The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This morning it was pointed out that we can give only general guidelines for music, just as it is possible to give only general guidelines for the visual arts. The details, of course, must be left to the teacher’s independent initiative. If you take these general guidelines in the right way, you will find that, basically, they are able to incorporate whatever you may find reasonable as musical instruction.

In the first, second, and third grades, we will essentially be dealing with very simple musical relationships, which should be applied with a view to developing the human voice and listening ability—that is, we should use the element of music to call upon the individual to use the human voice and the element of sound properly, and also to listen appropriately. I’m sure we all understand this.

Then come the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. By then we will already be involved in explaining musical notation and will be able to do comprehensive scale exercises. Especially in the fifth and sixth grades, we will be able to go into the different keys and talk about D major and so on. We should wait as long as possible before introducing the minor keys, but by this point they too can be presented to the children.

However, the important thing now is to work from the opposite of our original point of view—that is, to get the children to adapt to the demands of music. This means leaning more toward the esthetic in our teaching. At first the children themselves were the focus, and we had to structure everything so that they would learn to listen and sing. But after having been encouraged in this during the first three grades, the children should then begin to adapt to the artistic demands of music, and the pedagogical element becomes the focus.

In the last two elementary grades—the seventh and eighth—I ask you to take into consideration the fact that the children must no longer have the feeling that they are being “trained” to do something, but must feel that they are making music for the pleasure it gives them, for the sake of enjoying it. This must be the thrust of our instruction in music. Therefore, during these two years the children’s musical judgment can be awakened and educated. We can make them aware of the different character of different pieces of music, of the difference in character between a work by Beethoven and a work by Brahms. In simple ways, therefore, we should encourage the children to form opinions about music. Earlier, it was important to refrain from such opinions and judgments, but now we must cultivate them.

Now it will be especially important to understand one thing. You know I said something very similar this morning about the visual arts—that the way we initially use drawing allows writing to develop out of it. Later, however, drawing is used as an end in itself, and art itself becomes the important thing. As soon as the children progress from utilitarian forms of drawing and painting to developing independent artistic forms—in the third or fourth grade—it is also time to make the musical transition just described. At first we must work to affect the children physiologically; our work must help them adapt to the art of music. There should be a correspondence between these transitions in the graphic arts and in music.

One thing in the state curriculum is to our advantage—that there is no physical education instruction during the first three grades. So we may take the opportunity to begin with eurythmy. It would be very nice if eurythmy could be done in harmony with music instruction in the first grade, so that eurythmy would in fact help the children adapt to geometry and music. Not until the second grade would we begin to develop the gestures for the letters. This would be continued in the third grade, always linking eurythmy to music, geometry, and drawing.

Forms are added in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades—for concrete and abstract expressions, and so on—since by now the children will have made enough progress in grammar to make this possible. This is continued in the seventh and eighth grades, but the forms become more complicated.

Starting in the fourth grade, this slot in the schedule is divided between eurythmy and physical education. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, instruction in physical education should focus on the movement of the limbs and include everything that has to do with running, jumping, and climbing. Any exercises on gymnastic apparatus should be kept simple.

More complicated exercises involving equipment should not be done until the seventh and eighth grades. Meanwhile, the freeform exercises should be continued, and they should still all involve running, climbing, and jumping. If you go through all of what you’ve been able to conclude, I’m sure you will find that it agrees with the way I have tried to present this.

Today I would like to conclude these discussions by pointing out something I want to lay upon your hearts: that I would like you to stick firmly to the following four principles.

First, teachers must make sure that they influence and work on their pupils, in a broader sense, by allowing the spirit to flow through their whole being as teachers, and also in the details of their work: how each word is spoken, and how each concept or feeling is developed. Teachers must be people of initiative. They must be filled with initiative. Teachers must never be careless or lazy; they must, at every moment, stand in full consciousness of what they do in the school and how they act toward the children. This is the first principle. The teacher must be a person of initiative in everything done, great and small.

Second, my dear friends, we as teachers must take an interest in everything happening in the world and in whatever concerns humankind. All that is happening in the outside world and in human life must arouse our interest. It would be deplorable if we as teachers were to shut ourselves off from anything that might interest human beings. We should take an interest in the affairs of the outside world, and we should also be able to enter into anything, great or small, that concerns every single child in our care. That is the second principle. The teacher should be one who is interested in the being of the whole world and of humanity.

Third, the teacher must be one who never compromises in the heart and mind with what is untrue. The teacher must be true in the depths of being. Teachers must never compromise with untruth, because if they did, we would see how untruth would find its way through many channels into our teaching, especially in the way we present the subjects. Our teaching will only bear the stamp of truth when we ardently strive for truth in ourselves.

And now comes something more easily said than done, but it is, nevertheless, also a golden rule for the teacher’s calling. The teacher must never get stale or grow sour. Cherish a mood of soul that is fresh and healthy! No getting stale and sour! This must be the teacher’s endeavor.

And I know, my dear friends, that if during these two weeks you have properly received into your inner life what we were able to shed light on from the most diverse viewpoints, then indirectly, through the realms of feeling and will, what may still seem remote will come closer to your souls as you work with the children in the classroom. During these two weeks I have spoken only of what can enter directly into your practical teaching when you first allow it to work properly within your own souls. But our Waldorf school, my dear friends, will depend on what you do within yourselves, and whether you really allow the things we have considered to become effective in your own souls.

Think of the many things I have tried to clarify in order to come to a psychological view of the human being, especially of the growing human being. Remember these things. And maybe there will be moments when you feel unsure about how or when to bring one thing or another into your teaching, or where to introduce it, but if you remember properly what has been presented during these two weeks, then thoughts will surely arise in you that will tell you what to do. Of course many things should really be said many times, but I do not want to make you into teaching machines, but into free independent teachers. Everything spoken of during the past two weeks was given to you in this same spirit. The time has been so short that, for the rest, I must simply appeal to the understanding and devotion you will bring to your work.

Turn your thoughts again and again to all that has been said that can lead you to understand the human being, and especially the child. It will help you in all the many questions of method that may arise.

When you look back in memory to these discussions, then our thoughts will certainly meet again in all the various impulses that have come to life during this time. For myself, I can assure you that I will also be thinking back to these days, because right now this Waldorf school is indeed weighing heavily on the minds of those taking part in its beginning and organization. This Waldorf school must succeed; much depends on its success. Its success will bring a kind of proof of many things in the spiritual evolution of humankind that we must represent.

In conclusion, if you will allow me to speak personally for a moment, I would like to say: For me this Waldorf school will be a veritable child of concern. Again and again I will have to come back to this Waldorf school with anxious, caring thoughts. But when we keep in mind the deep seriousness of the situation, we can really work well together. Let us especially keep before us the thought, which will truly fill our hearts and minds, that connected with the present day spiritual movement are also the spiritual powers that guide the cosmos. When we believe in these good spiritual powers they will inspire our lives and we will truly be able to teach.

Today I would like to speak to you about the Waldorf School, founded by our friend Mr. Molt. You well know, from the announcements distributed about this school, that our intention is to take a first step along the path we would want the cultural life of the Threefold Social Organism to take. In establishing the Waldorf School, Mr. Molt has, to a large extent, felt motivated to do something to further the development of inner spirituality. He hopes to do something that will point the way for the present and future social tasks of the Threefold Social Organism. Obviously, the Waldorf School can be successful only if it is completely inspired by the Spirit that aspires toward the threefold nature of the social organism. It is easy to comprehend that such a first step cannot immediately be perfect. And along with this insight, belongs an understanding. We would so very much like to see this understanding offered to the founding of this school, at least from a limited group for the present. The work needed for the Waldorf School has already begun. It has begun with those who have offered to help and whom we have taken under consideration to contribute pedagogically to the Waldorf School. They are now attending a recently begun seminar in preparation for the work there. Gathered in this seminar are only those who, as a result of their talents and bearing, appear capable of working in the cultural movement which the Waldorf School should serve. Of course, they appear particularly called to work in the pedagogical area. Nevertheless, the Waldorf School must be offered understanding, at least from a small group for the present. You will notice more and more as you become aware of social reality that the mutual understanding of people regarding their work will be a major factor in the social life of the future. So, it seems to me that those persons who have themselves shown interest are most suitable to participate in the discussions, to be held here today and next Sunday, concerning the efforts of the Waldorf School.

Indeed, it seems to be of the utmost importance that something more comes about to encourage this understanding. Unquestionably, all parents who want their children to attend the Waldorf School have a broad interest in what this school should achieve. It appears to me to be a particular need that, before the opening of the Waldorf School in the first half of September, we meet again, along with all the parents who want their children to attend. Only what is rooted in the understanding of those involved in such initiatives with their souls and with their whole lives can flourish in a truly socially oriented social life.

Today I would like to speak with you about the goals of the Waldorf School and, to some extent, the desired instructional methods. With the Waldorf School we hope to create something that, in our judgment, needs to be based upon the particular historical stage of human development of the present and near future. You should not misunderstand the establishment of the Waldorf School by believing that everything in the old school system is bad. Nor should you believe that our starting point for the establishment of the Waldorf School is simply a criticism of the old school system. It is actually quite a different question.

In the course of the last three to four centuries a social life has been formed: a state/rights life, a spiritual/cultural life, an economic life, which have assumed a certain configuration. This social life, particularly the educational system, “resists,” we might say, the renewal of our social relationships, as I have recently so often argued. In the last three to four centuries the educational system has become so completely dependent upon the state that we could say that it is, in a quite peculiar way, a part of the state. Now, we can say that to a certain extent—however, only to a very limited extent—the educational institutions to which people have become accustomed were at one time appropriate to the configuration of the states of the civilized world. But what we strive for here is a transformation of the present social configuration. The understanding that is to form the basis of future social life requires that the system of education not remain in the same relationship to the state that it has had until now. For if we strive for a social form of economic life, the need to remove cultural life from the influence of politics and economics will be all the more urgent. This applies in particular to the administration of the educational system. People have felt this need for a very long time. But all pedagogical aspirations in the most recent past, and particularly at present, have something oppressive about them, something that hardly considers the general point of view of cultural life. This has all come about through the peculiar way in which government officials in the most recent past, and especially at present, have publicly addressed such pedagogical aspirations.

Naturally, the Waldorf School will have to reconcile itself with current institutions and public opinion concerning education and teaching. We will not immediately be able to achieve all that we wish to achieve—quite understandably we will, on the whole, find it necessary to comply with the present requirements of public education. We will find it necessary that the graduates of our school reach the level demanded for transfer to institutions of higher education, in particular, the universities. We will, therefore, be unable to organize our educational material so that it represents what we find to be the ideal of a truly humane education. In a manner of speaking, we will be able to use only the holes that still remain in the tightly woven web that spreads over the educational system. In these holes we will work to instruct the children entrusted to the Waldorf School, in the sense of a completely free cultural life. We plan to take full advantage of every opportunity presented. We most certainly will not be able to create a model school. However, we can show to what degree inner strengthening and a truly inner education of the child is possible, when it is achieved solely out of the needs of the cultural life, and not through something imposed from outside.

We will have to struggle against much resistance, particularly regarding the understanding that people can offer us today. We will have much resistance to overcome, precisely because, regarding present-day understanding, as I have often mentioned here, people just pass each other by. Yet, we repeatedly experience, precisely in the area of education, that people elsewhere also speak about a transformation of the educational system from the same point of view as represented here. The people who are involved at present with the latest principles of education listen and say, “Yes, that is exactly right, that is what we wanted all along!” In reality, they want something completely different. But today we are so far removed from the subjects about which we speak, that we listen and believe we mean the same things with the same words, when, in actuality, we mean just the opposite.

The power of the empty phrase has had a prolonged reign and has become very strong in our civilized world. Haven't we experienced this in the greatest measure? And into this reign of the empty phrase has been woven the most terrible event that has occurred in world history—the horrible catastrophe of the war in the past years! Just think about how closely the empty phrase is connected with this catastrophe! Think about the role it has played, and you will arrive at a truly dismaying judgment about the reign of the empty phrase in our time.

So today, in the pedagogical area also, we hear, “What is important is not the subject matter, but the pupil,” from those who strive for something quite different from what we intend.

You know that since we have no choice but to use the words in our vocabulary, we too will often have to say, “The important thing in education is not the subject matter, but the pupil.” We want to use the subject matter in our Waldorf School in such a way that at each stage of instruction it will serve to improve the human development of the pupil regarding the formation of the will, feeling and intellect, rather than serving to provide superficial knowledge. We should not offer each subject for the sole purpose of imparting knowledge. The teaching of a subject should become an art in the hands of the teachers. The way we treat a subject should enable the children to grow into life and fill their proper place. We must become aware that each stage of human life brings forth out of the depths of human nature the tendency toward particular powers of the soul. If we do not educate these inclinations at the relevant age, they cannot, in truth, be educated later. They become stunted, and render people unable to meet the demands of life connected with will, connected with feeling, connected with intellect. People cannot rightly take up the position into which life places them. Between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, that is, in the period of real education, it is particularly important to recognize the powers of soul and body that children need to develop in order to later fulfill their places in life.

Someone who has absorbed the pedagogical thoughts of the last decades could hear everything that I have now said, and say, “Exactly my opinion!” But what he or she does pedagogically on the basis of this opinion is not at all what we desire here. In the present, we commonly speak past each other, and thus we must, in a somewhat deeper way, attempt to draw attention to the real intention of the Waldorf School.

Above all, people are obsessed, we could almost say, with the need to take everything absolutely. By that I mean the following: If we speak today about how people should be educated in this or that way (we only want to speak about education; but we could, in various ways, extend the same considerations to other areas of life), we always think that education should concern something that is absolutely valid for humanity. We think it must be something that, so to speak, is absolutely right, something that, if it had only been available, would have been used, for example, for the people in Ancient Egypt or in Ancient Greece. It must also be useful in four thousand years for the people who will live then. It must also be useful in China, Japan, and so forth. This obsession of modern people, that they can set up something absolutely valid, is the greatest enemy of all Reality. Thus we should keep in mind, we should recognize, that we are not people in an absolute sense, but people of a quite particular age. We should recognize that people of the present age are, in their soul and physical body, constituted differently from, for example, the Greeks and Romans. Modern people are also constituted differently from the way in which people will be constituted in a relatively short time, in five hundred years. Thus, we do not understand the task of education in an absolute sense. Rather, we understand it as emerging from the needs of human culture in the present and near future.

We ask how civilized human beings are constituted today and base our viewpoint concerning methods of education upon that. We know quite well that a Greek or Roman had to have been raised differently, and, also, that people will have to be raised differently again in five hundred years. We want to create a basis of upbringing for our present time and the near future. We can really dedicate ourselves to humanity only if we become aware of these real conditions for human development and do not always keep nebulous goals in mind. Thus, it is necessary to point out what threatens human development, especially in connection with the educational instruction of the present, and what, in the present time, we want to avoid.

I have just pointed out that some people say, “The subject matter is not important, the pupil is important. The way the teacher acts in instructing the pupil is important. The way the subject matter is used for teaching, for educating, is important.” At the same time, however, we see a remarkably different direction in the very people who say this. We see a tendency that, to some extent, thoroughly paralyses and negates their demand of “more for the pupil than for the subject matter.”

People who say such things perceive that, as a result of specialization, science has gradually moved beyond normal intellectual comprehension. They see it taught in a superficial way, purely for the sake of knowledge, without any attention to the pupil. So now people say, “You may not do that. You must educate the pupil according to the nature of young people.” But how can we learn how the pupil needs to be treated? People expect to learn this from the very science that was formed under the regime they want to fight! They want to know the nature of the child, but they employ all kinds of experimental psychologies, those methods science developed by forcing itself into the very situation people desire to remedy. So, following the path of experimental psychology, they want to conduct research at the universities to determine which special methods are right for pedagogy. They want to carry experimental pedagogy into university life, to carry in all the one-sidedness that science has assumed. Yes, people want to reform! People want to reform because they have a vague feeling that reform is necessary. But this feeling arises out of the very spirit that has brought about the old methods they now want to keep. People would like to found an educational science, but they want to base it upon that scientific spirit that has arisen because people were not brought up correctly.

