The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

Today I would like to make a few aphoristic remarks on various pedagogical questions which we discussed in our first course and which I have since added to as I feel necessary at the present time. The Christmas course that I gave in Dornach, which in many ways complements the other explanations on pedagogy, I have not yet been able to print after the postscripts. I hope that this will happen some day. But for the time being it has been appearing continuously in the lectures of Steffen at the "Goetheanum". This reprint in the "Goetheanum" will now also be published in book form, so that at least these lectures by Steffen on this Christmas course, which I consider to be especially important for study by those interested in pedagogy, will be available.

Today I would like to point out some feelings that the teacher, the educator, should always have, and that he should also repeatedly, I would like to say meditatively, call into consciousness. The basic feeling must be what I have expressed in various ways: respect for the individuality of the child. We must be aware that there is a spiritual individuality embodied in every child, and that what we have before us as a physical child is not actually a true expression of the child's individuality. The regularity, the structure of the human organism, as you have seen from much that has come before our souls since the first Teacher's Course, is an extraordinarily complicated one. And for a variety of reasons, that which is the true individuality of a child is prevented from fully expressing itself by obstacles in the physical and also in the etheric organism, so that we actually always have before us in the child the more or less unknown true individuality and that which is actually concealed by the physical of the child. It is also possible to express the same truth in the other form that I tried to say in the public lectures in Vienna: We must be aware that in a certain individuality of a child, if we characterize it radically, there could be a genius, and it could also be that we ourselves as teachers and educators would not be a genius. If this relationship exists, that the child is a genius and the teacher is not a genius, it is a completely justified relationship, because not all teachers can be geniuses, and pedagogy has to deal with the general laws. But, of course, it would be quite wrong if the teacher then wanted to inculcate his own individuality or even his own sympathies and antipathies into the child, if he wanted to teach the child as right, as desirable, etc., what he himself thinks is right and desirable. Of course, he would hold the child back on his level, and we must not do that under any circumstances. We can help ourselves tremendously if we, I would say, once again meditate and become very deeply aware that all education basically has nothing to do with the real individuality of the human being, that we, as educators and teachers, actually have the main task, It is our duty as educators and teachers to stand before individuality with reverence, to offer it the possibility to follow its own laws of development, and to remove only those obstacles to development which lie in the physical-emotional and in the body-emotional, that is, in the physical body and in the etheric body. We are only called upon to remove those inhibitions which lie in the physical-emotional and in the body-emotional and to let the individuality develop freely; so that we should basically use what we teach the child in terms of knowledge only to bring the body, both the physical-emotional and the etheric-emotional, so far forward that the human being can just develop freely.

My dear friends, this seems abstract, but it is the most concrete thing in education, and at the same time it points to where one makes the most mistakes. Many people say that it is necessary to develop the individuality of the child. This is as true as it is empty. For if the physical and etheric inhibitions were not there, the individuality of each child would develop properly in life. But we have to remove these physical and etheric inhibitions. Just think of the terrible things we do when we teach six, seven, eight year old children to read and write. It is not often enough that this is brought home to us in all its gravity. For when the child grows up to be six, seven, eight years old, he really brings nothing with him to point out or even to imitate those little demonic things that appear before him on paper. There is no human relationship to the letter forms of today. Therefore, we must be aware of the fact that there is a terrible gap between what has developed in the later course of human civilization and what the child in his 7th year is. Today we have to teach the child something that it certainly does not want, so that it can grow into today's civilization. And if we don't want to spoil the child, we have to proceed in such a way that we treat the child in these years as it needs to be treated, so that the obstacles to its development are removed and it is gradually led, after the obstacles to its development are removed, to the point of view of the soul, to the state of the soul, where the adult people stood in that period of culture when the present forms of writing came into being. The nature of the child itself gives cause for this, of course.

You see, today experiments are being conducted on the tiredness of children. The fact that such figures have been found should not be the end of the research, but the beginning. We should ask ourselves: Why are children so tired? - We are looking at a system, we are looking at the head system, and probably also at the metabolic system and the limb system, which are tired, while the rhythmic system, which is in the highest flower of its development from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, is not really tired. For the heart beats even when it is tired, and the respiratory rhythm and all rhythms go on unharmed by any fatigue, so that the present figures of experimental psychology say something different from what is usually assumed today. They say that the rhythmic system is not taken into account enough in the education of children. But the rhythmic system is stimulated directly from the soul when the whole teaching is artistic, plastic-artistic or musical-artistic. Then you will find that the child will hardly get tired to a great extent because of this kind of teaching. And the teacher should indeed acquire a watchful eye to see whether his children tire too much; he should acquire a certain instinct to see whether the fatigue is much greater than it should be according to the mere external conditions, whether the air in the classroom is somewhat worse than it should be, whether the children have to sit for hours on end, that is, the purely physical things that occupy the metabolic-limb organism. On the other hand, the child has to think. If the thoughts echo in a quiet rhythm, they are not too tired. They get a little tired, but not too tired. The rhythmic system is the physical organ of education and teaching that must be used especially by the child. Now, in the subjects that are not directly artistic, we must try to make the teaching as artistic as possible. This must be taken very seriously, for this is the only real means of education: the artistic between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

Yesterday I said that what is very important for this age of life is that we transform everything into the image, either into the musical image or into the plastic image. Now, of course, you may find how extraordinarily difficult it is in some subjects to work through the image. It will be relatively easy to work through the image in history, where you can make an image of what you are describing; it will be relatively easy in this or that subject, for example, in natural history, where you should also make an image of what you want to teach the child. In other subjects it will be more difficult. In languages, for example, it will not be so difficult to bring things into the picture, if one attaches any importance at all to taking the pictorial aspect of language into account in teaching. One should not miss any opportunity to look at how sentences are structured, for example, a three-part sentence structure consisting of the main clause, the relative clause and the conditional clause, even with ten, eleven, twelve-year-old children. Not true, the grammatical aspect is not the main thing; it should be treated by us only as a means to get the picture, but we should not neglect to give the child, I would say, even a spatial-visual idea of a main clause and a relative clause. Of course, this can be done in many different ways. You can make the main proposition a large circle, the relative proposition a small circle, perhaps placed eccentrically - without theorizing, by staying in the picture - and you can make the conditional proposition, the if proposition, so vivid that you introduce, say, rays against the circle as the conditional factors. It is not necessary to exaggerate these things, but it is really necessary to come back to these things again and again after a good preparation of the subject. And even with ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old children, one should pay attention to what I would call the moral-characterological aspects of pictorial style. Not that you should have style lessons at that age. We discussed yesterday where that should be in the class. Rather, the matter should be grasped more from the inner intuitive. You can go very far. For example, you can treat the individual reading piece, not the pedantic reading pieces that are in our reading books, but what you really prepare carefully, you can treat it according to your temperament. You can talk about a melancholic style or a choleric style, not about the content. So please leave out the content completely, even the poetic content, I mean the sentence structure. There is no need to take things apart, which should be avoided; but the transformation into the image, which should be cultivated, when I say: into the moral-characterological. One can find the possibility to have a stimulating effect on the children already in the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th years, if one restrains oneself in an appropriate way to make the necessary studies..

You see, my dear friends, I do not want to mend anybody's things, I only want to characterize something. Again, at our Vienna Congress, I was able to make quite meaningful studies, meaningful for me, when I compared the attitude, the stylistic attitude of those who spoke, let us say, from Northern Germany, and those who spoke as our Viennese, who were called here. I always thought to myself, when Baravalle or Stein or another Viennese comes again, will he again begin his lecture with "if"? That is so characteristic of the Austrian, it is infinitely meaningful to begin with a conditional sentence, it immediately leads into the moral-characterological. I think you yourself are hardly aware of how you begin your lectures with "If"! The North Germans and the Swiss do not begin with "if," they immediately blurt out an unconditional, affirmative sentence. This is so characteristic, and this is how one should learn to approach things, first of all, so that one can become free, if I may say so, from one's own conditions, and so that in this becoming free one can also achieve an artistic treatment, which is not pedantic, an artistic treatment of any teaching material. If you learn to pay attention to such things, you can achieve an artistic treatment of any subject. And I would like to point out that it is extremely important to feel oneself in artistic things in such a way that one pays attention to details in artistic things, if one wants to be a good teacher for children from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. Again, look at the photographs*; look at how Dr. Kolisko and Walleen are standing, and do not look at them with an interpretive, commenting sense, but look at them with an artistic sense, and you will see how much they give you. It is very important not to force things like that; of course, if you make a judgment with your mind, that someone always holds a folder in a certain hand position and things like that, it comes out immediately as nonsense. But if you grasp it with an artistic sense, something comes out that cannot be completely put into words, but which pours the artistic into your limbs in a tremendously significant way, which is exactly what you need as an educator. It is very important to be able to transform things into a picture, because the picture brings the things that we want to teach the child closer to the human being.

With what we, after our own scientific education, what we have taken up and what we are always confronted with when we prepare ourselves - the books we prepare ourselves from contain nothing but abominations - we burden ourselves with something that is scientific systematics, and when we do not have enough time to get rid of the whole thing - when we prepare ourselves for a lesson, we have to take a contemporary book in which things are arranged scientifically - then this haunts our minds. When we bring this to the children, it is something that is not possible. And we have to realize that this causes us great difficulties, that today scientific systematics, not human systematics, have crept into the preparation books that we can use. So we have to get rid of it absolutely. We have to get everything that we bring into the school for this age absolutely free of all scientific systematics.

And here it is good to remember times when older children, older young people were taught in such a way that it was taken for granted that the appeal was not to the head, but to the whole person. One only has to remember the medieval education: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, where it was not important to teach this or that, but to get the child to be able to express himself in a sentence that was grammatically correct. There, grammar was not taught, but the child was given the opportunity to think in such a pictorial way that his sentences had a pictorial character. Then, not true, rhetoric: the child should be accustomed to feel the beauty of the word in its formation; dialectic: the child should be accustomed to let the thought free in itself, and so on; there it was a matter of ability. And basically it must also come to ability in the most spiritual things, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. But the ability is reached only at that age when everything is brought into the picture.

Well, that's where the trivialities sometimes play an extraordinarily large role. For example, when presenting mathematics, it really makes a difference whether you put one line of letters that is wider and then another that is shorter, whether you put it at the beginning or in the middle. You can make a picture out of what is an arithmetic operation at the end, which the students have in front of them, and put a certain value on something like that, so that even what you write on the blackboard becomes a picture; that even in the trivialities these things are thoroughly taken into account. Sometimes there are opportunities to bring out the picture from a very special corner of life, I would say. Mathematical formulas or sequences of formulas can sometimes be described by figures that are immediately perceived as beautiful. We should not miss such opportunities. It would be a sin and a pity if we missed such an opportunity to make something descriptive, which might be a kind of unnecessary tendril for those who can only think in a philistine way. We should gradually inoculate the philistro-logical way out of our souls for this age, if I may say so. Today we inoculate it much too much more and more. We should inoculate it out; we should work with all our might towards the imaginative or towards the musical, and then actually come close to rhythm for this age of life.

And now we should not close our minds to the realization that truly imponderables play a great role in the totality of teaching. You see, in our very first pedagogical courses, we spoke of a pedagogical relationship between the four temperaments. The task of the educator is to study these four temperaments in the child continuously, to study them in such a way that he can take them into account continuously. This is because, as I say, the right karma of a class is created through the right treatment of the temperaments of the children in the class. After all, such a class is together; they are souls that are together. As they work with the teacher and with each other, a part of their life karma is played out. All kinds of threads of life are being spun, but a piece of karma is being played out; especially between the 7th and 14th years, a piece of karma is being played out very strongly. And how the individual temperaments work into that karma is what we should look at. In this respect, the class can be a constant subject of inner apercus, if we let this be the quiet undertone of our pedagogical work. And above all, one should not let it happen that in any class there are sleeping, co-sleeping students. By sleeping students I mean those who, during the course of the lesson, give only half or three-quarters or a quarter of their whole being. It can happen that the few gifted ones, as they are usually called - they are not always - show up and the others remain asleep. Then the lesson will be really lively with a few, and the others will always be a kind of extras, and this is what must be avoided at all costs. Because, of course, this becoming an extra or being a chatterbox - I don't mean that in a bad way - is also based on other moments. But it is also based on the contrast of temperaments. Of course, among the students there are those who have, let's say, a sanguine or even a choleric temperament, and they will always show off, and you will always have to deal with them if you don't pay special pedagogical attention to them; and there are others, the more melancholic, phlegmatic ones, who then become the extras. This must be avoided at all costs, because the best thing we can do for the students who think more quickly and speak more easily is to make those who think more slowly and do not open their mouths so readily take part in everything, speak, cooperate, and so on. It is absolutely necessary that we go along with this inconvenience. Then we will feel that for a short time we may make less progress than if we left the extras to themselves, but in the long run it will be different. In the long run it will turn out that we have a tremendous effect on the memory retention of the children by not allowing the extras. What is justified in memory is essentially supported by the fact that we do not allow extras.

