such as I gave yesterday is healthy or health-bringing, that is to the point. If he simply considers it “right,” he merely shows that he cannot rise to the level where reality lies. It is a question of health or illness when we are dealing with spiritual truths, and it is precisely this that we must learn in connection with education. We must learn to regard things in their educational application as either healthy or unhealthy, injurious to health. This is of particular significance if one wishes to engender a true consciousness of oneself as a teacher. It may be said that engendering this consciousness begins with passing from the “true” and “false” of logic, to the reality of “healthy” or “ill.” Then we come quite close to understanding the principle of healing. This can be developed in concrete detail but we must also let ourselves be stimulated by a comprehensive knowledge of man, a knowledge of man in relation to the world around him.

In describing the breathing process, for example, according to modern science, no particular weight is laid on the essential factor, on the actual human factor.

It is said that the air consists of oxygen and nitrogen, leaving aside for the moment the other constituents. Man inhales oxygen along with a certain amount of nitrogen. He then exhales oxygen combined with carbon, and also nitrogen. The percentages are measured, and it is then believed that the essentials of the process have been described. Little account is taken, however, of the essentially human factor. This begins to dawn upon us when we consider the following. There is a definite percentage of nitrogen in the air that is good for breathing, and also a definite percentage of oxygen. Suppose a man comes to a region where the air is poor in nitrogen, containing less than the normal percentage. If the person breathes in this nitrogen-poor air, this air gradually becomes richer in nitrogen through his breathing. He exhales from his body nitrogen that he would not otherwise exhale in order to augment the nitrogen content of the air in his environment. I do not know whether any account is taken of this in physiology today. I have often pointed out that the human being living in air that is poor in nitrogen corrects this lack; he prefers to take nitrogen from his own organic substances, depriving them of it in order to augment the nitrogen content of the outside air. He does the same with respect to the normal content of oxygen in the air. The human being is so intimately related to his environment that the moment the environment is not as it ought to be, he corrects it, improves upon it. We thus may say that the human being is constituted in such a way that he needs nitrogen and oxygen not only for himself; it is even more necessary for him to have nitrogen and oxygen in certain percentages in his environment than within his own organism. The environment of a human being is more important for this subconscious forces than the make-up of his own body. The incredibly interesting fact is that through his instincts the human being has a far greater interest in his environment than in the make-up of his own body. This is something that can be proved by experiment, provided the experiments are arranged intelligently. It is only a question of arranging experiments in this realm. If our research institutes would only tackle such problems, what a vast amount there would be for them to do! The problems are there and are of tremendous importance. They are terribly important for education, too, for it is only now that we can ask why the human being needs an environment containing a particular amount of nitrogen and a particular amount of oxygen. We know that in the inner activity of nourishment or general growth, all kinds of combinations of substances are formed in the human being, revealing themselves in a definite way when man becomes a corpse. It is only in this dead form, however, that these things are investigated by science today.

Now the strange thing is that in the sphere of the human being that encompasses part of the rhythmic activity and part of the metabolic-limb activity, there: is a tendency for an activity to unfold between carbon and nitrogen. In the sphere that extends from the rhythmic upward to the nerve-sense activity, there is a tendency to unfold an activity between carbon and oxygen. It is truly interesting, if one observes a soul-constitution not worn out by dry scholarship, to see sparkling soda water, where the carbon dioxide appears in the liquid as the result of the interplay of carbon and oxygen. If one observes these bubbles one has directly and imaginatively a view of what goes on in the course of the rhythmic breathing activity from the lung system toward the head. The bubbling effervescence in sparkling water is a picture of what, in a fine and delicate way, plays upward toward the human head. Looking at a spring of sparkling water, we can say that this activity of the rising carbon dioxide is really similar, only in a coarser form, to a continual, inward activity within the human being that rises from the lungs to the head. In the head, something must continually be stimulated by a delicate, intimate sparkling-water activity; otherwise, the human being becomes stupid or dull. If we neglect to bring this effervescence of sparkling water to the head of a human being, then the carbon within him suddenly shows an inclination for hydrogen instead of oxygen. This rises up to the brain and produces “marsh gas,” such as is found in subterranean vaults, and then the human being becomes dull, drowsy, musty.

To begin with, these things confront us as inner—one would like to say—physical activities, but they are not really physical, for the production of marsh gas or carbon dioxide becomes in this case an inner spiritual life. We are not being led into materialism here but into the delicate weaving of the spiritual in matter.

