The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Author's note ¹ Prague, April 4, 1924

I would like to speak of a kind of education and teaching that strives to develop the whole human being, body, soul and spirit, in an equal way. Such an education can only be achieved if the educator is aware of how the physical is formed out of the soul and spiritual during development. For one can only contribute to the formation of a being if one understands the laws of this formation.

Anthroposophy leads to such knowledge of the human being. It does not look at the physical one-sidedly, as it happens in the scientific world view. It rises to a spiritual vision and thereby looks at every age of the human being at the way in which the spirit works on the body of the human being and how the soul lives in the body.

In the face of such a view, clearly distinct epochs arise in the growing human being.

The first epoch runs from birth to the change of teeth, around the seventh year. The appearance of the second teeth is not just a localized process in the human organism. When the first teeth fall out and the second teeth appear, something is happening in the whole organism. Until then, the soul and spirit participate intensively in the formation of the body. During this period of human development, body, soul and spirit are still highly unified.

The whole human being is therefore like a comprehensive sensory organ. What later is concentrated only in the sensory organization, still works in the whole human being at this time. The human being is therefore completely devoted to the activities of the environment, just like a sensory organ. In the most pronounced sense, he is an imitative being. His will reacts reflexively to everything that happens around him.

Therefore, the only way to educate a child at this age is for the educator to behave in such a way that the child can imitate everything they do. This must be taken in the broadest sense. There are imponderables at work between the child and their educator. The child is not only influenced by what it perceives with its external senses in its environment, but it also senses the attitudes, characters, and good and bad intentions of other people from their behavior. Therefore, as an educator, one should cultivate purity of life in the child's environment, right down to one's thoughts and feelings, so that the child can become what one is oneself.

But one should also be aware that one's behavior has an effect not only on the soul but also on the body. What the child absorbs and allows to flow reflexively into his will continues to vibrate in the organization of his body. A teacher with a violent temper can cause the child's physical organization to become brittle, so that in later life it is easily influenced by pathogenic influences. How one educates in this direction will become apparent in later life in the state of health of the person.

The anthroposophical art of education does not focus on the spiritual and soul aspects of education because it wants to develop only these, but because it knows that it can only develop the physical properly if it develops the spiritual, which works on the body, in the right way.

A complete metamorphosis takes place in the child when the teeth change. What was previously absorbed in the physical organization and working in it becomes an independent soul being and the physical is more left to its own forces.

Therefore, when dealing with the soul of the age at which the child is to be educated and taught in a scholastic way, one has to bear in mind that one is dealing with forces that were previously the malleable forces in the body. One only works in an educational and teaching way if one keeps this in mind. The child at this age does not yet absorb with an abstract mind; it wants to experience images, as it has worked with images up to this period of life. This is only achieved if the educator and teacher relate to the child in an artistic way through the soul. They cannot assume that the child already understands what they are communicating. He should work in such a way that the child is immersed in love in the images that he unfolds in an artistic way. He should be the self-evident authority for the child. The child cannot yet absorb what is true, good and beautiful because it understands it, but something must be true, good and beautiful for the child because the beloved teacher or educator presents it as such in front of the child.

Everything in teaching and education must be brought out in a pictorial way. All teaching must be artistically designed. You cannot start with reading and not with the letterforms, which in their present form are foreign to the inner experience of the human being. One must begin with a kind of painting drawing. The child must paint and draw forms that are similar to certain processes and things, like the signs in the pictographic writing of prehistoric peoples. First there must be a picture, which the child fixes from the things and processes of the world. Then one should proceed from the picture to the letter forms, just as pictographic writing developed into abstract sign writing.

Only when the child has progressed from painting to drawing to writing in this way should one move on to reading. This is because only one part of the human being is activated in this process: the ability to comprehend that is tied to the organization of the head. In painting, drawing and writing, a more comprehensive part of the human organization is also involved. This is how you educate the whole person, not just one side of the brain.

All education should be based on the same attitude until the second decisive point in the child's development. This lies in the onset of sexual maturity. Here, too, not only a local part of the human organism undergoes a metamorphosis, but the human being as a whole. It is only at this point that the relationship between the human being and his environment unfolds, which is revealed in the more abstract conceptualization. Only from this point on should one count on the adolescent to grasp things intellectually and freely. Before that, everything should be presented in a pictorial form, and in grasping it, one should count on the child's love of pictures.

Such an education has the whole of human life in mind, not just childhood. It is quite a different matter to occupy the child in a pictorial way, so that what it has absorbed is only later understood, than to develop only the intellectual system one-sidedly at an early stage in so-called visual instruction, which is not true visual instruction because it has no artistic element. What is laid down in childhood only comes to expression in later life. A child who has gone through the pictorial stage at the appropriate age will become a person who can still be fresh and fit for life in old age; a child who is taught in a one-sided way to understand what is often thought to be appropriate for childhood will become a person who ages prematurely and is susceptible to disease-causing living conditions.

• 1. On April 4, 1924, Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture in Prague with this title. The author's note presented here is apparently a text written for press representatives to make it easier for them to report on the lecture. Rudolf Steiner prefaced it with the following note: “This is only an outline of what I will say; the spiritual researcher cannot actually do such things; in a lecture, he draws from the spirit, not from memory, and is therefore misled when his lecture is to be written down verbatim. Please excuse this.”

Ladies and gentlemen! From Herr Molt’s words, you will have inferred out of what spirit he took the initiative to found this Waldorf School. You will also have gathered from his words that its founding springs, not from any mundane intention, but from a call that resounds very clearly from the evolution of humanity in our times in particular. And yet, so little of this call is heard. Humanity’s evolution resounds with much that can be encompassed within the framework of rebuilding society, of giving social form to humanity’s lot. Thus there is something in this call, above all else, that must not be disregarded: the issue of education. We can rest assured that the only people who hear this call for social restructuring correctly amid the chaos of what our present time demands of us will be those who pursue its consequences all the way to the issue of education. But we will certainly be on the wrong track if we hear this social call in a way that makes us want to call a halt to all our social striving when faced with the issue of education, preferring to fashion the facilities of our educational system on the basis of social principles, whatever they may be, that have not also sprung from a renewal of the source of education.

For me, ladies and gentlemen, it has been a sacred obligation to take up what lay in our friend Herr Molt’s intentions in founding the Waldorf School, and to do so in a way that enabled this school to be fashioned out of what we believe to have won from spiritual science in our present times. This school is really intended to be integrated into what the evolution of humanity requires of us at present and in the near future. Actually, in the end, everything that flows into the educational system from such requirements constitutes a threefold sacred obligation.

Of what use would be all of the human community’s feeling, understanding, and working if these could not condense into the sacred responsibility taken on by teachers in their specific social communities when they embark on the ultimate community service with children, with people who are growing up and in the becoming? In the end, everything we are capable of knowing about human beings and about the world only really becomes fruitful when we can convey it in a living way to those who will fashion society when we ourselves can no longer contribute our physical work.

Everything we can accomplish artistically only achieves its highest good when we let it flow into the greatest of all art forms, the art in which we are given, not a dead medium such as sound or color, but living human beings, incomplete and imperfect, whom we are to transform to some extent, through art and education, into accomplished human beings.

And is it not ultimately a very holy and religious obligation to cultivate and educate the divine spiritual element that manifests anew in every human being who is born? Is this educational service not a religious service in the highest sense of the word? Is it not so that all the holiest stirrings of humanity, which we dedicate to religious feeling, must come together in our service at the altar when we attempt to cultivate the divine spiritual aspect of the human being whose potentials are revealed in the growing child?

Science that comes alive!
Art that comes alive!
Religion that comes alive!
In the end, that is what education is.

If we understand teaching and child-rearing in this sense, we will not be inclined to carelessly criticize what is imposed from the other side as the principles, goals, and foundations of the art of education. However, it does seem to me that no proper insight into what our modern culture demands of the art of education is possible unless we are aware of the great need for a complete spiritual renewal in our times, unless we can really work our way through to understanding that in future, something must flow into what we do as teachers and educators that is quite different from what can thrive in the sphere of what is now known as “scientific education.” Nowadays, after all, future teachers, people who will have a formative influence on human beings, are introduced to the attitudes and way of thinking of contemporary science. Now, it has never occurred to me to denigrate contemporary science. I am full of regard for all the triumphs it has achieved, and will continue to achieve for the sake of humanity’s evolution, through a scientific viewpoint and method that are based on understanding nature. But for that very reason, it seems to me, what comes from the contemporary scientific and intellectual attitude cannot be fruitfully applied to the art of education. Its greatness does not lie in dealing with human beings or in insight into the human heart and mind. Great technical advances are possible as a result of what springs from our contemporary intellectual attitude, and on that same basis it is also possible to develop the basic convictions of a free humanity in the context of society. However, it is not possible—grotesque as this may still sound to the majority of people today—to take a scientific viewpoint that has gradually come to the conclusion that the human heart is a pump and the human body a mechanical device, to use the feelings and sensations that proceed from this science to inspire us to become artistic educators of growing human beings. It is impossible to develop the living art of education out of what makes our times so great in mastering dead technology.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is where a new spirit must enter the evolution of humanity—the spirit we seek through our spiritual science, the spirit that leads us away from seeing the living human being as a carrier of implements that pump and suck, as a mechanism that can only be understood according to the methods of natural science. Into this intellectual attitude of humanity must come the conviction that spirit is alive in all natural existence, and that we are capable of recognizing this spirit. This is why, in the course that preceded this Waldorf venture, in the course intended for teachers, we attempted to found an anthropology or science of education that will develop into an art of education and a study of humanity that will once again raise what is alive in the human being from the dead. The dead—and this is the secret of our dying contemporary culture—is what makes people knowing, what gives them insight when they take it up as natural law. However, it also weakens the feeling that is the source of teachers’ inspiration and enthusiasm, and it weakens the will. It does not grant human beings a harmonious place within society as a whole. We are looking for a science that is not mere science, that is itself life and feeling. When such a science streams into the human soul as knowledge, it will immediately develop the power to be active as love and to stream forth as effective, working will, as work that has been steeped in soul warmth, and especially as work that applies to the living, to the growing human being. We need a new scientific attitude. Above all, we need a new spirit for the entire art of education.

Ladies and gentlemen, if we think about contemporary education and its needs, we will not be too quick to criticize what has been undertaken with the best of intentions on the basis of all kinds of worthwhile impulses, both in the present and in the recent past. What beautiful impulses underlay the efforts to move the educational system out of the chaos and deadening aspects of city life to the country, to rural boarding schools! We must acknowledge all the good will that was expended in this direction. However, ladies and gentlemen, if the living spirit that makes the human being comprehensible to human beings, that shows people how to deal with the growing human being, does not enter these rural boarding schools, then what was dead in the cities remains dead in the country.