People still do not see the very strong forces at work in the development of our culture. People do not at all see that even though they have the best intentions they become involved in such conflicts and contradictions. Although some people may have another view about this, we can nevertheless say that Johann Friedrich Herbart is in many ways one of the most significant people in the pedagogical field. Herbart’s pedagogical writing and work place him in a position very unusual in recent times. His book, Allgemeine Padagogik [Pedagogical theory], appeared in 1806, and he continued to learn through his own pedagogical work after that. The 1835 Survey of his pedagogical lectures shows how he advanced in his understanding of pedagogical problems. We can say that a good portion of the pedagogical development in the second half of the nineteenth century stemmed from the impulse of Herbart’s pedagogy, since, for example, the whole Austrian educational system has been inspired by it. In Germany, too, a great deal of the spirit of Herbart’s pedagogy still lives today in views on education. Thus today, if we want to orient ourselves to the idea that we live in a particular cultural age, we must confront the content of Herbart’s pedagogy, and discover what a pedagogical force, a pedagogical reality, actually is.

To properly understand Herbart, we can say that all his thoughts and ideas stand fully within that cultural period that, for the true observer of human development, clearly ended in the mid-fifteenth century. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, we stand in a new epoch of human civilization. But, we have not followed the impulses that bloomed in the fifteenth century and have, therefore, achieved little; and what was active before the fifteenth century continues in our lives. It has brilliantly, significantly, continued in our pedagogical life in all that Herbart worked out and all that he inspired. Human development during the long period that began in the eighth century B.C. and ended in the middle of the fifteenth century AD. can be characterized by saying that intellect and feeling were instinctive. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, humanity has striven toward a consciousness of personality and toward putting itself in charge of its own personality. For the present and future, the most important change in the historical impulse of human development is the decline of instinctive understanding. No change is more important than the decline of the instinctive soul activity of the Greco-Roman age, and the beginning of the new epoch in the fifteenth century! The particular considerations which prove what I have just said are presented in my writings and publications. Here we must accept as a fact that as of the middle of the fifteenth century, something new began for humanity, namely the aspiration toward conscious personal activity, where previously an instinctive understanding and soul activity were present. This instinctive understanding and soul activity had a certain tendency to cultivate intellectual life one-sidedly. It could seem strange to say that the time in which understanding was instinctively oriented, led to a peak of a certain kind of education, an overdevelopment of human intellectuality. But you will not be amazed by such an idea if you consider that what affects a person intellectually need not always be something consciously personal, that instinctive intelligence in particular can come to the highest degree of expression. You need only remember that people discovered paper much later than wasps did through their instinctive intelligence, for wasp nests are made of paper, just as people, with their intelligence, make paper. Intellect need not affect only people. It can also permeate other beings without necessarily simultaneously bringing the personality, which should develop only just now in our age, to its highest level.

Now obviously, in a period in which intelligence endeavored to develop itself to its highest level, the desire was also present to permeate the educational system, and everything that the educational system permeates, with the intellect. Those who now examine Herbart’s pedagogy find that it emphasizes that the will and feeling should be educated. However, if you do not simply remain with the words, but if you go on to Reality, you will notice something. You will notice that an education based upon discipline and order, as is Herbarts pedagogy, desperately requires something. It should educate the will, it should educate the feeling. However, what Herbart offers in content is, in truth, suited only to educating the intellect. What he offers as pedagogical principles is instinctively felt, most particularly by Herbart himself, to be insufficient to comprehend the whole human; it comprehends only the human as an intellectual being. Thus, out of a healthy instinct he demands over and over again that there must also be an education of the feeling and will.

The question is, can we, with this as a foundation, really teach and educate the feeling and will in an appropriate way, in a way befitting human nature? I would like to point out that Herbart assumes that all pedagogy must be based upon psychology and philosophy, that is, upon the general world conception and understanding of the human soul life. Herbart’s thinking is thoroughly oriented to the abstract, and he has carried this abstract thinking into his psychology. I would like to examine Herbart’s psychology with you by means of a simplified example.

We know that in human nature three basic forces are at work: Thinking, Feeling and Willing. We know that the health of the human soul depends upon the appropriate development of these three basic forces, upon each of these basic forces coming into its own. What in Herbart’s philosophy develops these basic forces? Herbart is really of the opinion that the entire soul life first opens in the conceptual life—feeling is only a conceptual form for him, as is willing, endeavoring, desiring. So you hear from Herbart's followers, “If we try to drink water because we are thirsty, we do not actually desire the real substance of the water. Rather, we try to rid ourselves of the idea that thirst causes in us and to replace it in our soul with the idea of a quenched thirst. Thus, we do not desire the water at all. Instead, we desire that the idea of thirst cease and be replaced with the idea of quenched thirst. If we desire a lively conversation, we do not actually desire the content of this conversation. Rather, we long for a change in our present ideas and are really trying to obtain the idea that will occur through a lively conversation. If we have a desire, we do not have it as a result of basic forces at work in our soul. Rather, we have the desire because a particularly pleasant idea easily arises in our consciousness and easily overcomes the opposing inhibitions. This experience is desire. The ideas cause everything. Everything else is, in truth, only what the activity of the ideas reveals.” We can say that the whole Herbartian way of thinking, and everything which has been built upon it—and more than you think has been based upon the Herbartian way of thinking—is permeated by an unconscious belief that the true life of the soul takes place in the struggle between restraint and support of ideas. In this way of thinking, what appear to be feeling and willing exist only as emotions of the life of ideas. We should not be confused that many modern people who are concerned with pedagogy oppose teaching and bringing up children in this way, and yet direct their efforts only toward the life of ideas. They say they oppose it, of course, but they do not act accordingly; they base everything they do on the thought, “Conceptual ideas are what matter!” The strangest thing we can experience today is the lives of people caught in such contradictions. People preach and lecture today that we should indeed look at the whole person, that we should be careful not to neglect the soul life, the life of feeling and willing! Yet, if we return to what is practiced, precisely those who talk so much about the development of feeling and willing, are the ones who intellectualize teaching and education. These people do not understand even themselves because what they say is so far from the subject and has become just empty phrases.

We must look at these things intensely when we try to meet the demands of our cultural period, particularly regarding teaching and education.

So, I now come to the main point! People say that the subject matter does not matter so much as the pupil. But, as I have already mentioned, they want to study the pupil with a science of education that uses the methods of an imbalanced science. However, they do not even come close through the superficially oriented science of the last centuries. They need a very different orientation to understand humans. This other orientation is sought by our Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We want to replace the superficial anthropology, the superficial understanding of humanity, with something that studies the whole person, the physical, emotional and mental essence. Certainly, today people emphasize, even literally, the mental and the emotional, but they do not understand it. People do not pay any attention at all to the fact that something like the Herbartian philosophy, particularly as it regards the soul, is quite intellectually based, and therefore, cannot be integrated into our cultural period. On the other hand, Herbart wants to base his work on philosophy. But that philosophy upon which he builds likewise ended with the period that concluded in the middle of the fifteenth century. In our time, a philosophy founded in spirituality needs to have room. Out of this new philosophy, the soul and spirit can be so strengthened that we can link them to what we learn through anthropology regarding the physical aspects of humans. For in our time, the knowledge concerning the physical aspects of humans is truly great, even though it barely mentions the soul.

If you look at modern psychology with healthy common sense, you have to ask what you could really gain from it. There you will find disputes about the world of thinking, the world of feeling, the world of willing. But what you will find about these words, “thinking, feeling, willing,” is only word play. You will not become any wiser concerning the nature of thinking, feeling and willing if you search through modern psychology. Thus you cannot base a genuinely good pedagogy upon modern psychology. First, you must go into what is pertinent about the true nature of thinking, feeling and willing. To do that, the outdated scholastic spirit so prevalent in modern psychology is not necessary; what is necessary is a real gift for observing human life. What we observe today in psychology and in pedagogical laboratories appears to be efforts carried by the best of intentions. These efforts have nonetheless taken the direction they have taken because, fundamentally, the ability to pursue a true observation of people is lacking. Today most of all, people would like to put the developing child in a psychological laboratory and superficially study inner development, because they have lost the living relationship between people. A living way of observing is necessary for life, and it has largely been lost.

Today people talk about the spirit and soul in much the way that they speak about external characteristics. If we meet a child, a person of thirty-five and an old person, we say, “This is a person, this is a person, this is a person.” Although the abstract idea of “a person” is often useful, a real observation distinguishes a reality in the end, namely, that the child will become a person of thirty-five years and that a person of thirtyfive will become old. True observation must be quite clear concerning the difference in this development. Now, it is relatively easy to distinguish a child from a person of thirty-five and from an elderly person. However, a true observation of such differences concerning the inner aspects of people is somewhat more difficult. Thus, in the present, we often become entangled in questions of unity and multiplicity that arise, for example, from the three aspects of the soul life. Are thinking, feeling and willing completely separate things? If they are, then our soul life would be absolutely divided into three parts. There would be no transition between willing, feeling and thinking, and, therefore, human intellect, and we could simply delineate, as modern people do so easily, these aspects of human soul life. For the very reason that we cannot do that, Herbart tries to treat thinking, feeling and willing uniformly. But he has biased the whole thing toward abstractions, and his whole psychology has turned into intellectualism. We must develop an ability to see, on the one side, the unity of thinking, feeling and willing and, on the other side, the differences between them.

If, having sufficiently prepared ourselves, we now consider everything connected with human willing and desiring, then we can compare this willing with something that stands farther away in the life of the soul, namely, the intellect. We can ask ourselves, “How is the life of willing, the life of desiring, related to the intellectual life of concepts?” Slowly we realize that a developmental difference exists between willing and thinking, a developmental difference like the one that exists, for example, between the child and the elderly person. The elderly person develops from the child; thinking develops from willing. The two are not so different from one another that we can put them next to each other and say, the one is this, the other is that. Rather, they are different from one another in the way that developmental stages are different. We will first be able to correctly understand the life of the human soul in its unity when we know if an apparently pure desire, a pure willing that appears in the human soul, is a youthful expression of the life of the soul. There the soul is living in a youthful stage. If intellectual activity appears, if ideas appear, then the soul is living in the condition that presupposes an unfolding of the will, a development of the will. The life of feeling exists in between, just as the thirty-five-year-old person exists between the child and the elderly person. Through feeling, the will develops itself into intellectual life. Only when we grasp that willing, feeling and thinking, in their liveliness, in their divergence, are not three separate capacities of the soul, which Herbart resisted but which has never been properly corrected, do we come to a true grasp of human soul life.

However, our observations indeed easily deceive us if we view the life of the soul from this standpoint. Our observations easily deceive us because in this life between birth and death we can never allow our understanding to remain fixed if we use a living awareness of life as a basis. Those who want to believe that life between birth and death proceeds so that intelligence simply develops out of the will, stand on quite shaky ground. We see how intelligence gradually reveals itself out of basic human nature in the growing child. We can only develop intelligence, including the intelligence developed through education, if we are conscious that what children experience after birth is the idea, the consequence, of their experiences before birth, before conception. We only understand what develops into will during life between birth and death if we are aware that people go through the Portals of Death into a spiritual life, and there further develop the will.

We cannot really educate people if we do not take their total life into account. We cannot really educate people if we merely say to ourselves, “We want to develop what the future will need.” In saying this, we do not take the constitution of human nature into account. Every child, from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, reveals through its physical body what had developed in the life before birth, before conception. We will never gain a correct view of the will if we do not become conscious that what begins to appear as will is only a seed which develops in the physical body as in a fertile soil, but does not come to full fruition until we lay aside the physical body. Certainly, we must develop moral ideas in people. However, we must be clear that these moral ideas, embedded in the will as they are between birth and death, do not mean nearly as much as they seem, for their real life first begins when we leave this body.

Modern people are still shocked that, to obtain a complete understanding of humanity, it is necessary to consider all that humans endure before birth and after death along with what presently lives in people. This is necessary if we are to achieve an integration of humans into the whole, including into the temporal world. If we do not include that, if we consider people the way modern anthropology considers them—only in their existence between birth and death—then we do not consider the complete person, but only a portion. We cannot educate this portion of a person for the simple reason that we stand before the growing child and try to educate something we don't understand. Characteristics want to develop according to the standards set by the experiences before birth, but no one pays attention to that. We cannot solve the riddle of the child because we have no idea about what is in the child from the life before birth, and we do not know the laws of development that first unfold when the child has gone through death.

A main requirement of modern education must be to work out of a science that takes the whole person into account, not one that claims to see the pupil instead of the subject matter, but sees only a faceless abstraction of the person. What we will use as the basis of the educational system is truly not one-sided mysticism, but simply a full observation of all of human nature and the will to really comprehend the whole person in education. If we tend, as Herbart does, toward the one-sided development of the intellect, then the formation of willing and feeling must remain untrained and undeveloped. In this case, we would believe that through the acquisition, creation and development of certain ideas, we can call forth the restraint and support of the ideas he speaks of when he speaks of feeling and willing. We cannot do that; we can only develop the outdated will, that is, through an intellectual education we can only develop intellectualism. We can develop feeling only through a relationship that itself arises out of a genuine rapport between teacher and pupil. We can develop the will only by becoming conscious of the mysterious threads that unconsciously connect the pupil and teacher. Creating abstract principles of education for the development of feeling and willing can lead to nothing if we disregard the necessity of permeating the teachers and instructors with characteristics of mind and will that can work spiritually—not through admonition, that is physical—on the pupil. So, too, we must not build the educational relationship one-sidedly on intellectualism. It must depend wholly upon the person-to-person relationship. Here you see that it is necessary to expand everything that is connected with education. We must, therefore, take into account that the intimate relationship between teacher and pupil can be formed, thus raising the statement, “We should not simply pass on information, we should educate the pupil,” above the empty phrase. We can do this only if we become conscious that, if this is the goal, the teacher’s life cannot depend upon political or economic whims. It must stand on its own two feet to work out of its own impulses, its own conditions.

The leaders of modern society only vaguely feel what Anthroposophy and the realm of the Threefold Social Organism assert. Since these leaders of modern society uncourageously shun the thought of allowing themselves really to grasp life, to grasp it in the way striven for through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, they are also unable to recognize, even with all good will, the full nature of human beings. They cannot bring themselves to say, “We must base the educational system in particular upon a real recognition and a real experiencing of spiritual impulses.” It is interesting to see the leaders agonizing their way through modern culture toward a freeing of the educational system. It is interesting to see how they are unable to free themselves, because they really do not know what to do; they live in contradiction because they want reform through a science founded upon outdated concepts.

I have a book in front of me, entitled Entwicklungs-Psychologie und Erziehungswissenschaft [Developmental psychology and pedagogy], by Dr. Johann Kretzschmar, who actually wants to do something new in instruction, who feels that instructional methods do not really fit the social mood of the times. Let’s examine something characteristic about this man. He says:

If we proceed in this way from the standpoint of independent, investigative science [and here he means a pedagogy that is thoroughly based upon an outdated science] then not only will the teacher training and school work be influenced, but also the position of the teacher, the pedagogue, in the state, in the school administration. First of all, it is obvious, in principle, that the teacher, like a doctor, must hold a position of trust regarding the state and community. They must admit that education—just like health care—is something in which primarily the opinion of the scientifically trained expert must be the standard, not the wishes of political and religious parties; further, the leadership of the school is less an administrative activity than a scientific function...

What does this man feel, then? He feels that administrative activity, however much it may be a state function, cannot extend so far into education that there is only an administrative knowledge, with too little understanding of human nature, in the impulses of the instructors and teachers. He would like to see administration replaced with what we can learn scientifically about human nature. Therefore, from a vague feeling he says:

... further, the leadership of the school is less an administrative activity than a scientific function, that consequently cannot be prescribed in every detail by means of official decrees. Communities and the state must have full trust that the faculty will competently carry out their responsibilities, that they are aware of the full extent of their duties and are, thus, completely independent of external influences. This trust is revealed in that—insofar as the internal affairs of the school organization are concerned—along with the directors, the teachers will also come into their own, that is, the teachers will not be considered as subordinates, as employees. The proper appreciation of pedagogical activity will thus show itself in the question of the regulation of school supervision. Neither the theologian nor the academic can be considered as the suitable person for the leadership and supervision of the school; [One only wonders then, how does he not get around to understanding that he, too, cannot be appointed as a school supervisor by the state, that he, too, must be removed from his position in the school system?] both must be completely placed in the hands of experts, of pedagogues. [Yes, why shouldn't those from the pedagogical field direct the schools first hand? Why is there first the detour through something that, in principle, cannot relevantly partake in the discussions!] That the institutions for handicapped persons, the schools for the mentally retarded, etc., should be directed neither by ministers nor by doctors, hardly needs any particular proof. Most important now is the influence of the faculty on educational legislation...

The influence of the faculty on educational legislation will quite certainly be the greatest when the teachers themselves make the laws concerning education in the self-administered cultural realm of the Threefold Social Organism.