And so I would say that the possibility of working quite pictorially depends also on the effectiveness of these imponderables. We will see from experience that if we allow all the temperaments, all the possible dispositions of a class to really live themselves out, that for the age from the change of teeth to sexual maturity we are much more likely to arrive at a pictoriality seated in the soul than if we do not. Of course, a certain, I would say, strong devotion to the lesson is necessary if the things to be taught are really always to be taught with the consideration that they will become pictorial; but nevertheless, one should never end a lesson for this age without giving the child something pictorial. Those who are able to draw with the children from the very beginning have an easier time in this respect; but those who, let us say, give the children something pictorial, for example in languages or arithmetic, have all the more effect on them. And, in fact, there is no other real preparation for the educator for this pictorial work than that which I have indicated: to sharpen our sense of observation of life in such a way that we can respond objectively to what life reveals, especially in the human being. A healthy artistic physiognomics, not only human physiognomics, but also, for example, animal physiognomics, should indeed be revived among educators, a healthy, not the sentimental physiognomics of Lavater and the like, but a healthy physiognomics in which the pictorial is sought, without going so far as to close the concept, staying in the picture, being satisfied with it, when one has brought things into the picture, such a healthy physiognomy should be revived, and it will then pass over of itself into all kinds of actions, into all kinds of processes that the teacher develops during the lesson. Nowhere should we pay so much attention to the how and not so much to the what as in teaching and education. It is not the what that is important, but the fact that the what appears in a certain way, in a certain way in the lesson. And there is no greater enemy for the teacher than an incomplete preparation, because it always makes him stop at the "what," whereas a complete preparation always makes him go from the "what" to the "how," makes him rejoice to see how he can prepare it for the child, how he can form it before the child, because the forming itself has become like an inspiration and the like. We should not shrink back when we ourselves often bring incomprehensible things to the children in this respect. Incomprehensible things which the children accept on our authority - and for the children, between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, authority decides - are better taught to the children than trivial things which are comprehensible to them and which they grasp out of their own intellect.

These are quite, I would say, finer nuances of what the teacher, the educator, should do with his own soul life. You will notice, if you perhaps look again at the Christmas course on education, that there is actually everywhere an emphasis on answering the question: How do we form the shell of the human being, the physical body, the etheric body? - Not, how do we form the individuality? That will form itself. If you say, "How do we form the physical body? -...people today, in this materialistic age, have no idea that it is only through the spiritual-mental processes, the spiritual-mental processes that you develop during the teaching, that you form the physical body.

For example, suppose a child stumbles over its own words, cannot find the next word. You see, in the child, before he has reached sexual maturity, this stumbling over his own words is a trait that is still based in physical corporeality in the Upper Man. The upper man is the man in physical relationship, who undergoes his main development in the first and even in the infantile period of life. If you find the possibility to find out the right tempo for what you make the child sing, tell, to get the right tempo for such a person who makes us wait there when he has to look for the transition from one word to the other, then you are in a position to cure this in the child up to sexual maturity absolutely from the spiritual. You are removing a physical inhibition. If you have not removed it from the physical up to sexual maturity, then you have formed its counterpart in the metabolic limb system, then it has become a property of the intestines, then you cannot get it out. Then whatever you do in the ordinary sense as spiritual practices will not help you. They have to be done in such a way that they affect the digestive system, and of course it is not always possible to introduce this, I would say, in a general way. That would lead to the abuse of certain exercises. But with the child, we have to watch carefully to see if he goes from one word to another, from one thought to another, subnormally slowly. And in the child we can still make the body healthy. We make the digestive system sick if we do not cure such waiting from one word to another in youth. This is our duty, and it is more important than any content - which we need, because we have to teach, and therefore we have to have content - to teach the child. This is simply how the mind works in the whole physical organism. In order to learn to control the physical organism in the right way, we have to know the spiritual science, because it is the spirit that works in the physical organism. Therefore, we need to bring healthy medical thinking closer to educational thinking in a certain way. So that we really know how to take such a thing seriously, let us say that when it is said in the Old Testament that someone was tormented by bad dreams, the expression is not used: My brain has done something special, God has afflicted me through my brain. - No one who was active in the Old Testament would have said that. But he said: God is afflicting me through my kidneys. - And why? For the simple reason that it is true. People today are proud to know that spiritual things come from the brain, and they arrogantly disregard what is written in the Old Testament. Not only the brain is spiritualized, but the whole organism is spiritualized. Dreams, for example, come from the kidneys; the expression in the Old Testament is very serious. Just as it is clever in the modern sense to say that compassion also comes from the brain; but in the deeper sense it is nonsense, and the Old Testament form, that compassion comes from the bowels, is the correct one.

And so we must know that when we approach the child with the soul-spiritual, we are treating its whole body. We are the very ones who, with medical wisdom, take care of the physical-spiritual of the child when we do this or that in the construction of sentences, in the treatment of colors, in the treatment of sounds, in the treatment of this or that object. We are influencing the whole physical; for in the physical is the spirit, and we are influencing this spirit, not only the spirit which is only directly in the brain, for there, strangely enough, is the most ineffective thing. And so we must see ourselves as educators, either as people who are constantly bringing up in children something that nourishes and shapes life, or something that is poisonous and destroys the body. If we exaggerate a little in the direction of formalism, if we make the children think until they are tired, then we condemn them between the ages of 7 and 14 to relatively early sclerosis. We just have to be aware that we are working on the whole life when we develop this or that in the child's environment in education and teaching. And if we are not aware of this, we will certainly not approach pedagogical issues in the right way: We are really entitled to remove only the obstacles and hindrances that arise from the physical and etheric nature of man.

As for the rest, today's man, who is much more selfish than he thinks, will naturally say - this seems right to me, that seems wrong to me - and will then bring up the child to feel and think as much as possible like himself. That, of course, is wrong. What is right in all matters is life - not the individual teacher - whom we must ask. Today, of course, we have to teach a child to write. I must confess that I cannot find in myself any judgment of taste that would give me an answer directly from human nature as to whether a child should learn to write or not; it arises only from consideration of the development of civilization. Mankind has now come to the point where a certain content of civilization has an effect on the way of writing and reading. In order to educate the child not for another world but for this world, we must teach him to read and write. This is something we must accept as a condition of civilization, and we must remove the obstacles to development that come with living in a certain age. We have an enormous amount of work to do if we want to answer the question: How can we make the objects that are already given for the human development of the child as harmless as possible? - Because we can always assume that by giving the child a certain material, we are doing the child more harm than good. So we must always ask ourselves: How can we avoid the harm that must always be done when we teach the child something? Well, of course, this is all the less true the more artistic the material is, and all the more true the more cognitive the material is. But this fact must always be before our minds. And now we should be very clear about this: the right authoritative relationship that should exist between the change of teeth and sexual maturity between the educator and the child, this right authoritative relationship is brought about under no other circumstances than when we make an effort to make the teaching artistic-pictorial. If we can do that, then the authoritative relationship will certainly develop. You see, what undermines the authoritative relationship is one-sided intellectuality. Of course, it is easiest to cultivate one-sided intellectuality in the fields of arithmetic, science, and so on. But it is there that we should work into the pictorial. Often we are too unimaginative in language teaching. Let us be clear about this: when we create figuratively, there is a certain selflessness involved. It is much easier to think cleverly, it is much more selfish to think cleverly, than to create pictorially; and we face the child unselfishly when we create pictorially in our teaching. When the child has reached sexual maturity, and knowledge is to pass into cognition, then, because its intellect is now awakened, it simply rejects the judgment of the teacher, the educator, of its own accord. Then nothing is achieved by mere authority, then we have to be able to compete, then we really have to compete with the child, because actually at the age of 17 one is as clever as at the age of 35 in terms of the ability to judge. There are certain nuances, but basically you are as smart at 17 as you are at 35 in terms of formal logic. So you really have to compete with the child as soon as they reach sexual maturity. And therefore, what I said yesterday, that one must not show oneself in any way, must come true. Of course, this will be easy for the younger child if you devote yourself to an artistic organization of the lessons. And a great deal will be achieved if one gets a feeling for how different parts of one or the other can be formed artistically in different ways. Let's say you take the children through a series of plants. You talk about the blossoms; now you try to describe the blossoms in the whole tone, I would say, up to the tone of voice, in such a way that the whole words and ideas are something flowing, that they are light. Now, when you develop this, you try to appeal to the sanguine children in particular, so that the sanguine children contribute to the whole class what they have especially in the ability to perceive, in the easy ability to perceive, let us say, for such ideas as an artistic person develops when he describes blossoms. If you turn to the leaves, you may find that you strike such a tone that the melancholy children are more interested in the leaves; the dialog with the class now passes to the melancholy children. If you describe the roots, which are not usually seen, but which you can describe in such a way that their power can be felt in the flowers, if you describe what is usually invisible, then you must no longer describe statically, but dynamically, and then the choleric children help you to have a real dialog. In this way the whole class can be used for mutual stimulation, if only one develops the sense for it, which can become instinctive. Only, isn't it, it is necessary to pay attention to such things.

Well, actually the thing is that you imagine it to be much more difficult than it actually is. Because once you have brought yourself a quarter in such a direction, then you yourself have the need to bring yourself in 'such a direction'. But there is a catch. You start with great desire. You say to yourself: I want to do this now, I really want to create a picture, I want to create a picture for the lessons, tomorrow I will start. - Now it goes on for eight days, but after that you get lazy, and that is the catch. You have to persevere for a quarter of a year, and then you have to persevere longer. Eight days won't do it, but a quarter of a year will do it, if you are serious about training yourself for a quarter of a year.

And now today, my dear friends, I do not want to have given you one rule or another for one thing or another in class. Perhaps we will always organize pedagogical lectures at future meetings, so that we always move forward. But I would have liked to give you something today that would have made you meditate and put you in a pedagogical and pedagogical mood. I would have liked to see an arm move differently here and there in a class, so that it would create a different image in front of the students. Sometimes I wish that the always unimaginative bumpiness, for example, would not be one of the first things in the classroom. Sometimes I wish that this or that ungraceful wiping of the blackboard would be replaced by a more graceful one. All this comes naturally. It is worked out from the unartistic to the artistic when the general sense for it is there, and the general sense is actually much more important for the pedagogue than the individual dogmatic rule. I would like you to have taken up this today, which draws your attention to the importance of the heartbeat with which one is in pedagogy.

If today we think of the education of the young, we must bear in mind that we are concerned with feelings, the ideas, the will impulses of the next generation; we must be clear that our present work is to prepare this next generation for definite tasks which will be accomplished, at some time in the future of mankind. When a thing of this kind is said, the question at once arises; Why is it then that humanity has reached the widespread misery in which it is today? Humanity has entered into this misery because it has really in essential things made itself dependent, through and through dependent, on the kind of thinking and feeling peculiar to the western man. It is true to say that when today someone in Central Europe speaks about, e.g., Fichte, Herder or even Goethe, if he belongs to external public life, either as a journalist, book-wright or the like, he is much further from the true spiritual impulse living in Fichte, Herder or Goethe when he is thinking and active in Berlin or Vienna, than he is from what is felt and thought today in London, Paris, New York or Chicago. Things have worked out gradually In such a way that speaking generally our whole civilization has been flooded by the impulses proceeding from the philosophy of the western nations and our whole public life is lived in the impulses proceeding from the philosophy of these nations.

It must also be admitted that this is particularly true where the art of education is concerned. For from the last third of the 19th century European nations, speaking generally, have learned from the western nations in all such educational matters, and today it is taken for granted by those men who discuss or dispute among other things about questions of education, that they should make use of the habits of thought which come from the west. If you trace back all the educational ideas which are considered reasonable in Central Europe today, you will find their source in the views of Herbert Spencer or similar men. People do not trace out the numerous paths by which the views of Spencer and others like him have entered the heads of those who have to decide about spiritual questions in Central Europe, but these paths exist—they are to be found. And if you (I will not lay special stress on the details) take the spirit of the educational line such as is to be found, e.g., in Fichte, it is now not only absolutely different from that which is generally looked upon today as sensible pedagogy, but the fact is that modern men are hardly in a position to think and feel along the lines which would enable then to understand what was meant by Fichte and Herder that they could find a way of continuing it. Thus, our experience today in the realm of pedagogy, especially in the art of pedagogy, is that the principles that have arisen are exactly the opposite of what they ought to be. Here I would like to point out to you something which Spencer has written.

Spencer was of the opinion that the way of giving object lessons should be such that they would lead over into the experience of the naturalist, into the research work of the men of science. What then would have to be done in the school? According to that, we should have to teach the children in school in such a way that when they are grown up and have the opportunity, they can continue what they have learned in the school about plants, minerals, animals, etc., so that they can become regular scientists or natural philosophers. It is true that this kind of idea is frequently attacked, but at the same time people really put this principle into practice. And for this reason; Our textbooks are composed with this in view, and no one thinks of altering or doing away with our textbooks. Today the fact is that, e.g., the textbooks on botany are composed for future botanists rather than for human beings in general. In the same way textbooks on zoology are written for future zoologists, not for human beings in general.

Now the remarkable thing is that we ought to strive for the exact opposite of that which Spencer has laid down as a true educational principle. When we are teaching the children about plants and animals in our Volkschule lessons, we could hardly imagine a greater mistake in our method of education than to treat the subject as an introduction to the studies which would be required to enable the child later to become a botanist or zoologist. If, on the contrary, you could have arranged your lessons so that your way of teaching about plants and animals would hinder the child in question from becoming a botanist or zoologist, then you would have acted more wisely than by following Spencer's principle, for no one should become a botanist or zoologist through what he learns in the Volkschule; that he can only become through his special gifts which are revealed by his choice of vocation and which would be sure to appear during his life if there is a true art of education. Through his gifts! That is, if he has the gifts necessary for a botanist, he can become a botanist; and if he has the gifts necessary for a zoologist, he can become a zoologist. That can only be the result of the gifts of the child in question, i.e., of his predetermined Karma. This must come about through the fact that we recognise this child has the makings of a botanist, that child has the makings of a zoologist. It must never be the result of making our Volkschule lessons in any way a preparation for special scientific activity. Just think what has happened of late. It has come about that unfortunately our “scientists” have been our educationalists; people who have definitely trained themselves to think scientifically have been engaged in pedagogy, have taken a most important part in deciding educational questions. That is to say, it has been thought that the teacher as such has something to do with the scientist; a scientific training has actually been taken as a teacher's training, whereas the two should be completely and absolutely different. If the teacher is a scientist, if he makes it his business to think scientifically in a narrow sense (that he can do as a private man, but not as a teacher), then there comes about something which does often happen. The teacher cuts rather a comical figure in his class and among his pupils or among his colleagues; jokes are made at his expense. Goethe's “Baccalaureus” in the upper classes is not such a rarity as is usually supposed.

