The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the previous lectures I have shown that when the child reaches the usual school age (after the change of teeth) all teaching should be given in an artistic, pictorial form. To-day, I propose to carry further the ideas already put before you and to show how this method appeals directly to the child's sentient life, the foundation from which all teaching must now proceed.

Let us take a few characteristic examples to show how writing can be derived from the artistic element of painting and drawing. I have already said that if a system of education is to harmonize with the natural development of the human organism, the child must be taught to write before he learns to read. The reason for this is that in writing the whole being is more active than is the case in reading. You will say: Yes, but writing entails the movement of only one particular member. That is quite true, but fundamentally speaking, the forces of the whole being must lend themselves to this movement. In reading only the head and the intellect are engaged, and in a truly organic system of education we must draw that which is to develop from the whole being of the child.

We will assume that we have been able to give the child some idea of flowing water; he has learnt to form a mental picture of waves and flowing water. We now call the child's attention to the initial sound, the initial letter of the word ‘wave.’

We indicate that the surface of water rising into waves follows this line:

Then we lead the child from the drawing of this line over to the sign W derived from it. The child is thus introduced to the form of the letter ‘W’ in writing. The W has arisen from the picture of a wave. In the first place the child is given a mental picture which can lead over to the letter which he then learns to write. Or we may let the child draw the form of the mouth:—

and then we introduce to him the first letter of the word “Mouth.” In one of our evening talks [Between the lectures there were meetings for discussion and questions at which Rudolf Steiner was often present.] I gave you another example. The child draws the form of a fish; when the fundamental form is firmly in his mind, we pass on to the initial letter of the word “fish.”

A great many letters can be treated in this way; others will have to be derived somewhat differently. Suppose, for instance, we give the child an imaginative idea of the sound of the wind. Obviously the possibilities are many, but this particular way is the best for very young children. We picture to the child the raging of the wind and then we allow the child to imitate and to arrive at this form:—

By drawing the child's attention to definite contours, to movements, or even to actual activities, all of which can be expressed in drawing or painting, we can develop nearly all the consonants. In the case of the vowels we must turn rather to gesture, for the vowels are an expression of man's inner being. ‘A’ (ah), for example, inevitably contains an element of wonder, of astonishment. Eurhythmy will prove to be of great assistance here for there we have gestures that truly correspond to feeling. The ‘I’ the ‘A’ and all the other vowels can be drawn from the corresponding gesture in Eurhythmy, for the vowels must be derived from movements that are an expression of the inner life of the human soul.

In this way we can approach the abstract nature of writing by way of the more concrete elements contained in painting and drawing. We succeed in making the child start from the feeling called up by a picture; he then becomes able to relate to the actual letters the quality of soul contained in the feeling. The principle underlying writing thus arises from the sentient life of the soul.

When we come to reading, our efforts must simply be in the direction of making the child aware, and this time in his head, of what has already been elaborated by the bodily forces as a whole. Reading is then grasped mentally, because it is recognized in the child's mind as an activity in which he has already been employed. This is of the very greatest significance. The whole process of development is hindered if the child is led straight away to what is abstract, if he is taught, that is, from the beginning to carry out any special activity by means of a purely mental concept. On the other hand, a healthy growth will always ensue if the activity is first of all undertaken, and then the mental idea afterwards unfolded as a result of the activity. Reading is essentially a mental act. Therefore if reading is taught before, and not after writing the child is prematurely involved in a process of development exclusively concerned with the head instead of with the forces of his whole being.

By such methods as these all instruction can be guided into a sphere that embraces the whole man, into the realm of art. This must indeed be the aim of all our teaching up to the age of about nine-and-a-half; picture, rhythm, measure, these qualities must pervade all our teaching. Everything else is premature.

It is for this reason utterly impossible before this age to convey anything to the child in which definite distinction is made between himself and the outer world. The child only begins to realize himself as a being apart from the outer world between the ninth and tenth years. Hence when he first comes to school, we must make all outer things appear living. We should speak of the plants as holding converse with us and with each other in such a way that the child's outlook on Nature and man is filled with imagination. The plants, the trees, the clouds all speak to him, and at this age he must feel no separation between himself and this living outer world. We must give him the feeling that just as he himself can speak, so everything that surrounds him also speaks.

The more we enable the child thus to flow out into his whole environment, the more vividly we describe plant, animal and stone, so that weaving, articulate spirituality seems to be wafted towards him, the more adequately do we respond to the demands of his innermost being in these early years. They are years when the sentient life of the soul must flow into the processes of breathing and of the circulation of the blood and into the whole vascular system, indeed into the whole human organism. If we educate in this sense, the child's life of feeling will unfold itself organically and naturally in a form suited to the requirements of our times.

It is of incalculable benefit to the child if we develop this element of feeling in writing and then allow a faint echo of the intellect to enter as he re-discovers in reading what he has already experienced in writing. This is the very best way of leading the child on towards his ninth year.

Between the ages of seven and nine-and-a-half, it is therefore essential that all the teaching shall make a direct appeal to the element of feeling. The child must learn to feel the forms of the various letters. This is very important. We harden the child's nature unduly, we over-strengthen the forces of bones and cartilage and sinew in relation to the rest of the organism, if we teach him to write mechanically, making him trace arbitrary curves and lines for the letters, making use only of his bodily mechanism without calling upon the eye as well.

If we also call upon the eye—and the eye is of course connected with the movements of the hand—by developing the letters in an artistic way, so that the letter does not spring from merely mechanical movements of the hand, it will then have an individual character in which the eye itself will take pleasure. Qualities of the soul are thus brought into play and the life of feeling develops at an age when it can best flow into the physical organism with health-giving power.

I wonder what you would say if you were to see someone with a plate of fish in front of him, carefully cutting away the flesh and consuming the bones! You would certainly be afraid the bones might choke him and that in any case he would not be able to digest them. On another level, the level of the soul, exactly the same thing happens when we give the child dry, abstract ideas instead of living pictures, instead of something that engages the activities of his whole being. These dry, abstract concepts must only be there as a kind of support for the pictures that are to arise in the soul.

When we make use of this imaginative, pictorial method in education in the way I have described, we so orientate the child's nature that his concepts will always be living and vital. We shall find that when he has passed the age of nine or nine-and-a-half, we can lead him on to a really vital understanding of an outer world in which he must of necessity learn to distinguish himself from his environment.

When we have given sufficient time to speaking of the plant world in living pictures, we can then introduce something he can learn in the best possible way between the ninth and tenth years, gradually carrying it further during the eleventh and twelfth.

The child is now ready to form ideas about the plant world. But naturally, in any system of education aiming at the living development of the human being, the way in which the plants are described must be very different from such methods as are used for no other reason than that they were usual in our own school days. To give the child a plant or flower and then make him learn its name, the number of its stamens, the petals and so forth, has absolutely no meaning for human life, or at most only a conventional one.

Whatever is taught the child in this way remains quite foreign to him. He is merely aware of being forced to learn it, and those who teach botany to a child of eleven or twelve in this way have no true knowledge of the real connections of Nature. To study some particular plant by itself, to have it in the specimen box at home for study is just as though we were to pull out a single hair and observe it as it lay there before us. The hair by itself is nothing; it cannot grow of itself and has no meaning apart from the human head. Its meaning lies simply and solely in the fact that it grows on the head of a man, or on the skin of an animal. Only in its connections has it any living import. Similarly, the plant only has meaning in its relation to the earth, to the forces of the sun and, as I shall presently show, to other forces also. In teaching children about a plant therefore, we must always begin by showing how it is related to the earth and to the sun.

I can only make a rough sketch here of something that can be illustrated in pictures in a number of lessons. Here (drawing on the blackboard) is the earth; the roots of the plant are intimately bound up with the earth and belong to it. The chief thought to awaken in the child is that the earth and the root belong to one another and that the blossom is drawn forth from the plant by the rays of the sun. The child is thus led out into the Cosmos in a living way.