You see in all this a dull movement toward what only the impulse of the Threefold Social Organism has the courage to really want to implant in the outside world. The best of modern people recognize the need for what the impulse of the Threefold Social Organism wants. But, the stale air of today’s public life constricts the spiritual breathing of these modern people. They never complete their thoughts because prejudices weld everything together in the unified state. And so, one can read that the legislation

... will have to point out that the influence of the school on the home must be supported and strengthened by the state, that under certain circumstances, difficult or antieducation parents are to be forced into the proper rearing of their children. The school board would thus look to the state to sanction not only the board’s overseeing of the school system, but also the support and protection of the teachers...

People wonder, “Yes, why shouldn't the teachers be able to do all this?” As I just said, they do not sense the free breath that permits free cultural life. The enfeeblement of thought in the old unified state has brought people so far that they don't even think about what an absurdity it is to want the state to first order, then protect and support what the cultural members of the social organism should manage. Isn't the idea that the teacher “should be protected and supported by the state” so typical? That is the same as saying, “We don't dare to bring about this condition which would be so desirable; we want to be forced.” But the motivation does not come. For on that side from which we should expect it, exists no understanding—obviously, quite justifiably—for what really should happen.

This increased influence of the state upon child rearing [now he wants an even greater influence by the state upon what the teacher and educator should do] lies quite logically in the direction of historical development.

Yes, it really does lie in the direction of historical development, but for it to be healthy, historical development must take a course different from the one that it is now on. Consider, for instance, a plant that, in the sense of Goethean metamorphosis, would only produce green leaves, never going on from the green foliage leaf to the colored flower leaf. Such a plant would never reach the goal of its development. In a similar sense, we must take account of the fact that historical development cannot always continue in the same way, but rather that one stage of development must supersede another.

There was a time when the state had no direct interest in the education system, a time when it first expressed an interest in compulsory schooling and formal education. The modern state, regarded as a constitutional state in that the people are directly involved in legislation, must put particular value not only upon the political, but also upon the general education of its members.

Inasmuch as the educational possibilities of the school are limited, the state must expand its influence into all areas of upbringing, to the family and environment of the child. [Now the state should be a co-educator in parallel to what cultural life is itself able to do. You see how you can have vague feelings that are correct, and how you can arrive at a point of view that is in such contrast to that toward which you, from a healthy point of view, should strive.] That area of pedagogy that is of the greatest value to the state is, of course, pedagogical sociology; [Now he wants to make social life the yardstick of pedagogy, while, in actuality, the social desires of people must arise from correct education so that they are available for the rehabilitation of social life.] it shows, on the one hand, the influence of education on public welfare and, on the other hand, sheds light on the extent to which the development of the child is not simply a matter of systematic education, but also depends upon the co-educators. The school board must also be reminded time and again of the importance of pedagogical sociology, since the Board's advice will be all the more indispensable to the state as the state’s influence upon education increases.

Here Kretzschmar understands that the state will find it increasingly more necessary to pay attention to education. Yet, we shall not hear directly from an institution that can be developed out of the school system itself; rather, the state should do it. Then he points out that the state can also give orders. Thus, what in our time actually demands to develop freely and independently is to be curtailed.

There is something particularly interesting in this book. Obviously a person as well-intentioned as Kretzschmar is will also be aware that we must change teacher training. He notes that in the schools of education, not everything is as he would like to have it. He notices it, and says that there is much that we must change. He notes that the universities treat pedagogy as a secondary subject, but pedagogy includes much that, in his opinion, should not be treated in a subsidiary fashion. Rather, we must integrate it into the universities as an independent department. Now, he thinks, the four schools have already been augmented. The School of Natural Science has been formed out of the School of Philosophy, the School of Political Science has been formed out of the School of Law. He wonders if it would be possible to expand one of these schools to include Pedagogy.

There are universities today that, along with the four main schools—that is, the Theological, Philosophical, Medical and Law Schools—also have Political Science and Natural Science Schools. Kretzschmar thinks that the creation of an independent School of Education could lead to all kinds of problems. With which school could Pedagogy be joined? It is so characteristic that he concludes that it is most appropriate to join Pedagogy with Political Science and create a new School of Political-Educational Science!

You see, so great is the pressure working on people that everything should emanate from the state, that such an enlightened man as this believes it best to make pedagogy a part of political science. I have said it here before: people continually strive to be not what they are by nature, but what they can be through the blessing of the state. They are not to be free citizens, but people somehow included with their rights in the state. People strive to be members of the state. That fulfills the thought, “People must be educated so that they may become good members of the state.” Where should we better place pedagogy than as a part of political science? It is interesting that a man who has such completely correct feelings concerning what should happen, draws such opposite conclusions from his premises than you would think.

Today I have characterized the resistance against which we will have to struggle if we are to create a school such as the Waldorf School is to be. It goes against the thoughts of people, even the best people. It must oppose them, for otherwise it would not work in the direction of future development. We must work in the direction of future development, particularly in the areas of culture and education.

We have no desire to create a school with a one-sided philosophical viewpoint. Anyone who believes that we wish to form an “Anthroposophical school” or spreads that idea, believes or spreads a malignment. That is not at all what we want, and we will prove it. If people try to meet us as we try to meet everything, then religious instruction in the Waldorf School for Protestant children will be taught by the local Protestant minister, Catholic instruction given by the Catholic priest, Jewish by the rabbi. That is, we will not engage in propagating any particular point of view. We do not want to bring the content of Anthroposophy into our school; we want something else. Anthroposophy is life, it is not merely a theory. Anthroposophy can go into the formation, into the practice of teaching. Insofar as Anthroposophy can become pedagogical, to the extent that, through Anthroposophy, teachers can learn skills to teach arithmetic better than it has been taught, to teach writing, languages, geography better than they have been taught, to the extent that a method should be created for this school through Anthroposophy—to this extent we strive to bring in Anthroposophy. We aspire to methodology, to instructional reform. That is what will result from a true knowledge of the spiritual. We will teach reading, we will teach writing, and so forth, in a manner appropriate to human nature.

Thus, we can turn our backs on what people will probably insinuate, that through a school we want to subject children to anthroposophical propaganda. We do not want that. For we know quite well that already the resistance we need to overcome is nearly immeasurable. We will only strive to teach as well as it is possible to teach when enlivened by anthroposophical impulses. Thus it will not disturb us if we must meet certain demands that come from here and there, for example, that people designated by the confessions must give religious instruction for the different confessions.

Last week, I attempted to explain various aspects of the basis of the Waldorf School. I have already pointed out that this school did not appear out of the blue, that we must consider it in the context of modern education. However, we may put into the current stream of education only what conforms with our goals and our perceptions. I have suggested the difficulties that await a true art of education in our time. Today I will point out—of course, I can do this only in a general way—some things that will enable you to see the spirit from which an art of education may now develop. Quite possibly, due to people’s diverse backgrounds, a vague feeling, or even an almost conscious idea, already exists that our educational system is in need of change. The truly correct reformation of the social future of humanity depends upon the creation of a genuine art of education equal to the cultural tasks of the present and near future.

The primary concern is to have a suitable faculty, particularly for the younger age groups. What the teachers bring to the children, the impulse out of which they practice their art, is a very essential quality. Contemplating this more closely, we find much in the present time that resists the proper understanding of this quality. Of course, it is natural that the teachers, the educators, first attend the institutions of learning that have developed out of the more or less scientific consciousness of the present. However, this modern scientific consciousness is such that it does not provide any means of truly understanding the developing human. We find just in this point the first task necessary for founding the Waldorf School. I said in my last lecture here that we have already gathered the faculty of the Waldorf School, and that this future faculty is pursuing a pedagogical-didactic preparation. Our primary task is first to enable the teachers to find the proper attitude for understanding developing human nature and how it appears in childhood. Secondly, we want to bring them to the point where they can practice the art of education out of this insight. In the present time it is necessary to carve out a quite new—new for society at large—understanding and knowledge of humanity.

We, with our scientific mentality, are proud of our methods of experimentation and observation. These methods have led to great triumphs in the fields of natural science. However, many of our contemporaries who are close to the educational system feel that these same experimental and observational methods are incapable of finding an approach to education. Many people with a certain level of perception have asked, “What can we do to rightly use the developmental capacities that arise in the successive stages of the child’s life?” I need only point out a few things to show that some educators already have the desire to really understand the development of the child, but that due to the current scientific mentality they stand helplessly before such questions. Already in 1887, for example, the educator Sallwiirk drew attention to the discovery of a certain natural law that holds true during the development of an organism. According to this Recapitulation Theory, as it was named by the recently deceased Ernst Haeckel, the embryonic development of each individual human follows the history of development of the animal kingdom. During the first weeks of embryonic development, the human is similar to the lower animals, and then rises until it develops into a human. The individual development is a shortened repetition of a long development in the world at large. Educators have now asked themselves, “Can something similar also hold true for the mental development of the individual child? Also, can education find any help in a rule patterned after the Recapitulation Theory?”

You see, an effort already exists, not simply to begin teaching, but to gain insight into the development of the growing human. It was, for instance, obvious to say that all of humanity has gone through the time of the prehistoric cultures; then followed cultures such as those handed down to us through the writings of the ancient oriental cultures; then came the Greek and Roman cultures, followed by the developments of the Middle Ages, and so forth, right up to the present time.

Can we say that each human as a child repeats the stages of human cultural development during childhood? Can we, by observing the course of history, obtain an insight into the development of the individual child? Sallwiirk emphatically argued in his 1887 book Gesinnungsunterricht und Kulturgeschichte [The training of character and cultural history] that educators could not gain any help from such ideas. Even before that, the pedagogue Theodor Vogt, a follower of the Herbart school of thought, suggested that at present we are powerless to answer such pedagogical questions. In 1884 he said that if there were a science of comparative history in the sense of comparative linguistics, it could perhaps give us insight into child rearing comparable to the insight into the historical development of animals found in the Recapitulation Theory. However, he admitted that such a historical science did not exist. The pedagogue Rein echoed his words in 1887, and so things still lie in superficial pedagogy and the superficial art of education today.

Regarding such efforts and the discussions about such efforts, you can rightly say, “Yes, concerning what is necessary for the development of the growing child, shouldn't we, as educators, begin from the standpoint of a healthy human intuition, instead of allowing abstract science to dictate to us?” You would be right in raising such an objection. This objection also arises, if we consider the matter a bit more thoroughly, because the abstractions of that science based upon the methods of the present understanding of nature can tell us nothing concerning the development of the human spirit and the human soul. We work in vain if we attempt to use this. No one can become a true artist in education simply out of undeveloped human intellect and intuition. We need something that gives us insight. Just here we see that a new understanding of humans is needed as the foundation for a real future art of education. Normal science does not provide even the basis for such an understanding of humans. It must be gained by recognizing the human spirit and by recognizing the development of the human spirit within human history. We must have a much broader point of view than that of modern mechanistically oriented natural science.

If we observe the growing child, we first find—I have often remarked on this—that a relatively long developmental period lies between birth and the change of teeth, around seven years of age. If we compare what works during this time in the soul of the child with what develops in the time between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, a major difference is apparent. The child’s orientation until the change of teeth is to imitate what it sees, hears and perceives in its surroundings. In this period, the child is an imitator. From the age of seven until fifteen, from the change of teeth until sexual maturity, the child’s orientation is affected by the authority in its surroundings. For the most part, the child does not simply imitate, but wants to hear from adults what is right, what is good. He or she wants to believe in the judgment of adults; instinctively, the child wants authority. The child can develop only if he or she can develop this belief.

If we look further, however, we can see that shifts emerge during these major stages of life. We see, for example, that a clear shift occurs around three years of age, in the period between birth and the change of teeth, when children develop, for the first time, a clear feeling of their own selves. In later life, that event marks the earliest point they can remember; earlier experiences recede into the sleep of childhood. Much else appears around the same time in the development of the child, so we can say that, although the child is essentially an imitator in the first seven years of life, there is a turning point around the middle of this period that must be considered in early child rearing.

Two important phases lie in the period between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, that is, during that time in the child’s life when elementary education takes place. When the child approaches approximately nine years of age, those who are able will observe a great change in the child’s development. In the first seven years of life, the child is an imitator. Children tend toward a feeling for authority after the change of teeth, but some earlier desires to imitate remain. Thus, until the age of nine, the need to imitate their surroundings continues, but now it is mixed with the need to allow authority to take effect. If we observe which capacities in the child’s life arise out of the depths of human nature, then we find (as I said, I can merely touch upon these things today) through further consideration and observation, that the capacities that appear in this period between seven and nine years of age must be used to teach the child what naturally occurs as the beginnings of reading and writing. We should use these beginnings in the instruction of reading and writing so that only what is in harmony with the need to imitate and the need for authority is called upon. If we are artists in educating and can work, on the one hand, with the subject material and, on the other hand, with the emerging need for authority and the receding need to imitate, so that all of it harmonizes, then we create something in the child that has lasting power throughout life until death. We develop something that cannot be made up later, because each stage of life develops its own capacities. Certainly, you can say that many teachers have instinctively oriented themselves according to such laws. That is true, but it will not suffice in the future, for in the future, such things must be raised to consciousness.

Around the age of nine, everything that enables the child to go beyond people into an understanding of nature begins to develop. Before this time, the child is not very well suited to understand nature as such. We could say that until the age of nine, the child is well suited to observe the world in a moralizing manner. The teacher must meet this moralizing need of the child without becoming pedantic. Certainly, many teachers already act instinctively in this area.

If you examine the didactic instructions of the present, which should tend to relate the subject matter to human nature, then you could be driven to despair. A certain correct instinct is there, but these instructions are so narrow-minded and banal that they dreadfully harm the developing child. We would do well at this stage if we consider, for instance, animals or plants in a way such that a certain moralizing appears. For example, you can bring fables to children in a way that helps them to understand the animal world. You should be careful not to bring such “pablum” during the main lesson, as is so often done. Above all, you should take care not to tell a story to the children and then to follow it with all kinds of explanations. You destroy everything you want to achieve through telling the story by following it with interpretations. Children want to take stories in through feeling. Without outwardly showing it, they are dreadfully affected in their innermost being if they must listen afterwards to the often quite boring explanations.

What should we do in this situation, if we do not want to go into the real details of the art of storytelling? We might say, “Leave out the explanation and simply tell the children the story.” Fine. Then the children will not understand the story and will surely not enjoy it if they do not understand it. If we want to speak Chinese to people, we must first teach them Chinese; otherwise they cannot have the right relationship to what we tell them in Chinese. Thus, we gain nothing by saying, “Leave out the explanations.”

You must try to provide an explanation first. When you want to tell the children a story such as “The Wolf and the Lamb,” simply speak with the children about the wolf’s and the lamb’s characteristics. (We could also apply this to plant life.) As much as possible, speak of these characteristics in relationship to people. Gather everything that you feel will help the children form pictures and feelings that will then resonate when you read the story. If, in an exciting preliminary talk, you offer what you would give afterward as an explanation, then you do not kill the sensations as you would in giving that explanation afterward. On the contrary, you enliven them. If the children have first heard what the teacher has to say about the wolf and the lamb, then their sensations will be all the more lively, and they will have all the more delight in the story. Everything that is necessary for understanding should happen beforehand. The children should not hear the story first. When they hear the story, you must bring them to the heights of their souls for them to understand it. This process must conclude in reading the story, telling the tale, doing nothing more than allowing the children’s sensations, already evoked, to take their course. You must allow the children to take their feelings home.

Until the age of nine, it is necessary to form the instruction in this way, to relate everything to people. If we have the sensitivity to observe the transition that occurs around nine years of age, we will know that then the child is first capable of going out into the world of nature. However, the child still relates nature to people. If we describe nature without any relationship to people, it is not yet comprehensible to the nine-year-old child. We only deceive ourselves if we believe that the children understand the conventional descriptions offered as instruction in natural science. We must, of course, take up the study of nature when the child reaches nine years of age, but we must always relate it to people. Particularly in the study of nature, we should not begin with the idea of nature as something external to humans, but always begin with humanity itself; we should always put people in the center.

Let us assume that we want a child older than nine to understand the difference between lower animals, higher animals and people—then we begin with people. We compare the lower animals with the human; we compare the higher animals with the human. If we have described the human in terms of form, in terms of daily tasks, then we can apply what we know about humans to the lower and higher animals. The child understands that.