And as a matter of fact, if you are asked today whether you would be more on the side of the teacher when his pupils make jokes about him or on the side of the scholars, you would under present educational conditions be more on the side of the scholars. For it is in our universities that you can best see whence this has arisen. What are our universities, properly speaking? Are they institutions for teaching young men and women or are they institutions for research? They would like to be both and that is why they have become the caricatures which they are today. It is usually even held up as a special feature of our universities that they are at the same time institutions for teaching and for research. But it is in this way that the bad methods, which come into our education when it is carried out by scientists, work their way first of all into our highest educational centres. Later these bad methods find their way down into the Mittelschule, and then finally also into the Volkschule. And it is this which cannot sufficiently be borne in mind, that the art of education must proceed from life and that it cannot proceed from abstract scientific thought.

Now the remarkable thing is that there is now arising, chiefly out of the western culture, just what can be called a pedagogy with a scientific, even a natural scientific, bent and that when we remember what was to be found in Herder, in Fichte, what was to be found in Jean Paul, in Schiller and similar minds, we know that here is really a pedagogy, which has been forgotten, taken from life, a pedagogy drawn directly from life. And now there lies before us the calling of the Central European nations, that calling which has its place in the history of the world, to cherish and develop this pedagogy, to make it their esoteric task to develop this pedagogy. For many things can be common to humanity and many things must be common to humanity if an improvement in social affairs is to come in the future; but the western nations will not be able to understand what will arise out of the whole concrete Central European spiritual culture with regard to the art of education; on the contrary, it will annoy them, and it really ought not to be told them in its original form. It could only have an undesirable effect upon them. It will only be possible to speak of it to them when they have made up their minds to take their stand on the esoteric foundation of Spiritual Science. With regard to all those things which have been looked upon in Germany during the last forty years with such pride, with regard to all those things which have been considered such a great advance, Germany has lost. All this will pass over to the dominion of the western nations. In this respect there is nothing to be done, and we can only hope to awaken so much understanding for the threefold social organism that the western nations will take part in it. But with regard to what has to be given for the art of education, we have something to give the world from Central Europe which no one else can give, not an oriental and not a western man. But we must know how to keep this among those who are able to understand it; we must understand how to guard it with a certain sense of trust, and we must know that it is this guardianship which will make our work effectual. You must know exactly about what things you have to be silent before certain people if you want to obtain a result. Then we must above all things be clear that there is nothing to hope from anything that might come to us from the kind of thought which, proceeding from the west, is indispensable in many branches of modern civilization; we must know that there is absolutely nothing to be expected from this direction for the educational art we have to develop.

There is a publication about education by Herbert Spencer which is extraordinarily Interesting. He gives there a whole number of maxims, of “Principles,” as he calls them, about the intellectual education of the child. Among these principles there is one which he especially emphasizes. In teaching you should never proceed from the abstract, but always from the concrete; you should always work your subject out from an individual case. Now in his book about education, before anything concrete is approached, there is the worst possible abstract litter, really abstract chaff, and he does not notice that he is himself carrying out the opposite of those principles which he sets forth as indispensable. Thus, we have an illustration of how an eminent, leading philosopher of the present day absolutely contradicts what he himself advocates.

Now you saw last year that our pedagogy has not to be built up on abstract principles of education, for it was said that we should not bring things to the child from the outside, but rather develop the individuality of the child. You know that our educational art should be built upon a real sympathy with the child's being, that it should be built up, in the widest sense, on a knowledge of the growing child, and in our first course of lectures and then later in our conferences we have collected sufficient facts about the being of the growing child. If as teachers we can enter into the child's being, then, out of our knowledge of the child, there will spring up a perception of the way in which we should act. In this respect we must as teachers become artists. Just as it is impossible for an artist to take a book on aesthetics in his hand in order to paint or model according to the principles laid down by the writer, so it should be quite impossible for a teacher to use an “educational guide” in order to teach, but what he needs is a real insight into what the child really is, what he will become as he works his way through childhood. It is above all necessary that we should be clear about the following: we teach, let us say, to begin with in the first class, the 6-7 year old children; now our teaching will always be bad, will have failed to fulfil its purpose if after we have worked with this first class for a year we do not say to ourselves; Who then has really learned the most? It is I, the teacher! If we say to ourselves, “At the beginning of the school year I had excellent educational principles, I have followed the best educational authorities, have done everything to carry out these principles;”—If you really had done this, you really would have taught badly. You would however certainly have taught best if each morning you had gone into your class in fear and trembling without over much confidence in yourself and then had said at the end of the year, you yourself have really learned the most during this time! For whether you can say: you, yourself have learned the most depends on how you have acted; it depends upon what you have really done, depends upon your constantly having had the feeling: you are growing while you are helping the children to grow, you are experimenting in the highest sense of the word, you are not really able to do so very much, but by working with the children there grows in you a certain power. Sometimes you will have the feeling: there is not much to be done with this kind of child, but you will have taken trouble with them. From other children, owing to their special gifts, you will have had certain experiences. In short, you have become quite a different person from what you were before you began, and you have taught what you would not have been able to teach a year earlier. At the end of the school year you say: yes, now for the first time you can do what you ought to have been doing. This is quite a religious feeling! And here there lies hidden a certain secret. If at the beginning of the school year you had really been able to do all you can do at the end, you would have taught badly. You have given good lessons because you had to work them out as you went along! I must put the following paradox before you. You taught well when you did not know at the beginning what you had learned by the end of the year, and it would have been harmful if you had already known at the beginning of the year what you had learned by the end. A remarkable paradox!

It is important for many people that they should know this, but it is most important of all that teachers should know it. For this is a special case of universal comprehensive understanding; a knowledge, no matter what the subject is, which can be comprehended in abstract principles, which can be represented by ideas in the mind, can be of no practical value; it is only what leads to this knowledge, only what is found on the way to this knowledge that is of any practical value. For this knowledge which is ours after we have taught for a year, receives its first value after our death. It is not until after the death of a man that this knowledge becomes such a reality that it can further his development, that it can further the development of the real individual man. In life it is not the ready knowledge that is of value, but the work which leads to the knowledge and particularly in the art of education this work has its own particular value. It is the same in education as in the arts, I do not think that an artist has the right attitude of mind if, when he has finished a work, he does not say to himself; it is only now that you could really do it. I do not think that an artist has the right attitude of mind If he is satisfied with any work he has done. He may have a certain natural egoistic feeling for what he has done, but he cannot really be satisfied with it. A work of art when it is finished really loses for the artist a large part of its interest, and this loss of interest is owing to the peculiar nature of the knowledge which is acquired while the work is being done. And on the other hand, the living element in a work of art, the life that springs from it, owes its being to the fact that it has not yet been transmuted into knowledge.

The same thing is indeed true with regard to the whole human organism. Our head is as “finished” as anything can be finished, for it is formed out of the forces of our last incarnation; it is over mature. Human heads are all over mature, even the immature ones. But the rest of the organism is only at the stage of furnishing the seed for the head in our next incarnation; it is full of life and energy, but it is incomplete. It will not be until our death that the rest of our organization will really show its true form, namely the form of the forces which are at work in it. The constitution of the rest of our organism shows that there is flowing life in it; ossification is reduced to the minimum in this part of our organism while in our head it reaches the maximum.

This peculiar kind of real heartfelt modesty, this feeling that we ourselves are still only becoming, is something which will give the teachers strength, for more arises out of this feeling than out of any abstract principles. If when we are in our class we are conscious that we are doing everything imperfectly, then we shall teach well. If on the other hand we are constantly smacking our lips with satisfaction over the perfection of our teaching, then it is quite certain that we shall teach badly.

But now imagine the following: to begin with you have charge of the teaching of the first class and so on, so that you have gone through everything that has to be gone through, of excitements, disappointments, successes too, if you will. Imagine that you have gone through all the classes of the Volkschule; at the end of each year you have spoken to yourself somewhat after the fashion that I have just described, and now you go down again from the eighth to the first class. Yes, now it might be supposed that you must say to yourself; now I am beginning with what I have learned, now I shall be able to do it well, I shall be an excellent teacher! But it will not be like that. The course of your new class will bring something quite different before your mind. At the end of the second third of each school year, you will say just the same out of a really right feeling. I have now learned what it was possible to learn about seven, eight and nine-year old children by working with them; at the end of each school year I know what I ought to have done. But when you have reached the fourth or fifth, school year, you will again not know how you really ought to have taught. For now, you will correct what you thought to be right after you have taught for a year. And so, after you have finished the eighth school year and have corrected everything, if you really have the good fortune to begin again at the first school year, you will be in the same position, only you will teach in a different spirit. But if you go through your teaching with true, noble, not with mock scepticism, you will find that your diffidence has brought you an imponderable power which will make you peculiarly fitted to accomplish more with the children that are entrusted to you. That is doubtless true. The effect however in life will really then only be a different one, not one that is so much better, but a different effect. I might say that the quality which you bring about in the children will not be much better than the first time; the effect will only be a different one. You will attain something different in quality but not much more in quantity. You will attain something that is different in quality and that is sufficient, for everything which we acquire in the way described with the necessary, noble diffidence and heartfelt humility has the effect that we are able to make individualities out of the children; on the whole they become individualities. We cannot have the same class twice over and send out into the world the same copies of a cut and dried educational pattern.

We can however give the world figures which are individually different. We bring about many-sidedness in life. This does not depend on the working out of abstract principles, but rather this many-sidedness in life depends on a deeper understanding of life such as has been put before you.

Thus, you can see that what matters more than anything else in a teacher is the way in which he regards his holy calling. That is not without significance, for the most Important things In teaching and in education are those which are imponderable. A teacher who enters his classroom with this feeling in his heart achieves something different from another. Just as, even in everyday life, it is not always the largest thing physically that determines our standard but something quite small, so also it is not always what we do with the largest number of words which carries most weight, but sometimes it is that perception, that feeling which we have built up in our hearts before we enter the classroom. There is one thing especially which is of great importance. That is that we must quickly strip off our narrower, personal self like a snake skin when we go into the class. A teacher may in certain circumstances, because he, as is sometimes said with such self-satisfaction, is also only human, go through all sorts of experiences between the end of a class one day and beginning again on the next. It may be that he has been warned by his creditors, or he may have had a quarrel with his wife, as does happen in life.

These are things which bring disharmonies. Disharmonies of this kind give a man's frame of mind a certain tendency; so also do happy joyous feelings. The father of one of your pupils, if he particularly likes you, may have sent you a hare after he has been out hunting, or a bunch of flowers perhaps, if you are a lady teacher. What I mean is that it is quite a natural thing in life to have moods of this kind. As teachers we must train ourselves to lay aside these moods and to give ourselves up entirely to the content of the subject we are going to teach, so that we are really able in presenting one subject to speak tragically, taking our mood from our subject and then to pass over into a humorous mood as we proceed with our lesson, in this way entering completely into our subject. The important thing however is that we should now be able to perceive the whole reaction of the class to tragedy or sentimentality or humour. Then, when we are in a position to do this, we shall be aware that tragedy, sentimentality and humour are of extraordinary significance for the souls of children. And if we allow our lessons to be carried along by an alternation between humour, sentimentality and tragedy, if we pass from the one mood into the other and back again, if we are really able, after presenting something for which we needed a certain heaviness, to pass over into a certain lightness, not a forced lightness, but one that arises because we are living in our lesson, then we are bringing about in the soul something akin to the in and outbreathing in the bodily organism. In teaching, our object is not to teach merely intellectually or intellectualistically, but to be able to really take these various moods into consideration. For what is tragedy, what is sentimentality, what is a “melancholic” mood? It is just the same as an inbreathing in the organism, the same as filling the organism with air. Tragedy signifies that we are trying harder and harder to draw our physical body together so that in our drawing together of the physical body we are aware how the astral body comes ever more and more out of the physical body owing to the drawing together of the physical body. A humorous mood signifies that we paralyze the physical body, but with the astral body we do just the opposite of what we did before; we stretch it out as far as possible, stretch it out over its surroundings so that we are aware, if we, e.g., do not merely see redness but grow into it, how we stretch out our astral body beyond this redness, pass over into it. Laughing simply means that we drive the astral body out of our face; laughing is simply nothing else but an outbreathing. Only, if we want to apply all this, we must have a certain feeling for the force there is in these things. It is not always advisable to go straight over into something humorous when we have just had something serious or melancholy, but if we can always have in our lessons the means of preventing the childish soul from being imprisoned by the serious, the tragic, and of freeing it so that it can really experience this breathing in and out between the two frames of mind.

I have now told you something of the variety of moods which should be taken into consideration by the teacher, for this is just as necessary as any other part of special pedagogy.

It is impossible to educate or teach without a spiritual grasp of the whole human being, for this whole human being comes into consideration even far more prominently during the time of a child's development than later on. As we know, this whole human being comprises within itself the ego, the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body. These four members of the nature of man are by no means going through a symmetrical development, but rather they develop in very different ways; and we must distinguish accurately between the development of the physical and of the etheric body, and that of the astral body and of the ego. The outer manifestations of this differentiated development express themselves—as you know from the various elucidations—in the change of teeth and in that change which in the male appears as the change of voice at puberty, but which also proclaims itself clearly in the female, though in a different way. The essence of the phenomenon is the same as with the male in the change of his voice, only in the female organism it appears in a more diffused form, so that it is not merely observable in one organ as in the case of the male organism, but it extends more over the entire organism.