People are now considering how to draft a constitution for a school so that the teachers” authority would no longer work in a deadening way. However, if they are unable to inject the real living spirit that makes human beings human into these newly structured schools, then in spite of all their socio-educational theories these educational establishments will remain something dead, something that cannot lead the present generation into the future in the right way.

The conviction that the call resounding from humanity’s evolution demands a new spirit for our present age, and that we must carry this spirit into the school system first and foremost, is what underlies the efforts of this Waldorf School, which is intended to be a model along these lines. An effort has been made to listen to what is subconsciously present in the demands of the best of those who have attempted to work for healing and regeneration of the art of education in the recent past. In this context I had to think of explanations given by Theodor Vogt, a student of Herbart’s and a prolific thinker, and by his successor Rein, professor of education at Jena.¹ Their thoughts seem to me to spring from a deeper feeling for what is lacking in our educational system at present. Vogt and Rein suspected, although they did not clearly say it, that in order to really be able to educate, it would be desirable to know how children actually develop in the early years between infancy and the time they enter school around the seventh year of life, and above all how they develop during the primary school years, from their sixth or seventh year of life up to the time in their fourteenth or fifteenth year that impacts so heavily on the growing person’s entire development. Insightful instructors of education ask whether we can also understand the kinds of forces at work in human nature, which presents us with a different intellectual, emotional, and bodily face, if not every month, then at least every year. As long as we have no real science of history, so these educators say, we will also not be able to know how an individual human being develops, because the individual human being presents in concentrated form what humanity as a whole has gone through in the course of its historical development.

People like the ones I mentioned felt that modern science is basically a failure when it comes to saying anything about the great laws that prevail throughout history, or to grasping what wells up out of the great all-encompassing laws of human evolution for us at the present moment. We would be attempting to do something very foolish if we tried to understand individual human beings on the basis of the composition of the nutrients they take in from their first breath until their last. However, this is basically what we are trying to do in the case of history, in understanding humanity’s entire evolution. In the case of an individual, we must understand how a physiological process such as the change of teeth intervenes in development, for example. We must know all the mysterious things that are going on in the body as a result of a completely new physiology that is not yet available to modern science. But we must also know what is accompanying this transformation on an emotional level. We must know about the metamorphoses of human nature. In the case of an individual, we will at least not deny, although we may be powerless to fully recognize the fact, that a person experiences metamorphoses or transformations on the basis of his or her inmost being. We do not admit to this with regard to the historical development of humanity as a whole. The same methods are applied to antiquity, the Middle Ages, and recent times. We do not accept that great leaps have taken place in humanity’s historical evolution. Looking back over historical developments, we find the last leap in the fifteenth century. Humanity’s ways of feeling, conceptualizing, and willing, as they have developed in more recent times and as we know them now, have only taken on this subtle character among civilized humanity since the fifteenth century. How this civilized humanity differs from that of the tenth or eighth century is similar to how a twelve-year-old child differs from a child who has not yet reached his or her seventh year. And what happened by way of transformation in the fifteenth century proceeded from the innermost nature of humanity, just as the change of teeth as a lawful development proceeds from the innermost nature of the individual. And everything we are living with now in the twentieth century—our striving for individuality, the striving for new social forms, the striving to develop the personality—is only a consequence of what the inner forces of history have brought up since the time in question.

We can understand how individuals attempt to take their place in the present only if we understand the course that humanity’s development has taken, as described above. People like Vogt and Rein who have given a lot of thought to education and who have also been involved practically in such things know that the powerlessness of our modern art of education is a result of the powerlessness of modern historical insight. Just as it is impossible to educate human beings with a science for which the heart has become a pump, it is also impossible to find one’s place as a teacher in a system of education based on a historical understanding that does not draw on the living spirit of humanity or recognize the metamorphoses that have taken place between the Middle Ages and modern times. We are still involved with the consequences of what began there.

Regardless of the fact that we tend to make fun of prophecy in this day and age, it must be said that in a certain respect teachers must be prophets. After all, they are dealing with what is meant to live in the generation to come, not in the present.

From the insightful vantage point of real, true historical happenings, ladies and gentlemen, such things often look somewhat different than they do to modern observers of humanity. In many respects, these observers often have a very superficial grasp of what is meant to come to life in the science and art of education. Today the question is being debated of whether people should be educated more in line with what fosters human nature itself—that is, whether a more humanistic education is preferable—or whether they should be provided with an education that prepares them for their future careers and to fit into the context of the state, and so on. For those who attempt an insight into the depths of such things, discussions of this sort are verbal dialectics that take place on the surface. Why is that? Those with insight into the generation to come get a clear feeling that individuals, in what they work at, think, and feel, and in what they strive toward for the future as adults, emanate from the womb of history. Careers and state context and the places people can make for themselves—all this originated in these people themselves. It is not something external that is superimposed on them. We cannot ask whether we should have the individual being or the outer career more in view when we educate people, because if seen rightly, these are one and the same thing!

If we can develop a living understanding of the careers and people that are out there, then we can also develop an understanding of what previous generations that are still alive and at work today brought up out of the womb of humanity into the present time.

Separating education toward a career and education toward being an individual is not sufficient when we want to work as teachers and educators. There needs to be something living in us that is not outwardly visible, neither in a career nor in the context of the state nor anywhere else in the outer world. What must be alive in us is what the generations to come will bring to life’s outer level. What must live in us is a prophetic merging with the future evolution of humanity. The educational and artistic feeling, thinking and willing of a faculty stands and falls with this merging. A living theory and methodology of education for the present must strive to have flow into the faculty what can be known about the growing human being. This is like a soul and spiritual life-blood that becomes art without first having been knowledge. What is to enter the childlike heart, mind, and intellect can proceed only from this living methodology.

I cannot present our educational principles in detail today. I only wanted to point out how the art of education as it is meant to be in the present and future is to take its place in a living spiritual grasp of the entire nature of the world and of humanity.

We talk a lot today about the social forms of humanity’s future. Why is it always so difficult to take steps to bring this future about? It is difficult because in our times, antisocial drives and instincts are present in the evolution of humanity and work against social striving.

When we look back at patriarchal times, to a time when humanity led a more instinctive life than is the case in our civilization, we may have many reasons to be proud of the accomplishments of the present. However, the impulses of earlier times were more social than ours; we are now governed by antisocial impulses. These antisocial impulses, however, must be eliminated from the art of education above all else. More precise observers will note how our educational system has gradually developed into an antisocial system. However, the only art of education that can be fruitful is one in which the teacher’s effect on the child results from a commonality of feeling from the very moment they enter the classroom. The child’s soul and the teacher’s soul must become one through a mysterious and subconscious bond that passes from the teacher’s spirit to the child’s. This gives the school its social character. For this to happen, the teacher must be able to put him or herself in the child’s position.

What do we often do nowadays? We make an effort to formulate our thoughts in ways that will enable us to explain something to the children. Perhaps we say to them, “Look, here is a chrysalis. A butterfly is going to come out of it.” We may show the children the butterfly and the chrysalis and may also demonstrate how the one develops out of the other. Perhaps we then go on to say, “Your immortal souls are at rest in your bodies just as the butterfly is at rest in the chrysalis. And just as the butterfly leaves the chrysalis one day, so too your immortal souls will one day leave your bodies when you go through the gate of death.” We have thought of an image from nature that we use in order to make something clear to the children, but we know that we have only used a comparison, and that we ourselves have a different way of understanding the whole thing. We have made an effort to straighten something out for the children. However, according to a mysterious law, we cannot really accomplish anything in the lesson if we straighten things out in this way. It is really only possible to convey to the children what we ourselves believe in the depths of our souls. Only when we have wrestled our way through to the feeling that the image of the butterfly and chrysalis is no mere cooked-up comparison, but one presented to us by divine spiritual nature itself, only when we can believe in the truth of the image in the way that the children are meant to believe it, only in that instant are we able to convey living spirit to them.

It is never permissible for us to merely give lip service to something, although this plays such a great role in cultural development today. We must speak and be able to work out of the spirit of truth. This is possible only when we are connected, deeply and intimately connected, to everything human. Even if we are already white-haired, we must be able to unite with what growing human beings are in accordance with their essential nature. We must have an inner understanding of the growing human being. Can we still do that today? No, we cannot, or we would not sit ourselves down in laboratories and practice experimental psychology in order to work out the rules by which human understanding and human memory work. If teachers see these superficial methods and procedures as the essential thing in learning to understand the human being, they kill off their living intuitive connection and relationship to human beings. I know that educational experiments and experimental psychology are useful to teachers in a certain way. However, I also know that these are only symptoms of what they are supposed to be most useful for, and I know that we have lost the direct soul-route from person to person and are looking for it again through outer observation in laboratories. We have become inwardly estranged from what is human and are looking for it in outer ways. However, if we want to be real teachers and educators, we must be reunited with the human aspect. We must foster the whole person within us, and then this whole person will be related to what we have to develop in the child in educational and artistic ways. What we as educators gain from experimental study and observation, which are often promoted as the basis of the science of education nowadays, is comparable to the effort of trying to understand how we eat and drink on the basis of the study of nutrition and its applications to the human being. We do not need a science of how one eats and drinks, we need a healthily developed sense of taste and healthy organs, and then we will eat and drink properly. Nor do we need a theory of education based on experimental psychology. What we as educators need is an awakening of our living human nature, which will experience in itself the whole of the child to which it makes a spiritual connection.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, we want to create this Waldorf School on the basis of a new spirit. You will also have noticed what this school is nof meant to become. In any case, it is not meant to become a school to promote a particular philosophy. Anyone who says that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is founding the Waldorf School, and that it is now going to inject its philosophy into this school, will not be speaking the truth. I am stating this now, on the opening day. We are not interested in imposing our “dogmas,” our principles, or the content of our world-view on young people. We are not trying to bring about a dogmatic form of education. We are striving to turn what we have been able to learn from spiritual science into a living act of education. We are striving to include in our instructional methods a way of dealing with individual souls that can originate in a living spiritual science. Dead science can give rise only to knowledge; living spiritual science will give rise to instructional methodology and practical applications in the soul-spiritual sense. We strive to teach, to be able to educate. With regard to all this, we are fundamentally aware of the responsibility our dear friend Herr Molt spoke of earlier. We have pledged that the various religious denominations will be able to provide religious instruction in the school and to introduce the principles of their world-views, and we will honor this promise. It remains to be seen whether the art form we want to introduce provisorily and in a modest way will encounter as little interference from them as the world-views which they introduce will encounter from us.² We know that before humankind can acquire a correct insight into issues involving world-views and their interrelationships, people must understand that an art of education in the pedagogical and methodological sense can result from a spiritual world-view. Thus, we are not going to found a school on the basis of a particular world-view. What we are attempting to create in the Waldorf School is a school based on the art of education.