We should not worry too much that we are speaking above the child’s level of understanding. (Today we sometimes speak above the level of adult understanding.) We do not speak above the child’s level of understanding if, for example, we say—of course, with enthusiasm and with a real understanding of the subject—“Look at the lower animals!” Let’s say that we give the child the chance to see a squid. Then, always using the appropriate terms, we go on to show with which parts of the ideal human the squid is most closely related. The child can quickly understand that the squid is most closely related to the human head. It is in reality so; the lower animals have only simple forms, but the human head repeats the forms that find their simplest expression in the lower animals. The human head is only endowed in a more complicated way than the lower animals. What we find in the higher animals, for example, mammals, can only be compared with what we find in the human torso. We should not compare the higher animals with the human head, but with the torso. If we go on to the human limbs, then we must say, “Look at the human limbs; in their form they are uniquely human. The way the arms and hands are formed—as appendages to the body in which the soul-spirit in us can move freely—such a pair of limbs is not found anywhere in the entire animal kingdom!” If we speak of the monkey’s four hands, this is really an improper manner of speaking since their nature is to serve in holding, in moving the body along. In the human we see a remarkable differentiation of the hands and feet, the arms and legs. What makes a human really a human? Certainly not the head; it is only a more perfect form of what we find already in the lower animals. What we find in the lower animals is further developed in the human head. What makes a human, human, what puts the human far above the animal world, are the limbs.

Of course, you cannot bring what I have just shown you to children in the same form. You translate it so that the child by and by learns to feel such things out of experience. Then, through your teaching you can clear away endless amounts of what, for quite mysterious reasons, currently spoils our moral culture. Our present moral culture is so often spoiled because people are so proud and arrogant concerning the head. Whereas, people could be proud of their limbs—though they would not be if the limbs were better developed, and this can be proven—that serve to work, that serve to put them in the world of social order.

Natural scientific instruction concerning the animal world can, in an unconscious way, bring the correct feelings about the relationship of people to themselves and about social order into human nature. This shows that the pedagogical question has a much deeper meaning than we generally believe today, that it concerns the great, all-encompassing cultural questions. It also provides information about how to teach science to children after the age of nine. You can relate everything to humanity, but in such a way that nature appears everywhere alongside humans and humans appear as a great condensation of nature. Teachers can give the child much if they maintain this point of view until about the age of twelve.

Around twelve years of age, an important change begins in the development of the child. At the age of twelve, thirteen, fourteen—it is different in each child—that which sexual maturity expresses comes into play, namely, the ability to judge, judgment. Judgment comes into play and must work together with the reduction in the need for authority. The teacher must harmoniously handle the need for authority and judgmental powers during this age. We must treat the subject material in this way.

This is the time when we may begin to bring in those natural scientific and, in particular, physical facts that are completely independent of humans, for instance, the refraction of light and such. It is at this age that the understanding of how to use nature in relationship to humans begins. Until the twelfth year, the child, through inner necessity, wants to understand nature from the standpoint of a human, no longer moralizing, but in the way I just described to you. After the twelfth year, the child tends to observe what is independent of people, but to relate it back to people. You develop something that the child does not forget again when you, let us say, explain the refraction of light through a lens, and then continue on to its application to people, the refraction of light in the eye, the whole inner structure of the eye. You can teach this to a child of this age.

You see, the true curriculum results from an understanding of the stages of human life. The children themselves tell us, if we can really observe them, what they want to learn in a particular stage of life. However, we cannot derive these results from modern natural science. Using natural scientific facts, you simply do not come to the point of view that shows the immeasurable importance of that Rubicon in life that lies around the ninth year, or the other Rubicon in life that lies around the twelfth year. We must bring these things forth out of the entirety of human nature. This entirety of human nature includes body, soul and spirit; modern science, although it believes itself capable of saying something about soul and spirit, actually limits itself to the body. The way such things are often discussed today—whether to emphasize academics or morality in teaching, whether to teach people more according to their abilities, or to see that they learn more about science because it will be needed later for a job, or so that they can take their place in society—these questions appear childish when we get to know the deeper basis from which education must emanate. How the individual relates to all of human development is not understood by natural science. However a spiritual comprehension of human developmental history does understand it.

Let us consider the following law, which is just as much a law as the laws of natural science, but which the methods of modern science do not comprehend. If we go back—you will find these things fully developed in my writings—to the ancient times of humanity, we find that people remained capable of development into very old age, capable of development in the way that we are now capable only during our early childhood. If we go back to these ancient times, we find that people said to themselves, “When I am thirty-five years old,” or in still earlier times, “When I am forty-two years old, I will with certainty go through changes connected with the development of my body that will make me into another person.” Just as at the change of teeth we go through something connected with the development of the body which makes us into another person, just as at sexual maturity we go through something connected with the development of the body which makes us into another person, so in ancient times did people go through such things into very old age. In the course of time, human development has lost this. Today, in childhood we cannot look at an older person and say, to the same extent as was possible in ancient times, “I will be happy to be so old some day, because this person has experienced something that, due to my present stage of bodily development, is not yet possible for me.” The progress of human development is such that we bring a bodily development to ever fewer older stages of life.

Those able to observe such things know that, for example, in Greek times still, people in their thirties clearly perceived, as we today in our youth perceive, things not connected with the physical body. Today such perceptions are at most possible for people before the age of twenty-seven. In the future, this age will be even younger. This is the direction of human development, that the natural, the basic, development of the individual continues only to an ever-younger age. That is a fundamental law. Our cultural development is directly connected with this fundamental law, in that reading and writing appear at a particular age, whereas, in ancient times, they were not there. This is connected with humanity’s dependency upon ever-younger stages of natural development.

Those who can then look further for such clues concerning human development, which we can gain only from an inclusive knowledge, will know how the longings of a Theodor Vogt, a Rein, a Sallwiirk can be satisfied. The current mechanistic orientation of science does not have even the possibility of knowing something like this human life, in which natural development is condensed into ever younger stages of life. It does not have even the possibility of creating a truly comparative historical science that could give clues about how to recognize people’s relationship to cultural development. However, those who look further know that people, as they are born, have, of course, characteristics appropriate to their epoch, that they are part of a comprehensive human development. If we develop the aptitudes people already have, then, simply because these people are a part of human development, what we should develop is, in a formal sense, developed. If we recognize reality, then much of what causes such a furor today—whether to do things this way or that—becomes only an abstract rambling. This attitude of confrontation resolves itself in a true, a real, attitude of compromise.

This, you see, is what we would like to develop in the Waldorf School faculty, to create in at least one place something for the future. We hope that the teachers will correctly recognize people and the relationship of people to modern culture, and that they will be inspired by this knowledge, by this feeling, to a will to work together with the child. Then true educational artists will emerge. Upbringing is never a science, it is an art. Teachers must be absorbed in it. They can only use what they know as a starting point for the art of education.

We should not ramble on too much about the needs of teachers to have quite specific capabilities. These capabilities are more widespread than we think—only at present they are not very well developed. We need only the perseverance to develop them in the teachers in the right way, through a strong spiritual science. Then, we will find that what we call teaching ability is more widespread than we think.

You see, this is connected with something else again. Today, in theory, we are often warned against too much abstraction in instruction; but we still instinctively make these abstractions. It will concern those who see through these things that the plans and ideas for reform presently so common will make instruction more abstract than it is now. It will become worse in spite of all the beautiful ideas contained in these reform plans. If we study the stages of human development correctly—first, the long stages up to the change of teeth and to sexual maturity, and then the shorter stages up to the development of a feeling of self and the sense of people separate from nature—if we study these epochs correctly, so that we do not tritely define them, but obtain an artistic, intuitive picture of them, then we can first understand how greatly the developing child is damaged when intellectual education is steered in the wrong direction. We should always emphasize the need to educate people as whole beings. But we can only bring up people as whole beings if we know their separate parts, including the soul and spirit, and understand how to put them together. We can never educate people as whole beings if in education we allow thinking, feeling and willing to interact chaotically. We can educate people as whole beings only if we intuitively know what the characteristics of thinking, of feeling, of willing are. Then, we can allow these powers of the human being to interact correctly in the soul and the spirit.

When people today discuss such things, they tend to fall into extremes. When people realize that intellect is too prominent, that our intellects are too strongly developed, they become enthusiastic about eradicating this imbalance, and say, “Everything depends upon the development of will and feeling.” No, everything depends upon developing all three elements! We must develop people’s intellect, feeling and will in the right way, so that they can understand how to let those three elements of life interact correctly. If we are to develop the intellectual element correctly, then during the elementary school period we must give children something that can grow with them, that can develop as a whole. Understand me correctly, particularly on this point, for it is an important point. Think about it. You develop in children until the age of fourteen those ideas that you have carefully defined so the children know how they are to think them. But, just through the good definitions you have given them, you have often given them ideas that are quite stiff, that cannot grow with the person. People must grow from the age of fourteen to twenty, from the age of twenty to twenty-five, and so forth, and at the same time, their ideas must grow along with them. The ideas must be able to grow in parallel. If your definitions are too well formed, people grow, but their ideas do not grow with them. You guide intellectual development in the wrong direction. Then in cultural life, people will be unable to do anything except remember the ideas that you so carefully gave them. That would be wrong. Children’s ideas should grow in parallel with their own development. Their ideas should grow so that what they learned at the age of twelve is, at the age of thirty-five, as different from what it was when they first learned it, as people in their physical bodies at the age of thirty-five are different from what they were at the age of twelve. That is to say, in intellectual development, we must not bring something well-formed and dead, but teach something living, something that has life in it and can change. Thus, we will define as little as possible. If we want to bring ideas to a child, we will depict them from as many points of view as possible. We will not say, “What is a lion? A lion is such and such.” Rather, we will depict a lion from many different points of view—we will instill living, moving ideas that will then live with the child. In this regard, modern education does much damage.

People must live through their earthly existence, and often the ideas that we instill in them die and remain as soul corpses; they cannot live. We cannot get to the root of these things with the crude concepts developed by modern pedagogy. A very different spiritual impulse must imbue this pedagogy. That is something we strive for in the Waldorf School. We try to give pedagogy a new basis from which to consider such things psychologically. We are completely convinced that an understanding of human beings cannot arise out of the old principles, and that, therefore, these cannot be the principles of a pedagogy based upon psychology. We cannot form this psychology of the developing human with the methods that are so common today.

You see, when we can really, correctly, observe such things, then we throw light on many secondary concepts that we hold to be very important today. We can easily understand them once we understand the main concepts. There is today, for instance, so much nonsense concerning the importance of play in the education of children. In considering the importance of play, we often forget the most important thing, namely that if play is strongly regulated and children are made to direct their play toward a particular goal, then it is no longer play. The essence of play is that it is free. If, however, you make play really play, as is necessary for instruction, then you will not fall prey to the foolish expression, “Instruction should be just a game.” Then you will look more for the essential in the rhythm that comes into the life of the child when you allow play and work to alternate.

In training the mind and training feeling, we must give particular attention to the individual characteristics of the child. As teachers, we must be capable of forming the instruction so that the child does not simply receive something intellectual in the instruction, but enjoys the instruction in an aesthetic way. We cannot achieve this if the ideas appeal only to the intellect. We can do this if we, as teachers, relate to the children’s feelings in such varied ways that we actually elicit the children’s expectations of the subject, which we then fulfill. We can do this if we arouse hopes that, both large and small, we fulfill—if we develop every positive attribute of the children that can play a role in an aesthetic understanding of their surroundings. You can meet the child’s aesthetic needs if you bring yourself into a correct relationship to the child’s feelings, if you dont tritely “sell” nature studies, as is done nowadays: “Look, there is a mouse. The mouse runs. Was there ever a mouse at home? Have you ever seen a mousehole?” Of course, today instruction in nature study is not given in such extreme tastelessness, but similarly. People have no idea how much good taste, that is, the aesthetic experiencing of children, is damaged through what people nowadays call nature studies. We will develop taste only by steering the child’s interest to large, inclusive views. For the proper unfolding of the mind, of feeling, taste must rule in instruction and in the schools. Thus, we can develop a certain instinct for the essentials in education.

The intellect is at first the highest mental aspect in each of us; but if we develop it one-sidedly, without a concurrent development of feeling and will, then we also develop a tendency toward materialistic thinking. Although the intellect is our highest mental aspect during physical earthly life, intellect is directed toward materialism. Specifically, we should not believe that when we develop the intellect, we also develop people spiritually. As paradoxical as that sounds, it is nevertheless true that we develop people’s capacity to understand material things when we develop the intellect. By first tastefully, in an aesthetic way, developing the sensitivity, the feelings, we can direct the human intellect toward the soul aspects. We can give children a foundation for directing the intellect toward the spirit only insofar as we practice a development of will, even if we develop it only as physical dexterity. That so few people today tend to direct the intellect toward the spirit can only be a consequence of the fact that the will was so incorrectly trained during childhood.

How do we as teachers learn to develop will in the proper way? I recently pointed out that we learn to do it by allowing children to be artistically active. As early as possible, we should not only allow children to hear music, to see drawings and paintings, but also allow them to participate. Besides mere instruction in reading and writing—yes, we must develop instruction in reading and writing from artistic activities, writing from drawing, and so forth—besides all this, basic artistic activities must take place early in the education wherever possible. Otherwise, we will have weak-willed people. Directing youths toward what their later work will be comes in addition to this.

You see just how necessary it is in modern times that we come to a new understanding of humanity. This understanding can be the basis for a new way of educating, as much as this is possible within all the constraints that exist today. Because modern science does not comprehend these things, we must create something that leads in this direction through the Waldorf School.

It is urgently necessary that we do not allow ourselves to be deceived by much of what is said today. A week ago, I tried to explain the significance of the empty phrase for modern spiritual life. Empty phrases come into play particularly in educational reform plans. People feel good—and they believe that they are “very pedagogical’—when they repeatedly admonish others to raise people, not robots. But those who say this must first know what a real human is; otherwise this sentence becomes just an empty phrase. This is particularly so when the often-asked question, “To what end should we educate children?” is answered by, “To be happy and useful people.” Those who say this mean people who are useful in the way the speakers find useful and happy in the way the speakers mean happy.

It is especially important that we form a foundation that allows us to understand what human beings really are. However, this cannot be done with the old prejudices of our world view. It can only come from a new understanding of the world. A new form of education will not develop if we do not have the courage to come to a new scientific orientation. What we see most often today are people who want everything conceivable, but not what is necessary to arrive at a new orientation in understanding the world. We have been searching for this new orientation for years by means of spiritual science. If many people have distanced themselves from it, that is because they find it too uncomfortable, or because they do not have the courage. But what we need for a real art of education can emerge only from a properly founded spiritual world view.

Think about the importance of what the teacher represents to the growing child. Basically, we people here on earth, if we are not to become petrified in one of the stages in our life, must continually learn from life. But, first we must learn to learn from life. Children must learn to learn from life in school so that, in later life, their dead ideas do not keep them from learning from life; so that, as adults, they are not petrified. What keeps eating at people today is that school gave them too little. Those who see through our deplorable social conditions know that they are largely connected with what I have just described. People do not have that inner hold on life that can come only when the right material is taught at the right time in school. Life remains closed if school does not give us the strength to open it. This is only possible if, in the early school years the teacher is the representation of life itself. The peculiarity of youth is that the gulf still exists between people and life. We must bridge this gulf. The young senses, the young intellect, the young mind, the young will are not yet so formed that life can touch them in the right way. Children meet life through the teacher. The teacher stands before the child as, later, life stands there. Life must be concentrated in the teacher. Thus, an intensive interest in life must imbue the teachers. Teachers must carry the life of the age in themselves. They must be conscious of this. Out of this consciousness can radiate what lively instruction and conduct must communicate to the pupils. To begin such a thing, teachers must no longer be miserably confined to the realm of the school; they must feel themselves supported by the whole breadth of modern society and how this interacts with the future, a future in which precisely teachers have the greatest interest. Under the present conditions and despite the present obstacles, we should try to do this in the school, as well as it can be done by people who bring the necessary prerequisites from their present lives. We should not work out of any one-sided interest, out of a preference for this or that, but rather work out of what speaks loudly and clearly to us as necessary for the development of present and future humanity. What in human developmental progress we see as necessary for our time should enter and strengthen instruction through the founding of the Waldorf School.