If the teacher has sufficient inner vitality it is easy to give the child at this particular age a living conception of the plant in its cosmic existence. To begin with, we can awaken a feeling of how the earth-substances permeate the root; the root then tears itself away from the earth and sends a shoot upwards; this shoot is born of the earth and unfolds into leaf and flower by the light and warmth of the sun. The sun draws out the blossoms and the earth retains the root.

Then we call the child's attention to the fact that a moist earth, earth inwardly watery in nature, works quite differently upon the root from what a dry earth does; that the roots become shrivelled up in a dry soil and are filled with living sap in a moist, watery earth.

Again, we explain how the rays of the sun, falling perpendicularly to the earth, call forth flowers of plants like yellow dandelions, buttercups and roses. When the rays of the sun fall obliquely, we have plants like the mauve autumn crocus, and so on. Everywhere we can point to living connections between root and earth, between blossom and sun.

Having given the child a mental picture of the plant in its cosmic setting, we pass on to describe how the whole of its growth is finally concentrated in the seed vessels from which the new plant is to grow.

Then—and here I must to some extent anticipate the future—in a form suited to the age of the child we must begin to disclose a truth of which it is difficult as yet to speak openly, because modern science regards it as pure superstition or so much fantastic mysticism. Nevertheless it is indeed a fact that just as the sun draws the coloured blossom out of the plant, so is it the forces of the moon which develop the seed-vessels. Seed is brought forth by the forces of the moon. In this way we place the plant in a living setting of the forces of the sun, moon and earth. True, one cannot enter deeply into this working of the moon forces, for if the children were to say at home that they had been taught about the connection between seeds and the moon, their parents might easily be prevailed upon by scientific friends to remove them from such a school—even if the parents themselves were willing to accept such things! We shall have to be somewhat reticent on this subject and on many others too, in these materialistic days.

By this radical example I wished, however, to show you how necessary it is to develop living ideas, ideas that are drawn from actual reality and not from something that has no existence in itself. For in itself, without the sun and the earth, the plant has no existence.

We must now show the child something further. Here (drawing on the blackboard) is the earth; the earth sprouts forth, as it were, produces a hillock (swelling); this hillock is penetrated by the forces of air and sun. It remains earth substance no longer; it changes into something that lies between the sappy leaf and the root in the dry soil—into the trunk of a tree. On this plant that has grown out of the earth, other plants grow—the branches. The child thus realizes that the trunk of the tree is really earth-substance carried upwards. This also gives an idea of the inner kinship between the earth and all that finally becomes earthy. In order to bring this fully home to the child, we show him how the wood decays, becoming more and more earthy till it finally falls into dust. In this condition the wood becomes earth once more. Then we can explain how sand and stone have their origin in what was once really destined for the plants, how the earth is like one huge plant, a giant tree out of which the various plants grow like branches.

Here we develop an idea intelligible to the child; the whole earth as a living being of which the plants are an integral part.

It is all important that the child should not get into his head the false ideas suggested by modern geology—that the earth consists merely of mineral substances and mineral forces. For the plants belong to the earth as much as do the minerals. And now another point of great significance. To begin with, we avoid speaking of the mineral as such. The child is curious about many things but we shall find that he is no longer anxious to know what the stones are if we have conveyed to him a living idea of the plants as an integral part of the earth, drawn forth from the earth by the sun.

The child has no real interest in the mineral as such. And it is very much to the good if up to the eleventh or twelfth years he is not introduced to the dead mineral substances but can think of the earth as a living being, as a tree that has already crumbled to dust, from which the plants grow like branches.

From this point of view it is easy to pass on to the different plants. For instance, I say to the child: The root of such and such a plant is trying to find soil; its blossoms, remember, are drawn forth by the sun. Suppose that some roots cannot find any soil but only decaying earth, then the result will be that the sun cannot draw out the blossoms. Then we have a plant with no real root in the soil and no flower—a fungus, or mushroom-like growth. We now explain how a plant like a fungus, having found no proper soil in the earth, is able to take root in something partly earth, partly plant, that is, in the trunk of a tree. Thus it becomes a tree-lichen, that greyish-green lichen which one finds on the bark of a tree, a parasite.

From a study of the living, weaving forces of the earth itself, we can lead on to a characterization of all the different plants. And when the child has been given living ideas of the growth of the plants, we can pass on from this study of the living plant to a conception of the whole surface of the earth.

In some regions yellow flowers abound; in others the plants are stunted in their growth, and in each case the face of the earth is different. Thus we reach geography, which can play a great part in the child's development if we lead up to it from the plants.

We should try to give an idea of the face of the earth by connecting the forces at work on its surface with the varied plant-life we find in the different regions. Then we unfold a living instead of a dead intellectual faculty in the child. The very best age for this is the time between the ninth or tenth and the eleventh or twelfth years. If we can give the child this conception of the weaving activity of the earth whose inner life brings forth the different forms of the plants, we give him living and not dead ideas, ideas which have the same characteristics as a limb of the human body. A limb has to develop in earliest youth. If we enclosed a hand for instance in an iron glove, it could not grow. Yet it is constantly being said that the ideas we give to children should be as definite as possible, they should be definitions and the children ought always to be learning them. But nothing is more hurtful to the child than definitions and rigid ideas, for these have no quality of growth. Now the human being must grow as his organism grows. The child must be given mobile concepts, concepts whose form is constantly changing as he becomes more mature. If we have a certain idea when we are forty years of age, it should not be a mere repetition of something we learnt at ten years of age. It ought to have changed its form, just as our limbs and the whole of our organism have changed.

Living ideas cannot be roused if we only give the child what is nowadays called “science,” the dead knowledge which we so often find teaches us nothing! Rather must we give the child an idea of what is living in Nature. Then he will develop in a body which grows as Nature herself grows. We shall not then be guilty, as educational systems so often are, of implanting in a body engaged in a process of natural development, elements of soul-life that are dead and incapable of growth. We shall foster a living growing soul in harmony with a living, growing physical organism and this alone can lead to a true development.

This true development can best be induced by studying the life of plants in intimate connection with the configuration of the earth. The child should feel the life of the earth and the life of the plants as a unity: knowledge of the earth should be at the same time a knowledge of the world of the plants.

The child should first of all be shown how the lifeless mineral is a residue of life, for the tree decays and falls into dust. At the particular age of which I am now speaking, nothing in the way of mineralogy should be taught the child. He must first be given ideas and concepts of what is living. That is an essential thing.

Just as the world of the plants should be related to the earth and the child should learn to think of it as the offspring of a living earth-organism, so should the animal-world as a whole be related to man. The child is thus enabled in a living way to find his own place in Nature and in the world. He begins to understand that the plant-tapestry belongs to the living earth. On the other hand, however, we teach him to realize that the various animals spread over the world represent, in a certain sense, stages of a path to the human state. That the plants have kinship to the earth, the animals to man—this should be the basis from which we start. I can only justify it here as a principle; the actual details of what is taught to a child of ten, eleven or twelve years concerning the animal world must be worked out with true artistic feeling.

In a very simple, very elementary way, we begin by calling the child's attention to the nature of man. This is quite possible if the preliminary artistic foundations have already been laid. The child will learn to understand, in however simple a sense, that man has a threefold organization. First, there is the head. A hard shell encloses the system of nerves and the softer parts that lie within it. The head may thus be compared with the round earth within the Cosmos. We shall do our utmost to give the child a concrete, artistic understanding of the head-system and then lead on to the second member, the rhythmic system which includes the organs of breathing and circulation of the blood. Having spoken of the artistic modelling of the cup-like formation of the skull which encloses the soft parts of the brain, we pass on to consider the series of bones in the spinal column and the branching ribs. We shall study the characteristics of the chest, with its breathing and circulatory systems, that is, the human rhythmic system in its essential nature. Then we reach the third member, the system of metabolism and limbs. As organs of movement, the limbs really maintain and support the metabolism of the body, for the processes of combustion are regulated by their activities. The limbs are connected with metabolism. Limbs and metabolism must be taken together; they constitute the third member of man's being.