You know that between the change of teeth and the change of voice, or puberty, lies that period of teaching with which we have principally to do in the grade-schools; but the careful educator, in teaching and educating, must pay close attention as well to the years following the change of voice, or its analogy in the female organism.

Let us call to mind what the change of teeth signifies. Before the change of teeth—that is, between birth and the change of teeth—the physical body and the etheric body in the child's organism are strongly influenced by the nervous-sensory system, that is, from above downward. Up to about the seventh year the physical body and the etheric body are most active from the head. In the head are concentrated, as it were, the forces that are particularly active in these years—that is, in the years when imitation plays so important a role. And what takes place in the formative process in the remaining organism of trunk and limbs is achieved through the emanation of rays from the head to this remaining organism, to the trunk and the limb organism, from the physical body and the etheric body. That which here radiates from the head into the physical and etheric bodies of the whole child, right into the tips of his fingers and toes—this that radiates from the head into the whole child is soul-activity, even though it has its inception in the physical body: the same soul-activity that is later active in the soul as mind and memory. Later on this soul-activity appears in such a form that after the change of teeth the child begins to think, and that his memories become more conscious. The whole change that takes place in the soul-life of the child shows that certain psychic powers previously active in the organism become active as soul-forces after the seventh year. The whole period up to the change of teeth, while the child is growing, is a result of the same forces which after the seventh year appear as mental forces, intellectual forces.

There you have a case of actual co-operation between soul and body, when you realize how the soul emancipates itself in the seventh year and begins to function—no longer in the body but independently. Now those forces which in the body itself come newly into being as soul-forces begin to be active with the seventh year; and from then on, they operate through into the next incarnation. Now that which is radiated forth from the body is repulsed, whereas the forces that shoot downward from the head are checked. Thus, at this time of the change of teeth the hardest battle is fought between the forces tending downward from above and those shooting upward from below. The physical change of teeth is the physical expression of this conflict between those two kinds of forces: the forces that later appear in the child as the reasoning and intellectual powers, and those that must be employed particularly in drawing, painting, and writing. All these forces that shoot up, arising out of the conflict, we employ when we develop writing out of drawing; for these forces really tend to pass over into plastic creation, drawing, and so forth. Those are the forces that come to an end with the change of teeth, that previously had modelled the body of the child: the sculpture-forces. We work with them later, when the change of teeth is completed, to lead the child to drawing, to painting, and so on. These are in the main the forces in which the child's soul lived in the spiritual world before conception; at first their activity lies in forming the body, and then from the seventh year on they function as soul- forces. Thus, in the educational period following the seventh year, during which we must work with the forces of authority, we simply see that manifesting itself in the child which formerly he practiced unconsciously as imitation, when these forces still influenced the body unconsciously. If later the child becomes a sculptor, a draftsman, or an architect—but a real architect who works out of the forms—this is because such a person has the capacity for retaining in his organism, in his head, a little more of those forces that radiate downward into the organism, so that later on as well these forces of childhood can radiate downward. But if they are entirely used up, if with the change of teeth everything passes over into the psychic, children result who have no talent for architecture, who could never become sculptors.

These forces are related to the experiences between death and a new birth; and the reverence that is needed in educational activity, and that takes on a religious character, arises if one is conscious that when, around the seventh year, one calls forth from the child's soul these forces that are applied in learning to draw and to write, it is actually the spiritual world that sends down these forces. And the child is the mediator, and you are in reality working with forces sent down from the spiritual world. When this reverence permeates the instruction it truly works miracles. And if you have this reverence, if you have the feeling that by means of this telephone which transcends time you are in contact with the forces developed in the spiritual world during the time before birth—if you have this feeling that engenders a deep reverence, then you will see that through the reality of such a feeling you can accomplish more than through any amount of intellectual theorizing about what should be done. The teacher's feelings are the most important means of education there is, for this reverence can have an immeasurable formative influence upon the child.

Thus, we find in the change of teeth, when the child is entrusted to us, a process that directly represents a transfer through the child of spiritual forces out of the spiritual world into the physical world.

Another process takes place in the years of puberty, but it is prepared gradually through the whole cycle from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year. During this period something comes to light in those regions of the soul-life not yet illuminated by consciousness—for consciousness is still being formed, and something of the outer world which remains unconscious is constantly radiating into those regions not yet illuminated by consciousness—that only gradually becomes conscious, but that from birth has permeated the child from the outer world, that has co-operated in building the child's body, and that has entered into the plastic forces.

Those, again, are different forces. While the plastic forces enter the head from within, these forces now come from without. They are dammed up by the plastic forces and then descend into the organism. They co-operate in what takes place, beginning with the seventh year, in connection with the building of the child's body. I can characterize these forces in no other way than as those active in speech and in music. These forces are derived from the world.

The musical forces derive more from the outer world, the extra-human world, from the observation of processes in nature, particularly their regularities and irregularities. For all that takes place in nature is permeated by a mysterious music: I In- earthly projection of the “music of the spheres.” In every plant, in every animal, there is really incorporated a tone of the music of the spheres. That is also the case with reference to the human body, but it no longer lives in what is human speech—that is, in expressions of the soul—but it does live in the body, in its forms and so forth. All this the child absorbs unconsciously, and that is why children are musical to such a high degree. They take all that into their organism. While that which the child experiences as forms of movement, lines and plastic elements in his surroundings is absorbed by him and then acts from within, from the head, all that is absorbed by the child as tone-texture, as speech-content, comes from without. And this again, that which comes from without, is opposed by the gradually developing spiritual element of music and speech—only somewhat later: around the fourteenth year. This also is dammed up again now, in the woman in the whole organism, in the man more in the region of the larynx, where it causes the change of voice. The whole process, then, is brought about by the fact that here an element of the nature of will expresses itself from within in conflict with a similar element coming from without; and in this conflict is manifested that which at puberty appears as the change of voice. That is a conflict between inner music-speech forces and outer music-speech forces. Up to the seventh year, man is essentially permeated more by plastic and less by musical forces—that is, less by the music and speech forces that glow through the organism. But beginning with the seventh year what proceeds from music-speech becomes particularly active in the etheric body. Then this condition is opposed by the ego and the astral body: an element of the nature of will struggles from with-out against the similar one from within, and this appears at puberty. It is manifest even externally by the pitch of the voice that a difference exists between the male and the female. Only partially do the pitches of the voices of men and of women over lap: the woman's voice reaches higher, the man's goes lower—down to the bass. That corresponds with absolute accuracy to the structure of the remaining organism that forms itself out of the conflict of these forces.

These things show that in our soul-life we are concerned with something which at certain definite times co-operates also in the up-building of the organism. All the abstract discussions you find in modern scientific books on psychology, all the talk about psycho-physical parallelism, are merely testimony to the inability to grasp the connection between the psychic and the physical. For the psychic is not connected with the physical in the manner set forth in the senseless theories thought out by the psycho-physical parallelists; but rather we have to do with the recognition of this wholly concrete action of the psychic in the body, and then in turn with the reaction. Up to the seventh year what is plastic-architectonic works together with what is active in music-speech; only this changes in the seventh year, so that from then on the relation between music-speech on the one hand and the plastic-architectonic on the other is merely a different one. But through the whole period up to puberty this co-operation takes place between the plastic-architectonic, which emanates from the head and has its seat there, and speech-music, which comes from without, uses the head as a passage, and spreads itself into the organism.

From this we see that human language as well, but particularly music, co-operates in the formation of man. First it forms him, then it is dammed up as it halts at the larynx; now it does not enter the gate as it did before. For before, you see, it is speech that changes our organs, even down into the bony system; and anyone who observes a human skeleton from a psycho-physical thoughts of our present-day philosophers--and considers the differentiation between the male and the female skeleton sees in the skeleton an embodied musical achievement performed in the reciprocal action between the human organism and the outer world. Were we to take a sonata, and could we preserve its structure through some spiritual process of crystallization, we would have, as it were, the principal forms, the scheme of arrangement, of the human skeleton. And that will incidentally attest the difference between man and the animals. Whatever the animal absorbs of the music-speech element—very little of the speech, but very much of the musical—passes through the animal, because in a sense the animal lacks man's isolation that later leads to mutation. In the shape of an animal skeleton we find a musical image too, but only in the sense that a composite picture of the different animal skeletons, such as one can gain, for instance, in a museum, is needed to yield a musical coherence. An animal invariably manifests a one-sidedness in its structure.

Such things we should consider carefully in forming our picture of man: they will show us what feelings we should develop. As our reverence grows through feeling our connection, through fostering our feeling of contact, with pre-natal conditions, we acquire greater enthusiasm for teaching, by occupying ourselves intensely with the other forces of man. A Dionysian element, as it were, irradiates the music-speech instruction, while we have more of an Apollonian element in teaching the plastic arts, painting and drawing. The instruction that has to do with music and speech we impart with enthusiasm, the other with reverence.

The plastic forces offer the stronger opposition, hence they are held up as early as the seventh year; the others act less vigorously, so they are held up only in the fourteenth year. You must not interpret that to mean physical strength and weakness: it refers rather to the counter-pressure that is exerted. Since the plastic forces, being stronger, would overrun the human organism, the counter-pressure is stronger. Therefore, they must be held up earlier, whereas the music-forces are permitted by cosmic guidance to remain longer in the organism. The human being is permeated longer by the music forces than by the plastic ones.

If you let this thought ripen within you and bring the requisite enthusiasm to bear, conscious that by developing an appreciation for speech and music precisely during the grade-school period, when that battle is still raging and when you are still influencing the corporeality—not just the soul—then you are preparing that which man carries with him even beyond death. To this we contribute essentially with everything we teach the child of music and speech during the grade-school period. And that gives us a certain enthusiasm, because we know that thereby we are working for the future. On the other hand, by working with the plastic forces we make contact with what lived in man before birth or conception, and that gives us reverence. In that which reaches into the future we infuse our own forces, and we know that we are fructifying the germ of music-speech with something that will operate into the future after the physical has been stripped off. Music itself is a reflection of what is spheric in the air—only thus does it become physical. The air is in a sense the medium that renders tones physical, just as it is the air in the larynx that renders speech physical. That which has its being as non-physical in the speech-air, and as non-physical in the music-air unfolds its true activity only after death. That gives us the right enthusiasm for our teaching, because we know that when working with music and speech we are working for the future. And I believe that in the pedagogy of the future, teachers will no longer be addressed as they usually are today, but rather in ideas and concepts that can transform themselves into feelings, into the future. For nothing is more important than that we be able, as teachers, to develop the necessary reverence, the necessary enthusiasm. Reverence and enthusiasm—those are two fundamental forces by which the teacher-soul must be permeated.

To make you understand the matter still better I should like to mention that music has its being principally in the human astral body. After death man still carries his astral body fur a time; and as long as he does so, until he lays it aside completely—you are familiar with this from my book Theosophy — there still exists in man after death a sort of memory—it is only a sort of memory—of earthly music. Thus, it comes about that whatever in life we receive of music continues to act like a memory of music after death—until about the time the astral body is laid aside. Then the earthly music is transformed in the life after death into the “music of the spheres,” and it remains as such until some time previous to the new birth. The matter will be more comprehensible for you if you know that what man here on earth receives in the way of music plays a very important role in the shaping of his soul-organism after death. That organism is molded there during this period. This is, of course, the kamaloka time; and that is also the comforting feature of the kamaloka time: we can render easier this existence, which the Roman Catholics call purgatory, for human beings if we know that. Not, to be sure, by relieving them of their perception: that they must have; for they would remain imperfect if they could not observe the imperfect things they have done. But we furnish the possibility that the human being will be better formed in his next life if during that time after death, when he still has his astral body, he can have many memories of things musical. This can be studied on a comparatively low plane of spiritual knowledge. You need only, after having heard a concert, wake up in the night, and you will become aware that you have experienced the whole concert again before waking. You even experience it much better by thus awaking in the night after a concert. You experience it very accurately. The point is that music imprints itself upon the astral body, it remains there, it still vibrates; it remains for about thirty years after death. What comes from music continues to vibrate much longer than what comes from speech: we lose the latter as such comparatively quickly after death, and there remains only its spiritual extract. What is musical is as long as the astral body. What comes from speech can be a great boon to us after death, especially if we have often absorbed it in the form which I now frequently describe as the art of recitation. When I describe the latter in this way I naturally have every reason to point out that these things cannot be rightly interpreted without keeping in view the peculiar course the astral body takes after death: then the matters must be described somewhat as I have described them in my lectures on eurythmy. Here, you see, we must talk to people in the most primitive language, so to speak; and it is really true that, seen from the point of view beyond the Threshold, people are actually all primitive: only beyond the Threshold are they real human beings. And we can only work ourselves out of this primitive-man state by working ourselves into spiritual reality. This is also the reason for the constantly increasing fury against the endeavors of Anthroposophy to show the path to a spiritual reality.

Now I would call your attention to something that is very much in the foreground in the art of pedagogy and that can be pedagogically employed—namely, that in the first conflict which I described in connection with the adolescent child, the outer expression of which is the change of teeth, and in that later struggle whose equivalent is the change of voice, there is to be considered something peculiar that gives to each its special character: everything that up to the seventh year descends from the head appears as an attack in relation to that which meets it from within and which builds up. And everything is a warding off that acts from within toward the head, that rises upward and opposes the current emanating from the head and descending.

In the case of music in turn the conditions are similar; but here that which comes from within appears as an attack, and that which descends from above through the head-organism appears as the warding off. If we had not music, frightful forces really would rise up in man. I am completely convinced that up to the sixteenth or seventeenth century traditions deriving from the old Mysteries were active, and that even then people still wrote and spoke under the influence of this after-effect of the Mysteries. They no longer knew, to be sure, the whole meaning of this effect, but in much that still appears in comparatively recent times we simply have reminiscences of the old Mystery-wisdom. Hence, I have always been deeply impressed by the passage in Shakespeare :*

“The man that hath no music in himself,
Is fit for treason, murder and deceit!
Let no such man be trusted.”