Now if, in teaching languages, for example, we make the child learn too much vocabulary, if we make him memorize through an unconscious mechanization, this process can lead to the development of marsh gas in the head. If we bring as many living pictures as possible to the child, the effect is such that the breathing system lets the carbon dioxide effervesce toward the head. We therefore play a part, in fact, in something that makes either for health or illness. This shows us how as teachers we must demand a higher metamorphosis of the forces of healing. To be able to perceive these hidden relationships in the human organism kindles enthusiasm in the highest degree. We realize for the first time that the head is a remarkable vault that can be filled with either marsh gas or carbon dioxide. We feel we are standing before the deeper well-springs of existence.

In the next lecture, we shall study another activity, with which this activity must be brought into balance. This can happen, however, only when there is on the one hand the right kind of teaching in the musical sphere and, on the other, the right kind of teaching in lessons that are based upon outer perception (Anschauung) and not upon the musical sphere. Thus, our teaching takes shape, and our interest is aroused in the human being before us. To this something else must be added: the feeling of responsibility. The consciousness of a Waldorf teacher should be imbued with the realization that makes him say in all humility: people are let loose into the educational world today as if the totally blind were sent out to paint in color. Few know what is really taking place in education. It is no wonder that a blind man has no particular enthusiasm for painting in color; no wonder there is no real enthusiasm for education in the world! The moment we enter into education in the way described, however, the whole art of our education will provide the stimulus for this enthusiasm, and we shall feel that we are in touch with the well-springs of the world, and find the true feeling of responsibility. We realize that we can bring either health or illness. This enthusiasm on the one hand and a feeling of responsibility on the other: both must arise in us.

What I wish to offer you in these lectures is intended essentially as an impulse toward the inner enrichment of the teacher's profession. In continuation of what I said this afternoon, I would like to add the following. You see, we must bring our knowledge of the human being to the point where we really can know in detail what is going on in the human being in his ordinary activity in the world. I have shown you that the first form of activity we perceive in the human being is the one in which he moves his limbs. Now we must pose the question: what actually moves his limbs? What force is at work when a man walks or does something with his arms? What is it? Now, the materialistic view will simply be that it is man himself, and, thinking about man in this way, that it is a piece of the cosmos consisting of blood, bones, and so on, described as man, that moves the limbs! This is the true initiator of action! Fundamentally, there is no sense in putting it like that, since man himself is the object in movement, is that which is moved. If we ask who is the actual subject, who is moving the arm or the leg, then we arrive at something spiritual, certainly not material. We are forced to say to ourselves that it is the spiritual itself that must bring physical forces, forces that usually we designate as physical, into action. Our leg must be moved by something spiritual just as, for example, we say that a piece of wood is moved by us from one place to another.

Here, however, we come to something remarkable that generally receives little attention, because a great illusion prevails regarding it. Our human movement is really a magical effect, because in it something is set in motion by the spirit. Our movement as a human being is in truth a magical effect, and our view of man is entirely incorrect if we do not associate the magical element with the movements he makes. The will—that is to say, something purely spiritual—must intervene in physical activity; these are in truth magical effects. When you walk, an inner magician, something essential, is working within you. How does this happen? The fact that we are physical human beings, made up of bones, blood, and so forth, does not make us into moving human beings; at best it is able to make us inert beings, beings who lie permanently in bed. If we are to be able to move, the will must be directly active. Materialistic science simplifies things by theorizing about the motor nerves and the like. That is nonsense. In actual fact we have in human movement a magical effect, a direct intervention of the spirit into the bodily movements. How is this possible? This will become clear in the following.

I pointed out to you this afternoon that as the life process in man passes from the rhythmic system to the metabolic-limb system, what comes out of carbon has an affinity for what comes out of nitrogen, and there arises a continual tendency in the human being to create combinations of carbon and nitrogen. This tendency exists, and we shall never become clear about the digestive process itself, and especially the excretory process, if this tendency toward the combination of carbon and nitrogen is not kept in mind. This tendency finally leads to the formation of cyanic acid. As a matter of fact, there exists from above downward in the human being a continual tendency to produce cyanic acid, or at any rate, cyanides. There is really no commonly accepted expression for what happens here.