To begin with, then, we make this threefold division of man. If our teaching is pervaded with the necessary artistic feeling and is given in the form of pictures, it is quite possible to convey to the child this conception of man as a threefold being.

We now draw the child's attention to the different animal species spread over the earth. We begin with the lowest forms of animal life, with creatures whose inner parts are soft and are surrounded by shell-like formations. Certain members of the lower animal species consist, strictly speaking, merely of a sheath surrounding the protoplasm. We show the child how these lower creatures image in a primitive way the form of the human head.

Our head is the lower animal raised to the very highest degree of development. The head, and more particularly the nervous system, must not be correlated with the mammals or the apes, but with the lowest forms of animal life. We must go far, far back in the earth's history, to the most ancient forms of animal life, and there we find creatures which are wholly a kind of elementary head. Thus we try to make the lower animal world intelligible to the child as a primitive head-organization.

We then take the animals somewhat higher in the scale, the fishes and their allied species. Here the spinal column is especially developed and we explain that these “half-way” animals are beings in whom the human rhythmic system has developed, the other members being stunted. In the lowest animals, then, we find at an elementary stage, the organization corresponding to the human head. In the animal species grouped round the fishes, we find a one-sided development of the human chest-organization, and the system comprising the limbs and metabolism brings us finally to the higher animals.

The organs of movement are developed in great diversity of form in the higher animals. The mechanism of a horse's foot, a lion's pad, or the feet of the wading animals, all these give us a golden opportunity for artistic description. Or again, we can compare the limbs of man with the one-sided development we find in the limbs of the ape. In short, we begin to understand the higher animals by studying the plastic structure of the organs of movement, or the digestive organs.

Beasts of prey differ from the ruminants in that the latter have a very long intestinal track, whereas in the former, while the intestinal coil is short, all that connects the heart and blood circulation with the digestive processes is strongly and powerfully developed. A study of the organization of the higher animals shows at once how one-sided is its development in comparison with the system of limbs and metabolism in man. We can give a concrete picture of how the front part of the spine in the animal is really nothing but head. The whole digestive system is continued right on into the head. The animal's head belongs essentially to the digestive organs, to the stomach and intestines. In man, on the other hand, that which has remained, as it were, in the virginal state—the soft parts of the brain with their enclosing, protecting shell of bone—is placed above the limb and metabolic system. The head organization in man is thus raised a stage higher than in the animal, in which, as we have seen, it is merely a continuation of the metabolism. Yet man, in so far as his head organization is concerned, preserves the simplest, most fundamental principles of form, namely, soft substance within surrounded by a cup-like bony formation.

One can show too how in certain animals the structure of the jaw can best be understood if the upper and under jaw are regarded as the foremost limbs. This best explains the animal head. In this way, the human being emerges as a synthesis of three systems—head system, chest system, system of limbs and metabolism. In the animal world there is a one-sided development of the one or other system. Thus we have first, the lower animals, the crustaceans, for example, but also others; then the mammals, birds and so on, where the chest system is predominantly developed; and finally the species of fishes, reptiles and so on.

We see, as it were, the animal kingdom as a human being spread out in diversity over the earth. We relate the world of the plants to the earth, and the diverse animal species to man who is, in fact, the synthesis of the entire animal world. Taking our start from man's physical organization, we give the child, in a simple way, an idea of the threefold nature of his being. Passing to the animals, we explain how in the different species there is always a one-sided development of certain organs, whereas in man these organs are united into one harmonious whole. This one-sided specialized development is manifested by the chest organs in certain animals; in others by the lower intestines, and in others again, by the upper organs of digestion. In many forms of animal life, birds for instance, we find metamorphoses of certain organs; the organs of digestion become the crop, and so forth.

We can characterize each animal species as representing a one-sided development of an organic system in man, so that the whole animal world appears as the being of man spread over the earth in diversity of forms, man himself being the synthesis of the animal kingdom.

When it has been made clear to the child that the animal world is the one-sided expression of the bodily organs of man, that one system of organs comes to expression as one species, another as a different species, then we can pass on to study man himself. This should be when the child is approaching his twelfth year, for he can then understand that because man bears the spirit within him, he is an artistic synthesis of the separate parts of his being, which are mirrored in the various species of animals. Only because man bears the spirit within him can he thus unite the lower forms of animal life in a harmonious unity. The human head and chest organizations arise as complex metamorphosis of animal forms, all of which have evolved in such a way that they fit in with the other parts of his body.

Thus he bears within himself that which is manifested in the fishes and that which is manifested in the higher animals but harmonized into a limb. The separate fragments of man's being scattered over the world in the realm of the animals are in man gathered together by the spirit into unity; man is their synthesis. Thus we relate man with the animal world, but he is at the same time raised above the animals because he is the bearer of the spirit.

Botany, taught in the way I have indicated, brings life into the child's world of ideas so that he stands rightly in the world through wisdom. A living intelligence will then enable him to become efficient in life and to find his place in the world.

His will is strengthened if he has acquired an equally living conception of his own relation to the animal world.

You will naturally realize that what I have had to discuss here in some twenty minutes or so must be developed stage by stage for a long period of time; the child must gradually unite these ideas with his inmost nature. Then they will play no small part in the position a man may take in the world by virtue of his strength of will. The will grows inwardly strong if a man realizes that by the grace of the living spirit he himself is the perfecting and the synthesis of the animal kingdom.

And so the aim of educational work must be net merely to teach facts about the plants and animals, but also to develop character, to develop the whole nature of the child. A true understanding of the life of plants brings wisdom, and a living conception of his relation to the animals strengthens the will of the child. If we have succeeded in this, the child has entered between the ninth and tenth years, into a relationship with the other living creatures of the earth such that he will be able to find his own way and place in the world through wisdom on the one hand and on the other through a purposeful strength of will.

The one great object of education is to enable the human being to find his way through life by his intelligence and will. These two will develop from the life of feeling that has unfolded in the child between the ages of seven and nine-and-a-half. Thinking, feeling and willing are then brought into a right relationship instead of developing in a chaotic way. Everything is rooted in feeling. We must therefore begin with the child's sentient life and from feeling engender the faculty of thought through a comprehension of the kingdom of the plants. For the life of the plants will never admit of dead conceptions. The will is developed if we lead the child to a knowledge of his connection with the animals and of the human spirit that lifts man above them.

Thus we strive to impart sound wisdom and strength of will; to the human being. This indeed is our task in education, for this alone will make him fully man and the evolution of the full manhood is the goal of all education.

Arithmetic and geometry, indeed all mathematics, occupy a unique position in education. Education can only be filled with the necessary vitality and give rise to a real interplay between the soul of the teacher and the soul of the child, if the teacher fully realizes the consequences of his actions and methods. He must know exactly what effect is made on the child by the treatment he receives in school, or anywhere else.

Man is a being of body, soul and spirit; his bodily nature is formed and moulded by the spirit. The teacher, then, must always be aware of what is taking place in the soul and spirit when any change occurs in the body, and again, what effect is produced in the body when influences are brought to bear on the life of spirit or soul.

Anything that works upon the child's conceptual and imaginative faculties, anything that is to say of the nature of painting or drawing which is then led over into writing, or again, botany taught in the way indicated yesterday, all this has a definite effect. And here, above all, we must consider a higher member of man's being, a member to which I have already referred as the etheric body, or body of formative forces. The human being has, in the first place, his physical body. It is revealed to ordinary physical sense-perception. Besides this physical body, however, he has an inner organization, perceptible only to Imaginative Cognition, a super-sensible, etheric body. Again he has an organization perceptible only to Inspiration, the next stage of super-sensible knowledge. (These expressions need not confuse us; they are merely terms.) Inspiration gives insight into the so-called astral body and into the real Ego, the Self of the human being.

From birth till death, this etheric body, this body of formative forces which is the first super-sensible member of man's being never separates from the physical body. Only at death does this occur. During sleep, the etheric organization remains with the physical body lying there in bed. When man sleeps, the astral body and Ego-organization leave the physical and etheric bodies and enter them again at the moment of waking.