Merchant of Venice, V, 1.

“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.”

Translator's Note: The third line of the German translation of this passage reads: “Is fit for treason, murder and deceit”, and thus it is quoted by Dr. Steiner. Thus, must be kept in mind to understand what follows.

In the old Mystery-schools the pupils were told: that which acts in man as an attack from within and which must be continually warded off, which is dammed back for the nature of man, is “treason, murder and deceit,” and the music that is active in man is that which opposes the former. Music is the means of defense against the Luciferic forces rising up out of the inner man: treason, murder and deceit. We all have treason, murder and deceit within us, and it is not for nothing that the world contains what comes to us from music-speech quite aside from the pleasure it affords. Its purpose is to make people into human beings. One must, of course, keep in mind that the old Mystery- teachers expressed themselves somewhat differently: they expressed things more concretely. They would not have said “treason, murder and deceit” (it is already toned down in Shakespeare) but would have said something like “serpent, wolf and fox.” The serpent, the wolf and the fox are warded off from the inner nature of the human being through music. The old Mystery-teachers would always have used animal forms to depict that which rises out of the human being, but which must then be transformed into what is human. Thus, we can achieve the right enthusiasm when we see the treacherous serpent rising out of the child and combat it with music-speech instruction, and in like manner contend with the murderous wolf and the tricky fox or the cat. That is what can then permeate us with the intelligent, the true sort of enthusiasm—not the burning, Luciferic sort that alone is acknowledged today. We must recognize, then: attack and warding off.

Man has within him two levels where the warding off occurs. First, within himself, where the warding off appears in the change of teeth in the seventh year; and then again, in what he has received from music and speech, through which is warded off that which tends to rise up within him. But both battlefields are within man himself, what comes from music-speech more toward the periphery, toward the outer world, the architectonic- plastic more toward the inner world. But there is still a third battlefield, and that lies at the border between the etheric body and the outer world. The etheric body is always larger than the physical body; it extends beyond it in all directions; and here also there is such a battlefield. Here the battle is fought more under the influence of consciousness, whereas the other two proceed more in the subconscious. And the third conflict manifests itself when everything has worked itself to the surface that is a transformation of what takes place on the one hand between the human being and what is plastic-architectonic, and on the other between him and what is music-speech, when this amalgamates with the etheric body, thereby taking hold of the astral body, and is thus moved more toward the periphery, toward the outer border.

Through this originates everything that shoots through the fingers in drawing, painting, and so on. This makes of painting an art functioning more in the environs of man. The draftsman, the sculptor, must work more out of his inner faculties, the musician more out of his devotion to the world. That which lias ils being in painting and drawing, to which we lead the child when we have it make forms and lines, that is a battle that lakes place wholly on the surface, a battle that is fought principally between two forces, one of which acts inward from without, the other on I ward from within. The force that acts outward from within really tends constantly to disperse the human being, tends to continue the forming of man—not violently but in a delicate way. This force—it is not so powerful as that, but I must express il more radically so that you will see what I mean—this force, acting outward from within, tends to make our eyes swell up, to raise a goiter for us, to make the nose grow big and to make the ears bigger: everything tends to swell outward. Another force is the one we absorb from the outer world, through which this swelling up is warded off. And even if we only make a stroke—draw something—this is an effort to divert, through the force acting from the outer world inward, that inner force which tends to deform us. It is a complicated reflex action, then, that we as men execute in painting, in drawing, in graphic activity. In drawing or in having the canvas before us, the feeling actually glimmers in our consciousness that we are excluding something that is out there, that in the forms and strokes we are setting up thick walls, barbed wire. In drawing we really have such barbed wire by means of which we quickly catch something that tends to destroy us from within and prevent its action from becoming too strong. Therefore, instruction in drawing works best if we begin its study from the human being. If you study what motions the hand tends to make—if, say, in eurythmy instruction you have the child hold these motions, these forms that he wants to execute—then you have arrested the motion, the line, that tends to destroy, and then it does not act destructively. So when you begin to have the eurythmic forms drawn, and then see that drawing and also writing are formed out of the will that lives there, you have something which the nature of man really wants, something linked with the development and essence of human nature.

And in connection with eurythmy we should know this, that in our etheric body we constantly have the tendency to practice eurythmy: that is something the etheric body simply does of its own accord; for eurythmy is nothing but motions gleaned from what the etheric body tends to do of itself. It is really the etheric body that makes these motions, and it is only prevented from doing so when we cause the physical body to execute them. When we cause them to be executed by the physical body these movements are held back in the etheric body, react upon us, and have a health-giving effect on man.

That is what affects the human being in a certain hygienic- therapeutic as well as didactic-pedagogic way, and which outwardly gives the impression of beauty. Such things will be understood only when we know that something which is trying to manifest itself in the etheric organization of man must be stopped at the periphery by the movements of the physical body. In one case, that of eurythmy, an element more connected with the will is stopped; in the other, in drawing and painting, an element more closely allied with the intellect. But fundamentally both processes are but the two poles of one and the same thing.

If we now follow this process too with our feeling and incorporate it in our sensitive teaching ability, we have the third feeling that we need. That is the feeling which should really always penetrate us especially in grade-school instruction: that, when a human being is placed in the world, he is really exposed to things from which we must protect him through our teaching. Otherwise he would become one with the world too much. Man really always has the tendency to become psychically rickety, to make his limbs rickety, to become a gnome. And in teaching and educating him we work at forming him. We best obtain a feeling for this forming if we observe the child making a drawing, then smooth this out a bit so that the result is not what the child wants, but not what we want either, but a result of both. If I succeed, while smoothing out what the child wants to scribble, in merging my feelings with those of the child, the best results obtain. And if I transform all that into feeling and let it permeate me, the feeling arises that I must protect the child from an over-strong coalescence with the outer world. We must see that the child grows slowly into the outer world and not let him do so too rapidly. That is the third feeling that we as educators must cherish within us: we constantly hold a protecting hand over the child.

Reverence, enthusiasm, and the feeling of protection, these three are actually the panacea, as it were, the magic formula in the soul of the educator and teacher. And if one wished to represent, externally, artistically, something like an embodiment of art and pedagogy in a group, one would have to represent this:

Reverence for what precedes the child's existence (before birth);

Enthusiastic looking forward to what follows it (after death);

Protecting gesture for what the child experiences (during life).

Rudolf Steiner accompanied each of these three sentences with a gesture.

This work of art would also best represent the external manifestation of the teacher-character.

When one says something thus derived out of the intimacies of the world-mysteries one always feels it as unsatisfactory when uttered in conventional speech. But if one must say such things by means of external speech one always has the feeling that a supplement is necessary. What is spoken rather abstractly always feels the urge to pass over into the artistic. That is why I wanted to give you that hint in closing.

The fact is, we must learn to bear something of mankind's future frame of mind within us, consisting of the knowledge that the possession of mere science makes the human being into something which will cause him to regard himself as a psycho-spiritual monster. He who is a scientist pure and simple will not have the impulse—not even in the forming of his thoughts—to transform the scientific into the artistic. But only through the artistic can one comprehend the world. Goethe's saying always remains true:

“He to whom Nature begins to reveal her manifest secret feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy exponent — Art.”

As educators we should have the feeling: as far as you are a scientist only, you are in soul and spirit a monster. Not until you have transformed your psycho-spiritual-physical organism, when your knowledge takes on artistic form, will you become a human being. Future development will in the main lead from science to artistic grasp, from the monster to the complete human being. And in this it is the pedagogue's duty to co-operate.

When children come to the age of puberty, it is necessary to awaken within them an extraordinarily great interest in the world outside of themselves. Through the whole way in which they are educated, they must be led to look out into the world around them and into all its laws, its course, causes and effects, into men's intentions and goals—not only into human beings, but into everything, even into a piece of music, for instance. All this must be brought to them in such a way that it can resound on and on within them—so that questions about nature, about the cosmos and the entire world, about the human soul, questions of history—so that riddles arise in their youthful souls.

When the astral body¹ becomes free at puberty, forces are freed which can now be used for formulating these riddles. But when these riddles of the world and its manifestations do not arise in young souls, then these same forces are changed into something else.

When such forces become free, and it has not been possible to awaken the most intensive interest in such world-riddles, then these energies transform themselves into what they become in most young people today. They change in two directions into urges of an instinctive kind: first into delight in power, and second into eroticism.

Unfortunately pedagogy does not now consider this delight in power and the eroticism of young people to be the secondary results of changes in things that, until the age of 20 or 21, really ought to go in an altogether different direction, but considers them to be natural elements in the human organism at puberty. If young people are rightly educated, there should be no need whatsoever to speak about love of power and eroticism to them at this age. If such things have to be spoken about during these years, this is in itself something that smacks of illness. Our entire pedagogical art and science is becoming ill because again and again the highest value is attributed to these questions. A high value is put upon them for no other reason than that people are powerless today—have grown more and more powerless in the age of a materialistic world-conception—to inspire true interest in the world, the world in the widest sense ...

When we do not have enough interest in the world around us, then we are thrown back into ourselves. Taken all in all, we have to say that if we look at the chief damages created by modern civilization, they arise primarily because people are far too concerned with themselves and do not usually spend the larger part of their leisure time in concern for the world but busy themselves with how they feel and what gives them pain ... And the least favorable time of life to be self-occupied in this way is during the ages between 14, 15 and 21 years old.

The capacity for forming judgments is blossoming at this time and should be directed toward world-interrelationships in every field. The world must become so all-engrossing to young people that they simply do not turn their attention away from it long enough to be constantly occupied with themselves. For, as everyone knows, as far as subjective feelings are concerned, pain only becomes greater the more we think about it. It is not the objective damage but the pain of it that increases as we think more about it. In certain respects, the very best remedy for the overcoming of pain is to bring yourself, if you can, not to think about it. Now there develops in young people just between 15, 16 and 20, 21, something not altogether unlike pain. This adaptation to the conditions brought about through the freeing of the astral body from the physical is really a continual experience of gentle pain. And this kind of experience immediately makes us tend towards self-preoccupation, unless we are sufficiently directed away from it and toward the world outside ourselves ...

If a teacher makes a mistake while teaching a 10 or 12 year old, then, as far as the mutual relationship between pupil and teacher is concerned, this does not really make such a very great difference. By this I do not mean that you should make as many mistakes as possible with children of this age ...

The feeling for the teacher's authority will flag perhaps for a while, but such things will be forgotten comparatively quickly, in any case much sooner than certain injustices are forgotten at this age. On the other hand, when you stand in front of students between 14, 15 and 20, 21, you simply must not expose your latent inadequacies and so make a fool of yourself ...

If a student is unable to formulate a question which he experiences inwardly, the teacher must be capable of doing this himself, so that he can bring about such a formulation in class, and he must be able to satisfy the feeling that then arises in the students when the question comes to expression. For if he does not do this, then when all that is mirrored there in the souls of these young people goes over into the world of sleep, into the sleeping condition, a body of detrimental, poisonous substances is produced by the unformulated questions. These poisons are developed only during the night, just when poisons ought really to be broken down and transformed instead of created. Poisons are produced that burden the brains of the young people when they go to class, and gradually everything in them stagnates, becomes “stopped up.” This must and can be avoided. But it can only be avoided if the feeling is not aroused in the students: “Now again the teacher has failed to give us the right answer. He really hasn't answered us at all. We can't get a satisfying answer out of him.” Those are the latent inadequacies, the self-exposures that occur when the children have the feeling: “The teacher just isn't up to giving us the answers we need.” And for this inability, the personal capacities and incapacities of the teacher are not the only determining factors, but rather the pedagogical method.

If we spend too much time pouring a mass of information over young people at this age, or if we teach in such a way that they never come to lift their doubts and questions into consciousness, then the teacher—even though he is the more objective party—exposes, even if indirectly, his latent in-adequacies ...

You see the teacher must, in full consciousness, be permeated through and through with all this when he deals with the transition from the ninth to the tenth grades, for it is just with the entire transformation of the courses one gives that the pedagogy must concern itself. If we have children of six or seven, then the course is already set through the fact that they are entering school, and we do not need to understand any other relationship to life. But when we lead young people over from the ninth to the tenth grade, then we must put ourselves into quite another life-condition. When this happens, the children must say to themselves: “Great thunder and lightning! What's happened to the teacher! Up to now we've thought of him as a pretty bright light who has plenty to say, but now he's beginning to talk like more than a man. Why, the whole world speaks out of him!”

And when they feel the most intensive interest in particular world questions and are put into the fortunate position of being able to impart this to other young people, then the world speaks out of them also. Out of a mood of this kind, verve (Schwung) must arise. Verve is what teachers must bring to young people at this age, verve which above all is directed towards imagination; for although the students are developing the capacity to make judgments, judgment is actually borne out of the powers of imagination. And if you deal with the intellect intellectually, if you are not able to deal with the intellect with a certain imagination, then you have “mis-played,” you have missed the boat with them.

Young people demand imaginative powers; you must approach them with verve, and with verve of a kind that convinces them. Scepticism is something that you may not bring to them at this age, that is in the first half of this life-period. The most damaging judgment for the time between 14, 15 and 18 is one that implies in a pessimistically knowledgeable way: “That is something that cannot be known.” This crushes the soul of a child or a young person. It is more possible after 18 to pass over to what is more or less in doubt. But between 14 and 18 it is soul-crushing, soul-debilitating, to introduce them to a certain scepticism. What subject you deal with is much less important than that you do not bring this debilitating pessimism to young people.