What happens only goes so far as just to reach the point of coming into being, and then it is immediately arrested by the secretions, particularly of the gall bladder. Thus, downward in the human being, there is this continual tendency to create cyanide combinations that are arrested in their status nascendi by gall secretions. To create cyanide combinations in man, however, means to destroy him; the speediest method of destroying the human form [Gestalt] is to permeate it with cyanide. This tendency exists particularly in the direction of the metabolic-limb system; the human organism continually wants to create cyanide combinations, which are in turn immediately broken up. At this moment between the coming into being and the immediate dissolution of the cyanide compounds, the will lays hold of the muscular system. In the paralyzing of this process lies the possibility for the will to take hold so that man can move. From above downward there is always a tendency in the human being to destroy organic substance through a kind of poisoning. This is continually on the point of beginning, and we would not be able to move, we could never achieve any freeing of the will, if this continual tendency to destroy ourselves were not present. Thus, to express it in a grotesque way, from above downward we have this continual tendency to make ourselves into ghosts and thereby to move by magical means. We must not limit our gaze to the physical body with the movements of man but must turn to his will, to the calling forth of spatial movements by purely magical means.

You see, therefore, every time the human being brings himself into movement, he is faced with the responsibility of intervening in the processes that are the actual processes of illness and death. On the other hand, we have the task of knowing that this process of illness is opposed by the health-bringing process, of which I spoke this afternoon. For everything that occurs in the processes in lower man there is a corresponding process above. Carbon has the tendency to form nitrogen compounds downward but upward it has the tendency to form oxygen compounds. Early alchemists called carbon “The Stone of the Wise,” which is nothing other than carbon fully understood. Upward it has the tendency to form oxygen compounds, acids or oxides. These stimulate the thoughts, and whenever we vitally occupy a child we stimulate the formation of carbon compounds and therewith the activity of thinking. Whenever we guide a child into some form of action while he is thinking, we call forth a state of balance between the formation of carbonic and cyanic acids. In human life everything actually depends upon symmetry being produced between these two things.

If a human being is occupied only with intellectual work, the process of the formation of carbonic acid is too strongly stimulated in him; the upper organism is saturated with carbonic acid. Now a proper, intelligently conducted musical education counteracts this excessive formation of the carbonic acid and enables the human being to bring again some activity, inner activity at least, into the carbonic acid process. By arranging a schedule so that the teaching of music, for example, is interspersed among the other subjects, we actually penetrate directly into the processes of illness and health in the human organism. I am not telling you these things today simply for the sake of the subject matter, although I believe they are among the most interesting things that could be found in physiology, for it is only in this way that we can see clearly into the living activity of the substances and forces within the being of man. Processes of illness and health are continually taking place in the human organism, and everything a person does or is guided to do has its effect upon these processes. From this knowledge must be created a feeling of responsibility and a true consciousness of one's purpose as teacher. We must realize, in all humility, the importance of our profession, that we help to orient what are in the most eminent sense cosmic processes. In fact, as teachers we are coworkers in the actual guidance of the world. It is the particular value of these things for our whole life of feeling [Gemüt] and for consciousness that I wish to stress today.

By fully penetrating this, every one of our actions will take on extraordinary importance. Think how often I have said that a person will completely misapprehend the whole of human evolution if he persists in trivial pictorial instructions [Anschauungsunterricht] and never attempts to introduce to a child more than he can already understand; he fails to realize that a great deal of what is taught a child in his eighth or ninth year will be accepted only if the child feels himself in the presence of a beloved teacher, confronted by an obvious authority. The teacher should represent to the child the whole world of truth, beauty, and goodness. What the teacher takes to be beautiful or true or good should be so for the pupil. This obvious authority, during the period between the change of teeth and puberty, must be the basis of all the teaching. A child does not always understand the things that he accepts under the influence of this authority but accepts them because he loves the teacher. What he has accepted will then emerge in later life, say in his thirty-fifth year, and signify an essential enlivening of the whole inner being of man. Anyone who says that one should merely teach children trivial mental conceptions has no real insight into human nature, nor does he know what a vital force it is when in his thirty-fifth year a person can call up something he once accepted simply through love for his teacher. Now you can see the inner significance of what I have been saying. The process in man that is the equilibrium between the carbon and the cyanide processes is essentially supported, made essentially more vital by the fact that something of this condition remains deeply embedded in human nature in the same way that something that we may have accepted in love in our eighth or ninth year remains hidden and is understood only decades later. What occurs between receptivity and understanding, what lies directly in the soul in the process of balance between the lower and upper man, together with the corresponding action of carbon, has enormous influence.