Now it is the physical and etheric bodies which are affected when the child is taught arithmetic or geometry, or when we lead him on to writing from the basis of drawing and painting. All this remains in the etheric body and its vibrations persist during sleep. On the other hand, history and such a study of the animal kingdom as I spoke of in yesterday's lecture work only upon the astral body and Ego-organization. What results from these studies passes out of the physical and etheric bodies into the spiritual world during sleep.

If, therefore, we are teaching the child plant-lore or writing, the effects are preserved by the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, whereas the results of history lessons or lessons on the nature of man are different, for they are carried out into the spiritual world by the Ego and astral body. This points to an essential difference between the effects produced by the different lessons.

We must realize that all impressions of an imaginative or pictorial nature made on the child have the tendency to become more and more perfect during sleep. On the other hand, everything we tell the child on the subject of history or the being of man works on his organization of soul and spirit and tends to be forgotten, to fade away and grow dim during sleep. In teaching therefore, we have necessarily to consider whether the subject-matter works upon the etheric and physical bodies or upon the astral body and Ego-organization.

Thus on the one hand, the study of the plant kingdom, the rudiments of writing and reading of which I spoke yesterday affect the physical and etheric bodies. (I shall speak about the teaching of history later on.) On the other hand, all that is learnt of man's relation to the animal kingdom affects the astral body and Ego-organization, those higher members which pass out of the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. But the remarkable thing is that arithmetic and geometry work upon both the physical-etheric and the astral and Ego. As regards their role in education arithmetic and geometry are really like a chameleon; by their very nature they are allied to every part of man's being. Whereas lessons on the plant and animal kingdoms should be given at a definite age, arithmetic and geometry must be taught throughout the whole period of childhood, though naturally in a form suited to the changing characteristics of the different life-periods.

It is all-important to remember that the body of formative forces, the etheric body, begins to function independently when it is abandoned by the Ego and astral body. By virtue of its own inherent forces, it has ever the tendency to bring to perfection and develop what has been brought to it. So far as our astral body and Ego are concerned, we are—stupid, shall I say? For instead of perfecting what has been conveyed to these members of our being, we make it less perfect. During sleep, however, our body of formative forces continues to calculate, continues all that it has received as arithmetic and the like. We ourselves are then no longer within the physical and etheric bodies; but supersensibly, they continue to calculate or to draw geometrical figures and perfect them. If we are aware of this fact and plan our teaching accordingly, great vitality can be generated in the being of the child. We must, however, make it possible for the body of formative forces to perfect and develop what it has previously received.

In geometry, therefore, we must not take as our starting point the abstractions and intellectual formulae that are usually considered the right groundwork. We must begin with inner, not outer perception, by stimulating in the child a strong sense of symmetry for instance.

Even in the case of the very youngest children we can begin to do this. For example: we draw some figure on the blackboard and indicate the beginning of the symmetrical line. Then we try to make the child realize that the figure is not complete; he himself must find out how to complete it. In this way we awaken an inner, active urge in the child to complete something as yet unfinished. This helps him to express an absolutely right conception of something that is a reality. The teacher, of course, must have inventive talent but that is always a very good thing. Above all else the teacher must have mobile, inventive thought.

When he has given these exercises for a certain time, he will proceed to others. For instance, he may draw some such figure as this (left) on the blackboard, and then he tries to awaken in the child an inner conception of its spatial proportions. The outer line is then varied and the child gradually learns to draw an inner form corresponding to the outer (right). In the one the curves are absolutely straightforward and simple. In the other, the lines curve outwards at various points. Then we should explain to the child that for the sake of inner symmetry

he must make in the inner figure an inward curve at the place where the lines curve outwards in the outer figure. In the first diagram a simple line corresponds to another simple line, whereas in the second, an inward curve corresponds to an outward curve.

Or again we draw something of this kind, where the figures together form a harmonious whole. We vary this by leaving the forms incomplete, so that the lines flow away from each other to infinity. It is as if the lines were running away and one would like to go with them. This leads to the idea that they should be bent inwards to regulate and complete the figure, and so on. I can only indicate the principle of the thing. Briefly, by working in this way, we give the child an idea of “a-symmetrical symmetries” and so prepare the body of formative forces in his waking life that during sleep it elaborates and perfects what has been absorbed during the day. Then the child will wake in an etheric body, and a physical body also, inwardly and organically vibrant. He will be full of life and vitality. This can, of course, only be achieved when the teacher has some knowledge of the working of the etheric body; if there is no such knowledge, all efforts in this direction will be mechanical and superficial.

A true teacher is not only concerned with the waking life but also with what takes place during sleep. In this connection it is important to understand certain things that happen to us all now and again. For instance, we may have pondered over some problem in the evening without finding a solution. In the morning we have solved the problem. Why? Because the etheric body, the body of formative forces, has continued its independent activity during the night.

In many respects waking life is not a perfecting but a disturbing process. It is necessary for us to leave our physical and etheric bodies to themselves for a time and not limit them by the activity of the astral body and Ego. This is proved by many things in life; for instance by the example already given of someone who is puzzling over a problem in the evening. When he wakes up in the morning he may feel slightly restless but suddenly finds that the solution has come to him unconsciously during the night. These things are not fables; they actually happen and have been proved as conclusively as many another experiment. What has happened in this particular case? The work of the etheric body has continued through the night and the human being has been asleep the whole time. You will say: “Yes, but that is not a normal occurrence, one cannot work on such a principle.” Be that as it may, it is possible to assist the continued activity of the etheric body during sleep, if, instead of beginning geometry with triangles and the like, where the intellectual element is already in evidence, we begin by conveying a concrete conception of space. In arithmetic, too, we must proceed in the same way. I will speak of this next.

A pamphlet on physics and mathematics written by Dr. von Baravalle (a teacher at the Waldorf School) will give you an excellent idea of how to bring concreteness into arithmetic and geometry. This whole mode of thought is extended in the pamphlet to the realm of physics as well, though it deals chiefly with higher mathematics. If we penetrate to its underlying essence, it is a splendid guide for teaching mathematics in a way that corresponds to the organic needs of the child's being. A starting-point has indeed been found for a reform in the method of teaching mathematics and physics from earliest childhood up to the highest stages of instruction. And we can apply to the domain of arithmetic what is said in this pamphlet about concrete conceptions of space.

Now the point is that everything conveyed in an external way to the child by arithmetic or even by counting deadens something in the human organism. To start from the single thing and add to it piece by piece is simply to deaden the organism of man. But if we first awaken a conception of the whole, starting from the whole and then proceeding to its parts, the organism is vitalised. This must be borne in mind even when the child is learning to count. As a rule we learn to count by being made to observe purely external things—things of material, physical life.

First we have the 1—we call this Unity. Then 2, 3, 4, and so forth, are added, unit by unit, and we have no idea whatever why the one follows the other, nor of what happens in the end. We are taught to count by being shown an arbitrary juxtaposition of units. I am well aware that there are many different methods of teaching children to count, but very little attention is paid nowadays to the principle of starting from the whole and then proceeding to the parts. Unity it is which first of all must be grasped as the whole and by the child as well. Anything whatever can be this Unity. Here we are obliged to illustrate it in a drawing. We must therefore draw a line; but we could use an apple just as well to show what I shall now show with a line.

This then is 1. And now we go on from the whole to the parts, or members. Here then we have made of the 1 a 2, but the 1 still remains. The unit has been divided into two. Thus we arrive at the 2. And now we go on. By a further partition the 3 comes into being, but the unit always remains as the all-embracing whole. Then we go on through the 4, 5, and so on. Moreover, at the same time and by other means we can give an idea of the extent to which it is possible to hold together in the mind the things that relate to number and we shall discover how really limited man is in his power of mental presentation where number is concerned.