To you parents of the first children to be sent to this school, let me say that you are pioneering not only a personal human intention, but also a cultural challenge of our times, and that you will be able to grasp in the right way what is now meant to happen with regard to the Waldorf School only if you feel yourselves to be pioneers of this sort.

It is too soon to speak to the children in words as rational as those I spoke to their parents, but we will promise these children that what we are conveying to their parents in words will come to them in the form of actions—actions that will help them find their place in life so that they will be a match for the difficult challenges facing the generations to come. These challenges will be difficult, and what we today, especially in Central Europe, are experiencing as a time of great troubles is only the beginning of greater troubles to come. But just as the greatest things for human beings have always emerged from pain and suffering, so too a true, reality-based human art of education will emerge from these troubles. By seeking the source and foundation of our school system in the whole human being, by trying to build it up on the basis of the whole human being, we want to insert the social issue of education into the overall social issue of our times.

Comprehensive school! That is what our times are saying. And the art of teaching that draws its ability from the whole human being, as has been indicated here, will appear only in a comprehensive school. If humanity is to be able to live in social justice in the future, then people must first educate their children in a socially appropriate way. Through the Waldorf School, we hope to make a small contribution toward bringing this about.

In spite of the best will, we may be able to accomplish only a portion of what we set out to do, but we hope that the strength of the effort may not be exhausted in our feeble attempts, and that it will find successors. For we are convinced that although a feeble attempt may fail due to opposition and lack of understanding, the central core of this effort will find successors. When a real social art of education finds its way into the consciousness of all of humanity, which is what carries the faculty and the group of children to be educated, then the school will be incorporated into our overall life in society in the right way.

May the Waldorf School make a small contribution toward this great goal.

• 1. Theodor Vogt, 1835-1906. Wilhelm Rein, 1847-1929, author of Pädagogik im Grundriss [An Outline of Pedagogy].
• 2. Unlike in the U.S., in Germany it is even now quite standard for state-supported schools to make space available in the school and time in the school week for religious instruction, with teachers supplied by the churches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dear children! Today, now that we are at the end of our first school year here in our dear Waldorf School, let us inscribe on our souls something of why we are actually in this school. What does it mean that our dear friend Herr Molt, together with Frau Molt, founded this Waldorf School for you, my dear children, and for humankind? What does it mean that you come here every morning in order to learn something good? What does it mean, above all, that there are people who are taking great pains to guide you into life so that you will grow up to be good and capable people?

You know, my dear children, that I have often come here during this school year, and in each class I always asked you a question, a question that comes straight from my heart. I often asked you, “Do you love your teachers?” [“Yes!” shout the children.] And you know, you always answered me as warmly as you just did today.

Now there will be weeks in which you do not see your teachers for a while, and so now I want to say something different to you. I hope your hearts will often answer this question during vacation. Now I would like to say to you, “Now that you are not going to see your teachers, learn to be grateful to them.” In the same way that you have learned, tried hard to learn to love your teachers, now learn to feel firmly in your heart that you are grateful to your teachers, so that when you ask yourselves, “Am I grateful to my teachers?” you can honestly and heartily say, “Yes, I am grateful.”

Now there is something else I want to say to you. You see, my dear children, here with us it should not happen that as Waldorf School students you say, “Hey, school is over now; it’s vacation. When we'e in school, we have to work hard and learn, but now we can be lazy. We don't have to do anything. We'e glad that we can be lazy.” You know that is not what we want to say. We should say something else; we should say, “Yes, it's a beautiful day. During the day we experience many beautiful things along with some that are sad and painful, but what would human beings be if they could not experience through their senses everything that divine spirituality has put into the world, everything that is so great and beautiful and true.”

But unless we can also sleep and rest, we cannot use our ears and eyes properly to hear and see all the beautiful things divine spirituality has put into the world. Think about how after enjoying the day, you have to rest at night, and then in the morning you are strengthened again. Your eyes see better and your ears hear better. If you had to stay awake all the time, you would surely not be able to enjoy and learn about life in all its truth and beauty the way divine spirituality made it.

This is also how it is in life as a whole. You should not think, “Now that it’s vacation we can be lazy;” you should think, “All of what we received from our dear teachers, everything that humankind has learned so that individuals can know it—we received all this, and now we need a little rest, so that when we have rested, we can go back into our classes and be fresher and more lively. In fact, we will each go into the next grade; with new forces we will once again take into our hearts what our teachers will give us through their love and hard work, what humanity has learned in service to humanity.” This is how we should think of it—that we are resting during the vacation to get strong again for the whole new school year.

Then, my dear children, I would like to tell you a little about what it means that this Waldorf School of ours exists, and what it means that we are here in this school. You see, the person you are going to grow up to be, this person has a physical body, a soul and a spirit. You each have a body, a soul, and a spirit. And when a person is very little and is born into the world, this body and soul and spirit are all very incomplete. In you, they are still incomplete, but they are supposed to become more complete. Here in the Waldorf School your body will be shaped to become skilled at everything a person has to do in life. Your teachers have worked hard at this on your behalf; you have been introduced to eurythmy, for example, which works to make your body very skillful in life, and many other things have been brought to you so that you will become people who are skillful and capable and strong in their bodies. When you are small, you are fairly clumsy. You have to become more skillful. It is the same with the soul which is in each one of you. But it has to be developed so that it can send out threads in all directions for life. This is like unwinding the strands from a tangled ball of yarn—the threads for your life have to be untangled from your soul. This is how the soul develops, and this happens for you so that you become good and capable with regard to your forces for life. Good strong forces for life have to be fetched up out of your souls. And your spirit—yes, my dear children, if we did not educate the spirit, we would not be human beings at all. The spirit must be educated so that we become very good and capable human beings.

Now you see, when a person has worked all day or when a child has played and learned well and then sleeps, sometimes dreams come to them from their sleep. Most of you have experienced dreams. Sometimes they are very beautiful dreams, sometimes ugly dreams. And now you are going to go rest during vacation. Then something will come to you that can be compared to a dream. You see, during vacation, when you think back to when you were in school, it may be that you think, “Oh, I had nice teachers, I learned a lot, I was glad to be able to go to school.” And when you think that, those are beautiful dreams during your vacation. And when you think, “Oh, I should have been less lazy; I didn' like to go to school,” and so forth, then you are having bad dreams during vacation. Think back often during this vacation to when you were in school; for example, think like this: “My thoughts are drawn back to the Waldorf School, where my body is shaped for skillful activity, where my soul is developed to be strong in life, where my spirit develops so that I can be truly human.” When you think often like this about how your body is being shaped, your soul developed and your spirit educated, you will send yourself a good dream for your time of rest, and then your vacation time will also contribute something to making you a good and capable person in life.

You know, when I came in today, one of your good little fellow students gave me something. Let’s see what it is. Look, this is what he gave me—a washcloth and a flower! Now I guess I must wash myself and dry my hands, and perhaps the flower is meant to say that your lessons are something that blooms as beautifully as this nice little white flower. [Rudolf Steiner holds up the washcloth.] And perhaps this could remind us that what we learn here is also something we can use to wash away everything in our souls that is incomplete, all bad thoughts and feelings that want to make us be lazy and not pay attention. I would like to give you each a little spiritual cloth so you can wash away all the laziness and lack of hard work and inattentiveness, and so on. So I am very glad that you have given me this little symbol and that I can show you how to use it to wash away a whole lot of what should not be in your souls.

And look at this little flower! You have learned many things here that you needed to learn, and what you learned is so many little flowers like this in your soul. Think about this when you remind yourselves that your thoughts are hurrying back to the Waldorf School where your bodies are trained to be skillful, your soul is developed to be strong for life, and your spirit unfolds so that you can be properly human—and think about how flowers like this are being cultivated in your soul day after day, and how grateful you should be for that. Everything in life can be of service to us and help us think about what is right. That, dear children, is what I wanted to say to you.

Think about each other, too! You have gotten to know each other and also, I hope, learned to love each other. Think about each other very, very often, and think about how good it was that you came together so that your teachers could help you grow into good and capable people. Don't think, “Now we can be lazy,” but think, “We need to rest, and when we have rested we will come back and be fresh and ready to receive what our dear teachers bring to us.”

And now, although you will not yet be able to understand it, I would like to say a few words in your presence to your dear teachers, who have now put all the diligent work of the Waldorf School behind them, and I would like to shake their hands. First of all, I would like to shake hands with Herr Molt and Frau Molt for having created this Waldorf School for us so that we can try to do something for humanity in its dire straits. My dear friends—as I said, I am speaking to the teachers, but you children can also hear it and can remember it later—the years behind us have been bitter ones for humanity, years in which people beat and bloodied and shot each other. There are still other bitter things in front of us, for the times still look very bad. But then the Waldorf teachers were the first to find the courage to appear here and to start to believe something that I am convinced that people today must start to believe above all else. The Waldorf teachers came here and said, “Yes, we have to work on the children so that when we are old, something will have happened to the children that can prevent unhappiness and bitterness of this sort from overcoming people.” This requires a certain courage and it requires hard work, but above all it requires something that awakens in human hearts the possibility of not sleeping, but of staying awake. That, dear Waldorf teachers, is why I want to shake your hands so warmly. If many people would wake up and look at the decision you have come to instead of sleeping through it, if what happens here would find successors, then you would realize that you were the first to work at something that is so very necessary for our future as human beings.

Dear children, when your teachers came into school each morning, they were people who clearly grasped the task of our times and devoted themselves diligently to what was required of them. And it was always a warm moment for me when I asked you, “Do you love your teachers?” and you so heartily answered, “Yes!” During the vacation I will also wonder whether you are grateful to your teachers. But you, dear Waldorf teachers, let me warmly shake your hands. I thank you in the name of the spirit of humanity which we are trying to cultivate throughout our spiritual movement. In this spirit, I shake your hands for everything you have accomplished on behalf of the future ideals of humanity. Today is the day for us to be able to remember these things, and it is the day when you children should feel how grateful you ought to be to these teachers of yours.

There is still something I would like to say today. Alongside everything we have learned here, which the individual teachers have demonstrated so beautifully, there is something else present, something that I would like to call the spirit of the Waldorf School. It is meant to lead us to true piety again. Basically, it is the spirit of Christianity that wafts through all our rooms, that comes from every teacher and goes out to every child, even when it seems that something very far from religion is being taught, such as arithmetic, for example. Here it is always the spirit of Christ that comes from the teacher and is to enter the hearts of the children—this spirit that is imbued with love, real human love. This is why I want you children to feel that not only have you learned something here, you have also gradually learned to feel what it is for one person to love another. And so now as you are going on vacation, I would like you to think of all your schoolmates with a warm-hearted “Until we meet again! Until we meet again, when we come back strengthened into these rooms, when we can once again work with our teachers on what will make us into good and capable people.”