It is important for oneself as a teacher to exercise a certain amount of self-observation and not give in to any illusions; for it is fatal if, just at this age, young people feel cleverer than the teacher during class, especially in secondary matters. It should be—and it can be achieved, even if not right in the first lesson—that they are so gripped by what they hear that their attention will really be diverted from all the teacher's little mannerisms. Here, too, the teacher's latent inadequacies are the most fatal.

Now if you think, my dear friends, that neglect of these matters unloads its consequences into the channels of instinctive love of power and eroticism, then you will see from the beginning how tremendously significant it is to take the education of these young people in hand in a bold and generous way. You can much more easily make mistakes with older students, let us say with those at medical school. For what you do at this earlier age works into their later life in an extraordinarily devastating way. It works destructively, for instance, upon the relationships between people. The right kind of interest in other human beings is not possible if the right sort of world-interest is not aroused in the 15 or 16 year old. If they learn only the Kant-Laplace theory of the creation of the solar system and what one learns through astronomy and astrophysics today, if they cram into their skulls only this idea of the cosmos, then in social relationships they will be just such men and women as those of our modern civilization who, out of anti-social impulses, shout about every kind of social reform but within their souls actually bring anti-social powers to expression. I have often said that the reason people make such an outcry about social matters is because men are antisocial beings.

It cannot be said often enough that in the years between 14 and 18 we must build in the most careful way upon the fundamentally basic moral relationship between pupil and teacher. And here morality is to be understood in its broadest sense: that, for instance, a teacher calls up in his soul the very deepest sense of responsibility for his task. This moral attitude must show itself in that we do not give all too much acknowledgement to this deflection toward subjectivity and one's own personality. In such matters, imponderables really pass over from teacher to pupil. Mournful teachers, un-alterably morose teachers, who are immensely fond of their lower selves, produce in children of just this age a faithful mirror picture, or if they do not, kindle a terrible revolution. More important than any approved method is that we do not expose our latent inadequacies and that we approach the children with an attitude that is inwardly moral through and through ...

This sickly eroticism which has grown up—also in people's minds—to such a terrible extent appears for the most part only in city dwellers, city dwellers who have become teachers and doctors. And only as urban life triumphs altogether in our civilization will these things come to such a terrible—I do not want to say “blossoming” but to such a frightful—degeneracy. Naturally we must look not at appearances but at reality. It is certainly quite unnecessary to begin to organize educational homes in the country immediately. If teachers and pupils carry these same detrimental feelings out into the country and are really permeated by urban conceptions, you can call a school a country educational home as long as you like, you will still have a blossoming of city life to deal with ...

What we have spoken about here today is of the utmost pedagogical importance and, in considering the high school years, should be taken into the most earnest consideration.

• 1. A term used to designate all that is sentient in man and in animals.

Before the conference began, Rudolf Steiner addressed the participants gathered in the White Hall of the Goetheanum:

Ladies and Gentlemen, before beginning this lecture course, allow me to bring up an administrative matter. Originally, this course was meant for a smaller group, but it has drawn such a response that it has become clear that we cannot gather in this tightly-packed hall. It would be impossible, and you would soon realize this if you were to attend both the lectures and the translations. Consequently, I have decided to present the lectures twice—the first each day at ten A.M. and again at eleven, for those who wish to hear it translated into English. For technical reasons this is the only way to proceed. Therefore, I will begin the earlier lectures exactly at ten and second at eleven o’clock. I will ask those who came from England, Holland, and Scandinavia to attend the later lectures and everyone else to attend the first.

First of all I would like to express my great joy at meeting so many of you here in this hall. Anyone whose life is filled with enthusiasm for the movement centered here at the Goetheanum is bound to experience happiness and a deep inner satisfaction at witnessing the intense interest for our theme, which your visit has shown. I would therefore like to begin this introductory lecture by welcoming you all most warmly. And I wish to extend a special welcome to Mrs. Mackenzie, whose initiative and efforts have brought about this course. On behalf of the anthroposophic movement, I owe her a particular debt of gratitude.

I would like to add that it is not just a single person who is greeting you here, but that, above all, it is this building, the Goetheanum itself, that receives you. I can fully understand if some of you feel critical of certain features of this building as a work of art. Any undertaking that appears in the world in this way must be open to judgment, and any criticism made in good faith is appreciated—certainly by me. But, whatever your reactions may be to this building, it is the Goetheanum itself that welcomes you. Through just its forms and artistic composition, you can see that the aim here was not to erect a building for specific purposes, such as education, for example. The underlying spirit and style of this building shows that it was conceived and erected from the spirit of our time, to serve a movement and destined to play its part in our present civilization. And because education represents an integral part of human civilization, it is proper for it to be nurtured here at this center.

The close relationship between anthroposophic activities and problems of education will occupy us in greater detail within the next few days. Today, however, as part of these introductory remarks, I would like to talk about something that really is a part of any established movement. In a sense, you have come here to familiarize yourselves with the various activities centered here at the Goetheanum, and in greeting you most warmly as guests, I feel it right to begin by introducing you to our movement.

The aims of this anthroposophic movement, which has been in existence now for some twenty years, are only gradually beginning to manifest. It is only lately that this movement has been viewed by the world at large in ways that are consistent with its original aims. Nevertheless, this movement has gone through various phases, and a description of these may provide the most proper introduction.

Initially, the small circle of its adherents saw anthroposophy as a movement representing a very narrow religious perspective. This movement tended to attract people who were not especially interested in its scientific background and were not inclined to explore its artistic possibilities. Nor were they aware of how its practical activities might affect society as a whole. The first members were mainly those dissatisfied with traditional religious practice. They were the sort of people whose deepest human longings prompted them to search for answers to the problems inherent in the human soul and spirit—problems that could not be answered for them by existing religious movements.

For me it often was quite astonishing to see that what I had to say about the fundamentals of anthroposophy was not at all understood by members who, nevertheless, supported the movement with deep sympathy and great devotion. When matters of a more scientific nature was discussed, these initial members extracted what spoke to their hearts and appealed to their immediate feelings and sentiments. And I can truly say that it was the most peaceful time within the anthroposophic movement, though this was certainly not what I was looking for. Because of this situation, during its first phase the anthroposophic movement was able to join another movement (though only outwardly and mainly from an administrative perspective), which you might know as the Theosophical Society.

Unless they can discern the vital and fundamental differences, those who search with a simple heart for knowledge of the eternal in human nature will find either movement equally satisfactory. The Theosophical Society is concerned primarily with a theoretical knowledge that embraces cosmology, philosophy, and religion and uses the spoken and printed word as its means of communication. Those who are satisfied with their lives in general, but wish to explore the spirit beyond what traditional doctrines offer, might find either movement equally satisfying. But (and only a few members noticed this) once it became obvious that, in terms of cosmology, philosophy, and religion, anthroposophic goals were never intended to be merely theoretical but to enter social life in a direct and practical way according to the demands of the spirit of our times—only then did it gradually become obvious that our movement could no longer work within the Theosophical Society. For in our time (and this will become clear in the following lectures), any movement that limits itself to theories of cosmology, philosophy, and religion is bound to degenerate into intolerable dogmatism. It was the futility of dogmatic arguments that finally caused the separation of the two movements.

It is obvious that no one who is sensible and understands western culture could seriously consider what became the crux of these dogmatic quarrels that led to this split. These quarrels were sparked by claims that an Indian boy was the reincarnation of Christ. Since such a claim was completely baseless, it was unacceptable.

To waste energy and strength on theoretical arguments is not the way of anthroposophy, which aims to enter life directly. When it became necessary to work in the artistic, social, scientific, and—above all—in the educational realm, the true aims of anthroposophy made it necessary to separate from the Theosophical Society. Of course, this did not happen all at once; essentially, all that happened in the anthroposophic movement after 1912 demonstrated that this movement had to fight for its independence in the world, if it was going to penetrate ordinary life.

In 1907, during a Theosophical Society congress in Munich, I realized for the first time that it would be impossible for me to work with this movement. Along with my friends from the German section of the Theosophical Society, I had been given the task of arranging the program for this congress. Apart from the usual items, we included a performance of a mystery play by Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), The Sacred Drama of Eleusis. We decided to create a transition from the movement’s religious theories to a broader view that would encourage artistic activity. From our anthroposophic perspective, we viewed the performance as an artistic endeavor. But there were people in the movement who tried to satisfy their sometimes egotistical religious feelings by merely looking for a theoretical interpretation. They would ask, What is the meaning of this individual in the drama? What does that person mean? Such people would not be happy unless they could reduce the play to theoretical terms.

Any movement that cannot embrace life fully because of a lopsided attitude will certainly become sectarian. Spiritual science, on the other hand, is not the least inclined toward sectarianism, because it naturally tends to bring ideals down to earth and enter life in practical ways.

These attempts to free the anthroposophic movement from sectarianism by entering the artistic sphere represent the second phase of its history. Gradually, as membership increased, a need arose for the thought of philosophy, cosmology, and religion to be expressed artistically, and this in turn prompted me to write my mystery plays. And these must not be interpreted theoretically or abstractly, because they are intended to be experienced directly on the stage. To bring this about, my plays were performed in ordinary, rented theaters in Munich, from 1910 to 1913. And this led to an impulse to build a center for the anthroposophic movement. The changing situation made it clear that Munich was inappropriate for such a building, and so we were led to Dornach hill, where the Goetheanum was built as the right and proper place for the anthroposophic movement.

These new activities showed that, in keeping with its true spirit, the anthroposophic movement is always prepared to enter every branch of human life. Imagine that a different movement of a more theoretical religious character had decided to build a center; what would have happened? First, its members would collect money from sympathizers (a necessary step, unfortunately). Then they would choose an architect to design the building, perhaps in an antique or renaissance style or in a gothic or baroque or some other traditional style.

However, when the anthroposophic movement was in the happy position of being able to build its own home, such a procedure would have been totally unacceptable to me. Anything that forms an organic living whole cannot be assembled from heterogeneous parts. What relationship could any words, spoken in the spirit of anthroposophy, have had with the forms around a listener in a baroque, antique, or renaissance building? A movement that expresses only theories can present only abstractions. A living movement, on the other hand, must work into every area of life through its own characteristic impulses. Therefore, the urge to express life, soul, and spirit in practical activity (which is characteristic of anthroposophy) demanded that the surrounding architecture—the glowing colors of the wall paintings and the pillars we see—should speak the same language that is spoken theoretically in ideas and abstract thoughts. All of the movements that existed in the world previously were equally comprehensive; ancient architecture was certainly not isolated from its culture, but grew from the theoretical and practical activities of the time. The same can be said of the renaissance—certainly of the gothic, but also of the baroque.

To avoid a sectarian or theoretical ideology, anthroposophy had to find its own architectural and artistic styles. As mentioned before, one may find this style unsatisfactory or even paradoxical, but the fact is, according to its real nature, anthroposophy simply had to create its own physical enclosure. Let me make a comparison that may appear trivial but may, nevertheless, clarify these thoughts. Think of a walnut and its kernel. It is obvious that both nut and shell were created by the same forces, since together they make a whole. If anthroposophy had been housed in an incongruous building, it would be as if a walnut kernel had been found in the shell of a different plant. Nature produces nut and shell, and they both speak the same language. Similarly, neither symbolism nor allegory was needed here; rather, it was necessary that anthroposophic impulses flow directly into artistic creativity. If thoughts are to be expressed in this building, they must have a suitable shell, from artistic and architectural points of view. This was not easy to do, however, because the sectarian tendency is strong today, even among those looking for a broadening of religious ideals. But anthroposophy must not be influenced by people’s sympathies or antipathies. It must remain true to its own principles, which are closely linked to the needs and yearnings of our times, as will be shown in the next few days.

And so anthroposophy entered the practical domain—as far as this was possible in those days. At the time, I surprised some members by saying, “Anthroposophy wants to enter all walks of life. Although conditions do not allow this today, I would love to open banks that operate according to anthroposophic principles.” This may sound strange, but it was meant to show that anthroposophy is in its right element only when it can fertilize every aspect of life. It must never be seen merely as a philosophical and religious movement.

We now come to the catastrophic and chaotic time of the World War, which produced its own particular needs. In September 1913, we laid the foundation stone of this building. In 1914, when war broke out, we were building the foundation of the Goetheanum. Here I want to say only that, at a time when Europe was torn asunder by opposing nationalistic aspirations, here in Dornach we successfully maintained a place where people from all nations could meet and work together in peace, united by a common spirit. This was a source of deep inner satisfaction. Those war years could be considered as the second phase in the development of our movement.

Despite efforts to continue anthroposophic work during the war, the outer activities of the anthroposophic movement were mostly paralyzed. But one could experience how peoples everywhere gradually came to feel an inner need for spiritual sustenance, which, in my opinion, anthroposophy was able to offer. After 1918, when the war had ended, at least outwardly, there was an enormous, growing interest in spiritual renewal, such as anthroposophy wished to provide. Between autumn 1918 and spring 1919, numerous friends—many from Stuttgart—came to see me in Dornach. They were deeply concerned about the social conditions of the time, and they wanted the anthroposophic movement to take an active role in trying to come to terms with the social and economic upheavals. This led to the third phase of our movement.

It happened that Southern Germany—Württemberg in particular—was open to such anthroposophic activities, and one had to work wherever this was possible. These activities, however, were colored a little by the problems of that particular region, problems caused by the prevailing social chaos. An indescribable misery had spread over the whole of Central Europe at the time. Yet, seen in a broader context, the suffering caused by material needs was small compared to what was happening in the soul realm of the population. One could feel that humanity had to face the most fundamental questions of human existence. Questions once raised by Rousseau, which led to visible consequences in the French Revolution, did not touch the most basic human yearnings and needs as did the questions presented in 1919, within the very realms where we wished to work.