In certain nations to-day the concept of number that is clearly held in the mind's eye only goes up to 10. Here in this country money is reckoned up to 12. But that really represents the maximum of what is mentally visualised for in reality we then begin over again and in fact count what has been counted. We first count up to 10, then we begin counting the tens, 2 times 10=20, 3 times 10=30. Here we are no longer considering the things themselves. We begin to calculate by using number itself, whereas the more elementary concept requires the things themselves to be clearly present in the mind.

We are very proud of the fact that we are far advanced in our methods of counting compared with primitive peoples who depend on their ten fingers. But there is little foundation for this pride. We count up to 10 because we sense our hands as members. We feel our two hands symmetrically with their 10 fingers. This feeling also arises and is inwardly experienced by the child, and we must call forth the sense of number by a transition from the whole to the parts. Then we shall easily find the other transition which leads us to the counting in which one is added to another. Eventually, of course, we can pass on to the ordinary 1, 2, 3, etc. But this mere adding of one or more units must only be introduced as a second stage, for it has significance only here in physical space, whereas to divide a unity into its members has an inner significance such that it can continue to vibrate in the etheric body even though quite beneath our consciousness. It is important to know these things.

Having taught the child to count in this way, the following will also be important. We must not pass on to addition in a lifeless, mechanical way merely adding one item to another in series. Life comes into the thing when we take our start not from the parts of the addition sum but from the sum total itself. We take a number of objects; for example, a number of little balls. We have now got far enough in counting to be able to say: Here are 14 balls. Now we divide them, extending this concept of a part still further. Here we have 5, here 4, here 5 again. Thus we have separated the sum into 5 and 4 and 5. That is, we go from the sum to the items composing it, from the whole to the parts. The method we should use with the child is first to set down the sum before him and then let the child himself perceive how the given sum can be divided into several items.

This is exceedingly important. Just as to drive a horse we do not harness him tail foremost, so in the teaching of arithmetic we must have the right direction. We must start from a whole which is always actually present, from a reality, from what is present as a whole and then pass on to the separate parts; later, we find our way to the ordinary addition sum.

Continuing thus, from the living whole to the separate parts, one touches the reality underlying all arithmetical calculations: i.e., the setting in vibration of the body of formative forces. This body needs a living stimulus for its formative activity and once energised it will continually perfect the vibrations without the need of drawing upon the astral body and Ego-organization with their disturbing elements.

Your teaching work will also be essentially enhanced and vivified if you similarly reverse the other simple forms of calculation. To-day, one might say, they are standing on their heads and must be reversed. Try, for instance, to bring the child to say: “If I have 7, how much must I take away to get 3,” instead of “What remains over if I take 4 from 7?” That we have 7 is the real thing and that 3 remains is also real; how much must we take away from 7 to get 3? Beginning with this form of thought we stand in the midst of life, whereas with the opposite form we are dealing with abstractions. Proceeding in this way, we can easily find our way further. Thus, once more, in multiplication and division we should not ask what will result when we divide 10 into two parts, but how must we divide 10 to get the number 5. The real aspect is given; moreover in life we want eventually to get at something which has real significance. Here are two children, 10 apples are to be divided among them. Each of them is to get 5. These are the realities. What we have to deal with is the abstract part that comes in the middle. Done in this way, things are always immediately adapted to life and should we succeed in this, the result will be that what is the usual, purely external way of adding, by counting up one thing after another with a deadening effect upon the arithmetic lessons, will become a vivifying force, of especial importance in this branch of our educational work. And it is evident that precisely by this method we take into account the sub-conscious in man, that is, the part which works on during sleep and which also works subconsciously during the waking hours. For one is aware of a small part only of the soul's experience; nevertheless the rest is continually active. Let us make it possible for the physical and etheric bodies of the child to work in a healthy way, realizing that we can only do so if we bring an intense life, an awakened interest and attention, especially into our teaching of arithmetic and geometry.

The question has arisen during this Conference as to whether it is really a good thing to continue the different lessons for certain periods of time as we do in the Waldorf School. Now a right division of the lessons into periods is fruitful in the very highest degree. “Period” teaching means that one lesson shall not perpetually encroach upon another. Instead of having timetables setting forth definite hours:—8 – 9, arithmetic, 9 – 10, history, religion, or whatever it may be, we give one main lesson on the same subject for two hours every morning for a period of three, four, or five weeks. Then for perhaps five or six weeks we pass on to another subject, but one which in my view should develop out of the other, and which is always the same during the two hours. The child thus concentrates upon a definite subject for some weeks.

The question was asked whether too much would not be forgotten, whether in this way the children would not lose what they had been taught. If the lessons have been rightly given, however, the previous subject will go on working in the subconscious regions while another is being taken. In “period” lessons we must always reckon with the subconscious processes in the child. There is nothing more fruitful than to allow the results of the teaching given during a period of three or four weeks to rest within the soul and so work on in the human being without interference.

It will soon be apparent that when a subject has been rightly taught and the time comes round for taking it up again for a further period it emerges in a different form from what it does when it has not been well taught. To make the objection that because the subjects will be forgotten it cannot be right to teach in this way, is to ignore the factors that are at work. We must naturally reckon on being able to forget, for just think of all we should have to carry about in our heads if we could not forget and then remember again! The part played by the fact of forgetting therefore as well as the actual instruction must be reckoned with in true education.

This does not mean that it should be a matter for rejoicing whenever children forget. That may safely be left to them! Everything depends on what has so passed down into the subconscious regions, that it can be duly recalled. The unconscious belongs to the being of man as well as the conscious. In regard to all these matters we must realize that it is the task of education to appeal not only to the whole human being, but also to his different parts and members. Here again it is essential to start from the whole; there must first be comprehension of the whole and then of the parts. But to this end it is also necessary to take one's start from the whole. First we must grasp the whole and then the parts. If in counting we simply place one thing beside another, and add, and add, and add, we are leaving out the human being as a whole. But we do appeal to the whole human being when we lay hold of Unity and go from that to Numbers, when we lay hold of the sum, the minuend, the product and thence pass on to the parts.

The teaching of history is very open to the danger of our losing sight of the human being. We have seen that in really fruitful education everything must be given its right place. The plants must be studied in their connection with the earth and the different animal species in their connection with man. Whatever the subject-matter, the concrete human element must be retained; everything must be related in some way to man.

But when we begin to teach the child history, we must understand that at the age when it is quite possible for him to realize the connection of plant-life with the earth and the earth itself as an organism, when he can see in the human being a living synthesis of the whole animal kingdom, he is still unable to form any idea of so-called causal connections in history. We may teach history very skilfully in the ordinary sense, describing one epoch after another and showing how the first is the cause of the second; we may describe how in the history of art, Michelangelo followed Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, in a natural sequence of cause and effect. But before the age of twelve, the child has no understanding for the working of cause and effect, a principle which has become conventional in more advanced studies. To deduce the later from the earlier seems to him like so much unmusical strumming on a piano, and it is only by dint of coercion that he will take it in at all. It has the same effect on his soul as a piece of stone that is swallowed and passes into the stomach. Just as we would never dream of giving the stomach a stone instead of bread, so we must make sure that we nourish the soul not with stones but with food that it can assimilate. And so history too, must be brought into connection with Man and to that end our first care must be to awaken a conception of the historical sequence of time in connection with the human being.

Let us take three history books, the first dealing with antiquity, the second with the Middle Ages, and the third with our modern age. As a rule, little attention is paid to the conception of time in itself. But suppose I begin by saying to the child: “You are now ten years old, so you were alive in the year 1913. Your father is much older than you and he was alive in the year 1890; his father, again, was alive in 1850. Now imagine that you are standing here and stretching your arm back to someone who represents your father; he stretches his arm back to his father (your grandfather), now you have reached the year 1850.” The child then begins to realize that approximately one century is represented by three or four generations. The line of generations running backwards from the twentieth century brings him finally to his very early ancestors. Thus the sixtieth generation back leads into the epoch of the birth of Christ. In a large room it will be possible to arrange some sixty children standing in a line, stretching an arm backwards to each other. Space is, as it were, changed into time.