You see, dear children, you must consider how life here in this school is connected to the whole of human life. When people get old, they are seventy or eighty years old. Life brings joy and sorrow, beauty and ugliness. When we get old, we are seventy or eighty, as I said. We can compare our life to a day with twenty-four hours. If this day represents our life, then a year that we spend in this day of life would be about twenty minutes long, and your eight years in primary school would be something like two to three hours out of your whole life. So the time that you spend in the Waldorf School makes up two or three hours out of your whole life. And when we go through the other twenty hours we have for living, for working, for becoming aware of the spirit, for doing things with other people so that something good can happen in the world—when we go through these hours, it can be a real comfort for our hearts, a real strength for our lives, if we are able to realize that the two or three hours of life we spent in primary school gave us something for our whole life, gave us strength and spirit and the ability to work.

Let us say this to ourselves, my dear children, now on this last day of our first school year in the Waldorf School, but during the vacation, let us remember something else again and again. I would like to write it in your souls so that it blooms there like this cute little flower, so that you think of it often: “Let my thoughts hurry back to my dear Waldorf School, where my body is trained to work and to do good, where my soul is developed to be strong for life, where my spirit is awakened to be truly good and human.” We want you all to become such good and capable people someday, when you are grown up and out there in life.

I wanted to speak to you from heart to heart today. I wanted to say this to you out of love, and I say it to you so that you can take note of it. Once again, think of your thoughts hurrying back to your dear Waldorf School, where your body is shaped to work capably in life, where your soul is developed for strength in life, where your spirit is awakened to true humanity. That is how it should be. And so now we will leave each other, and when we come back, we will go on as we have done before.

Afterwards you will receive your reports.¹ Whoever gets a good report should not take it as an indication that it is now all right to be lazy, and whoever gets a bad report need not immediately start to cry, but should think about trying harder next year.

Out of the spirit of the Waldorf School, shake your teachers’ hands and say to each other, “We will be back in fall to learn to do good work, to develop our souls to be strong for life, and to awaken our spirit to true humanity.”

And so, until we meet again!

• 1. At the end of the school year, instead of receiving grades, the children received brief characterizations of their behavior and of how they worked.

Dear friends;¹ dear ladies and gentlemen! You have chosen to entrust your children’s education to the Waldorf School, which has now been in existence for more than a year. If we want to communicate the Waldorf School’s methods and manner of instruction in a few indications—we do not have time for more than that tonight—it is best to start by mentioning one thing that we need in the Waldorf School much more than in any other school. In this school more that in any other, we need to work with the parents in a relationship of trust if we want to move forward in the right way. Our teachers absolutely depend on finding this relationship of trust with the children’s parents, since our school is fundamentally based on spiritual freedom—by which I do not mean, of course, any phantasmagorical spiritual license on the part of the children. Our school takes its place in our overall culture as an independent school in the best sense of the word. Just think about the otherwise compulsory integration of school life into public life by the civil authorities. Schools have been conceived wholly in the context of the state establishment which they are intended to serve exclusively, supplying the state with human beings of the sort it requires. That this is not also in the interest of truly healthy individual development is the recognition on which the Waldorf School is founded. The Waldorf School is intended to serve healthy human development above all else. All the instruction and education taking place in the Waldorf School are to be built up on the basis of healthy human development.

As you know, people today often say that a child’s individuality should be developed in school, that children should not be force-fed, that we should draw out what is present in each child. This is a very nice principle. There are many, many equally nice principles in the pedagogical literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In an abstract respect, this pedagogical literature, which is supposed to teach teachers how to teach, is not bad at all. An extraordinary number of good things have been said about education by all kinds of humanitarian people, but we cannot say that these good intentions correspond in all instances to the actual practice of education, as we may call it. And that is what it all depends on for us in the Waldorf School—on building up a real, true practice of education. And I actually do believe that it will be possible to arrive at a true practice of education through cultivating the spiritual life that takes place in our circles in particular, for this is especially intended to enable us to understand the human being better than any other way of cultivating the spiritual life could do. And this applies not only to the adult human being, but also to the child, to the human being in the becoming.

People often believe that they understand growing human beings in the right way. And at least as a general rule—and in fact this is much more often the case than those who are not closely involved with children believe—there is indeed a human relationship in which a very good understanding of the developing human being is present, and that is the relationship of a father or mother to the child. The relationship of a father and mother to their child is a natural one. It is one in which they grow into living with the child, and they have a certain feeling for the right thing to do. Of course they may also do the wrong thing at times, but that is because of more or less unnatural circumstances, because of an unnatural development in their proper fatherly or motherly feeling.

However, when the child grows up and enters the time when the change of teeth begins, then what home can be for the child is no longer enough. If this were not the case, then we would not need to have schools. But at this point the child must go to school, and then the important thing is for the child to receive an education that can guide him or her as a developing individual toward life, consciously and out of an understanding of the nature of the child. In order for this to take place, however, a real understanding of the human being must be alive in the child’s teacher. And a real understanding of the human being actually requires the teacher to be active in the noblest of the sciences, the science of the soul. Because the human being is fashioned out of the entire world, a real knowledge of the human being requires us to look into the whole world with a free and penetrating gaze. Someone who is not sufficiently warmly interested in knowing about the world to focus on it will also not be capable of insight into the human heart and mind, and especially not into the aspect of this that is meant to make a child develop into a complete human being. Anyone who is incapable of feeling everything that exists in the world as the physical element, everything that pervades and governs the world as the soul element, and everything that is contained in it as the spiritual element, will not be able to understand the nature of the child, because there is still present in the child something of the mysterious working of what is brought along when a human being descends from quite different worlds, from spiritual worlds, to the parents from whom he or she takes on a body.

When we observe a child in the first years of life, from week to week and from month to month, it is really the most wonderful thing in the world’s becoming. The world’s most wonderful secrets are revealed when we observe how something that is at first indefinite grows out spiritually through the child’s physical being, how indeterminate features that still bear traces of the merely natural are shaped by the inner element of spirit and soul, how the soul gradually works its way out through the eyes that gaze into life with ever-increasing understanding. It is wonderful to see how children become one with their surroundings, how they recreate almost everything they see there in all that they do in their still clumsy fashion, and how they finally grow together with their surroundings in learning to speak. The first seven years of their life are totally dedicated to growing together with their surroundings in this way. When the children are admitted to school, around the time when they are approaching the change of teeth, then everything we undertake with them must be based on this knowledge of the human being.

However, there is also something else on which it must be based. We may believe that we understand the nature of the growing human being. However, what induces a child to read, write, and do arithmetic must be drawn from the very nature of the growing person, and here we soon notice what a complicated thing it is to truly understand the human being. In our teacher-training courses we may have learned methodically and well how to teach reading and writing and so forth. Then we can make an effort to apply what we learned there, and in practical terms we can even do very well up to a certain point, and yet we achieve nothing in our teaching unless a certain relationship exists between teacher and child, a relationship of real mutual love. That is what we really try to cultivate in our Waldorf School as something that is pedagogically and methodologically just as necessary as mere outer skill. We want an atmosphere of love to be alive in every class, and for instruction to take place on the basis of this atmosphere of love.

But this love cannot be mandated. It is not accomplished by giving sermons on this type of love in teacher-training institutes. Love cannot be taught just like that. But as teachers, we actually need more love than we need for the other aspects of our lives. You see, the amount of love people usually have for their children, no matter how many they may have, is small compared to what a teacher needs. No one has as many children of their own as a teacher usually has to teach in a class. As adults we develop the love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man, and this is also something that is meant to be kept within a narrow circle, because it is not good if love of this sort is divided up among too many personalities. So the love that flows from an individual out into life is always meant to be distributed among relatively few people. Of course we are supposed to love all human beings, but that is kept within certain limits. To include the millions is only possible to a certain extent.

However, it is absolutely necessary for a teacher to have the same degree of love, although possibly in a somewhat different way, for the children in his or her class that parents have for their children or a man for the woman he loves or a woman for the man she loves. It must be the same love and just as intense. It is transferred more to a soul and spiritual level, but it must be present. We are not born with this love; we must acquire it from elsewhere, from a science, from knowledge. This science, however, is not as dry and abstract as today’s natural sciences or scientific activity in general, whose dryness and solemnity have rubbed off on education. We can have love of this sort only as a result of a science that truly deals with the spirit and reveals the spirit, for where a science provides spirit, it also provides love. Thus the cultivation of the spiritual life, the spiritual science, that has led to founding the Waldorf School provides the teachers with this real love. We need this love; everything must be based on it. Even the school’s most matter-of-course methods must be based on it. Above all else, the spirit of understanding the world and the spirit of love must be present in instruction as it is practiced in the Waldorf School, in the education that we want to provide. And this cannot be accomplished with cliches and generalities. It can be accomplished only if we know how to apply in detail and over and over again what we know about the development of the child from month to month and from year to year.

In ordinary education, people nowadays immediately begin to present the child with something that paralyzes the individual’s entire healthy development. Let us look back on the development of humanity for a moment. There have been times—and we cannot be so arrogant as to imagine that people in those times were stupid and childish—when people did not yet learn to read and write in the modern sense. At most, they learned a primitive form of arithmetic. Today we learn to read and write, but we do not learn reading and writing as they first developed out of nonreading and nonwriting; we learn something that has become very rational and conventionalized. When we do not hesitate to teach children the reading and writing that are now customary in our dealings with each other, we are basically using very artificial means to introduce them to something that is foreign to them. When children come to us in the first grade, we must be careful not to forcefeed them with what adults are supposed to be able to do. And now I am going to speak of something that our dear friend Herr Molt already pointed to—that in the Waldorf School children learn to read and write somewhat later than in other schools. There are good reasons for this. In many respects, it is a mistake to learn to read and write as early as this happens in other schools. The point is not to make the children acquire certain capabilities as quickly as possible, but rather to teach them to be good and capable people later on in life, people who do not make life difficult for themselves. Outer circumstances can make life difficult enough for many people as it is; we do not need an inner feeling of weakness or inability messing up our lives. We must find a method of teaching reading and writing very carefully and on the basis of the children’s natural tendencies and skills.

Let me just mention that we start by first letting the children draw certain forms from which the forms contained in the letters of the alphabet are developed. We let the children get into reading by starting with writing, because the more we start from something that has its basis in the entire human being, the better it is for the children’s development. In reading and writing as we adults use them to interact with each other or to learn about things belonging to spiritual or other aspects of life, the signs for letters, the signs constituting our words, have become something very conventionalized. Ancient peoples still used a pictorial script that contained something concrete. There was still a connection between what was used to express something in writing and what was being expressed. In our letters, however, it is no longer possible to recognize anything of what is being expressed. Thus if we simply teach children these letters as the end result of a long process of development, we are forcing them into something that is foreign to them. Instead, we must lead the children in a sensible way from things they enjoy drawing, from something that comes from their whole being, to the shapes of the letters. Only afterwards can we develop reading on the basis of this.