Of course, you cannot apply these things in detail in your methods of teaching, but you can go into the classroom supported by this knowledge of man and apply one aspect or another in various realms of your teaching; if one has acquired this knowledge, a definite result will follow. One can distinguish between those who have knowledge that is inwardly mobile or inwardly immobile. One who simply knows how diamonds, graphite, and coal appear in nature outside the human being, and goes no further than that, will not teach in a very lively way. If one knows, however, that the carbon in coal, in graphite, and so on, also lives within man as a substance metamorphosed; that on the one side it acts only in death-bringing compounds and on the other only in compounds of resurrection; if one speaks not only of the metamorphoses of carbon, which in the various stages of the earth's evolution produced diamond, coal, and graphite; if one realizes that there are different kinds of metamorphosis of carbon in man, which can become inwardly alive, can be spiritualized, can mediate between death and life; if one understands this, one has in this understanding an immediate source of inspiration. If you can understand this, you will find the right method of teaching in school; it is essential for the right method to occur to you; you should not stand in the classroom with such a sour look that anyone can tell from your expression that you stand before the children in a morose, surly mood. Such a mood is impossible if you possess an inwardly mobile, creative knowledge. Then, in all humility, you will realize the importance of the work, and this will reveal itself even in your facial expression while teaching. Your expression is then naturally illuminated by the etheric and astral and unites with that which is outer form to create a whole.

The face of a teacher has three main nuances of expression, with any number of intermediate stages. There is the face with which he meets ordinary people, when he forgets that he is a teacher and simply engages in natural conversation; there is the face he has when he has finished his lesson and leaves the classroom; and there is the face he has in the classroom. We may often be ashamed of human nature when we see the difference in the face of a teacher when he is going into his classroom and when he leaves it. These things are connected with the whole consciousness of the teacher. Perhaps it may comfort you a little if I say that every face becomes twice as beautiful under the influence of an active, vital knowledge than it is otherwise, but the knowledge must do its work, the knowledge must live, and the faces of the teachers should always be alive, inwardly expressive, especially when the lessons are actually being given. In what I am telling you, the important thing is not that you should know these things but that they should work on your life of feeling [Gemüt], strengthening you, giving you the vigor to spiritualize your profession.

Teachers ought to be conscious, especially nowadays, of their great social task, and they should ponder a great deal about this task. The teacher, above all others, should be deeply permeated by awareness of the great needs of modern civilization.

I will give you an example of what is needed in order to adopt the right attitude in our civilization today. You have all heard of Mahatma Gandhi who, since the war, or really since 1914, has set a movement going for the liberation of India from English rule. Gandhi's activities began first in South Africa with the aim of helping the Indians who were living there under appalling conditions and for whose emancipation he did a great deal before 1914. Then he went to India itself and instituted a movement for liberation in the life there. I shall speak today only of what took place when the final verdict was passed on Mahatma Gandhi and omit the court proceedings leading up to it. I would like to speak only of the last act in the drama, as it were, between him and his judge. Gandhi had been accused of stirring up the Indian people against British rule in order to make India independent. Being a lawyer, he conducted his own defense and had not the slightest doubt that he would have to be condemned. In his speech—I cannot quote the actual words—he spoke more or less to the following effect, “My Lords, I beg of you to condemn me in accordance with the full strength of the law. I am perfectly aware that in the eyes of British law in India my crime is the gravest one imaginable. I do not plead any mitigating circumstances; I beg of you to condemn me with the full strength of the law. I affirm, moreover, that my condemnation is required not only in obedience to the principles of outer justice but to the principles of expediency of the British Government. For if I were to be acquitted I should feel it incumbent upon me to continue to propagate the movement, and millions of Indians would join it. My acquittal would lead to results that I regard as my duty.”

The contents of this speech are very characteristic of that which lives and weaves in our time. Gandhi says that he must of necessity be condemned and declares that it is his duty to continue the activity for which he is to be condemned. The judge replied, “Mahatma Gandhi, you have rendered my task of sentencing you immeasurably easier, because you have made it clear that I must of necessity condemn you. It is obvious that you have transgressed against British law, but you and all those present here will realize how hard it will be for me to sentence you. It is clear that a large portion of the Indian people looks upon you as a saint, as one who has taken up his task in obedience to the highest duties devolving upon humanity. The judgment I shall pass on you will be looked upon by the majority of the Indian people as the condemnation of a human being who has devoted himself to the highest service of humanity. Clearly, however, British law must in all severity be put into effect against you. You would regard it as your duty, if you were acquitted, to continue tomorrow what you were doing yesterday. We on our side have to regard it as our most solemn duty to make that impossible. I condemn you in the full consciousness that my sentence will in turn be condemned by millions. I condemn you while admiring your actions, but condemn you I must.” Gandhi's sentence was six years at hard labor.