In this context, awareness of a specific social need began to grow in the hearts of my friends. They realized that perhaps the only way to work effectively toward a better future would be to direct our efforts toward the youth and their education. Our friend Emil Molt (who at the time was running the Waldorf- Astoria Cigarette Factory in Stuttgart) offered his services for such an effort by establishing the Waldorf school for his workers’ children, and I was asked to help direct the school. People were questioning everything related to the organization of society as it had developed over the past centuries from its tribal and ethnic elements. This prompted me to present a short proclamation concerning the threefold social order to the German people and to the civilized world in general, and also to publish my book Towards Social Renewal.

Many other activities connected with the social question also occurred, at first in South Germany, which resulted from this general situation and prevailing mood. It was essential then, though immensely difficult, to touch the most fundamental aspirations of the human soul. Despite their physical and mental agony, people were called upon to search, quite abstractly, for great and sublime truths; but because of the general upheaval they were unable to do so. Many who heard my addresses said to me later, “All this may be correct and even beautiful, but it concerns the future of humanity. We have faced death often during the last years and are no longer concerned about the future; we must live from day to day. Why should we be more interested in the future now than when we had to face the guns every day?” Such comments characterize the prevaling apathy of that time toward the most important and fundamental questions of human development.

Before the war, one could observe all sorts of educational experiments in various special schools. It was out of the question, however, that we would establish yet another country boarding school or implement a certain brand of educational principles. We simply wished to heal social ills and serve the needs of humankind in general. You will learn more about the fundamentals of Waldorf education during the coming lectures. For now, I merely wish to point out that, as in every field, anthroposophy sees its task as becoming involved in the realities of a situation as it is given. It was not for us to open a boarding school somewhere in a beautiful stretch of open countryside, where we would be free to do as we pleased. We had to fit into specific, given conditions. We were asked to teach the children of a small town—that is, we had to open a school in a small town where even our highest aspirations had to be built entirely upon pragmatic and sound educational principles. We were not free to choose a particular locality nor select students according to ability or class; we accepted given conditions with the goal of basing our work on spiritual knowledge. In this way, as a natural consequence of anthroposophic striving, Waldorf education came into existence.

The Waldorf school in Stuttgart soon ceased to be what it was in the beginning—a school for the children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Factory. It quickly attracted students from various social backgrounds, and today parents everywhere want to send their children. From the initial enrollment of 140 children, it has grown to more than 600, and more applications are coming in all the time. A few days ago, we laid the foundation stone for a very necessary extension to our school, and we hope that, despite all the difficulties one must face in this kind of work, we will soon be able to expand our school further.

I wish to emphasize, however, that the characteristic feature of this school is its educational principles, based on knowledge of the human being and its ability to adapt those principles to external, given realities. If one can choose students according to ability or social standing, or if one can choose a locality, it is relatively easy to accomplish imaginary, even real, educational reforms. But it is no easy task to establish and develop a school on educational principles closely connected with the most fundamental human impulses, while also being in touch with the practical demands of life.

Thus, during its third phase, our anthroposophic movement has spread into the social sphere, and this aspect will naturally occupy us in greater depth during the coming days. But you must realize that what has been happening in the Waldorf school until now represents only a beginning of endeavors to bring our fundamental goals right down into life’s practicalities.

Concerning other anthroposophic activities that developed later on, I would like to say that quite a number of scientifically trained people came together in their hope and belief that the anthroposophic movement could also fertilize the scientific branches of life. Medical doctors met here, because they were dissatisfied with the ways of natural science, which accept only external observation and experimentation. They were convinced that such a limited attitude could never lead to a full understanding of the human organism, whether in health or illness. Doctors came who were deeply concerned about the unnecessary limitations established by modern medical science, such as the deep chasm dividing medical practice into pathology and therapy.

These branches coexist today almost as separate sciences. In its search for knowledge, anthroposophy uses not just methods of outer experimentation—observation of external phenomena synthesized by the intellect—but, by viewing the human being as body, soul, and spirit, it also utilizes other means, which I will describe in coming days. Instead of dealing with abstract thoughts, spiritual science is in touch with the living spirit. And because of this, it was able to meet the aspirations of those urgently seeking to bring new life into medicine. As a result, I was asked to give two courses here in Dornach to university-trained medical specialists and practicing doctors, in order to outline the contribution spiritual science could make in the field of pathology and therapy. Both here in Dornach and in nearby Arlesheim, as well as in Stuttgart, institutes for medical therapy have sprung up, working with their own medicines and trying to utilize what spiritual science can offer to healing, in dealing with sickness and health. Specialists in other sciences have also come to look for new impulses arising from spiritual science; thus, courses were given in physics and astronomy. In this way, anthroposophic spirit knowledge was called upon to bring practical help to the various branches of science.

Characteristic of this third phase of the anthroposophic movement is the fact that gradually—despite a certain amount of remaining opposition—people have come to see that spiritual science, as practiced here, can meet every demand for an exact scientific basis of working and that, as represented here, it can work with equal discipline and in harmony with any other scientific enterprise. In time, people will appreciate more and more the potential that has been present during these past twenty years in the anthroposophic movement.

Yet another example shows how the most varied fields of human endeavor can be fructified through spiritual science, through the creation of a new art of movement we call eurythmy. It uses the human being as an instrument of expression, and it aims toward specific results. So we try to let anthroposophic life—not anthroposophic theories—flow into all sorts of activities—for example, the art of recitation and speech, about which you will hear more in the next few days.

This last phase with its educational, medical, and artistic impulses is the most characteristic one of the anthroposophic movement. Spiritual science has many supporters as well as many enemies—even bitter enemies. But now it has entered the very stage of activities for which it has been waiting. And so it was a satisfying experience during my stay in Kristiania [Oslo], from November twenty-third to December fourth this year to speak of anthroposophic life to educators and to government economists, as well as to Norwegian students and various other groups. All of these people were willing to accept not theories or religious sectarian ideas, but what waits to reveal itself directly from the spirit of our time in answer to the great needs of humanity.

So much for the three phases of the anthroposophic movement. As an introduction to our course I merely wanted to acquaint you with this movement and to mention its name to you, so to speak. Tomorrow, we will begin our actual theme. Nevertheless, I want you to know that it is the anthroposophic movement, with its deep educational interests, that gladly welcomes you all here to the Goetheanum.

The art of education (about which we will say a great deal during this course of lectures) is based entirely on knowledge of the human being. If such knowledge is to have a deep foundation, however, it must be based on knowledge of the entire universe, because human beings, with all their inherent abilities and powers, are rooted in the universe. Therefore true knowledge of the human being can spring only from knowing the world in its entirety. On the other hand, one can say that the educational attitudes and ideas of any age reflect the general worldview of that age. Consequently, to correctly assess current views on education, we must examine them within the context of the general worldview of our time. In this sense, it will help to look at the ideas expressed by a typical representative of today’s worldview as it developed gradually during the last few centuries. There is no doubt that, since that time, humankind has been looking with great pride at the achievements accomplished through intellectuality, and this is still largely true today.

Basically, educated people today have become very intellectualized, even if they do not admit to it. Everything in the world is judged through the instrument of the intellect. When we think of names associated with the awakening of modern thinking, we are led to the founders of modern philosophy and of today’s attitudes toward life. Such individuals based all their work on a firm belief in human intellectual powers. Names such as Galileo, Copernicus, and Giordano Bruno come to mind, and we easily believe that their mode of thinking relates only to scientific matters; but this is not the case.

If one observes without prejudice the outlook on life among the vast majority of people today, one finds a bit of natural scientific thinking hidden almost everywhere, and intellectuality inhabits this mode of thinking. We may be under the impression that, in our moral concepts or impulses and in our religious ideas and experiences, we are free from scientific thinking. But we soon discover that, by being exposed to all that flows through newspapers and popular magazines into the masses, we are easily influenced in our thinking by an undertone of natural science.

People simply fail to see life as it really is if they are unaware that today’s citizens sit down to breakfast already filled with scientific concepts—that at night they take these notions to bed and to sleep, use them in their daily work, and raise their children with them. Such people live under the illusion that they are free from scientific thinking. We even take our scientific concepts to church and, although we may hear traditional views expressed from the pulpit, we hear them with ears attuned to natural scientific thinking. And natural science is fed by this intellectuality.

Science quite correctly stresses that its results are all based on external observation, experimentation, and interpretation. Nevertheless, the instrument of the soul used for experiments in chemistry or physics represents the most intellectual part of the human entity. Thus the picture of the world that people make for themselves is still the result of the intellect.

Educated people of the West have become quite enraptured by all the progress achieved through intellectuality, especially in our time. This has led to the opinion that, in earlier times, humankind more or less lacked intelligence. The ancients supposedly lived with naive and childish ideas about the world, whereas today we believe we have reached an intelligent comprehension of the world. It is generally felt that the modern worldview is the only one based on firm ground. People have become fearful of losing themselves in the world of fantasy if they relinquish the domain of the intellect. Anyone whose thinking follows modern lines, which have been gradually developing during the last few centuries, is bound to conclude that a realistic concept of life depends on the intellect.

Now something very remarkable can be seen; on the one hand, what people consider the most valuable asset, the most important feature of our modern civilization—intellectuality—has, on the other hand, become doubtful in relation to raising and educating children. This is especially true among those who are seriously concerned with education. Although one can see that humanity has made tremendous strides through the development of intellectuality, when we look at contemporary education, we also find that, if children are being educated only in an intellectual way, their inborn capacities and human potential become seriously impaired and wither away. For some, this realization has led to a longing to replace intellectuality with something else. One has appealed to children’s feelings and instincts. To steer clear of the intellect, we have appealed to their moral and religious impulses. But how can we find the right approach? Surely, only through a thorough knowledge of the human being, which, in turn, must be the result of a thorough knowledge of the world as a whole. As mentioned, looking at a representative thinker of our time, we find the present worldview reflected in educational trends. And if one considers all relevant features, Herbert Spencer could be chosen as one such representative thinker.

I do not quote Spencer because I consider his educational ideas to be especially valuable for today’s education. I am well aware of how open these are to all kinds of arguments and how, because of certain amateurish features, they would have to be greatly elaborated. On the other hand, Spencer, in all his concepts and ideas, is firmly grounded in the kind of thinking and culture developed during the last few centuries. Emerson wrote about those he considered representative of the development of humankind—people such as Swedenborg, Goethe, and Dante. For modern thinking and feeling, however, it is Herbert Spencer above all who represents our time. Although such thinking may be tinged with national traits according to whether the person is French, Italian, or Russian, Spencer transcends such national influences. It is not the conclusions in his many books on various aspects of life that are important, but the way he reaches those conclusions, for his mode of thinking is highly representative of the thinking of all educated people—those who are influenced by a scientific view and endeavor to live in accordance with it.

Intellectualistic natural science is the very matrix of all he has to say. And what did he conclude? Herbert Spencer, who naturally never loses sight of the theory that humankind evolved gradually from lower life forms, and who then compares the human being with animals, asks this question: Are we educating our youth according to our scientific ways of thinking? And he answers this question in the negative.

In his essay on education, he deals with some of the most important questions of the modern science of education, such as, Which kind of knowledge is most valuable? He critically surveys intellectual, moral, and physical education. But the core of all considerations is something that could have been postulated only by a modern thinker, that we educate our children so they can put their physical faculties to full use in later life. We educate them to fit into professional lives. We educate them to become good citizens. According to our concepts, we may educate them to be moral or religious. But there is one thing for which we do not educate them at all: to become educators themselves. This, according to Spencer, is absent in all our educational endeavors. He maintains that, fundamentally, people are not educated to become educators or parents. Now, as a genuine natural scientific thinker, he goes on to say that the development of a living creature is complete only when it has acquired the capacity of procreating its own species, and this is how it should be in a perfect education; educated people should be able to educate and guide growing children. Such a postulate aptly illustrates the way a modern person thinks.

Looking at education today, what are Spencer’s conclusions? Metaphorically, he makes a somewhat drastic but, in my opinion, very appropriate comparison. First he characterizes the tremendous claims of education today, including those made by Pestalozzi. Then, instead of qualifying these principles as being good or acceptable, he asks how they are implemented in practice and what life is actually like in schools. In this context, he uses a somewhat drastic picture, suggesting we imagine some five to six centuries from now, when archeologists dig up some archives and find a description of our present educational system. Studying these documents, they would find it difficult to believe that they represent the general practice of our time. They would discover that children were taught grammar in order to find their way into their language. Yet we know well that the grammar children are taught hardly teaches them to express themselves in a living way later in life. Our imaginary archeologists would also discover that a large portion of students were being taught Latin and Greek, which, in our time, are dead languages. Here, they would conclude that the people of those documents had no literature of their own or, if they did, little benefit would be gained by studying it.

Spencer tries to demonstrate how inadequately our present curricula prepare students for later life, despite all the claims to the contrary. Finally, he lets these archeologists conclude that, since the document could not be indicative of the general educational practice of their time, they must have discovered a syllabus used in some monastic order. He continues (and of course this represents his opinion) by saying that adults who have gone through such educational practice are not entirely alienated from society, behaving like monks, because of the pressures and the cruel demands of life. Nevertheless, according to our imaginary archeologists, when having to face life’s challenges, those ancient students responded clumsily, because they were educated as monks and trying to live within an entirely different milieu. These views—expressed by a man of the world and not by someone engaged in practical teaching—are in their own way characteristic of contemporary education.

Now we might ask, What value do people place on their lives after immersion in a natural scientific and intellectualistic attitude toward the world?