I have tried to use this example to show you the thrust of our art of education—to really read in growing human beings what we are meant to do with them. Those who understand human nature are well aware of how things are connected in life. We often do not observe much of what is most important in life. We often find people—and today they are much more numerous than we believe—who take no real pleasure in anything, who tire very easily, and who grow old before their time—at least inwardly with regard to their souls—and so on. We are not clear as to the origin of this. It comes from the fact that as children in the sixth, seventh and eighth years of life, they were not taught writing and reading in the right way. Those who understand human nature know that children who learned to read in the right way, who were not force-fed at age six or seven but learned to read and write naturally, may master reading and writing a bit later, but they will take along what they gained from learning to read and write as a real gift that they will have for the rest of their lives.

If we drum it into them in all kinds of artificial ways that disregard their natural tendencies and developmental possibilities, we can get children to read and write at seven-and-a-half, but in many respects we will have crippled these children’s souls for life. In contrast, if we have gone about it in the right way, the children only learn to read and write at age eight, but life forces develop in them as they are learning. That is what we want. While the children are in school, we want them to acquire life forces, forces with effects that will last for their entire lives.

As inhabitants of Central Europe, you do not need to be told that we find ourselves in a terrible situation today. The misery and suffering are truly not becoming any less, but are increasing almost from day to day. And it can be said that much of this stems simply from the fact that people can no longer find their way into life in the right way; they can no longer adapt to life. To be sure, the most important time with regard to people finding their way into life is not their school years, but a much later time, the time when they are in their twenties, between the ages of twenty and thirty. This is the time that earlier ages (which we cannot and do not want to wish back) called the transition from apprenticeship to mastery. There is sometimes something extremely sensible in the designation of such transitions.

This is the time in which people actually fully grow up. They must then find a way to become skillful in life. Then something happens that I would like to compare to the following image taken from nature. Let me remind you of a certain river that flows through Carinthia and Krain. As it flows from its source, it is known as the Poik. Then it disappears into a hole and is no longer visible. After a time it comes to the surface again. It is the same river; it has simply flowed underground for a while, but now as it continues above ground, it is called the Unz. Then it again disappears and flows underground. When it surfaces again, it is known as the Laibach. It surfaces again and again; it is the same water, but sometimes it flows underground.

It is also like this in a human life. There is something present in human life in the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh years of life, and also during the school years, in the form of children’s urge to play. Everything that belongs to children’s play is especially active at this age. Then, like the river, it sinks below the surface of human life. Later, when sexual maturity arrives and other things happen, we see that this urge to play is no longer active in the same way. But when people enter their twenties, the same thing that was present in play surfaces again. However, it no longer functions as the urge to play; it is now something different. It has now become the way in which the individual can find his or her way into life. And in fact, if children are allowed to play in the right way according to their particular potentials, when they are introduced to the right games, then they will be able to adapt to life in the right way. But if we miss out on something about the nature of the child in the games we introduce, the children will also lack skill in finding their place in life. This is how these things are related: The urge to play, the particular way in which a child plays, disappears and sinks below the surface of life. Then it resurfaces, but as something different, as the skill to adapt to life. There is an inner coherence in life throughout all its stages. We need to know this in order to teach children in the right way.

For example, there is a very important point in time in the life of a child that may sometimes come a bit earlier, sometimes a bit later, but always falls approximately between the ninth and tenth years of life. At this point in a person’ life, a lot depends on having the right feeling of admiration and respect for one’s teacher. Of course, this feeling should also be present at other times, but at this moment in life something essential is being decided for the child. It is really of extraordinarily great significance. That is why the art of education is so difficult to achieve—it rests on a thorough understanding of the human being. Many things that show up at later stages of life and cause a great deal of unhappiness, preventing people from finding their place in life and making them incapable of working, even causing them to develop tendencies toward physical illnesses, all stem from the fact that as children they were not dealt with in the right way between their ninth and tenth years of life. We do not believe this today, but it really is so. Until the ninth or tenth year of life, we must try to keep the children occupied with instructional material that does not force them to think about themselves too much. Instead, they should be thinking about things that are out there in life. Then, between the ninth and tenth years of life, we must begin to present them with concepts and images of plants and animals that help them make a transition from thinking about the world to thinking about themselves. All of our teaching must be designed to introduce things at the right moment, when the inner nature of the child requires it, so to speak.

What I am indicating to you in just a few words is actually a highly developed study of the human being on the basis of spiritual science. This is what makes it possible to develop a real art of education. This art of education, based on a truly spiritual scientific understanding of the human being, is meant to govern the entire Waldorf School; it is meant to be the spirit that prevails there. And in fact, we believe that much of what is so painful in our day and age is crying out for the next generation to be made good and capable through an education of this sort. We also believe that if parents understand why they are entrusting their children to a school that is set up on the basis of a real and thorough understanding of the human being, they also really understand what our present times demand. What we need in this school comes about through a relationship of this sort between the parents and the school. This is a part of how we work. If the children who come to school in the morning are sent off by parents who understand the school and therefore have the right kind of love for it, then the children will also be able to have the right experience of what is meant to come to meet them, more than anything else, when they open the door to the school and meet their teachers with the love that is the only source of truly appropriate instruction and education.

When what we introduce is presented at the right moment and lies within the children’s abilities and potentials, it becomes a source of revitalization for the children for their entire lives. And when the parents of our children realize that we are actually working to produce people who will be both fit for and able to question a life that will become ever more difficult in decades to come, these parents will relate to the school in the right way. Our work must rest on the understanding of the parents. We cannot work in the same way as other schools that are protected by the state and by authorities of all sorts. We can only work only if we are met by an understanding community of parents. We are aware of what we are being given in the children in this school, whom we are trying to educate out of a true understanding of the human being and of what subjects can be employed at any given time. This is the awareness out of which our teachers can teach best. If, out of this awareness, we always try to give these children the best that can be given to them, then we need to have this school surrounded by a wall of parental understanding like the walls of a fortress. We love our children here; we teach on a basis of understanding the human being and of loving children, while around us a different love grows up, the parents’ love for the being of our school. Given the lack of understanding and questionable moral development that we face today, it is only within this community that we are really able to work toward a future in which human beings will thrive.

The work that is to be done in this direction may be limited to a small community, but much can come out of this small community if it always meets the school with the right understanding.

Our teachers need an awareness of this sort because they lack all the compulsory disciplinary measures that teachers in other schools have to back them up, as it were. But nothing reasonable will ever happen in human life as a result of coercion. In order to be able to work in freedom, we need the parents to understand how we try to do this. And the fact that a very considerable number of people have been found who are sending their children to the Waldorf School demonstrates that at least a start has been made toward this understanding. We would like it to spread more and more, of course; we would like more and more people to realize that something good can come about only through a real, true art of education. But especially on evenings like tonight, we must be glad that we can come together in the spirit of wanting to bring about a better future for humanity by working together with those who are trying to raise and educate the generations to come in the sense of real knowledge of and love for the human being.

Of course it is not possible, even with the best of will, to fully achieve the ideal that hovers before us on our first attempt; something, however, has been achieved. To begin with, too, what we are doing will not meet with a full and thorough understanding. It is possible that many things will be misunderstood. Under certain circumstances, it will be possible for people to say, “Well, in this school some children are not being hit often enough. There are surely some children who need to be hit, either literally or figuratively.” Such things are sometimes said, but not out of a thorough understanding of, or love for, the human being. There are methods that may work more slowly, but are more certain to develop the good in a person than any unnatural compulsory disciplinary measures. An understanding of some of these things can be achieved only gradually.

You know, I was recently told about one boy who came to the school only a short time ago, but has put in a lot of thought and also really learned something fundamental here with us. He said, “I don't know; I used to be in another school where we learned arithmetic and mathematics and geometry and all kinds of things; and now I'm supposed to become a good, capable person, but in this school I'm not learning any math at all. What am I going to amount to if I don't learn any math?” Where did this boy get the idea that he was not going to learn any math? You see, we try to accomplish under natural circumstances what other schools attempt to achieve by scheduling, by herding the children from one subject to another so that they never have time to concentrate on anything. So that the children can really work their way into a subject, we teach the same subject for weeks at a time during the main lesson of the day, for two hours each morning. We do not jump from one lesson to the next or from one subject to the next; we only change subjects after a while. Now this boy arrived at a time when mathematics was not being taught, so he thought that he was not going to learn any math at all. Later, of course, he noticed that he was then concentrating on math rather than being driven on to something different in each lesson; he was learning math more thoroughly. It is easy for misunderstandings of this sort to arise, even if they are not all as obvious as in this case. In the Waldorf School, many things look different from what we were used to earlier, so we should not be too quick to judge.

The things we foster really are drawn from what I have called “understanding the human being.” This is characteristic of our school. It is also the reason why, as far as we can tell, the children are extraordinarily happy to come to school. I come to the school from time to time and take part in the lessons. We are striving to work out of the nature of the child in such a way that the children feel that they want to know the things we intend them to know, to be able to do the things we intend them to be able to do, rather than having the feeling that things are being forced upon them. This has to be developed in a way specific to each subject, since each one is different.

Next, all instruction must be pervaded by a specific educational principle that can be attained only if the teachers themselves are fully involved in spiritual activity. It is not possible for them to do this if they are not aware of their responsibility to the spiritual life. However, ladies and gentlemen, it is only possible to take up this great responsibility toward the spiritual life if it is not being replaced for us by a merely external feeling of responsibility. If we proceed simply according to what is prescribed for a single school year, we feel relieved of the need to research week by week both what we are to take up in school with regard to the individual subject, and how we are to present it. It should be characteristic of our teachers that they draw again and again from the living spiritual source. In doing so, they must feel responsible to the spiritual life and know that the spiritual life is free and independent. The school must be self-administrating; teachers cannot be civil servants. They must be fully their own masters, because they know a higher master than any outer circumstance, the spiritual life itself, to whom they stand in a direct connection that is not mediated by school officials, principals, inspectors, school boards, and so forth. The activity of teaching, if it is really independent, requires this direct connection to the sources of spiritual life.² Only teachers who possess this direct connection are then able to convey the spiritual source to the children in their classes. This is what we want to do; this is what we are striving to accomplish more and more. In the time since we began our work, we have carefully reviewed from month to month how our principles are working with the children. In the years to come, some things will be carried out in line with different or more complete points of view than in previous years. This is how we would like to govern this school—out of an activity that is direct and unmediated, as indeed it must be if it flows from spiritual depths.