You could hardly find a more striking example of what is characteristic of our times. We have two levels of actuality before us. Below is the level of truth, the level where the accused declares that if he is acquitted, it will be his solemn duty to continue what he must define as criminal in face of outer law. On the level of truth, also, we have the judge's statement that he admires the one whom, out of duty to his Government, he sentences to six years' hard labor. Above, at the level of facts, you have what the accused in this case, because he is a great soul, defined as crime: the crime that is his duty and that he would at once continue were he to be acquitted. Whereas on the one level you have the admiration of the judge for a great human being, on the other you have the passing of judgment and its outer justification. You have truths below, facts above, which have nothing to do with one another. They touch on one another at only one point, at the point where they confront each other in statement and counter-statement.

Here, my dear friends, you have a most striking example of the fact that nowadays we have a level of truth and a level of untruth. The level of untruth, however, is in public events, and at no point are the two levels in touch with each other. We must keep this clearly in mind, because it is intimately bound up with the whole life of spirit of our times. An example as striking as this reveals things that occur everywhere but are usually less obvious and startling. We must achieve first, however, a real consciousness of what has come to pass in the present in order to put truth in the place of what is happening in the present. We simply must find the true path. Naturally, it is not a matter of overturning everything or of engaging in false radicalism, which leads only to destruction, but of seeing what one can do. We have to find the way to a clear insight and then work in the area where our efforts can be most fruitful.

The most fruitful sphere of activity of all is that of education. There, even if education is controlled by dictatorial rules and standards, the teacher can let what he gains from a true feeling for his profession flow into the lessons he gives. He must, however, have a knowledge of man that will imbue life and spirit into what is otherwise dead knowledge, and, on the other hand, have an enthusiasm arising from a really free and open-minded conception of what life actually is today. You must be clear that in outer life you are at the level above, but as a teacher confronting children it is possible to maintain the level below. It is not by practicing an educational method based on clichés, but by acquiring real enthusiasm for your profession, the consciousness of your profession, that you can emancipate yourselves from the constraints in educational activity and be inspired by the majesty contained in a true knowledge of man. It is sometimes a very bitter experience to speak to anthroposophists, for example, and be compelled to say things that—though not in the bad sense- turn upside down what people have learned and then to find that no attention is paid to what has been said. If you grasped the full weight of what I said in the lecture yesterday [Rudolf Steiner, “The Michael Inspiration, Spiritual Milestones in the Course of the Year,” The Festivals and Their Meaning, London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981.] about meteoric iron, for instance, you might well be astonished at the indifference with which such a matter is received. I can understand this in the case of people who have not learned anything but in the case of those who are conversant with the scientific concepts about iron, it is incomprehensible. But the world is like that today.

That is not, however, how the world should be in the head and especially in the heart of the teacher and educator. He must be filled with the consciousness that all the knowledge acquired through modern science is dead knowledge, out of which we must create something living, and the only sort of knowledge that we can use in school arises from this enthusiasm. If you are permeated on the one side with the enthusiasm kindled by such a knowledge of man, and, on the other, with the consciousness of the necessity to put truth in place of the lies that are accepted today—you can find no more impressive example than the legal case I just described to you—if you realize this necessity with your whole being and know that it is the teacher's task to find the right direction through recognition of this necessity, and of the appalling crudities inherent in what appears to be truth in public life today, then something happens within the human being that colors every sphere. You will become a different kind of eurythmy teacher, a different kind of art teacher, a different kind of mathematics teacher. In every sphere you will become different if you are permeated in the real sense by this consciousness. Everything is established by this enthusiasm. This is not the time to talk about the niceties of this or that method. We must bring life into the world, which through its dead intellectualism is faced with the danger of falling still further into death.

Basically, we have fallen out of the habit of being inwardly incensed by things as they are. If you merely pull a long face, however, about things that ought to be rejected in our civilization, you certainly will not be able to educate. That is why it is so necessary from time to time to speak of things in such a way that they can really take hold of our feeling [Gemüt]. If you go away from these lectures with nothing more than the feeling that there has to be a change in the spiritual factors governing the world today, then you will have grasped my aim in giving them.