When Mr. Molt first set out to found a school for the children of his employees, clearly his intention was to serve humanity in these difficult times. He chose a means which we must employ above all others when working to heal our social conditions. It is written in all your souls that we must create something new out of the conditions that we experience—the conditions that have developed over the past three or four centuries in the so-called civilized world. It must also have been deeply written in your souls that what we need above all to achieve other conditions is a different way of preparing human beings for a place in the world, through upbringing and education. What we need is a way untainted by the traditions of the past three or four centuries that are now reaching their zenith. For the future, we expect a social structure much different from the one of the present. We have a right to expect that. We look lovingly at our children, at the next generation, and we, particularly those who are parents, often have misgivings in our hearts. How will our loved ones fit into a society that must be so different from that of the present? Will they be equal to the new social challenge coming to humanity? Will they be capable of contributing to the formation of society, so that those who come after us will have it other than we have had, will have, in a much different sense, a more humane existence than we have had?

Everyone feels that the question of upbringing and education is, in a profound sense, a question of the highest order. This is particularly true in times like ours, times of sudden change and transformation of society. We look back at the terrible times humanity has recently lived through in Europe, we look upon the rivers of blood that have flowed, and we see the great army of unhappy people, their bodies broken and their souls shattered, which necessarily resulted from the unnatural conditions of recent times. When we look upon all this, the desire wells up in us to ask, “In the broadest sense, how must we bring up people so that this will be impossible in the future?” Out of this privation and misery, an understanding must awaken for the role of education in restructuring human social relations.

In principle, we hear this expressed from many sides. Yet, we must ask ourselves, when people say this here and there, if they always mean it in the correct sense. Today, people say pleasant words about many things. These pleasant words do not always arise from inner strength, nor above all else, from inner truths that can put into practice the content of these words. Today those people who are called upon to school and educate our children come forth, offer their opinions and notions, and say, “We know how children should be brought up and educated. We should simply do it just as we have always wanted, but have not been allowed to do—then the right thing will occur.” Behind those who so speak, we hear those who feel themselves called to teach the teachers. They assure us, “We have the right views about what teachers should become. Just follow us. We will send the right teachers into the world, so everything goes well in education.” Yet, when we look deeply into what has become of our social conditions, we want to shout to both these teachers and these teachers of teachers, “You may mean well, but you do not really know what you are talking about!” For nothing can help modern education, nothing can raise modern education to a better state, unless the teachers admit, “We come from the traditions formed during the past three or four centuries. We were trained in the way that leads humanity into such misfortune.” In their turn, those who trained the teachers must admit, “We have not understood anything except how to give teachers the results of industrialism, statism, capitalism. Of course, we have delivered the present teachers, who fit into this present social configuration, this configuration that simply must change.”

This means that, just as we demand a change, a transformation of the full spectrum of the present social structure for the future, we must also demand another art of education, and a different basis for this art!

In many respects, the question of education today is a question of teachers. Today, when we speak with those who want to become teachers and educators, we frequently sense the deep antisocial feeling lying within humanity. We speak with them about what education should become in the future. They say, “Yes, I have been saying that all along. We should raise children to be competent modern-day people. We should educate them to be useful people. We should not pay so much attention to vocational training, but more to the training of the whole person.” They talk about such things and go away with the impression that they think just the same as we think. They think just the opposite!

Today, our antisocial life has come so far that people express opposites with the same words. This is what makes it so difficult to understand one another. Someone who truly thinks socially, thinks very differently from modern people satisfied with the old traditions. In the same way, we must think fundamentally differently about teaching and education when we attempt to solve the educational social question in a particular instance. We must think differently from those who believe we can base this change on their traditional educational methods. Truly, today we must think and perceive more thoroughly than many believe. In addition, we must be clear that we cannot create something new out of the old educational and scientific methods; education and science must themselves change.

This is adequate justification for us to begin this work of starting the Waldorf School with a course for the faculty. We have attempted to select for the faculty people who, at the least, are rooted in the old educational system to a greater or lesser degree—for one it is more, for another less. But, we were also intent on finding people who have the heart and soul for the reconstruction of our society and culture. We sought people who have the heart and soul for what it means to raise the children of today to be the people of tomorrow.

Our new teachers also must carry another conviction in their souls, namely, that from the time children enter school we may teach them only what the essence of humanity dictates. In this sense we want to found a unified school in the truest sense of the word. All we want to know in the growing child is the developing human being. We want to learn from the nature of the developing child how children want to develop themselves as human beings, that is, how their nature, their essence should develop to become truly human.

“That is just what we also want,” the old teachers and educators of teachers tell us. “We have always tried to teach people, to consider, for example, the distinct personalities of the children.”

Yes, we must reply, you have striven to train children to be what you perceived human beings to be, the kind of people you thought were necessary for the old political and economic life. We cannot do anything with this idea of “human beings”; and the future of humanity will not know what to do with it nor want to know. We need a fundamental renewal.

The first thing needed for the educational system of the future is a new understanding of humanity. The understanding of humanity that has swollen up out of the morass of materialism in the last centuries and has been dressed up in our higher schools of learning as the basis of human nature cannot be the basis of the art of education in the future. What we require is a new perception of human nature. We can derive this only from a new science. The science taught today, and also represented by those who teach, is only the reflection of older times. Just as a new epoch should come, so too should come a new science, a new way to train teachers, a new pedagogy built upon a new understanding of human beings. For just that reason, we pay particular attention to a real understanding of humanity in the course to prepare the faculty for the Waldorf School. We cherish the hope that the future teachers in the Waldorf School will come to know the developing human. We hope that they will give this embryonic human the capacities that the future will require of people who work in the socially formed human society. We sense that much of what the old way of teaching has said about humanity is just words. Today we study the true essence of human thought, so we can train the child in the right kind of thinking. We study the true basis of real human feeling, so that in the genuinely social community people bring forth justice based upon true human feeling. We study the essence of human will, so that this human will can embrace and permeate the newly formed economic life of the future. We do not study people in a materialistic, one-sided way; we study the body, soul and spirit of the human being, so that our teachers can train the body, soul and spirit of human beings. We do not speak of body, soul and spirit merely as words. We attempt to discover how the various stages of the human being result from one another. We look carefully at how the children are when they enter the school, and the faculty takes over from the parents.

How superficially the so-called educational sciences have observed this period of human growth! There is an important turning point in the life of a child; it lies around the age of seven, just about that year in which the child enters elementary school. It is just at that year when the teacher should take over the child from the parents for a portion of the further education. The external expression of this important period of life is the change of teeth; however, the new teeth are only an outward sign of the important change occurring within.

Certainly, you have already heard much about what we need to understand to properly comprehend social reforms, and so forth. However, many of you were probably still of the opinion, received from a study by the leading experts, that everything has already been taken care of for humanity in an admirable way. The most important things have not been done! Modern people find it quite strange, when we say that at the age when the child enters school, an inner revolution occurs in the human soul, in the whole being, which is only outwardly expressed only in the cutting of teeth. Until that time children are imitating beings, beings that bring through birth the urge to do everything as it is done around them. In these first years it is simply a part of human nature to allow ourselves to be trained by what we see in our surroundings. Just at the time of the cutting of teeth, something quite different begins to appear in human nature. The urge arises to learn from authority, to learn from those who already can do something. This urge lasts until the time of sexual maturity, until about fourteen or fifteen years of age. Thus, this natural drive fills the time in elementary school. We can properly teach in elementary school only if we have a thorough pedagogical understanding of this revolution within the child of seven. Here I have given you only a single example of what, compared to the old way, the new pedagogy must thoroughly observe and understand.

On the other hand, we need to know that around the age of nine new inner physical and spiritual strengths begin to come forth. If we were to teach prematurely what the curriculum foresees for the age after nine, the instruction, instead of helping, would damage the child for life.

We need a comprehensive understanding of human life if we want to practice a comprehensive, a true, pedagogy serving humanity. We must know how to teach before and after the children reach the age of nine. We may not, as old, gray-haired administrators from the school board do, set up the curriculum to take into account just any external consideration: this for the first grade; this for the second grade; this for the third grade; and so forth. Nothing that could really prepare the child for life will result. Human nature itself must teach us what we need to accomplish through education in each year of the child's life.

Consider for a moment that, as adults, you are still learning from life. Life is our great teacher. However, the ability to learn from life comes at the earliest at fifteen, sixteen or seventeen years of age. Then, we first stand face to face with the world in a way such that we can learn directly from the world. Until then, the teacher who faces us in the classroom is the world. It is the teacher we want to understand; it is the teacher we want to love; it is from the teacher we want to learn. The teacher should bring to us what is out there in the world. From the age of seven to fifteen years, there is an abyss between ourselves and the world. The teacher should bridge that gulf for us.

Can teachers who are not gripped by all that life has to give, who, embittered and soured by all that has been funneled into them, “teach grammar so, natural history so, and other subjects s0,” who do not concern themselves with what so agitates humanity in our time—can such teachers rightly depict and reveal to children all that life brings over the seven or eight years of elementary school? A new study of humanity, a new understanding of humanity is necessary. The faculty must develop a new enthusiasm out of this new understanding of humanity.

This shows you some of what we keep in mind in preparing for the children in our teaching seminars: to thoroughly understand humanity so that we can teach from human nature itself and send the child into life.

The second thing that we must develop as we work toward a more humane form of society, is a social attitude of the teachers toward the children already in the school. This is a new love of humanity—an awareness of the interplay of forces between the teacher and pupil. Those forces cannot exist if the teacher does not enter into the art of teaching in a lively way.

Everyone agrees that the painter must learn to paint, that the musician must have command over a musical instrument and much more, that the architect must learn architecture. We set certain requirements so these people may become artists. We also must set these kinds of requirements for teachers who would become true human artists. We must set them seriously. To do so, we must understand that no present-day pedagogy and no present-day educational method gives the teacher what must first be found through a thorough study of humanity. We must find it so that a new love of humanity may come into the relationship between teacher and pupil. Our goal must be that teachers become true artists in their field.

Many things play a role. One teacher enters the classroom, and the children feel an aversion that lasts throughout the year; they would much rather be outside because what that teacher does with them is so unpleasant. Another teacher need only enter the classroom and, simply by being present, creates a bridge to each pupil. What makes such a difference? The teacher who makes such an adverse impression on the children goes into the school only to, as the saying goes, earn a living—in order to live. That teacher has acquired the superficial ability to drill the children, but goes just as unwillingly to school as the children and is just as happy when school ends. That teacher does the job mechanically.

I am not surprised that the majority of today's teachers view their work mechanically. Their understanding of humanity comes from the dead science that has arisen out of the industrial, statist and capitalist life of the past three or four centuries. That science has resulted in a dead art of education, at best a wistful form of education. We are striving for the understanding of humanity that we need to create the art of teaching in the Waldorf School. This vision of humanity, this understanding of humanity, so penetrates the human being that of itself it generates enthusiasm, inspiration, love. Our aim is that the understanding of humanity that enters our heads should saturate our actions and feelings as well. Real science is not just the dead knowledge so often taught today, but a knowledge that fills a person with love for the subject of that knowledge.

Thus, this understanding of humanity is brought to the teachers, in the seminar they are now taking to prepare themselves to educate your children. This understanding of humanity, this understanding of the growing child, should so saturate the teachers that a love of humanity enters the teaching. As recompense for the love that the teachers provide the children, a power will come forth, will well up from the children, that gives them the ability to take in more easily the material to be learned. The right kind of love, not overly protective love, but the real love that flows through what we do in the classroom or other teaching activities, determines whether the child will learn with ease or difficulty, whether the child’s education is good or bad.

The third thing that we want to bring to the child and for which we prepare our teachers so that they understand the proper way to present it to the children, is willpower. We want to cultivate this willpower by allowing the child to do something artistic at a relatively early stage of childhood. Most people do not know the secret connection between the will and working in the proper way in childhood with drawing, painting, music and the other arts. We do so much good when the child has this opportunity.

Our children will learn to read and write from life itself. This is our intention. We will not pedantically force them to write letters that for every child at first seem all the same. They need not learn it as an abstract thing, as letters were for the North American Indians when the Europeans came. It is true, isn't it? The Europeans destroyed the North American Indians down to the root. One of the last chiefs of the North American Indian tribes destroyed by the Europeans tells that the white man, the paleface, came to put the dark man and all he stood for under the earth. “The dark man had certain advantages over the palefaces,” the chief then continued; “he did not have the little devils on paper.” We want to say that everything teachers pedantically and narrow-mindedly draw on the blackboard for the pupils to copy is seen as little devils by today’s children. We can draw all such things from life. If we succeed in what we are attempting, the children will learn to read and write more quickly. When we derive everything from life, when writing comes from drawing and not from arbitrariness, children will learn more quickly. At the same time, we can raise strong-willed people who later in life will be up to the task.

We will not simply superficially say, “We want to educate people.” In a profound manner, we first ask ourselves, modestly and honestly, “What is the Being of Humanity, and how does it appear in the developing Human Being?” We do not first go and ask political and industrial leaders, “How should we teach and educate people so that they can take their place in society?” We also do not ask, “What does this or that governmental body compel us to teach so that people can fulfill what the state demands of them?” No, we turn our questions to the uniform nature of humanity and its requirements. Yes, you see, in this respect the old social conditions are in conflict with what is necessary for a more socially oriented human future.

Today the state takes over the developing person, the child, at a particular age. The state would take over the child earlier, but the child is not clean enough for it. For a while, it leaves the rearing of and caring for the child to the parents. When the child has grown enough that it is no longer so dirty, the state takes over and dictates what we are to funnel into the child. Of course, the state allows us to funnel into the child only what is necessary for the workplace, thereby enabling itself to do with people as it will. Even when they are adults, people are often quite satisfied. The state tells them, “You will be assured of a lifelong job, and when you are no longer able to work, you will have a pension.” Retirement is a notion that some circles of leading people treat as an ideal. They expect it from the state education. These people also expect that the state, through the religion teachers, will take their souls in hand so that these souls need not work, since the churches will do the work for them. They expect that the churches will, so to speak, provide a “soul retirement” after death. Today everyone wants to have everything done for them. This is the result of a totally false education.

A real education takes care that body, soul and spirit will be intrinsically free and independent. A real education takes care to put people into life. Do you believe that if we really ask people how we should bring them up, that is, if we inquire into the nature and being of humanity, we would then create impractical people? No, just the opposite! We are educating people who can, in truth, put themselves powerfully into life. In grammar school we are educating humans who, in later life, will know more of what is necessary for the outward, practical life. These people will have learned to think; these people will have learned to correctly feel; and these people will have learned to properly use their will. We want to introduce all of this, so that truth and strength can rule, not so that in pedagogy the phrase holds, “We should bring up children correctly.” We should instead make the child a true person!

Much must happen in the outside world to create better social conditions. Much must happen in just the area where the Waldorf School wants to set a foundation stone for this great building. It would be something beautiful for you to say with heartfelt meaning, “We want to be pioneers for a future educational system. We want to be pioneers in the sense that we want to be the first to entrust our children to such an educational system of the future, one working for a new social life. We want to be pioneers in the sense that we do not believe that a few external changes will lead to a better social condition, but that a change must occur at the heart of science, art and education to bring about the desired condition of humanity.”

How do people today often imagine what should actually happen? Socialization should occur, but most people, even those who quite honestly speak of socialization, think, “Sure, somewhere there are the universities, and they have already done everything right. It may be that we need to change the outward position of the university professors a little, but science itself, we may not change that in any way.” Middle school, high school, trade school—people just do not think that outward life has come from these schools. But the people educated in these schools have created the outer life. At most, we think we should organize the lower level of education somewhat differently than it is now. This results in self-deception, in that we say, “We must provide education without cost.” I would like to know how we can, in fact, do this. We just deceive ourselves, since we must pay for education. It cannot be free of cost—that is only “possible” through the deception of taxes or such things. We make up such phrases, which do not have any basis in reality.

People think that we should change this or that in the organization a little. We must subject everything to fundamental change, from top to bottom. We need another teacher training, another spirit in the school, even another love, different from that which modern sophisticated faculties bring into the schools. Unfortunately, all too few people think about that. You will perform a great service to humanity if you are pioneers in this respect, if you think we must renew the educational system for the betterment of humanity, and if you take part in this renewal with heartfelt interest and heartfelt sense. The more you think of taking part, of interesting yourselves in what is to happen in the Waldorf School, the better the faculty will succeed in working in unity with you for the betterment and blessing of your children, and thus for the whole of future humanity—at least within the boundaries that we can envision now.

People can work out ideals alone and write them down. The ideals can be beautiful and can please this or that person. Yes, people can think abstract ideals alone. But, with ideals that we should put into practice, such as the ideal of our new educational system, we are dependent upon finding understanding in the world. We want especially the parents of the children to be entrusted to the Waldorf School to be understanding of its ideal.