You absolutely do not need to be afraid that we are trying to make this school into one that represents a particular philosophy, or that we intend to drum any anthroposophical or other dogmas into the children. That is not what we have in mind. Anyone who says that we are trying to teach the children specifically anthroposophical convictions is not telling the truth. Rather, we are trying to develop an art of education on the basis of what anthroposophy means to us. The “how” of educating is what we are trying to gain from our spiritual understanding. We are not trying to drum our opinions into the children, but we believe that spiritual science differs from any other science in filling the entire person, in making people skillful in all areas, but especially in their dealings with other human beings. This “how” is what we are trying to look at, not the “what.” The “what” is a result of social necessities; we must apply our full interest to deriving it from a reading of what people should know and be able to do if they are to take their place in our times as good, capable individuals. The “how,” on the other hand, how to teach the children something, can only result from a thorough, profound and loving understanding of the human being. This is what is meant to work and to prevail in our Waldorf School.

This is what I wanted to tell you, my dear friends—to point out how on the one hand we need our children’s parents to be really sincere friends of our school. The more we are able to know that this is the case, the better and more forcefully we will be able to accomplish our intentions for the school. We need to have an ongoing activity of love for teaching, of love for dealing with children, among our faculty and among all those who are connected to our teaching. This will be accomplished if a real spiritual life, a spiritual life that has honest and upright intentions with regard to humanity’s spiritual, economic and political upswing and progress, stands behind our faculty and all those having to do with our school. It will be accomplished if the attitude toward teaching and the skill in teaching that are to be at work in our school are surrounded by a wall of parents who approach us with understanding and are devoted to our school in sincere friendship. If we have these friends, then the work of our school will succeed, and we can be convinced, ladies and gentlemen, that by doing what is good for our school and our children we will also be doing what is good for all of humanity as it is meant to evolve in the future. To work in the right way for education, for schooling, also means to work seriously and truly for human progress.

From the discussion

Herr Molt thanked Dr. Steiner for his lecture and encouraged the parents to ask questions and make their wishes known.

People complained that the children in the second grade could not yet read as well as those in the public school, and that because the subjects were being taught in blocks, the children always lost their connection to what had been done before.

Dr. Steiner replied:

With regard to reading and writing at the right time, I would still like to say the following: In line with what we are accustomed to today, it is certainly somewhat depressing to see a child going into the second grade who still cannot correctly rattle off what is there on the paper in the form of little ghosts. However, experience contradicts this and teaches us to know better. You see, we do not necessarily have to assess life only in terms of very short spans of time. I have met people who at the age of eighteen or nineteen were able to put their reading and writing to extremely good and skillful use, for instance because of being obliged to take up a career at an early age, as life sometimes demands of us. I have met people who found their place in a profession at an early age with considerable skill, and I have known others who did this with less skill. Now, do some research and find out whether, among these people whom life forced to embark on a career at age eighteen or nineteen, the ones who did so with skill are the ones who learned early, much too early, to rattle off what the little ghosts on the paper said, or whether it was the ones who learned to do this somewhat later. At issue here is whether things were learned in the right way for real life. This is what our method adheres to very carefully. I would like to make you aware that we often do not observe these things in their appropriate context in life. I have met people who had a very, very good style of writing, who wrote good letters. It was possible to research the circumstances to which they owed this. And I must confess quite openly that I discovered that in most cases they were people who had still made the most awful mistakes at age eight or nine. They only learned to shed these mistakes at age ten or eleven, but that is how they came by their special skill. These things are complicated, and we have to consider how our methods of instruction proceed from a comprehensive understanding of the human being. Then we will get used to the fact that many things become accessible to the children at different times from what we are used to. If it had always been the case that there had been strict rules about these things—"It is harmful for children to learn to read before the age of eight”—then no one today would be surprised when they still cannot read, but now we think this is a bad thing. There is something in this that you just said yourselves: The Waldorf School is supposed to lead to the right thing, not to make compromises with what is false.

As to what was said about it being difficult for the children to get back into a subject when they have been away from it for a while, what is important here is that we not judge the success of the school by what happens in the very next block of time. For the life of the mind, we need something similar to what happens in our physical life: We cannot be awake all the time; we must also sleep. When we do not sleep, we also cannot be properly awake in the long run. When the children have been taught for a couple of years according to this method, in which things do not always proceed at a constant pace but are removed from the children’s view now and then, you will be able to convince yourselves how thoroughly they have taken possession of these things. After a couple of years you will probably come to a different conclusion than you do now on the basis of first impressions. Of course we are exposed to misunderstandings on some counts. However, perhaps what now puts people off will prove its worth over the years. We must wait and see.

Two additional questions addressed the points of whether Waldorf school students would be able to take the Abitur,³ and of whether it would not be possible to assign homework.

Dr. Steiner responded:

It is certainly a matter of principle with us that the children should not be deprived of any possibility to take their place in life as we know it at present. There are certain things we have to do as a consequence of our pedagogical and methodological viewpoints, but these must be compatible with guiding the children into life in ways that do not cause them any outer difficulties. I formulated this principle myself, and it is being implemented as best we possibly can, especially in the most important points. With this in mind, I also drew up a document, an educational contract of a sort, that takes these two things into account.⁴ We teach without regard for the interim educational goals that are set for the individual grades in other schools until our children are nine years old and have completed the third grade. After all, in order to do justice to what follows from a real recognition of the children’s needs and to meet the demands of a real philosophy of education, we need a certain amount of leeway, don't we? After this amount of time, we can then take into account what is required of us by law for all kinds of underlying reasons. So, by age nine we want the children to have come far enough that they would be able to transfer to any other school. After that, we again allow ourselves some leeway until they are twelve, so that we can again practice an appropriate education during this time. At age twelve, any child is again able to transfer to another school. The same thing will apply at age fifteen and again at the Abitur: If we are lucky enough to be able to continue adding grades to the school and to take the children all the way to the Abitur; then they will be far enough along to take the exam at the usual age. Of course it is always possible that there will be an examiner somewhere who insists that the young people from the Waldorf School cannot do a thing. It is always possible for the examiners to flunk someone if they so choose, or to give the slow ones a good grade and flunk the smart ones. We cannot guarantee that this will not happen. As a general rule, however, where we can do better than what is done outside, we must do better, in spite of the fact that we must avoid putting obstacles in the children’s way when it comes to meeting the outer demands of life. To be sure, this is at best a second choice. It would be better if we could also establish colleges, but that cannot be, so we must be content with the second choice in this instance.

We should never fail to consider what it means for a real art of education when children are given assignments that we cannot make them complete. It is much, much better to refrain from giving compulsory homework, so that we can count on having the children do what they do with real pleasure and conviction, rather than constantly giving assignments which some children will not complete anyway. It is the worst thing in education to constantly give assignments that are not carried out. It demoralizes the children in a terrible way. We must be especially careful to comply with these more subtle educational principles. The children who want to work have plenty to do, but there should be no attempt at coercion on the part of the school. Instead, if we absolutely want the children to work at home, we should make the effort to encourage them to do so voluntarily. There will always be enough for them to do. But we should not let the tendency arise to work counter to the principles of a really appropriate art of education by moving toward coercion.

• 1. The wording of this speech and of the discussion that follows was revised by Rudolf Steiner himself for publication in the Mitteilungsblatt für die MitZlieder des Vereins Freie Waldorfschule [Newsletter for Members of the Independent Waldorf School Association], March 1922, Vol. 2.
• 2. On truly independent educational activity and the threefolding of the social organism, see Rudolf Steiner’s Towards Social Renewal, Rudolf Steiner Press, Bristol, England, 1992, [Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendjgkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft (1920)], GA 23, 1976, and The Renewal of the Social Organism, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1985, in GA 24, Aufsätze iiber die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage 1915-1921, 1961.
• 3. The German school-leaving examination that qualifies a student for university entrance.
• 4. When the Waldorf School was founded, Rudolf Steiner had submitted a memorandum to the authorities in which the agreement was recorded that at the conclusion of the third, sixth and eighth grades its students were to be at the same level of learning as their counterparts in the public schools. Within these time-periods, however, the School was guaranteed complete freedom of instruction.

My dear children!¹ I must speak to you first of all. You have now put a year of school behind you. When you entered the classes you are in now, you were one year younger, and now you have grown one year older. This can remind you of how you are always growing older, and this in turn will bring you to the thought that someday you will have grown from being children to being adults, big people who will have to be good and capable so that they can work and really carry out what the world and other people ask of them.

Now recall how you were once very small. Remember how you all used to be very little babies who could not speak. You learned to speak and you learned many other things, and when you had already learned a lot, you came here to us to go to school. Your parents sent you here to go to school with us. Think about your parents and about how they thought about you. When you were babies, when you were very small children, your parents were concerned: “What will become of my boy? What will become of my girl? Will they grow up to be good and capable people someday, so that when I am old I will be able to have confidence in my children?” That is what your fathers and mothers said. And you know, dear children, that your parents brought you here, you who are nearest and dearest to them, so that you would grow up to be people like that. Your parents were concerned that you grow up to be good, capable people, and they brought you here to this Waldorf School because they believe that the teachers here can teach you to grow up to be good and capable people.

Remember that you must learn! Your parents brought you here and entrusted you to your dear teachers, and you must bring home a present to your parents at the end of each day and especially at the end of the year—a present that they will like a lot and that will make them say (if it is a good present), “My boy, or my girl, has learned something real.” You must realize that it is something really nice for them when you can go home at the end of the school year and say, “Father and Mother, I really tried hard to learn something good.” If you can do this, dear children, you give your parents great pleasure and take away one of their greatest worries. This is something we especially want to think about today. Let us think about being here in this school to fulfill what our parents intended when they brought us here.

After that, let us think about growing older each year, and about being grown-up people someday. Life is coming, with its pain, its destiny, and its joy, and with its work, too. Life, my dear children, will ask a lot of you. It will have very specific requirements for you. Now, dear children, there is one thing that always will give you strength, always be a sun for you, and that is being able to remember being here in school and gradually coming to love your teachers more and more. You do love your teachers very much, dont you? [“Yes!” answer the children.] Later, if you can think back to how you once learned something, to a nice day when your teacher spoke to you with love and it was a real joy for you to be in school, then you will really have a sun that shines into our life. Someday when you are really old and have gray hair, you can think back and remember learning something nice. And if you remember being in school in the right way, you will see that this gives you strength, and that something of it will last until the day you die.

There is something that makes remembering unpleasant, something that clouds our memory, and that is if we have to think, “Oh, I was such a lazy character!” It is not good later on in life if we have to think of how lazy we were. It has a very bad effect on our life if we have to remember that we did not love our teachers and that we had no love for the subject or for what was on the blackboard or for what was being said or read out loud. It is always lovely later on if we can remember working hard and loving the teacher, but it is painful when we have to say to ourselves, “I was a lazy kid. If I hadnt been so lazy, I would be a skillful person now.” Maybe it was fun to be lazy, but later on you will regret it bitterly. Similarly, if you did not pay attention, you will understand nothing of life, and then your whole life will be like a sun with a big cloud in front of it that covers the whole world with hailstones. That is what it will be like if you have to remember not loving your teachers or not loving what you were taught. Keep this in mind, and your thoughts will be good when you think about working hard and paying attention and loving.