If the teacher has a fertile, inventive mind, he can find other ways and means of expressing the same thing—I am merely indicating a principle. In this way the child begins to realize that he himself is part of history; figures like Alfred the Great, Cromwell and others are made to appear as if they themselves were ancestors. The whole of history thus becomes an actual part of life at school when it is presented to the child in the form of a living conception of time.

History must never be separated from the human being. The child must not think of it as so much book-lore. Many people seem to think that history is something contained in books, although of course it is not always quite as bad as that. At all events, we must try by every possible means to awaken a realization that history is a living process and that man himself stands within its stream.

When a true conception of time has been awakened, we can begin to imbue history with inner life and soul, just as we did in the case of arithmetic and geometry, by unfolding not a dead but a living perception. There is a great deal of quibbling to-day about the nature of perception, but the whole point is that we must unfold living and not dead perception. In the symmetry-exercises of which I spoke, the soul actually lives in the act of perception. That is living perception. Just as our aim is to awaken a living perception of space, so must all healthy teaching of history given to a child between the ages of nine and twelve be filled with an element proceeding in this case not from the qualities of space, but from the qualities of heart and soul.

The history lessons must be permeated through and through with a quality proceeding from the heart. And so we must present it as far as possible in the form of pictures. Figures, real forms must stand there and they must never be described in a cold, prosaic way. Without falling into the error of using them as examples for moral or religious admonition, our descriptions must nevertheless be coloured with both morality and religion. History must above all lay hold of the child's life of feeling and will. He must be able to enter into a personal relationship with historic figures and with the modes of life prevailing in the various historical epochs. Nor need we confine ourselves merely to descriptions of human beings. We may, for instance, describe the life of some town in the twelfth century, but everything we say must enter the domains of feeling and will in the child. He must himself be able to live in the events, to form his own sympathies and antipathies. His life of feeling and will must be stimulated.

This will show you that the element of art must everywhere enter into the teaching of history. The element of art comes into play when, as I often describe it, a true economy is exercised in teaching. This economy can be exercised if the teacher has thoroughly mastered his subject-matter before he goes into the classroom; if it is no longer necessary for him to ponder over anything because if rightly prepared it is there plastically before his soul. He must be so well prepared that the only thing still to be done is the artistic moulding of his lesson. The problem of teaching is thus not merely a question of the pupil's interest and diligence, but first and foremost of the teacher's interest, diligence and sincerity.

No lesson should be given that has not previously been a matter of deep experience on the part of the teacher. Obviously, therefore, the organization of the body of teachers must be such that every teacher is given ample time to make himself completely master of the lessons he has to give.

It is a dreadful thing to see a teacher walking round the desks with a book in his hands, still wrestling with the subject-matter. Those who do not realize how contrary such a thing is to all true principles of education do not know what is going on unconsciously in the souls of the children, nor do they realize the terrible effect of this unconscious experience. If we give history lessons in school from note-books, the child comes to a certain definite conclusion, not consciously, but unconsciously. It is an unconscious, intellectual conclusion, but it is deeply rooted in his organism: “Why should I learn all these things? The teacher himself doesn't know them, for he has to read from notes. I can do that too, later on, so there is no need for me to learn them first.” The child does not of course come to this conclusion consciously, but as a matter of fact when judgments are rooted in the unconscious life of heart and mind, they have all the greater force. The lessons must pulsate with inner vitality and freshness proceeding from the teacher's own being. When he is describing historical figures for instance the teacher should not first of all have to verify dates. I have already spoken of the way in which we should convey a conception of time by a picture of successive generations. Another element too must pervade the teaching of history. It must flow forth from the teacher himself. Nothing must be abstract; the teacher himself as a human being must be the vital factor.

It has been said many times that education should work upon the being of man as a whole and not merely on one part of his nature. Important as it is to consider what the child ought to learn and whether we are primarily concerned with his intellect or his will, the question of the teacher's influence is equally important. Since it is a matter of educating the whole nature and being of man, the teacher must himself be “man” in the full sense of the word, that is to say, not one who teaches and works on the basis of mechanical memory or mechanical knowledge, but who teaches out of his own being, his full manhood. That is the essential thing.

From what I have said as to the way. in which we should teach the child about Nature, about plant and animal, I think you will have realized that the aim of the Waldorf School is to adapt the curriculum exactly to the needs of the child's development at the successive stages of growth. I have already spoken of the significant turning-point occurring between the ninth and tenth years. Only now does the child begin to realize himself as an individual apart from the world. Before this age there is in his life of thought and feeling no sense of separation between himself and the phenomena of the outer world. Up to the ninth year, therefore, we must speak of plants, animals, mountains, rivers and so on in the language of fairy-tales, appealing above all to the child's fantasy. We must make him feel as if his own being were speaking to him from the outer world, from plant, mountain and spring.

If you will bear in mind the way in which after this age we lead on into botany and zoology, you will realize that the aim of the teaching is to bring the child into a true relationship with the world around him. He learns to know the plants in their connection with the earth and studies them all from this point of view. The earth becomes a living being who brings forth the plants, just as the living human head brings forth hair, only of course the forms contained in the earth, the plants, have a much richer life and variety. Such a relationship with the plant world and with the whole earth is of great value to the well-being of the child in body and soul. If we teach him to see man as a synthesis of the animal species spread over the earth, we help to bring him into a true relationship with other living beings standing below him in the scale of creation. Until the age of eleven or twelve, the mainspring of all Nature-study should be the relationship of the human being to the world.

Then comes the age when for the first time we may draw the child's attention to processes going on in the outer world independently of man. Between the eleventh and twelfth years, and not until then, we may begin to teach about the minerals and rocks. The plants as they grow out of the earth are in this sense related to stone and mineral. Earlier teaching about the mineral kingdom in any other form than this injures the child's mobility of soul. That which has no relationship with man is mineral. We should only begin to deal with the mineral kingdom when the child has found his own relation to the two kingdoms of nature which are nearest to him, when in thought and feeling he has grasped the life of the plants and his will has been strengthened by a true conception of the animals.

What applies to the minerals applies equally to physics and chemistry, and to all so-called causal connections in history and geography, in short, to all processes that must be studied as only indirectly related to the human being in the sense of which I spoke yesterday. The teaching of all this should be postponed until the period lying between the eleventh and twelfth years.

The right age for a child to begin his school life is when he gets his second teeth, i.e. at about the seventh year. Until then, school is not really the place for him. If we have to take a child before this age, all kinds of compromises are necessary. I will however, explain certain basic principles When the child first comes to school, we teach him in such a way that as yet he makes no distinction or separation between himself and the world at large. Between the ninth and tenth years we begin to awaken a living understanding through a knowledge of the plants, and to strengthen his will through a knowledge of the animals. In mineralogy, physics, and chemistry we can only work through the intellect, and then as a necessary counterbalance art must be introduced. (I shall be speaking more of this in tomorrow's lecture.) From the eleventh or twelfth year onwards we shall find that the child is able to form a rational, intellectual conception of cause and effect and this must now be elaborated by physics and chemistry. These processes which should gradually lead into the study of astronomy must not however be explained to the child before he has reached the age of eleven or twelve. If we describe simple chemical processes—combustion for instance—before this age, our descriptions must be purely pictorial and imaginative. Abstract reasoning from cause to effect should not be introduced until the child is between eleven and twelve years of age. The less we speak of causality before this time the stronger, the more vital and rich will the soul become; if, on the other hand, we are constantly speaking of causality to a younger child, dead concepts and even dead feelings will pass with a withering effect into his soul.

The aim of the Waldorf School has been on the one hand to base the whole curriculum upon the actual nature of the human being; thus we include in the curriculum all that answers to the needs of the child at each of the different life-periods. On the other hand, we strive to enable the child to take his rightful part in the social life of the world.

To achieve this we must pass on from physics and chemistry to various forms of practical work when the child has reached the fourteenth and fifteenth years. In the classes for children of this age, therefore, we have introduced hand-spinning and weaving, for these things are an aid to an intelligent understanding of practical life. It is good for boys and girls to know the principles of spinning and weaving, even of factory-spinning. They should also have some knowledge of elementary technical chemistry, of the preparation and manufacture of colours and the like.