Mr. Molt has spoken of his responsibility, and he is right. This responsibility, though, is something that goes much further. We are all conscious of this responsibility as we prepare for the Waldorf School, and we will always remain conscious of it. Such a responsibility is always before us, when we work toward an ideal as radical as that of the Waldorf School. By taking up this ideal, we are forced to break with prejudices in the broadest sense. Truly, today it is not easy to find out everything we must do to educate children properly, particularly in grammar school. The empty phrase has caused such great havoc.

“We should teach the children through play.” This is particularly the ideal of middle-class mothers who, through a certain kind of love—we might call it a doting affection—are devoted to their children. From one side we may emphasize, with a certain right, that education should not become drudgery for the child. We could take the position that we should “playfully” carry out education. We are all quite clear that in education we must bring play as well as work together in the proper relationship to prepare for life. However, we are also conscious that play which trains the child like an animal, is play no longer. This play, often found in our schools today, trains the children like animals, just as before we pedantically drilled them. Play can only occur in freedom. However, play must alternate with another kind of activity so that children learn the seriousness of work, so that they are up to the seriousness of work in life. We will not work with empty phrases. We will have a time for work and a time for play. We will judge everything by the manifestations of the nature of the developing person, of the child.

Just as we should familiarize ourselves with the true understanding of humanity, so must we gradually bring the school to the point that the children happily go to it, that they are glad to go to this school. We will not seek to attain anything unnatural. It would be unnatural to believe that children, who should have vacation, should go to school and not play during vacation. We will also not be so foolish as to believe that children, after they have played for weeks, should sit well-behaved in the classroom upon just returning to school. We will understand our children. However, after awhile, through the way that we relate to the children, they will do their work during school time just as happily as they play during vacation. An ideal of the Waldorf School is that the children do what they should do, out of an inner force. We do not see our goal as simply to command the children. Rather, our goal is to relate to the children so that from our attitude the children feel, “I am glad to do this, I am happy to go through this with my teacher.”

When your children come home from school, we hope that you enjoy it when they talk about the things they enjoyed at school. We hope that you enjoy the joyous faces of the children when they come home after school. We do not hope this because we want to make life into some sort of entertainment, but because we know how many of today’s terrible social conditions result from something that could be different. We know that worse will come to humanity if we do not work for new social circumstances through conscientious new beginnings in education. We do everything possible to form education and upbringing as I have described it to you, not to do the child a favor, but because we know the power that joy gives to the child.

We want to create this new school as an example—this school so many people hunger for, but do not have the courage to look in the eye. We will have to believe, we will have to understand, that the so-called social question also rests upon the problem of education as I characterized it here, and that we can accomplish social change only in the way that we are attempting in the Waldorf School. It would be a great tragedy if the social impulse that is the foundation of the Waldorf School were ignored. May it first be recognized by those who entrust their children to the Waldorf School. We are all conscious of the responsibility of placing something in the world to which you should entrust the development and future of your children, come what may. We have not taken on the responsibility of what should happen here out of some sort of whim, but out of the recognition that such tasks are necessary in our time and that it is now particularly necessary to come to the developing human being, the child, with the best that humanity can understand.

I do not know if you know exactly the feeling of having gone through the world during these terrible war years, the last four or five years, and having seen how the children, the six- to nine-year-olds or still younger, have grown up. At times, you could feel quite a deep pain if you did not live unconsciously and thoughtlessly in the world, but lived, rather, with a consciousness of what lies ahead if we do not conceive some help for what has brought humanity to such a terrible state. You get a heavy heart, seeing the growing children lately. You cannot see them without having a deep heartache, if you do not decide at the same time, as far as you are able, to effect another way of bringing up children—a way that is different from the way people of today had to go, the way that has caused so much of the present unhappiness and misery. In the foremost sense, we create a piece of human future with education. We must be clear that we must relearn, must rethink, many things. Today, we experience many curious things from teachers in the upper and lower grades.

I recently spoke in a neighboring city that has a university. I said that, among other things, the social question also involves the fact that people, although depressed by questions about the organization of life, do not consider themselves to be in an inhumane condition. I expanded upon that further. Afterward—it is hard to believe that today such people still exist—a university professor came up and said he could not understand why an inhumane existence of the modern blue-collar worker was connected with the wage scale. He saw their situation as no different from that of, for instance, Caruso, who sings, and receives a payment of thirty to forty thousand marks for the evening. That would be just the same as when a blue-collar worker received his wages and as when he, as a professor, received his salary. He could see no difference. There would be only a difference in the size of the payment, but no essential difference. Therefore he could not see wages as being a degradation of human existence. Wages are wages.

That is the response we receive today from a highly educated teacher. We receive such responses also from teachers at lower schools. This only emphasizes the necessity for a renewal of our training and educational system. We can say, “Truly, today, when we hear what people around many higher schools say about a reformation of our social conditions, and about the necessity to reform the schools, that is the most vivid proof that we must reform these schools. These people can only say what they say because these schools have a form that we must change.”

Now, two things could happen. Mr. Molt has had the ideal to found the school which today and over the next eight days shall be ceremoniously opened. Due to the peculiar circumstances of our time, people could misunderstand his intention. Resistance could arise so that we could not put this ideal into practice, and it would disintegrate after a short time. Then we would say, “Yes, Mr. Molt wanted something quite ideal, but it was utopian. No one can put something like that into practice so easily.” Why is it utopian? It is utopian because it is not understood, or because it is resisted!

A second thing could happen. Understanding could arise for what is born out of true social understanding, understanding for the real practicality of this wish. Then what is desired will become customary. It will become so familiar, that at first you, and later others, will say, “There was someone who saw more practically than others who thought they knew all about practical life.” People will not say, “This was utopian.” People will say, “Something really practical was put into the world!”

May the second of these two possibilities come to pass! Those who have the heart and soul for the social development of humanity now and in the future see this as a necessity. We will be able to look with utmost satisfaction upon what will occur when you, the first to send your children to the Waldorf School, stand by the side of the teachers with understanding, with interest. That will be the beginning of what should thrive with this school, what can really prosper.

May it prosper! May it thrive, so that those who see this blossoming decide to do the same in many different places. Of course, only when, and may it be as soon as possible, the same takes place out of the same spirit in many places, only then can what should come out of the Waldorf School come out of it. Then soon many more will follow. The free spirit will rule and a free social training and educational system will spread over the civilized earth.

This spirit and this feeling will be instilled into the civilized earth and will be an important power for all that will help us to come to a better, more humane existence in social organization.

May we grasp that the social question is a manifold one, and that one of its most important aspects is the question of education. May understanding and vision arise in the hearts of many people and powers for thinking, feeling and willing arise in the children. Thus, these children, when they are grown, can look back thankfully to their parents, who stood and first saw the social question, but still suffered deprivation because they themselves could not be brought up within the new socially oriented education. To these parents who understand the idea of such an education, the children will look back thankfully. Those children will be carried into a new time, along with many others, by the power that has become theirs through a truly humane upbringing and a humane education.

People want to make children useful for life in many ways. The old teachers also said that. Through the new educational system and pedagogy, we want to put people more humanely into life. Through these children, raised in this way, life itself will be so formed that its humanness appeals to the decency of understanding people.

May this spirit rule in the founding of this work that Mr. Molt, through the Waldorf School, wants to give to a part of humanity.

Question Session Following the Lecture

Question: How will religious instruction be given in the Waldorf School? Also, how will the feelings of the children coming from other schools be taken into account?

Dr. Steiner: Tt must first be emphasized that, in the strictest sense, the Waldorf School does not teach a particular philosophy. We are not going to bring dogmatically to the children what we derive from a philosophy that has been stated here for years. We will use it only because we can use it to improve, to reform the instructional methods, the way of handling the instruction.

On the other hand, we must, because our modern time needs it, present the content of the child’s religion. A Catholic teacher will instruct Catholic children in the Catholic tradition; a Catholic teacher will lead them in their religious exercises. The same is true for Protestant children. We do not seek to achieve the goals of the Waldorf School through the inculcation of any particular philosophy. What we want is that a new method of instructing and handling instruction, a new method of teaching and handling teaching arises out of what we do.

What happens to the children coming from other schools is a very important question, particularly for the older children. We will not begin with the first grade and then build upon that. Rather, we will begin with a complete elementary school. Thus, we will have children of all ages. Of course, through the methods we are now discussing in our seminar, we will later be able to do many things differently, when we have only children whom we taught beginning in the first grade. However, we will now take into account everything that the children have already learned. In each grade, we will begin with what the children have already learned and continue in the way appropriate to our methods. We will seek out only what is advantageous for the children without needing to repeat what they have already learned. In instructing, we can work very economically. Lay people have no idea of what we can accomplish. When we work so economically, we can teach in a quarter of an hour what normally takes two hours. This is a question of method; however, people must know the method. This is a very important thing, that we can teach in a quarter of an hour something that takes two hours to teach through incorrect methods. In that we use the right method, that is, a method that is in accord with human nature, we can teach more economically and accomplish much that other schools cannot accomplish, and still meet the criteria of the public school system. In this way, so long as we still have the present school system, when children graduate from our school, they can enter other schools without any loss of time. We will keep such things in mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So much for the special area of instructional pedagogy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man really only faces the riddles of existence when he has developed a degree of awareness of life, when he feels compelled to form ideas, sensations, feelings about his relationship to the world. But then, when he has reached such a situation, then the riddles of existence mean to him what can be called a vital question, because they are not only connected with some theoretical longings, with mere external questions of education, but the whole position of man in the world depends on them, the way in which man can find his way in the world, the degree of security he can have in life, and the inner support with which he can move through this life.

But now there is a considerable difference between the various types of riddle of existence. Man stands in the face of nature, must form ideas and feelings about his relationship to nature, and if I may use a comparison, I would like to say: When man has come to consciousness in the way I have characterized it, and he cannot find his way into certain things that confront him as mysteries of nature of nature, then existence, to which he once belonged — as I said, it is only expressed as a comparison — appears to him as a spiritual darkness; he feels as if he has been placed in a dark world, he feels that he cannot orient himself in this dark world. But to a certain extent this whole relationship to the world secrets of outer natural existence remains something external for the human being; it concerns his outer relationship to existence.

The human being's attitude to the riddles of his own soul is quite different. These riddles are what he lives by, and what basically constitute mental health and illness, but which can also become physical health and illness. For the life of the soul is something extraordinarily complicated, however simple it may initially appear. What we carry in our consciousness during our waking hours from morning to evening – it is indeed scientifically recognized today – is only a part of our soul life. A large part of our soul life rests in unconscious or, I could also say subconscious depths; it rises to the surface in the form of vague feelings, of vague moods, and also of all kinds of other soul content, and forms what is an indefinite basic state of our soul life. But what takes place and surges up in this more or less indeterminate way in the depths of our soul life is intimately connected with what actually constitutes the happiness or suffering of our lives. And anyone who tries to penetrate into the soul life of a human being by anthroposophical means will soon notice how everything that surges up indeterminately from the depths of the soul is connected with the physical body, and then more and more our entire state of health, which makes us capable of living or unable to live, can depend on these subconscious soul moods.

Today, however, I do not want to speak to you in the way that this unconsciousness of the soul is currently spoken about very often, by simply placing everything that shimmers unclearly in consciousness into the great container of this unconscious and by having more or less vague ideas about how this unconscious or subconscious works. I have been speaking here in this place about questions of anthroposophical research for many years and therefore cannot start from the most elementary of this research today, but I would like to consider the questions of soul life in their very essence in the way that they are connected to the happiness or unhappiness of life. But to do that, we must enter into what, flooded with all kinds of elements that are initially unknown, can have a disturbing or calming, happy or sorrowful effect on human mental life, which we want to point out more or less clearly through today's reflections, and what lies in between.

Now, if we look at our soul life, even if only superficially, we find two clearly distinguishable poles: on the one hand, the life of the imagination, which encompasses everything that takes place clearly and brightly in our consciousness, and on the other hand, the life of the will, which, in a certain way, initially emerges from the depths of the soul in darkness and darkness.

We distinguish – as I have often mentioned here – in the ordinary course of a person's life between two states of consciousness, of which only one is actually a distinct state of consciousness: the waking state and the sleeping state. In the sleeping state, the conscious life of imagination ceases; the entire soul life sinks down into a more or less dark darkness. But when we look at our soul life in the waking state with complete impartiality, we can only speak of the fact that we are truly awake with regard to everything that is conceptual. We have, so to speak, taken possession of ourselves as waking human beings, in that we have filled our consciousness with clear images, with thoughts full of light. We also accompany our volitional impulses, we accompany our actions with thoughts. But even in the simplest movement of the human body, how the thought of consciousness is connected with what actually happens during a volitional impulse, during an action, remains completely dark. How dark it is, what actually happens inside the arm when I just raise this arm, when the thought that has the goal of raising this arm wants to realize itself, so to speak, wants to shoot in and voluntarily set the arm in motion.

What happens in our own organism eludes our waking consciousness just as much as what happens in the human soul from falling asleep to waking up, so that we actually have to say: It is the case for the human soul that even in the waking state we have an element of sleeping, that the state of sleeping constantly permeates us and that we are only fully awake in the act of imagining, in the experience of clear, luminous thoughts. Between these two states, between the, I would say, fully waking state of imagination and the will life immersed in darkness, participating in both, lies the life of feeling and of the mind. Our feelings permeate our ideas. We bring certain sympathies and antipathies from our feelings into our imaginative life, and in doing so we usually either connect or separate our ideas. We accompany what flows into our will impulses with our emotional judgment, in that we perceive some actions as being in accordance with duty and others as transgressions of duty. And because we experience a certain emotional satisfaction when we perform our duties or dissatisfaction when we fail to fulfill our duties or for some other reason, our emotional life flows back and forth between our mental and our volitional life.

But the real soul mysteries do not present themselves to the dull person who, in the manner just described, devotes himself to the life of ideas on the one hand and to the life of feeling and the life of will on the other, but these soul mysteries emerge as man becomes more and more aware and aware. And even then the riddles of the soul do not arise in full consciousness, but they belong to the more or less subconscious experiences of the human being. Man never becomes quite clear in his consciousness as to the actual origin of the moods and dispositions of his soul life, which so influence his daily happiness and daily suffering. One must seek out and clearly express that which lives unclearly in the consciousness. And this is what I ask you to bear in mind first of all when I make the following remarks: that I will be obliged to express something in clear words that never lives in this clarity in the consciousness, but that is present in the soul life, healing and causing illness, that the person feels without being able to bring it to consciousness. And because this is so, the riddles of the soul are not merely theoretical, they are riddles of existence that are thoroughly experienced.

When man devotes himself to the life of imagination — as I said, I am speaking clearly about what is only felt vaguely, what is never fully brought to consciousness — he feels something like the vanity of his own existence. The life of imagination is an experience of images. The life of imagination is something that fills up during our waking day-to-day life with what we receive from the outer world in the way of impressions and perceptions. What we experience from nature forms the content of our imagination, it lives in us, it is what we draw up out of our memories. But we are aware: Yes, you are active in that you process your ideas in your ideas, in that you separate and connect the ideas; you are active inwardly, but you do not have your activity fully present in your mind; what is present in your mind is basically a reflection of the outer world. We know that we have to base our imaginative life on this external world. What we have is merely a picture of the external world; we live in pictures when we live in our imaginations, we do not feel fully alive in our imaginative life.

And this feeling, it lives subconsciously, as strange and paradoxical as it may sound. And as little as it is present in consciousness, it is alive in the subconscious; this feeling lives out in certain anxious feelings in relation to the life of ideas, in feelings of fear.

It sounds paradoxical, but this undercurrent of the human soul does exist. Most people know nothing about it, but most people, or actually all people, are constantly under its influence. And this undercurrent is an anxious current, that we could, so to speak, lose ourselves in the world, that we stand over an abyss because our world of imagination is a world of images. And again, the indefinite longing lives in the human soul: How do I find existence in this mere world of images?

This unconscious feeling in the undercurrent of the soul can be compared to the feeling that a person has when they are physically short of air, when they suffer from air hunger and thus consciously fall into anxious feelings. What a person consciously experiences through physical conditions is actually always unconsciously felt as a concomitant of the life of ideas. And so, on the one hand, attention can be drawn to a mystery of the soul, not in theoretical formulation, but by bringing up from the depths of the soul something that germinates or slumbers in this soul.