That is why you are here. You are here to grow up to be good, strong, capable people in life, and that can happen only if you can remember your childhood as a time when you tried hard to pay attention and to love your subjects and your teachers. That is what you should feel in every lesson. When you come to school in the morning and say your morning verse, you should remember that you are here to become a good and capable person. When you go home from school, you should be thinking about how every minute in which you are not hard-working, attentive and loving is a minute wasted because you are making your parents worry. You bring the best thing home to your parents if they say when they see you coming, “I can tell by looking at my children that they are bringing something good home from school today.” Think about coming home to your parents after school. They should be able to say to themselves, “My children will grow up to be good, capable people.” I want to tell you this, dear children, because we grow a little older each school year, and we remember how we are growing older.

Now that I have talked to the children, I would like to speak over their heads and say a few words to their parents. What unites this school’s faculty is the recognition that a divine spiritual element pervades all human activity, and that people can devote themselves to this divine spiritual element. They must do so especially when they have tasks such as those that teachers have. Our teachers always must be aware that their task consists in calling the spirit of the world down into the school, and they must live in this awareness. This awareness, ladies and gentlemen, is best established among our faculty through the relationship we need to have to the parents of the school children. This relationship should be such that we really think together with the parents, that our feelings are in harmony with theirs, and that what we try to do in the school is the same as what the parents are trying to do with their dear children in realizing their ideals. Our teachers’ philosophy hammers this into their hearts and souls every morning. By looking at the souls of the children, our teachers learn the value of the human soul and know the value of what you have given them by bringing your children here. You have given them the gift of being able to guide the spirit into human souls. It is with this deep feeling of gratitude and of good intentions that our teachers receive what is nearest and dearest to you, the children you bring to this schoolhouse. This is the source of our teachers’ efforts to give something back to you, in love and gratitude and to the best of their abilities, in the souls you then see when your children come home from school or when they leave school to make their way in life. Our teachers receive a gift from you in the form of faith in human development; they would like to give a gift in return by educating your children to be good human beings. To be able to do this, they need to be in full agreement with you. You can be certain, ladies and gentlemen, that when you as parents strive toward this agreement and express it in the right way, harmoniously and with fellowfeeling, as you did just now, our teachers then feel that they have solid ground under their feet, regardless of whatever opposition and enmity they may encounter from other directions. May our teachers seek the impulse for their activity in this harmony with our parents.

There is still a third thing I would like to say to you, my dear teachers. You are united with the spirit of a spiritual worldview. With the best forces you have rooted in you, you try to understand the souls of growing human beings and to work on these souls, not in the sense of a school promoting a single philosophy, but in the sense of permeating an entire system of education with a thoroughly spiritualized attitude. This is the best way to learn two things, my dear friends.

The first is what wells up in freedom from creative strength, from within the human being. We gradually come to recognize that we must constantly learn what is good for the children from the children themselves. We learn to recognize that only what we create in freedom, the best in us that arises from our interactions with the children, can work into the children’s souls. Our creative strength educates us, in the best sense of the word, to be able to do this, and we regard this as the best thing we can do in all of our work.

The other point is that because of our world-view we have developed a deeper connection to the idea of destiny. We work in an artistic manner on the souls of the children, but what we are working on is not like an outer work of art made of marble or wood; it is something that unites with us through destiny. When we stand in front of our children each day, trying to embody, ensoul, and enspirit them with the right insight that is present in the background, we unite with these souls for eternity as a matter of destiny. In the realm of eternity we will be met by what we have shaped during these different transformations, and by how we have done so. In a world-view such as the one we have, the teacher’s true responsibility flows out of a feeling for freedom and destiny. It is out of the spirit of this responsibility that you, my friends, spoke earlier, both to the children and over their heads to their parents. I merely wanted to sum up your words.

Once again, let us say to you, children, “Come back to school next year with the same joy in paying attention; learn to love your teachers even more than you have until now; think of how your teachers’ minds are focused day and night on having you grow up to be good, capable people. Your teachers show their love for you in their efforts to educate your souls, your spirits, and your bodies so that you will grow up to be good, capable people.” Let us impress this deeply upon ourselves as we conclude this school year, and let us begin the next school year with the appropriate strength. Resolve to work hard and pay attention, to love your subjects and your teachers. Then things will go even better than they went this year.

• 1. When he was in Stuttgart, Rudolf Steiner always spoke at these final assemblies, as he did at the opening assemblies. In the early years all the teachers also addressed the children.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear children! Today I will speak first to those of you who are here with us today for the first time and who will be getting together with your nice teachers over in the Waldorf School in the next few days.

My dear children! Until now, your time has been spent at home in your parents” house, and your good parents have taken care of you, taken care of you lovingly. You need only to do a little bit of thinking—you can already think enough to do that—to know how your parents began each morning by taking care of you. They made sure that your bodily needs were met, that you got the breakfast and lunch that you need so badly in order to live, and they also made sure that you could enjoy life, that you had a chance to enjoy flowers and plants and all the beautiful things there are in the world. Dear children, you can also already think about how glad your hearts were when your dear parents said something nice to you. Perhaps it did not always occur to you to be heartily thankful for what they do for you, but now that you are starting school, which is something very important for you, I would like to tell you this today: The more grateful you are for all the love your parents give you—and they are always trying to do more—and the more gratitude you show in receiving this love, the better children you are.

During all this time, your parents were realizing that their children would grow up to be big people, just like they are themselves. Once upon a time they had to realize that there was something they needed to learn in order to be able to provide for their children. They had to learn to work. And you see, if you want to work, you also have to think. They had to learn to think! And then your parents thought about where they would send their children to become good, capable people who would be able to handle their work and get on in life. Then the thought occurred to them to send you here to us in the Waldorf School, because they thought that you could learn something here about becoming good, capable people. I want you to think about how your parents sent you here so that you will be able to work someday. You cannot work without thinking. So that you will know that, I want you to promise to work in the Waldorf School.

In the Waldorf School we have made sure that you will be able to learn something, and we have also made sure that you will be able to find things you really like. From time to time you received something from your parents, a gift or a kind word, and then you said or thought or felt, “That’s really nice!” And you see, if you really understand what is going on when you go to the Waldorf School in the next few days, you may also be able to say, “That’s really nice! Going to the Waldorf School is a nice gift our parents have given us.”

You will often feel that this is a nice gift. You see, we have to take care of the Waldorf School, and the teachers are people who care a lot. They made sure that the children will be able to say, “That’s really nice!” It will be easy for you to say it's nice in the Waldorf School because we have made sure that the men and women who are going to be your teachers are really nice. You will meet good teachers who really like you. And actually, you will learn the most if you really love your teachers. This is what you have to watch out for, that you really, really love your teachers. If you do, then you will also learn well.

This is why I am telling you especially to notice the nice things your teachers will tell you. If you really love them, then you will do what they want, and then you will really learn a lot. I think you will often be able to say to yourselves, “How nice that our parents sent us to the Waldorf School!” And when you come into our school and sit in class, you will also always be able to feel that your teachers love you a whole lot.

You know that you are often tired in the evening. Often you were tired, and then you had to go to sleep, and in the morning you woke up again. While you are sleeping, you do not see anything or hear anything, but you are getting strong before morning comes. That is when other spiritual beings are awake. This is something you cannot understand yet. (That is why you have to go to school—to learn to understand things that you do not understand now.) Other spiritual beings are awake, and people must be able to give themselves up to these spiritual beings. They must learn to love and respect what they do not see. That is what the Waldorf School wants to give you, so that you will be good, thinking, hard-working children, and devout children, too. In the Waldorf School you are meant to become devout children, children who know that people also have something inside them that we cannot see. And as I said, even though you may not have understood very much of this now, that is why you are coming to the Waldorf School, where you will learn to understand it. This is something you must understand, or you will not get anywhere in life.

Now I am going to turn to your parents who have sent you here, and I am especially going to thank them for the confidence they show in the Waldorf School by sending us what is nearest and dearest to them. I would like to assure these parents that we who are trying to represent and implement the spirit of the Waldorf School are aware of the infinitely great responsibility we take on when you parents bring what is dearest to you here to become good and capable in life. Now that you have made the important and significant decision to send your children to the Waldorf School, we hope that your confidence in the school will be able to grow as you see Waldorf faculty striving to accomplish what you expect of us in educating your children in spirit, body, and soul. What has developed in the Waldorf School over the past two years gives us good reason to hope that what we do will merit your confidence. What we do, what our Waldorf faculty does, is what will confirm the confidence you now show in the school by entrusting to us what is dearest to you. Although what I have said may not be fully comprehensible to our dear children, they will find that they are able to pick it up again later.

Now that I have said this to our youngest children who are just beginning their school careers, I would like to turn to the older children who have already spent part of their time in school with us, and say a few words to them. And the first thing I would like to say to them is something I have come to love doing each time I come here, because it always gets a clear and unmistakable answer. Now that I have asked the youngest children to make sure that they start to love their teachers, I would like to ask you older children, who have been here before, whether you love your teachers. [The children answer, “Yes!”] You love your teachers because that is the way things should be. The way your teachers behave toward you will make you love them.

To the older children, I would like to say this: In your new grades, you will meet the same teachers that you had last year. You will continue with what you learned in the earlier grades. However, you should still think about what it means to move up a grade. Think about how moving up can remind us that in life we are always getting older and older. Especially today, when you are entering a new grade, you should look back a bit on the time when you were younger. You should think about all the things you now know because of what was taught to you in school, and now that you are moving up a grade you should think about needing to look into the future. The future, my dear children, is what we often try to hold in front of us in life. It is what you should hold in front of yourselves.

When you go out in the street, you see the older people around you. You see them leaving home to go to work and then coming home from work; you see them going out to do all kinds of things that need to be taken care of in life. When you go out in the street, you also see younger people who have just gotten out of school and who now have to apply what they learned in school for the first time. You see people who are older than you are and who have already learned something from life itself, who have experienced joy and sorrow in life. And if these older people speak to you, then they will tell you that they learned a lot about life through having learned real things in school. They will tell you that school prepared them to be working people and to be really human. If people take life seriously, you will almost always find that when they think back on their school days, they think, “What would I be now if I had not been nurtured by loving teachers during my school days, if I had not learned all the things that you can learn when you are young, the things that help you on in life and are a real support for you in life?” You find people walking around with gray hair, people on whom life has already left its mark, people who have matured. Most of them, when they reach the twilight of their life, think back on their own childhood whenever they see children. Now they think back to when they were sitting at their desks in school, and only now do they understand what they were able to take with them from that time. Only now do they really feel what it meant for their whole life.