During their school life children ought to acquire really practical ideas of their environment. The affairs of ordinary life often remain quite incomprehensible to many people to-day because the teaching they receive at school does not lead over at the right moment to the practical activities of life and of the world in general. In a certain direction this is bound to injure the whole development of the soul. Think for a moment of the sensitiveness of the human body to some element in the air, for instance, which the organism cannot assimilate. In the social life of the world of course conditions are not quite the same. In social life we are forced to put up with many incongruities, but we can adapt ourselves if at the right age we have learnt in some measure to understand them.

Just think how many people nowadays get into a train without having the least idea of the principles governing its motion, its mechanism. They see a railway every day and have absolutely no notion of the machinery of an engine! This means that they are surrounded on all hands by inventions and creations of the human mind with which they have no contact at all. It is the beginning of unsocial life simply to accept these creations and inventions of the mind of man without understanding them. At the Waldorf School therefore when the children are fourteen or fifteen years old, we begin to give instruction in matters that play a role in practical life. This age of adolescence is nowadays regarded from a very limited, one-sided point of view. The truth is that at puberty the human being opens out to the world. Hitherto he has lived chiefly within himself, but he is now ready to understand his fellow-men and the social life of the world. Hence to concentrate before puberty on all that relates man to Nature is to act in accordance with true principles of human development, but at the age of fourteen or fifteen the children must be made acquainted with the achievements of the human mind. This will enable them to understand and find their right place in social life. If educationalists had followed this principle some sixty or seventy years ago, the so-called “Social Movement” of to-day would have taken a quite different form in Europe and America. Tremendous progress has been made in technical and commercial efficiency during the last sixty or seventy years. Great progress has been made in technical skill, national trade has become world trade, and finally a world-economy has arisen from national economies. In the last sixty or seventy years the outer configuration of social life has entirely changed, yet our mode of education has continued as if nothing had happened. We have utterly neglected to acquaint our children with the practical affairs of the world at the time when this should be done, namely, at the age of fourteen or fifteen.

Nevertheless at the Waldorf School we are not so narrow-minded as to look down in any way on higher classical education, for in many respects it is extremely beneficial; we prepare pupils whose parents desire it, or who desire it themselves, both for a higher classical education and for final certificates and diplomas. But we do not forget how necessary it is for our age to understand the reason that induced the Greeks, whose one purpose in education was to serve the ends of practical life, not to spend all their time learning Egyptian, a language belonging to the far past. On the other hand, we make a special point of familiarizing our boys, and girls too, with a world not of the present but of the past. What wonder that human beings as a rule have so little understanding of how to live in the world of the present.

The world's destiny has grown beyond man's control simply because education has not kept pace with the changing conditions of social life. In the Waldorf School we try to realize that it is indeed possible to develop the human being to full manhood and to help him to find his true place in the ranks of humanity.

Our endeavour to develop the child in such a way that he may later reveal the qualities of full manhood and on the other hand be able to find his true place in the world is more especially furthered by the way in which languages are taught.

So far as the mother-tongue is concerned, of course, the teaching is adapted to the age of the child; it is given in the form I have already described in connection with other lessons. An outstanding feature of the Waldorf School, however, is that we begin to teach the child two foreign languages, French and English, directly he comes to school, at the age of six or seven. By this means we endeavour to give our children something that will be more and more necessary in the future for the purposes of practical life. To understand the purely human aspect of the teaching of languages we must remember that the faculty of speech is rooted in the very depths of man's being. The mother-tongue is so deeply rooted in the breathing system, the blood circulation, and in the configuration of the vascular system, that the child is affected not only in spirit and soul, but in spirit, soul and body by the way in which this mother-tongue comes to expression within him. We must realize however that the forces of languages in the world permeate man and bring the human element to expression in quite different ways. In the case of primitive languages this is quite obvious; that it is also true of the more civilized languages often escapes recognition.

Now amongst European languages there is one that proceeds purely from the element of feeling. Although in the course of time intellectualism has tinged the element of pure feeling, feeling is nevertheless the basis of this particular language; hence the elements of intellect and will are less firmly implanted in the human being through the language itself. By a study of other languages then, the elements of will and intellect must be unfolded. Again, we have a language that emanates particularly from the element of plastic fantasy, which, so to say, pictures things in its notation of sounds. Because this is so, the child acquires an innately plastic, innately formative power as he learns to speak. Another language in civilized Europe is rooted chiefly in the element of will. Its very cadences, the structure of its vowels and consonants reveal that this is so. When people speak, it is as though they were sending back waves of the sea along the out-breathed air. The element of will is living in this language.

Other languages call forth in man to a greater extent the elements of feeling, music, or imagination. In short each different language is related to the human being in a particular way.

You will say that I ought to name these various languages, but I purposely avoid doing so, because we have not reached a point of being able to face the civilized world so objectively that we can bear the whole impersonal truth of these things!

From what I have said about the character of the different languages, you will realize that the effects produced on the nature of man by one particular “genius of speech” must be balanced by the effects of another, if, that is to say, our aim is really a human and not a specialized, racial development of man. This is the reason why at the Waldorf School we begin with three languages, even in the case of the very youngest children; a great deal of time, moreover, is devoted to this subject.

It is good to begin teaching foreign languages at this early age, because up to the point lying between the ninth and tenth years the child still bears within him something of the quality characteristic of the first period of life, from birth to the time of the change of teeth. During these years the child is pre-eminently an imitative being. He learns his mother-tongue wholly by imitation. Without any claim whatever being made on the intellect, the child imitates the language spoken around him, and learns at the same time not only the outer sounds and tones of speech, but also the inner, musical, soul element of the language. His first language is acquired—if I may be allowed the expression—as a finer kind of habit which passes into the depths of his whole being.

When the child comes to school after the time of the change of teeth, the teaching of languages appeals more to the soul and less strongly to the bodily nature. Nevertheless, up to the ages of nine and ten the child still brings with him a sufficient faculty of fantasy and imitation to enable us to mould the teaching of a language in such a way that it will be absorbed by his whole being, not merely by the forces of soul and spirit.

This is why it is of such far-reaching importance not to let the first three years of school-life slip by without any instruction in foreign languages. On purely educational principles we begin to teach foreign languages in the Waldorf School directly the child enters the elementary classes.

I need hardly say that the teaching of languages is closely adapted to the different ages. In our days men's thinking, so far as realities are concerned, has become chaotic. They imagine themselves firmly rooted in reality because of their materialism, but in point of fact they are theorists. Those who flatter themselves on being practical men of the world are eminently theorists; they get it into their heads that something or other is right, without ever having tested it in practical life. And so, especially in education and teaching, they fall with an utterly impracticable radicalism into the opposite extreme when anything has been found wrong. It has been realized that when the old method of teaching languages, especially Latin and Greek, is based entirely on grammar and rules of syntax, the lessons tend to become mechanical and abstract. And so exactly the opposite principle has been introduced simply because people cannot think consistently. They see that something is wrong and fall into the other extreme, imagining that this will put it right. The consequence is that they now work on the principle of teaching no grammar at all. This again is irrational, for it means nothing else than that in some particular branch of knowledge the human being is left at the stage of mere consciousness and not allowed to advance to self-consciousness. Between the ninth and tenth years the child passes from the stage of consciousness to that of self-consciousness. He distinguishes himself from the world.

This is the age when we can begin gradually of course to teach the rules of grammar and syntax, for the child is now reaching a point where he thinks not only about the world, but about himself as well. To think about oneself means, so far as speech is concerned, to be able not merely to speak instinctively, but to apply rational rules in speech. It is nonsense, therefore, to teach languages without grammar of any kind. If we avoid all rules, we cannot impart to the child the requisite inner firmness for his tasks in life. But it is all-important to bear in mind that the child only begins to pass from consciousness to self-consciousness between the ages of nine and ten. To teach grammar before this age, therefore, is absolutely irrational.