With the aid of natural laws, we can comprehend lifeless matter. This leads us to conclude that, following the same methods, we can also understand living organisms. This is not the time to go into the details of such a problem, but one can say that, at our present state of civilization, we tend to use thoughts that allow us to grasp only what is dead and, consequently, lies beyond the human sphere. Through research in physics and chemistry, we construct a whole system of concepts that we then apply to the entire universe, albeit only hypothetically. It is true that today there are already quite a few who question the validity of applying laboratory results or the information gained through a telescope or microscope to build a general picture of the world. Nevertheless, a natural scientific explanation of the world was bound to come and, with it, the ways it affects human feelings and emotions. And if one uses concepts from laboratory or observatory research to explain the origin and the future of the earth, what happens then? One is forced to imagine the primeval nebulae of the Kant-Laplace theory, or, since views have changed since their time, something similar. But this notion of primeval nebulae makes sense only when we apply to it the laws of aeromechanics. Such laws, however, contain nothing of a soul or spiritual character. People who long for such a soul and spiritual element, therefore, must imagine that all sorts of divine powers exist along side the aeromechanical view of the universe, and then these spirit beings must be somehow blended skillfully into the image of the nebulae. The human being, in terms of soul and spirit, is not part of this picture, but has been excluded from that worldview. Those who have gotten used to the idea that only an intellectually based natural science can provide concrete and satisfactory answers find themselves in a quandary when looking for some sort of divine participation at the beginning of existence.

Education Based on Knowledge of the Human Being 21 A hypothetical concept of the end of the cosmos is bound to follow the laws of physics. In this context, we encounter the socalled second fundamental law of thermodynamics. According to this theory, all living forces are mutually transformable. However, if they are transformed into heat, or if heat is transformed into living forces, the outcome is always an excess of heat. The final result for all earthly processes would therefore be a complete transformation of all living forces into heat. This destruction through heat would produce a desert world, containing no forces but differences of temperature. Such a theory conjures up a picture of a huge graveyard in which all human achievements lie buried—all intellectual, moral, and religious ideals and impulses. If we place human beings between a cosmic beginning from which we have been excluded and a cosmic end in which again we have no place, all human ideals and achievements become nothing but vague illusions. Thus, an intellectual, natural scientific philosophy reduces the reality of human existence to a mere illusion. Such an interpretation may be dismissed simply as a hypothesis, yet even if people today do not recognize the way science affects their attitudes toward life, the negative consequences are nevertheless real. But the majority are not prepared to face reality. Nor do such theories remain the prerogative of an educated minority, because they reach the masses through magazines and popular literature, often in very subtle ways.

And, against the background of this negative disposition of soul, we try to educate our children, True, we also give them religious meaning, but here we are faced above all with division. For if we introduce religious ideas alongside scientific ideas of life, which is bound to affect our soul attitude, we enter the realm of untruth. And untruth extracts a toll beyond what the intellect can perceive, because it is active through its own inner power. Untruth, even when it remains concealed in the realm of the unconscious, assumes a destructive power over life. We enter the realm of untruth when we refuse to search for clarity in our attitudes toward life. This clarity will show us that, given the prevailing ideas today, we gain knowledge of a world where there is no room for the human being.

Let us examine a scientific discovery that fills us with pride, as it should. We follow the chain of evolution in the animal world, from the simplest and most imperfect forms via the more fully developed animals, right up to the arrival of the human being, whom we consider the most highly developed. Does not this way of looking at evolution imply that we consider the human being the most perfect animal? In this way, however, we are not concerned with true human nature at all. Such a question, even if it remains unconscious, diminishes and sets aside any feeling we might have for our essential humanity.

Again I wish to quote Herbert Spencer, because his views on contemporary education are so characteristic, especially with the latest attempts to reform education and bring it into line with current scientific thinking. In general, such reforms are based on concepts that are alien to the human spirit. Again, Spencer represents what we encounter in practical life almost everywhere. He maintains that we should do away with the usual influences adults—parents or teachers—have on children. According to him, we have inherited the bad habit of becoming angry when a child has done something wrong. We punish children and make them aware of our displeasure. In other words, our reaction is not linked directly to what the child has done. The child may have left things strewn all over the room and we, as educators, may become angry when seeing it. To put it drastically, we might even hit the child. Now, what is the causal link (and the scientific researcher always looks for causal links) between hitting the child and the untidy child? There is none.

Spencer therefore suggests that, to educate properly, we should become “missionaries of causal processes.” For example, if we see a boy playing with fire by burning little pieces of paper in a flame, we should be able to understand that he does this because of his natural curiosity. We should not worry that he might burn himself or even set fire to the house; rather, we should recognize that he is acting out of an instinct of curiosity and allow him—with due caution, of course—to burn himself a little, because then, and only then, will he experience the causal connection. Following methods like this, we establish causal links and become missionaries of causal processes.

When you meet educational reformers, you hear the opinion that this principle of causality is the only one possible. Any open-minded person will reply that, as long as we consider the intellectualistic natural scientific approach the only right one, this principle of causality is also the only correct approach. As long as we adhere to accepted scientific thinking, there is no alternative in education. But, if we are absolutely truthful, where does all this lead when we follow these methods to their logical extremes? We completely fetter human beings, with all their powers of thinking and feeling, to natural processes. Thoughts and feelings become mere processes of nature, bereft of their own identity, mere products of unconscious, compulsory participation. If we are considered nothing more than a link in the chain of natural necessity, we cannot free ourselves in any way from nature’s bonds.

We have been opposed by people who, in all good faith, are convinced that the ordinary scientific explanation of evolution can be the only correct one. They equate the origin of everything with the primeval nebulae, comprehensible only through the laws of aeromechanics. They equate the end of everything with complete destruction by heat, resulting in a final universal grave. Into this framework they place human beings, who materialize from somewhere beyond the human sphere, destined to find that all moral aspirations, religious impulses, and ideals are no more than illusions. This may seem to be the very opposite of what I said a few minutes ago, when I said that, when seen as the last link in evolution, human beings loses their separate identity and are therefore cast out of the world order. But because human identity remains unknown, we are seen only as a part of nature. Instead of being elevated from the complexities of nature, humankind is merely added to them. We become beings that embody the causal nexus. Such an interpretation casts out the human being, and education thus places the human being into a sphere devoid of humanity; it completely loses sight of the human being as such. People fail to see this clearly, because they lack the courage. Nevertheless, we have reached a turning point in evolution, and we must summon the courage to face basic facts, because in the end our concepts will determine our life paths.

A mood of tragedy pervades such people. They have to live consciously with something that, for the majority of people, sleeps in the subconscious. This underlying mood has become the burden of today’s civilization. However, we cannot educate out of such a mood, because it eliminates the sort of knowledge from which knowledge of the human being can spring. It cannot sustain a knowledge of the human being in which we find our real value and true being—the kind of knowledge we need if we are to experience ourselves as real in the world. We can educate to satisfy the necessities of external life, but that sort of education hinders people from becoming free individuals. If we nevertheless see children grow up as free individuals, it happens despite of our education, not because of it.

Today it is not enough just to think about the world; we must think about the world so that our thinking gradually becomes a general feeling for the world, because out of such Education Based on Knowledge of the Human Being 25 feelings impulses for reform and progress grow. It is the aim of anthroposophy to present a way of knowing the world that does not remain abstract but enlivens the entire human being and becomes the proper basis for educational principles and methods.

Today we can already see the consequences of the materialistic worldview as a historical fact. Through a materialistic interpretation of the world, humankind was cast out. And the echo of what has thus lived in the thoughts of educated people for a long time can now be heard in the slogans of millions upon millions of the proletariat. The civilized world, however, shuts its eyes to the direct connection between its own worldview and the echo from the working classes. This mood of tragedy is experienced by discerning people who have decided that moral ideas and religious impulses are an illusion and that humanity exists only between the reality’s nebulous beginning and its ultimate destruction by heat. And we meet this same mood again in the views of millions of workers, for the only reality in their philosophy is economic processes and problems.

According to the proletarian view of life, nothing is more important than economics—economic solutions of the past, labor and production management, the organization of buying and selling, and how the process of production satisfies the physical needs of people. On the other hand, any moral aspirations, religious ideas, or political ideals are viewed as an illusory ideologies and considered to be an unrealistic superstructure imposed on the reality of life—the processes of material production. Consequently, something that was theoretical and, at best, a semi-religious conviction among certain educated social circles has, among the proletariat, become the determining factor for all human activity. This is the situation that humankind faces today. Under these conditions, people are trying to educate. To do this task justice, however, people must free themselves of all bias and observe and understand the present situation.

It is characteristic of intellectuality and its naturalistic worldview that it alienates people from the realities of life. From this perspective, you only need to look at earlier concepts of life. There you find ways of thinking that could very well be linked to life—thoughts that people of the past would never have seen as mere ideologies. They were rooted in life, and because of this they never treated their thinking as though it were some sort of vapor rising from the earth. Today, this attitude has invaded the practical areas of most of the educated world. People are groaning under the results of what has happened. Nevertheless, humankind is not prepared to recognize that the events in Russia today, which will spread into many other countries, are the natural result of the sort of teaching given at schools and universities. There one educates and while the people in one part of the earth lack the courage to recognize the dire consequences of their teaching, in the other part, these consequences ruthlessly push through to their extremes. We will not be able to stop this wheel from running away unless we understand clearly, especially in this domain, and place the laws of causality in their proper context. Then we shall realize that the human being is placed into a reality tht will leave him no room for maneuvering as long as he tries to comprehend the world by means of the intellect only. We will see that intellectuality, as an instrument, does not have the power of understanding realities.

I once knew a poet who, decades ago, tried to imagine how human beings would end up if they were to develop more and more in a onesided, intellectualistic way. In the district where he lived, there was a somewhat drastic idea of intellectual people; they were called “big heads” (grosskopfet). Metaphorically, they carried large heads on their shoulders. This poet took up the local expression, arguing that human development was becoming increasingly centered in the intellect and that, as a result, the human head would grow larger and larger, while the rest of the body would gradually degenerate into some sort of rudimentary organs. He predicted only rudimentary arms, ending in tiny hands, and rudimentary legs with tiny feet dangling from a disproportionately large head—until the moment when human beings would move by rolling along like balls. It would eventually come about that one would have to deal with large spheres from which arms and legs were hanging, like rudimentary appendages. A very melancholic mood came over him when he tried to foresee the consequences of one-sided intellectual development.

Looking objectively at the phenomenon of intellectuality, we can see that it alienates people from themselves and removes them from reality. Consequently, an intellectual will accept only the sort of reality that is recognized by the proletariat—the kind that cannot be denied, because one runs into it and suffers multiple bruises. In keeping with current educational systems (even those that are completely reformed), such people believe that one can draw conclusions only within the causal complex. On the other hand, if they must suffer from deprivation, again they limit their grasp of the situation to the laws of causality. Those who are deprived of the necessities of life can feel, see, and experience what is real only too well; but they are no longer able to penetrate the true causes. While distancing themselves from reality in this way, people become less and less differentiated. Metaphorically, they are, in fact, turning into the poet’s rolling sphere. We will need to gain insight into the ways our universities, colleges, and schools are cultivating the very things we abhor when we encounter them in real life, which, today, is mostly the way it is. People find fault with what they see, but little do they realize that they themselves have sown the seeds of what they criticize. The people of the West see Russia and are appalled by events there, but they do not realize that their western teachers have sown the seeds of those events.

As mentioned before, intellectuality is not an instrument with which we can reach reality, and therefore we cannot educate by its means. If this is true, however, it is important to ask whether we can use the intellect in any positive way in education, and this poignant question challenges us right at the beginning of our lecture course.

We must employ means other than those offered by intellectuality, and the best way to approach this is to look at a certain problem so that we can see it as part of a whole. What are the activities that modern society excels in, and what has become a favorite pastime? Well, public meetings. Instead of quietly familiarizing ourselves with the true nature of a problem, we prefer to attend conferences or meetings and thrash it out there, because intellectuality feels at home in such an environment. Often, it is not the real nature of a problem that is discussed, because it seems this has already been dealt with; rather, discussion continues for its own sake. Such a phenomenon is a typical by-product of intellectuality, which leads us away from the realities of a situation. And so we cannot help feeling that, fundamentally, such meetings or conferences are pervaded by an atmosphere of illusion hovering above the realities of life. While all sorts of things are happening down below at ground level, clever discourses are held about them in multifarious public conferences. I am not trying to criticize or to put down people’s efforts at such meetings; on the contrary, I find that brilliant arguments are often presented on such occasions. Usually the arguments are so convincingly built up that one cannot help but agree with two or even three speakers who, in fact, represent completely opposite viewpoints. From a certain perspective, one can agree with everything that is said. Why? Because it is all permeated by intellectuality, which is incapable of providing realistic solutions. Therefore, life might as well be allowed to assume its own course without the numerous meetings called to deal with problems. Life could well do without all these conferences and debates, even though one can enjoy and admire the ingenuity on display there.

During the past fifty or sixty years, it has been possible to follow very impressive theoretical arguments in the most varied areas of life. At the same time, if life was observed quietly and without prejudice, one could also notice that daily affairs moved in a direction opposite to that indicated by these often brilliant discussions. For example, some time ago, there were discussions in various countries regarding the gold standard, and brilliant speeches were made recommending it. One can certainly say (and I do not feel at all cynical about this but am sincere) that in various parliaments, chambers of commerce, and so on, there were erudite speeches about the benefits of the gold standard. Discriminating and intelligent experts—and those of real practical experience—proved that, if we accepted the gold standard, we would also have free trade, that the latter was the consequence of the former. But look at what really happened; in most countries that adopted the gold standard, unbearable import tariffs were introduced, which means that instead of allowing trade to flow freely it was restricted. Life presented just the opposite of what had been predicted by our clever intellectuals. One must be clear that intellectuality is alien to reality; it makes the human being into a big head. Hence it can never become the basis of a science of education, because it leads away from an understanding of the human being. Because teaching involves a relationship between human beings—between teacher and student—it must be based on human nature. This can be done only by truly knowing human nature. It is the aim of anthroposophy to offer such knowledge.