On the other hand, by living towards the element of will, the human being feels the opposite state. There is a different undercurrent in the life of the soul. Here the human being senses how he is exposed to his drives, his emotions, his instincts, how something natural plays into the human soul life that does not open up to the clarity of thinking, that is always immersed in a certain way in a reality that we cannot penetrate with light, that forms a darkness within ourselves. And if one can penetrate into these undercurrents of the soul with unbiased observation, one can indicate - one must always say a contradiction if one wants to characterize that which exists in the depths of the soul - how that which lives there is unconsciously felt. One must then characterize it by saying: It is felt in the same way as anger is felt in consciousness, or also the way a person feels when he cannot breathe out, when his blood circulation is so disturbed that the inhaled air is not properly converted in his body, when a kind of suffocation sets in. Something like anger-patience is always there in the human soul as a result of such a way of living towards the element of the will.

These are forces that live deep in the unconscious of the human soul, that surge up and constitute the real mystery of the human soul's life. And if you merely take the ideas in their pictorialness, the will in its instinctuality, as they present themselves to consciousness, you may feel these soul mysteries as something vague, as an indefinite sensation of the soul, but he does not make these soul riddles clear to himself, he does not really know what the indeterminate workings in him are that deeply influence his happy or unhappy mood in life.

It must be said again and again: the soul riddles are not the same as those we feel in nature; the soul riddles are those that are experienced inwardly, that flood up from the deep undercurrents of the soul and that must first be interpreted. That is why all science – which of course, as I have already emphasized here, has nothing to object to in its legitimate field – knows little about the actual mysteries of the soul. We see it – and I would like to cite two examples of this – in all of modern scientific thinking, how helpless science, which celebrates such great triumphs in other fields, actually is when it comes to the soul life, despite the fact that the greatest riddles of existence are connected to this soul life of man. I would like to recall two examples, which, however, I am convinced are deeply significant of what is there and of what is scientifically necessary in order to penetrate into the actual realm that the human being experiences as a soul mystery.

Almost half a century ago, the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond gave a speech at the 45th Naturalists' Conference in Leipzig that must be referred to again and again, although it has been discussed extensively and is now almost forgotten and has disappeared from the discussion. This speech was about the “limits of knowledge of nature”, and Du Bois-Reymond rightly states, on the one hand, that the material world is the limit of knowledge of nature in its essence. He says: Into the realm of matter the human spirit cannot penetrate. It penetrates into the outer observation of the outer sense phenomena to the revelation of material existence, but it cannot state what matter itself actually is. Du Bois-Reymond states this as the one limit. As the other limit, he states that of human consciousness; but today this is nothing other than that of the human soul life. He says: With the most perfect knowledge of nature, one cannot even gain any idea of how the simplest sensation in the human soul comes about. Even if one knew quite clearly how atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen move in the human brain, one would never be able to fathom from a clear insight into these movements how the simplest sensation - “I see red”, “I smell the scent of roses” - comes about, that is, how the first elements of mental life come about.

And Du Bois-Reymond is actually completely right in this statement. There is a second limit for external natural science here, except that Du Bois-Reymond's conviction is precisely the one that must be overcome through anthroposophical research. Du Bois-Reymond believes that the boundaries of knowledge of nature are the boundaries of all science. Therefore, he says: If one wants to penetrate into this realm of the spiritual and soul, one must do so by means other than scientific ones, because where supernaturalism begins, where, in other words, one enters the realm of the spiritual and soul, science ends. Anthroposophical research seeks to defend the idea that science need not be limited to the external natural world, but can develop the means to penetrate into the spiritual and soul realms.

The other example I would like to give is that of an outstanding personality, Franz Brentano, who wanted to establish a psychology entirely according to the method of modern natural science. That was his ideal. I have discussed the whole situation underlying Franz Brentano's research in detail in the third part of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Puzzles of the Soul) and would like to mention only a few principles here. Franz Brentano then tried to write a psychology at the beginning of the seventies of the last century. The first volume was published in spring 1874. The second volume was promised for the fall; it never appeared. The whole work was intended to be in four volumes; except for the first volume, nothing was ever published except individual attempts, which, however, are always only attempts. The whole work remained a torso. In the work mentioned, I have discussed why this had to be so. Franz Brentano wanted to conduct research into the life of the soul in the same way as in the natural sciences, and in this first volume one finds a remarkable confession by Franz Brentano. He says, for example: With this scientific research, it is possible to find one's way around the details of mental life in a modest way; one can indicate how one idea connects with another, how one idea separates from another, how certain feelings attach to ideas, how volitional impulses attach to ideas, how memory works, and so on. But if, as Franz Brentano says, it had to remain the case that one could only investigate these details of mental life, and if knowledge of the most important questions of human existence had to be bought with this strict scientific method, where would that get us? For Brentano finds justified the yearning that already lived in Plato, in Aristotle, in ancient Greece: to pursue that which can be investigated in detail about the human soul all the way to the great questions from birth to immortality. And it would be sad, says Franz Brentano, if, in the desire to be scientific in our exploration of the soul's life, we had to renounce knowledge of how the better part of the human being in us fares when the physical part is handed over to the earth at death.

And it can be seen from what Franz Brentano has expounded in the first volume of his psychology that his whole scientific yearning is to lead the individual questions, which basically have little to do with the wider public and which this wider public is willing to leave to the scholars, on a long path to the great questions of human immortality and the divine-spiritual content of the world, as reflected in the soul. But Brentano did not find this way out of his natural scientific way of thinking, and because he was an honest researcher by nature, he left the following volumes, for which he found no research path, unwritten until his death a few years ago.

I would like to say that it is precisely this researcher's fate that shows in the truest sense how tragic it is that what is often recognized today as the only scientific approach must falter when faced with the great riddles of the human soul. That is it - again I have to say it - that anthroposophy must defend before the world today: that the path that Brentano could not find from natural science can be found! And it can be found if we do not stop at the ordinary capacities of the soul life, as they present themselves in outer life and as they are used in ordinary science.

I have often said that there are dormant, let us say, scientifically latent cognitive abilities in every human soul that must first be brought out of this soul, just as certain abilities must be brought out of a child through education. Those who have already matured for the ordinary cognitive abilities must train themselves in devotional inner soul exercises so that they develop those soul abilities through which not that which I have characterized on both sides as human, enigmatic soul - the experience in relation to the ideas, the experience in relation to the impulses of the will - but so that the human soul process becomes, so to speak, transparent, so that one can penetrate into what actually takes place in the human life of ideas and in the human life of will. For without penetrating into these everyday soul riddles, one cannot find the way to the great questions of human immortal existence and the divine-spiritual content of the world, in which the human soul also originates.

Now, in my lectures here, I have often described how a person can do inner exercises, purely soul-spiritual exercises, through which he awakens the otherwise dormant cognitive abilities to existence, so that they can really help him in his knowledge. I have pointed out how one can strengthen one's own power of imagination. Just as we strengthen a muscle when we use it continually in work, so we can strengthen our imaginative life when we, in the way I have described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” , when we direct this life of imagination in a certain direction through inner soul work, when we bring certain easily comprehensible images into the center of consciousness and thus repeatedly devote ourselves to this kind of imaginative work to which we would otherwise not devote ourselves. I can only hint at this in principle here, but you will find clear indications in the work just mentioned and also in the second part of my “Occult Science” that the imaginative life of the human being can become something quite different through such meditation and concentration exercises of thinking. I would like to say: without any kind of abnormal practice, but through the mere development of what is normal in a person's thought life, a stronger, more powerful thought life can be created.

And by generating this stronger imaginative life, by elevating oneself through meditation and concentration above that which is merely pictorial in our ordinary imaginative life, one comes to what I call in the books mentioned, the imaginative presentation rich in content.

This imaginative presentation lives with such inner vividness in the mere thought as otherwise man lives in his outer perceptions. But through this, one gradually comes to the point where the life of the imagination is no longer merely abstract, I might say merely pictorial, but through purely inward research — which, however, is pursued with the same seriousness as any scientific research — one makes the discovery that the soul, which could otherwise only fill its imaginative life with the results of external impressions, is inwardly filled with forces that, so to speak, shoot into the soul life. The images are no longer merely this light fluid when they are formed through meditation and concentration, but they are imbued and permeated with forces that I would like to call formative forces, forces that make up an inwardly spiritual-plastic element. And after a while one discovers that through this training of the life of imagination one grows together with that which the formative forces of the human body itself are; after some time one makes the discovery that the life of thought is, so to speak, nothing other than the rarefied life of forces of human growth. What gives us our physical body from birth to death in a plastically formative way is, I would say, in a 'diluted' state our imaginative life in ordinary consciousness.

We look at the newly born child. We know that in this newly born child, starting from the brain, the plastic forces are at work shaping the body. We follow the growth of the child, how it radiates straight from the plastic brain activity, we follow it to a certain point in human life on earth, until the teeth change, until around the age of seven. We will initially perceive this life of forces, which pulsates in man and is vividly active in him, as something indeterminate. On the other hand, by powerfully developing our life of ideas through meditation and concentration, we are unconsciously led to the same element that has been vividly working in us from our earliest childhood. And this is a significant discovery of the inner human life: that one can strengthen the life of the imagination to such an extent that one can make it so intense inwardly that one then feels oneself in it, in what the human formative forces are, what formative forces are in one's growth, in one's metabolism. However strange it may still sound to today's research, it is the case that it is possible to grow into what, so to speak, then takes us up as that which plastically shapes our outer physical body as its formative forces, by strengthening our soul life. One grows into reality through the life of the imagination; one grows into a formative element.

And in this way one gets to know what lies behind the mere thought process; one learns to recognize how a spiritual, with which one has now connected oneself, works in the human organism from birth to death. The life of thinking acquires its reality; the life of thinking is no longer the mere life of picturing, the life of thinking becomes a life of strength that is inherent in existence itself.

And only through such an insight can that which the undercurrent of anxiety and fear produces in the human soul be conquered from consciousness, so that it is indeed not a theoretical solution to the riddles of the soul that anthroposophy points to here, but a thoroughly inward, practical solution that can be experienced.

Anthroposophy must point out that, on the basis of its research, what lives in the human being, what, I might say, only appears to have become so rarefied as to emerge as our ordinary life of thought, but which in truth is the inner sphere of growth of our existence, can enter into human consciousness and be grasped through human consciousness. And on the other hand, when a person loses the main focus of their mental life and enters into a fearful undercurrent of this soul life, they can absorb the results of spiritual science anthroposophy through their mental life and can consolidate this mental life through the path of knowledge. Anthroposophy does not offer a solution to this soul riddle by putting forward a theory, but by putting a result in front of the human being that he can fully grasp with his common sense and that then - like giving weight - appears in the life of ideas for his consciousness, for his soul life, so that the soul mood, the soul constitution, can flow into it, solving riddles, which Anthroposophy seemingly asserts as mere knowledge about the life of ideas.

On the one hand, we can see how the human being is a formed being, how he appears as a whole in a certain form, how his individual organs are formed out of the spirit and how we — so that we can be free beings, so that we do not act only through these inner forces, but can surrender to free mirror images until our merely pictorial representations develop into something vividly formed. I explained this at the beginning of the nineties of the last century in my 'Philosophy of Freedom', by showing that man is a free being precisely because he can live in pure thoughts that are not connected with any external reality for his consciousness, that he can form his moral impulses in these pure thoughts. In relation to mirror images, one will be in the position of having to do something oneself if the mirror image is to change; mirror images do not determine one causally. A human being would never be free if he were determined by a reality in his ordinary consciousness. In his ordinary consciousness, ideas live as images, but he is not determined by them, just as one is not determined by mirror images. He is free. In order for him to be free, his life must be distinguished from that which permeates it in a plastic way as a growth force, as a body of growth, one could say, as a body of formative forces. But this life in freedom must be paid for by the person with the characterized anxious undercurrent in his or her soul life, and therefore, in his or her ordinary consciousness, the person must come to fully experience his or her sense of freedom, but also, as a polar opposite, to be able to counter this experience of freedom with what anthroposophy can give as a way of strengthening the life of ideas in the way indicated.

But if one continues along this path, one does indeed advance from what I would call the very rarefied, purely pictorial life of ideas to what is real reality, what lives in the human being in a formative way. It is not the physical body, it is not the physical organs, it is a supersensible force, but it is there. One grasps something that lies outside the physical body, and by simply pursuing the riddles of the soul in one direction, one penetrates into that which has a supersensible reality in man, independently of the human physical body. One advances to that which is prepared by birth or by conception as a human physical body, by mere hereditary conditions, by mere external natural facts. One learns to recognize how the inherited traits, which come from parents or ancestors, combine with the whole body, which is formed in the maternal organism, from the spiritual world, to create what one finds in life when one strengthens one's imaginative life.

One arrives, I would say, at one side of the question of immortality. One looks at what is immortal, what is eternal in human nature, because it penetrates from a spiritual world through conception and birth into what is humanly physical, and because it continues to have an effect during earthly life as the inner plastic formative power with which we connect by strengthening our thought life in the manner indicated.

In this way, anthroposophy offers the perspective that someone like Franz Brentano was looking for. Brentano also began with an investigation of thoughts, but he left thoughts as they are in ordinary consciousness. He confined himself to merely registering what was present in ordinary consciousness. It is only by strengthening the life of thought through meditation and concentration that this life of thought leads to the inner, plastic formative power, and it really leads along the path that begins with the grasping of the simple everyday thought and ends with the spiritual-soul that lived in the spiritual and soul realm before birth, before conception, and that has connected with the hereditary forces and the physical forces of the human body.

There is no other solution to the riddle of the soul than to really find this path from the simplest phenomena of everyday life to the great riddle of existence.

So far, I have pointed out what a person can achieve in relation to their thoughts. There he comes to what, so to speak, drives the human being out into space, what vividly permeates the human being's spatial corporeality, what is lived out in form, what, as I have indicated, descends from the spiritual world and flows into the outer form of the human being, and also into the form of his inner organs. But this is only one side of human life, and the soul also participates in the other side of human life. Just as we can develop our thinking through meditation and concentration, we can also develop our will, not in the sense of strengthening it, but in the sense of making it more devoted and spiritualized.

This can be achieved by, in a sense, tearing the life of the will away from its everyday nature. I have given many individual exercises. Spiritual science is no easier than research in an observatory or in a clinic. These exercises would have to be practised for years, but I would like to pick out just a few to suggest the principles. It can happen that [this breaking away] by the fact that one, which works in ordinary thinking as a will - because in thinking there is always a will, the thoughts are shaped by the will, the thought is only one side, in the life of the soul is always the will is interwoven with the thoughts and the thoughts with the will - that one tears this element of will, which lives in the thoughts, away from its usual course, which adheres to external physical facts, by, for example, presenting something backwards. Let us say, for example, that instead of presenting a drama from the first act to the fifth, we present it backwards, starting from the last scenes and working back to the beginning. We then proceed to present external facts backwards. For example, one can imagine one's usual daily life in reverse, proceeding in as small portions as possible, from evening to morning, even to the point of imagining going up a staircase in such a way that one imagines it as going down backwards from the top step to the penultimate step and so on.

Because we are accustomed to thinking in the same direction as external facts unfold, thinking actually plays a passive role for us in relation to the will that unfolds in it. It becomes actively inwardly active, permeated with inner initiative, when we train it through such exercises as retrospection, where we tear it away from the course of external facts and make it rely on itself. For if we reinforce what we achieve in this way through careful and energetic exercises with a truly serious self-observation, observing what we do as a person of will as if we were standing beside us and observing ourselves piece by piece in our development of will, or even if we were to proceed to action, if we were to do exercises with the express purpose of making a resolution and then executing it with iron energy exactly, so that we live completely in the element of will. I just wanted to mention in principle such exercises that not only tear the will away from external facts, but also from its ties to the body itself, that make the will independent, spiritualize it. Then we actually come to a development of the will in this way, so that we experience ourselves with our soul life, which now develops the will, outside of our body. It is a momentous experience. But only through this do we begin to understand what the will is. In ordinary life, the will is bound to the organs. We see it unfold as we move our limbs. We observe the processes, the effects of our will, only through our thought life. We see into it when we have detached it from the body, when we experience it in itself, when we become completely one with it. Then it is permeated by an elevation of the power that is otherwise also bound to our physical organism, permeated by the power of love. And that devoted element in our soul life is developed into a transparent, bright clarity, which - I would say dark, as an emotional life of will in love - rode towards us.