Let me tell you today that if you love your teachers, if you work hard while you are sitting at your desks in school, then having been able to be in school in this way will be the greatest possible joy for you when you have grown old. The Waldorf School wants to make sure that you have something that will last you a lifetime when you think back on the school, when you apply what came to you in the Waldorf School to your life. The Waldorf School does not want to simply uplift you; it wants to let the difficulties of work, which do have to be there, alternate with joy and with what can bring you pleasure in life.

The Waldorf School wants to give this to all of you. You will see that you can take great pleasure in having done hard work, in having learned something difficult. You must not believe it when people say that school should turn everything into a pleasure. As a teacher, you cannot always arrange things so that the students learn everything as if they were playing a game. You will not find that we always turn learning into a game. There will also be times when it is hard for you, but when you see that your teachers are concerned that there also be a place for the hard things, you will be able to take pleasure in overcoming the difficulties. Then you will also be able to be glad that you are in the Waldorf School and that you can learn what you need to learn for life in this way. And those of you who have been here longer will have noticed that we are really trying with all our might to help you become people with a feeling for true human devotion, people who can look up to a spiritual, supersensible world. You will learn to understand the words “spirit” and “supersensible world” better and better as you move up from one grade to the next.

Today, then, try to think about growing older. Moving up through the grades in school shows you that people grow older. It reminds you that you need to be in school to make sure, both for your own sake and out of love for your teachers, that you pay attention and work good and hard so that you learn what you need to know for life.

Every hour of the day and night, your teachers are concerned about how to best introduce you to what you need for life. With strong will and with all the thoughts they can possibly have, they are looking for what you need. Of course this will be difficult for you, but they will make it as easy as possible. If they tried to teach it to you in the form of a game, you would not become good, capable people in life. Some things in life are difficult, but you will overcome them if you learn to overcome difficulties when you are still children.

You will go into the new school year in the right way. You will learn many new things, and some of what comes to you will bring you new joys. Some of it will show you the greatness and glory and breadth of the things in the world into which we human beings come. You will learn that what shines down from the moon and stars, what expresses itself and reveals itself in this world that speaks to us when the plants grow green and come up out of the earth in spring, what reveals itself in deep valleys and in the shapes of mountains and in minerals—that all this challenges us to lend a hand and bring forth the best that we can. It challenges us to learn to understand something about the world so that we can work in it. What is presented to you in your new grade will help you learn to better understand the greatness and glory of this world, of the divine deeds of lofty beings. You will learn that it is inherent in the nature of human beings to take their place in this divine world as workers who are able to do something because of what they have learned. The moment will come when you look out at the world and at the hard-working people who do so much, and if you yourself are not capable and have not learned anything worthwhile, you will be forced to ask yourself, “Now that I have grown old, what am I, since I made myself useless as a child?” This moment will come. As you grow old, think about how you can avoid this moment. You certainly can avoid it. The less you reject what your teachers ask of you out of love, the bigger and stronger you will be as you take your place in life. Think about this. Think about it each morning when you go to school. Think about that moment, and by being attentive in school you will become good, capable people who have no reason to reproach themselves in life.

My dear children, today in this serious moment there is something else I need to remind you. By now you will have seen how, once people have gotten gray hair and grown tired and old, they are carried out and their bodies are buried; the end of their life has come. That is only an outer ending. When this moment comes, a person’s immortal soul rises up to the spirit of whom we all know. Just as you are now in a body, one day you will be spirit. Although people must prepare themselves for serious work in the world, they also must prepare themselves to enter the world in which they will live as spirit, just as we now live in bodies in this physical, sense-perceptible world. The body gets sick if it is damaged by the outer world or harmed by the weather, or the damage can come from inside. It is a hard destiny for some people when their bodies do not grow right, but it is a much worse destiny if people do not let their souls grow right. While you are in school, getting ready to do good and capable work, you are being guided so that you can also grow in your souls, in the spirit of humanity, so that you will become good and capable people not only in the eyes of other human beings and in the eyes of the world, but also in the eyes of God and the spiritual world. You will already have experienced this spirit in the Waldorf School. Remain in this spirit and become more and more conscious of it, the older you get.

As you advance from the beginning of the year to the end, your work and your worries increase. So think of a moment like this as something especially important, something that reminds you of how we human beings are standing in the midst of the divine world; of how you need to become strong and capable in body, soul and spirit; of how you think of your spirit, your soul and your body in your diligent striving for growth and health. This thought will help you. You will reach the point where it gives you strength each morning, so that you can prepare your deeds and your goals in the right way. Then you will be able to think about it with satisfaction in the evening. If you can say to yourselves, “I did my duty in school,” you will be able to pass over into God’s spiritual world when you sleep. Through what you experience in the Waldorf School, you must increasingly learn the meaning of the word “duty,” and how duty plays into love for your work. This is something you must learn in the Waldorf School, and through all of this you will become good and capable people.

I am saying this to those who are already in the upper grades, who are entering a more mature age, who are already closer to the life in which they will have to work independently. You more mature children must think about how what I have just said applies to you. You who are now moving up into the higher grades are allowed to do so because of a special destiny that gives you the opportunity to know more than some others can. You have seen others who are already called upon to go to work out there in the world at a young age. They were your classmates; continue to love them. Think of them and consider them your friends. Thinking about them in the right way will make life move forward. Learn not only your subjects, not only what grows and thrives in you directly, but learn to love others too. Get to know each other and learn to really love your classmates. Learn that people are there for each other, that the Spirit Creator of the world endeavors most of all to work through the love that human beings bring toward each other. It is the worst thing for a school when the students do not love each other. Try to discover something lovable in each of your fellow students; there is something lovable in every human being. Learn to carry into each of your classes the warmth that expresses itself in love. If you learn to do that, what you have acquired in this way will give you much to carry out into life.

Now I would also like to address a few words to the parents whose children have been in the Waldorf School before. You will have done some thinking about our way of working in this school. Perhaps you have already been able to see that how we work here requires a sensitivity to the great needs of civilization at the present time. The people who brought the idea of the Waldorf School into the world are burdened by the knowledge that things have come so far that we had to experience the great suffering of the beginning of the twentieth century, the great killing and the distress it brought with it. Those who observe all this with an unprejudiced view, ladies and gentlemen, know that attitudes and ways of thinking, things that live in human thoughts and human hearts, are the origin of these outer events. They know that we must work on the soul and spirit of humanity so that it can be guided out of the forces of world decline into forces of ascent. The idea of the Waldorf School was born out of the great thoughts of our times, and this responsibility stands over us as we work. We in the Waldorf School would like to imbue ourselves through and through with the idea of what it means to lay seeds in the hearts of children, seeds that must begin to grow in the next few decades for the salvation of the world.

At this point I always like to invoke the feeling of responsibility that lies in nurturing humanity’s near future. Ladies and gentlemen, it is easy to speak of great ideals in an abstract sense. It is easy to proclaim that humanity must strive for the true, the beautiful and the good. But salvation and happiness in human evolution do not come from speaking great words about utopias and distant ideals for the future, or from nice words about things that are still undefined and unclear and hovering in the misty distance. They do not come from what we say to make ourselves feel good inside. Working for salvation and happiness and a livable society lies in grasping the details of the tasks life presents us with. If we can think about ideals and ideas in the right way, then ideas become something holy for all of us. If we talk about ideals as if they were undefined, nebulous things, we are speaking in hollow and empty words, but if we do not do that, if in all our dealing with ideals we are aware that we are involved in real concrete work on them, then we contribute much more to the progress and evolution of humanity than we do through beautiful-sounding talk.

The men and women who are Waldorf teachers really want to kindle their feeling of responsibility, really want to dwell in a right understanding of the world, in this attentive listening to what the world demands. May there grow from this spirit the forces that are needed to always do the right thing at any given moment. These forces only arise when we are able to look at the whole. We live our lives with no backbone, no spiritual backbone, if we are not in a position to think and work on behalf of real ideals in this way, if we speak in indeterminate words and foggy ideals. Therefore, I would like to say a few concrete words about the forces that are present in the hearts and souls of our teachers, the forces they will use to justify the confidence you parents place in them, the forces they will use to prove that it is no blind confidence that leads you to send your children to the Waldorf School and that our efforts to nurture the next generation for the sake of the salvation and happiness of humanity are based on understanding.

In thinking like this and in acting on this thought, we are fulfilling not only some pet idea or feeling, but a mission of our times. In acting in this way, we understand what we must do so that humanity can progress from this age of great misery to different age. We understand what can come of wanting to have our young people led with understanding. We know that sensitivity in guiding these young people will carry over into a near and difficult future.

It is in this spirit that I would like to turn to my dear friends the teachers. We have worked together, made an effort together, to bring this spirit into the Waldorf School. After careful selfexamination, we can say today that in some respects we have succeeded in what we set out to do. We succeeded in developing this in a certain way so that our intentions of two years ago have become our practice of today. This will become ever more the case. As the faculty, carried by this spirit, finds its way to its tasks, the outer practice of Waldorf teaching, our outer way of acting, will be imbued more and more by this spirit. Through the fact that our faculty makes a daily effort to learn the art of bringing what is present in the Waldorf School spirit into outer life, this spirit will become ever more a reality, more fit for outer existence; it will grow and perhaps pull others along through its growing.

The important thing is for this Waldorf School spirit to be an example for people to follow. We can do but little in comparison to what humanity needs. However, it can work as a model if you make an effort to do more and more of what has met with understanding on the part of the parents. Then it will be possible to bring the Waldorf School spirit out of the Waldorf School and into the entire life of our civilization.

This is why I am thanking all of you in this moment when you, dear teachers, must set new tasks for yourselves. I thank you because I have been present to see how you have worked on yourselves and thus taken part in the progress of the good spirit here in the Waldorf School.

In this feeling of gratitude we will continue to work together, and we will attempt to understand each other more and more, so that the body of teachers becomes a unity. A school is only something whole when it is an organism out of which a unitary spirit-soul arises. This is what we promise the parents today, these are the intentions we undertake for the future, in the hope that they will become deeds in the same way that some of our earlier intentions have become deeds.

Now that I have turned to you with these words, I would like to sum it up in a few words that may perhaps be said here, in the context of the spirit of the Waldorf School. It would of course be presumptuous to speak these words if they were intended to characterize what has happened through the Waldorf School. However, they are of significance if we speak them, not as a command or as a point we want to hammer in, but as something we say to ourselves so that the forces can become even greater, as we tried to make it happen in the two previous years. Knowing that each individual field of activity expresses in miniature what is intended to happen in the world, we say to ourselves as children, parents, and teachers trying to unite and work together so that the Waldorf School may prosper, not presumptuously, but to our own hearts—“Onward, in the true spirit of the Waldorf School ideal!”

This is the call I wanted to utter to the spirits and souls of all of you, and especially from my heart to yours, today when we are leading our students into a new school year.