The dragon takes on the most diverse forms; he takes on every possible form. Those that arise from human emotions are harmful enough but not nearly as harmful as the form the dragon acquires from the dead and deadening knowledge prevailing today. There the dragon becomes especially horrible. One might almost say that the correct symbol for institutions of higher education today would be a thick black pall hung somewhere on the wall of every lecture room. Then one would realize that behind it there is something that must not be shown, because to do so would throw a strange light on what goes on in these lecture rooms! Behind the black pall there should be a picture of Michael's battle with the dragon, the battle with deadening intellectualism. What I have said today shows you how the struggle between Michael and the dragon should live in teachers. What I wanted to present to you is this: we must come to be aware of this battle of Michael as a reality to us in order to celebrate Michaelmas in the right way. No one is more called to play a part in inaugurating the Michael festival in the right way than the teacher. The teacher should unite himself with Michael in a particularly close way, for to live in these times means simply to crawl into the dragon and further the old intellectual operation. To live in the truth means to unite oneself with Michael. We must unite ourselves with Michael whenever we enter the classroom; only through this can we bring with us the necessary strength. Verily, Michael is strong! If we understand Michael's struggle with the dragon in a particular sphere, we are working for the healing of humanity in the future. If I had been asked to give these lectures a title, I would have had to say: Michael's Struggle with the Dragon, presented for the teachers at the Waldorf School. One should not speak about the possibility of celebrating a Michael festival now but rather give thought to introducing into the most diverse spheres of life the kind of consciousness with which a Michael festival could be connected. If you can make these things come alive in your hearts, to permeate your souls with them; if you can bring this consciousness with you into the classroom and sustain it there in complete tranquility, without any element of agitation or high-sounding phrases; if you can let yourselves be inspired to unpretentious action through what can be kindled in your consciousness by surrender to these necessities, then you will enter into the alliance with Michael, as is essential for the teacher and educator.

In considering the beginnings of Waldorf education—now a movement of over 300 schools worldwide—one may well be astonished to find that Rudolf Steiner preferred to convey its revolutionary thrust by word of mouth rather than by means of the printed page. Over a period of almost six years (1919-1924) Steiner, traveling widely in Germany, Switzerland, France, Norway, Holland, and England, gave some 200 lectures on the Waldorf approach, speaking to small groups of qualified teachers as well as to large public audiences.

Important seeds had been planted in Steiner's early years through his own experiences as tutor and teacher. In 1907 he formulated his views on education in an essay entitled Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. It was not until twelve years later, soon after the first World War, which left Middle Europe shattered, morally depleted, and financially in ruins, that Steiner answered the call from Emil Molt, the owner of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, to found a school initially intended for the children of the factory workers.

Three mighty courses of fourteen lectures each (The Study of Man, Practical Advice for Teachers, Discussions with Teachers, August-September 1919), given over a period of two weeks to a group of twelve young, able, enthusiastic teachers, launched the bold venture that was to grow into a strong movement with schools in Europe, the United States, Canada, South America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Steiner became the director of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. He was tireless in giving his time and strength, entering into every detail of the curriculum, the work in the classroom, the life of the students; he counseled teachers, visited classes, and advised parents, all this in spite of a host of other commitments in such fields as medicine, agriculture, and social renewal.

In studying Rudolf Steiner's educational work, a careful distinction should be made between the courses given to the first teachers of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, who were well prepared through a sound basis in anthroposophy, and those given to public audiences often without the slightest background in spiritual science.

Steiner emphasized that the Waldorf approach was a great deal more than the application of methods of teaching; this new art of education was born out of a solid anthroposophical foundation, out of a knowledge of the growing child as body, soul, and spirit. Today it would be said that Waldorf education is holistic, that it aims at unfolding the capacities of hand, heart, and head in the child according to the stages of child development.

The three lectures published here were given in 1923 to the original teachers of the Waldorf School, who had received four years of intensive training and practice under Steiner's personal guidance. They should be read with this background in mine; their original and sometimes startling message will then be understood more readily. For beginners, it may well be advisable first to work through Steiner's written work and some of the earlier public lectures, for example, A Modern Art of Education, fourteen lectures delivered in August 1923 in Ilkley, England, or The Renewal of Education, fourteen lectures given to Swiss teachers in April and May 1920 in Basel, Switzerland, or Spiritual Ground of Education, four lectures given at Manchester College, Oxford, England, in August 1922. It should be mentioned that many invaluable indications on education will also be found in Steiner's lectures on the social question, the arts, medicine, curative education, and the sciences.

Serious readers will readily become aware that Steiner's comprehensive teachings are undogmatic in character. They are indications, seeds that parents or teachers or anyone genuinely interested in the development and well-being of the child can make their own and verify through experience. Rather than encountering a number of easily applicable educational recipes, they will find themselves engaged in a process of discovery in the realm of childhood and adolescence.

Rene M. Querido