I know how little people today want to accept love as a force of knowledge. In ordinary life it is not; but when it is so developed that the will is no longer rooted in instincts, in drives, in emotions, but that it lives in the purely soul realm, apart from the body, then this will is actually only recognized in its essence, and then it shows itself as something quite different from what the thought element has shown itself to be. The thought element, in its intensified form, has shown itself to be that which shapes in a constructive way, which, I might say, allows an organ to flow out of an organ, which culminates in human reproduction. The thought element unfolds as the plastic activity, from the soul into the human body. The will element unfolds in the body in such a way that, when it is recognized separately from the body, one can see how it affects the body. The physical body is not shaped plastically, but rather the plastic form is reduced, dissolved, atomized, made to flow. The element of will is what continually — please do not misunderstand me — I would like to say, again burns the formed elements of the human being, lets them go up in flames, spiritually speaking. The expression is meant figuratively, but it means something very important.

Human life, as it pours out of the soul into the body, can only be understood by seeing it, on the one hand, as this plastic element and, on the other hand, as the re-dissolving of the plastic element, as that which, I would like to say, lets the plastic element enter into the atomized and the deliquescent. And in that everything that unfolds as will in the human being is such a dissolving, atomizing, and deliquescent element in the human body, this will-like element is what is now experienced as pointing the way to the other side of human life, pointing the way to death.

Just as we first get to know the spiritual-plastic element of the human soul through the sculpture of thinking, which moves into the physical body through birth or conception, so we learn to recognize how the will-like element dissolves the human body, but in dissolving - as I said, figuratively speaking - pure spirituality emerges from the flame. We get to know the soul's departure from the body. In this way we learn to understand death through the dissolution of the will element. We learn to understand what happens to a person in death because we learn to understand what happens in a person in everyday volitional decisions. The everyday volitional decision brings about a kind of burning process in the physical body, but it is out of this burning process that our inner soul life emerges. What we feel inwardly as soul could not be there if we were always merely body, merely shaped in a plastic way. The plastic must be broken down, flow, and from the flowing of the plastic, from the ever-continuing destruction of the bodily, the experiencing of the soul arises. And we comprehend the departure of the human soul from the physical body at death, which, summarized into a single moment, represents that which is always represented in the unfolding of the will to the spirituality of the soul. Just as I experience my will in the present moment, how it forms a kind of process of combustion, dissolution in the body, how through this destruction the spiritual comes to life in the human body, so I learn to recognize how the other destruction of the body in death, which is nothing other than the last effect of the will hidden in the body, how the spiritual returns to the spiritual and soul world.

This is what leads us from anthroposophy into the riddles of the soul in a living way. Anthroposophy is not intended to be a theory; it certainly wants to provide knowledge, but not theoretical knowledge. It wants to provide knowledge that nourishes the soul. And in this way it can present the individual daily experiences of the soul being before the spiritual eye; it can then proceed from these individual experiences to the great questions of soul life.

Allow me to go into one detail so that you can see what is at the very basis of what anthroposophy is meant to bring to the riddles of the human soul. Allow me to give the details of human memory.

Once one has attained the intensified life of imagination that I have characterized, and once one has also become acquainted with how the plastic is continually being broken down by the life of will, then one also sees the inner soul processes with transparent clarity for the first time. One sees how the human being stands in relation to the outer world, how he receives his impressions from the outer world, how he then forms ideas and thoughts about these outer impressions, how after some time - or even after a long time - he brings up these ideas as memories from certain backgrounds or how they also arise of their own accord, as one says today, as “free-rising” memory ideas. For anyone who wants to look at the human soul with an open mind, the mere emergence of these memories heralds a significant psychological puzzle. It can be said that, in a very curious way, people have spoken of what the essence of memory actually is. People have imagined – and sometimes still do today – that impressions are evoked by the senses, then they are passed on through the nervous system, and finally they are transformed by the power of imagination. These images then enter into certain depths of the soul and come to the surface when they are remembered. Now, no person who thinks impartially can form any clear idea about how these ideas, when we do not have them, are supposed to go for a walk down there in unknown depths of the soul's life, only to come up again through arbitrariness when they are either needed or want to lean against something that appears as a new perception, as a new impression of the outside world.

Anthroposophy goes beyond this to the real, true observation of the human soul life itself. By knowing the intensified life of imagination and the spiritualized life of will, it sees through the whole process that takes place from the perception of the external thing through the formation of imagination, through the formation of memory, to the re-emergence of the remembered imaginations. The fact that anthroposophical research penetrates to the forces of knowledge through such a shaping of the life of imagination and will, as I have indicated, transforms the whole process of soul and body and the way in which these two interact with each other, is so transformed that, if I may compare it to something very dark and opaque that I have before me, it is suddenly made transparent by being illuminated. The whole human soul process becomes transparent through this strengthened life of imagination and spiritualized life of will.

And what do we now see with regard to what I have indicated? We see how the outer impressions stretch for miles, how the whole process continues and how, in fact, what I have described as the formative, plastic element of the intensified life of thought, works in the ordinary process of perception as a continuation. I perceive outwardly, but it is not only the abstract thoughts that I have in my ordinary consciousness that work in me, but also what is merely fathomed through spiritual science, that works continually; this plastic quality in the perceptions works down into the depths of the human soul and body. And then, when this has happened, when the thought has taken shape in the depths of the soul and body, then the human being moves on to something else. A volitional decision is at work here, the will is active, but the spiritualized will is present. In that part of the human being that is connected to the external brain, this will unfolds, it builds by dissolving the plasticity of the brain, what the impression has built up for the ordinary consciousness, so that we have spread an outer brain surface, if I may express myself roughly, over substrates, but where the plasticity continues to have an effect.

Now let us assume that I remember something in an arbitrary way, then it happens in such a way that I unfold this will out of a certain series of images. The development of the will is in turn connected with a breakdown, if external impressions do not now penetrate; and the fact that these do not come is ensured by the development of the will, which is a breakdown. And this dismantling allows what is in the subconscious during the voluntarily evoked memory to emerge as a sculpture of the human being. If free-floating ideas arise, the opposite happens. There is some external impression that forms into a thought. The thought is vividly active. It is imprinted on the brain. This plastic activity is similar to that which has formed in the subsoil that which can live in a certain form in the subsoil. This lives in the plastic that the thought has now formed.

You see, in this way the life of the soul becomes transparent; one learns to recognize it in its interaction with the life of the body, in the interaction of the spiritual with the bodily and with the soul; one learns to recognize it in its inner plastic structure, in its continuous extinguishing, burning away through the will element. And by learning to understand every single moment of life, one learns to grasp in these currents of life what the great questions of life are. One learns to recognize from the thoughts what moves into physical life at birth, one learns to recognize from the will what moves out into the spiritual world at death.

In this way, the results of anthroposophical research appear to penetrate from the details of life to the enigmatic essence of the human soul.

In this way, by recognizing how thought already works plastically in ordinary memory, as if something is being formed in the body, we also experience how that which is not yet in the body, but connects with the body through birth and conception, how that intervenes plastically in the body. We get to know the human life element in this plastic form because we get to know the individual plastic element that already appears in the formation of memory.

Anthroposophy wants to look at the riddles of the soul with a full life! This should be understood as the essence of anthroposophical research: that it stops everywhere at the scientific conscientiousness that has been cultivated today through the great, powerful advances of external natural science, but that by stopping at this conscientiousness, it simultaneously goes beyond what mere external observation and mere external experiment can offer, that it progresses from the abilities which, precisely by their special presence, make the human soul a mysterious being for the human being himself, that through the development of these abilities it leads to the soul's riddles being solved not theoretically but practically.

There is no need to fear that someone who approaches the so-called solution of the soul's riddle from this point of view might one day, as if it were a fait accompli, present the solution as a completed insight, so that the soul might then fall into lethargy and carelessness towards its own life. No, the soul poses the riddles that I have mentioned today as the living, as the experienced soul riddles, in every moment of life, and in every moment of life we need the results of spiritual research anew, which have a balancing effect on that which arises so mysteriously from the dark depths of the soul. What I have called the anxious undercurrent of human soul life and the wrathful undercurrent are nothing other than the inner call of the human soul not to take itself for granted, but to accept itself in such a way in its full ongoing experience that this human soul is constantly a mystery to itself, that it constantly needs the solution to this mystery. And it is precisely such a continuous solution to the mystery of the soul that anthroposophical research seeks to offer, linking it to the reality of existence in such a way that one can say – if I may use a trivial comparison – Just as a person in their physical life is a being that must constantly take in nourishment, that cannot be satisfied with a single intake of nourishment because they consume this nourishment, because they combine this nourishment with their life process, so it is with what is offered to us by anthroposophy as the result of the soul's riddle. Its intense inner effectiveness eludes us if we do not constantly contemplate it, if we do not constantly progress. Because we are dealing here with a reality, not with a theory that can be learned and memorized, as with the reality of nourishment, we are dealing with something that must penetrate the ongoing process of life through anthroposophy.

And it is true. The human being will become aware of the following when dealing with the results of anthroposophy in relation to the riddles of the soul: learning – as strange as it may sound, it is a truth that anyone who deals with anthroposophy can experience with regard to the riddles of the soul – basically, you cannot learn anthroposophy; you can let its results approach you, you can read books, listen to lectures; but if you do not continually experience what you have absorbed in this way, if you do not, in a continuous process, just as one continually connects the bodily substances of the external world with the bodily processes through the process of nutrition and metabolism, one connects that which is presented in anthroposophy with the human soul, with the soul process. If this is not continually introduced into this bodily process, one will see that it loses its significance for the soul, just as the physical loses its significance for the body if it is not continually introduced into this bodily process. And just as hunger and thirst express themselves physically in the absence of physical nourishment, so a fearful and morbidly angry nature that wells up from the depths of the soul expresses itself when it is influenced by a real knowledge of the spiritual significance of the life of the imagination and the will. And if a person advances by always being able to cultivate in his consciousness, as a nourishment for his soul, what anthroposophical research gives him, then he finds what he needs to balance his soul life, what he must feel and experience as a continuous living solution of the soul riddles that are also continuously alive.

And it must be said again and again: although the fact that one allows and examines what is set out in the books mentioned above can lead one to embark on the path of independent anthroposophical research, anthroposophy does not depend on every person being able to verify what is presented in anthroposophy by following this path. Even if one does not do this, one can still use one's common sense to find what comes to light in anthroposophy reasonable or unreasonable. A person can use his or her common sense to follow what the anthroposophical researcher claims without becoming an anthroposophical researcher himself. But apart from this common sense, a person has something else. A person, even if he is a layman in the physiological or biological field, does not know the chemical composition of his food; but he tests what food really is for a human being by consuming it, by combining the forces with the forces of his bodily processes. In this way, he can unite the results that anthroposophy offers him, and the way in which it solves the soul's riddles, with his soul life, and he will find that it satisfies him soulfully. And what, in essence, are soul riddles in front of this anthroposophical forum? Soul riddles, grasped in their vitality, are nothing other than the expression of soul-spiritual hunger and soul-spiritual thirst. And the solution of soul riddles is basically nothing other than the assimilation of true spiritual content, true spiritual beings, which unite with the human spirit and with the human soul life. And so, I would say, spiritual saturation, which must continually repeat itself, is the solution to the riddle of the soul. The more vividly one grasps the process and the more one realizes how anthroposophy seeks to reach into every aspect of practical life, how it seeks to take root in the most mundane things and reach up to the great riddles of existence, by introducing the human being to the divine spiritual source of existence, by leading him to his own immortality, the more one will realize that anthroposophy cannot be theory, but something that can be experienced.

From this point of view, anthroposophy tries to have an effect on the most diverse practical areas of life; from this point of view, it has tried to shape what I have often presented here as the founding of our Waldorf School by Emil Molt, that is, something that is done in the practical social sphere.

Anthroposophy, as you can see, solves the riddle of the soul by addressing the whole living human being, body, soul and spirit. In doing so, it overcomes the one-sidedness of the knowledge and soul life that necessarily had to arise with the fully recognized results of modern natural science in their field, which is also thoroughly recognized as a triumph by anthroposophy.

But people would take note of such things – and they would be taken note of if anthroposophy were not so misunderstood – as happened, for example, here in Stuttgart at the anthroposophical Congress, where Dr. von Heydebrand, in a lecture that was also printed, used Waldorf education to explain the one-sidedness of mere external experimental psychology. Not because opposition should be taken against this experimental psychology – it will be possible to appreciate it in the right way in its own field with its own results, if on the other hand what is explored in such an external way can be combined with what can be achieved spiritually and soulfully through anthroposophy. For it is through anthroposophy that what works spiritually and soulfully out of spiritual and soulful worlds in the physical body of man is understood. But in this way, all external research can be enlivened, as can education, medicine (this too has been discussed here in earlier lectures), and social life.

Here, too, I would like to refer to a fine example in the lecture given by Emil Leinhas at the above-mentioned congress – which is also available in print here – which explains what economics, which has been developed purely on the basis of imitated natural science methods, cannot achieve. A start has been made here on a real recovery of social life that comes from the spiritual and soul realms. And what is the reason for this in the end?

Through anthroposophy, we can see how thought has a formative effect. Now, it not only has a formative effect in the human body as the soul-spiritual, it also has a formative effect when we can introduce it into human social life in the right way as social ideals, and the will that has been understood in the right way also works in a social relationship. For just as we know that the human body is dissolved through it and led to a certain combustion, so that which is introduced into social life as a comprehended element of will will recognize at the right moment when any institution has outlived itself and must disappear so that its fruits can be reborn in a new form. Just as the soul and spirit rise up out of the physical in the way described, so the higher structures of social life rise up through the disappearance of certain external institutions that have outlived their purpose, and through this disappearance working together with the formative and constructive. What is seen in the right anthroposophical understanding of the human soul riddle can flow out into social life, I would even say, solving the riddle of social problems as well.

But this is how the human being comes to understand himself in the right way, to be filled with the right inner strength, with the true strength of his real self, which lives in human feeling, in human soul. Between the life of imagination and the life of will, there lives the always incomprehensible, always unfathomable, but no less tangible emotional life of the human being; and in this emotional being, for those who are able to look at life in this way, as I have characterized it today in relation to the riddles of the soul, the eternal self is revealed, which goes through repeated lives on earth. Then one knows how to look at the plastic-creative, developed life of the imagination and the spiritualized life of the will, which breaks it down.

In this way one learns by touching the human being what has entered into the human being through birth or conception in such a way that it initially points back to earlier earth lives to the state in which, in all primeval times, the outer cosmic was so little separated from the inner human life that it required not repeated earth lives but a continuously progressing spiritual-soul-natural life in order to bring about progress. One learns to look at repeated earth lives, at spiritual-soul lives lying between them; one learns to look into the future until a state where man will again have connected himself so strongly with the spiritual that the repeated earth-lives lose their meaning - in that man rises to the spiritualization of his existence, I might say, with an experience that rises out of the mere inanimate into spirituality.

One is led to the true solution of the riddle of the world through the solution of the riddle of the soul; one rises to the human soul, to the cosmos. But through this one attains living knowledge, living insight, which, as I have already indicated, is spiritual nourishment. But through this, knowledge as it is presented by anthroposophy becomes a real inner support for the soul in the element in which life wants to falter. Security, support and orientation in life can be found by seeking the spiritual nourishment that comes from anthroposophy. It brings us back to ourselves, transforming it into inner support, giving our inner balance an inner center of gravity. And in the difficult moments of life, when we are often in danger of sinking into misfortune, we can also find support in a mood of the soul that is carried inwardly by the full consciousness of the spirituality that fills the human being, when we become fully aware that the life of thought is not in vain, that it can find reality in the power of the soul to shape the world in a plastic way, and that the will is that which always gives this plastic shaping of the soul power. that the life of thought is not in vain, that it can find reality in the power of the soul and the world, and that the will is that which brings this power of the soul back to the spirit again and again. This gives support in the difficult moments of life, it puts life on a firm foundation and leads in the right way to the end of life.

And so, here, in reference to what has been said today, we can be reminded of the saying of an old Greek, pre-Socratic sage, who, out of an initially intuitive realization, speaks the weighty word: “When the human soul, freed from the body, soars into the free ether, it is an immortal spirit, freed from death.”

Yes, the riddles of the soul can be solved through real science. One can come to this conviction by trying to solve the riddles of everyday life of the soul through real spiritual insight. One can see a reflection of the knowledge of immortality in the ordinary events of life. And he who can judge the individual unfolding of thought, of feeling, of will in the right way, already sees the immortal in them, and he then looks up to the immortal in the all-embracing sense and thus comes to a real grasp of the eternal in human nature, which is rooted in the eternal ground of the existence of the Cosmos, of the evolution of the world.

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).