We must know when the change occurs between the ninth and tenth years in order to lead over gradually from an instinctive acquiring of language to the rational element of grammar. This applies to the mother-tongue as well. Real injury is done to the child's soul if he is crammed with rules of grammar or syntax before this eventful moment in his life. Previously the teaching must appeal to instinct and habit through his faculty of imitation. It is the task of speech to inaugurate self-consciousness between the ninth and tenth years and generally speaking the principle of self-consciousness comes to light in grammar and syntax. This will show you why at the Waldorf School we make use of the two or three preceding years in order to introduce the teaching of languages at the right age and in accordance with the laws of human development.

You see now how Waldorf School education aims, little by little, at enabling the teacher to read, not in a book and not according to the rules of some educational system, but in the human being himself. The Waldorf School teacher must learn to read man—the most wonderful document in all the world. What he gains from this reading grows into deep enthusiasm for teaching and education. For only that which is contained in the book of the world can stimulate the all-round activity of body, soul and spirit that is necessary in the teacher. All other study, all other books and reading, should be a means of enabling the teacher ultimately to read the great book of the world. If he can do this he will teach with the necessary enthusiasm, and enthusiasm alone can generate the force and energy that bring life into a classroom.

The principle of the “universal human,” which I have described in its application to the different branches of teaching, is expressed in Waldorf School education in that this school does not in any sense promulgate any particular philosophy or religious conviction. In this connection it has of course been absolutely essential, above all in an art of education derived from Anthroposophy, to remove from the Waldorf School any criticism as to its being an “anthroposophical school.” That certainly it cannot be. New efforts must constantly be made to avoid falling into anthroposophical bias, shall I say, on account of possible over-enthusiasm or of honest conviction on the part of the teachers. The conviction of course is there in the Waldorf teachers since they are anthroposophists. But the fundamental principle of the Waldorf School education is the human being himself, not the human being as an adherent of any particular philosophy.

And so, with the various religious bodies in mind, we were willing to come to a compromise demanded by the times and in the early days to confine our attention to principles and methods to be adopted in a “universal human” education. To begin with, all religious instruction was left in the hands of the pastors of the various denominations, Catholic teaching to Catholic Priests, Protestant teaching to Protestant Priests. But a great many pupils in the Waldorf School are “dissenters,” as we say in Central Europe, that is to say they are children who would receive no religious instruction at all if this were limited to Catholic and Protestant teaching. The Waldorf School was originally founded for the children of working-class people in connection with a certain business, although for a long time now it has been a school for all classes of the community, and for this reason a large majority of the children belonged to no religious confession. As often happens in schools in Central Europe, these children were being taught nothing in the way of religion, and so for their sake we have introduced a so-called “free religious instruction.” We make no attempt to introduce theoretical Anthroposophy into the School. Such a thing would be quite wrong. Anthroposophy has been given for grown-up people; one speaks of Anthroposophy to grown-up people, and its ideas and conceptions are therefore clothed in a form suitable for them. Simply to take what is destined for grown-up people in anthroposophical literature and introduce that would have been to distort the whole principle of Waldorf School education. In the case of children who have been handed over to us for free religious instruction, the whole point has been to recognize from their age what should be given to them in the way of religious instruction.

Let me repeat that the religious teaching given at the Waldorf School—and a certain ritual is connected with it—is not in any sense an attempt to introduce an anthroposophical conception of the world. The ages of the children are always taken into fullest account. As a matter of fact the great majority of the children attend, although we have made it a strict rule only to admit them if their parents wish it. Since the element of pure pedagogy plays an important and essential part in this free religious teaching, which is Christian in the deepest sense, parents who wish their children to be educated in a Christian way, and also according to the Waldorf School principles, send them to us. As I say, the teaching is Christian through and through, and the effect of it is that the whole School is pervaded by a deeply Christian atmosphere. Our religious instruction makes the children realize the significance of all the great Christian Festivals, of the Christmas and Easter Festivals, for instance, much more deeply than is usually the case nowadays. Also the ages of the children must always be taken into account in any teaching connected with religion, for infinite harm is wrought if ideas and conceptions are conveyed prematurely. In the Waldorf School the child is led first of all to a realization of universal Divinity in the world.

You will remember that when the child first comes to school between the ages of seven and ten, we let plants, clouds, springs, and the like, speak their own language. The child's whole environment is living and articulate. From this we can readily lead on to the universal Father-Principle immanent in the world. When the rest of the teaching takes the form I have described, the child is well able to conceive that all things have a divine origin.

And so we form a link with the knowledge of Nature conveyed to the child in the form of fantasy and fairy-tales. Our aim in so doing is to awaken in him first of all a sense of gratitude for everything that happens in the world. Gratitude for what human beings do for us, and also for the gifts vouchsafed by Nature, this is what will guide religious feeling into the right path. To unfold the child's sense of gratitude is of the greatest imaginable significance. It may seem paradoxical, yet it is nevertheless profoundly true that human beings should learn to feel a certain gratitude when the weather is favourable for some undertaking or another. To be capable of gratitude to the Cosmos, even though it can only be in the life of imagination, this will deepen our whole life of feeling in a religious sense. Love for all creation must then be added to this gratitude. And if we lead the child on to the age of nine or ten in the way described, nothing is easier than to reveal in the living world around him qualities he must learn to love. Love for every flower, for sunshine, for rain this again will deepen perception of the world in a religious sense. If gratitude and love have been unfolded in the child before the age of ten, we can then proceed to develop a true sense and understanding of duty. Premature development of the sense of duty by dint of commands and injunctions will never lead to a deeply religious sense. Above all we must instil gratitude and love if we are to lay the foundations of morality and religion.

He who would educate in the sense of true Christianity must realize that before the age of nine or ten it is not possible to convey to the child's soul an understanding of what the Mystery of Golgotha brought into the world or of all that is connected with the personality and divinity of Christ Jesus. The child is exposed to great dangers if we have failed to introduce the principle of universal divinity before this age, and by ‘universal divinity’ I mean the divine Father-Principle. We must show the child how divinity is immanent in all Nature, in all human evolution, how it lives and moves not only in the stones, but in the hearts of other men, in their every act. The child must be taught by the natural authority of the teachers to feel gratitude and love for this ‘universal divinity.’ In this way the basis for a right attitude to the Mystery of Golgotha between the ninth and tenth years is laid down.

Thus it is of such infinite importance to understand the being of man from the aspect of his development in time. Try for a moment to realize what a difference there is if we teach a seven-or-eight-year-old child about the New Testament, or, having first stimulated a consciousness of universal divinity in the whole of Nature, if we wait until he has reached the age of nine or ten before we pass to the New Testament as such. In the latter case right preparation has been made and the Gospels will live in all their super-sensible greatness. If we teach the child too early about the New Testament it will not lay hold of his whole being, but will remain mere phraseology, just so many rigid, barren concepts. The consequent danger is that religious feeling will harden in the child and continue through life in a rigid form instead of in a living form pervaded through and through with feeling for the world. We prepare the child rightly to realize from the ninth and tenth years onwards the glory of Christ Jesus if before this age he has been introduced to the principle of universal Divinity immanent in the whole world.

This then is the aim of the religious teaching given at the Waldorf School to an ever-increasing number of children whose parents wish it. The teaching is based on the purely human element and associated moreover with a certain form of ritual. A service is held every Sunday for the children who are given this free religious instruction, and for those who have left school a service with a different ritual is held. Thus a certain ritual similar in many respects to the Mass but always adapted to the age of the child is associated with the religious teaching given at the Waldorf School.

Now it was very difficult to introduce into this religious instruction the purely human evolutionary principle that it is our aim to unfold in the Waldorf School, for in religious matters to-day people are least of all inclined to relinquish their own point of view. We hear a great deal of talk about a ‘universal human’ religion, but the opinion of almost everyone is influenced by the views of the particular religious body to which he belongs. If we rightly understand die task of humanity in days to come, we shall realize that the free religious teaching that has been inaugurated in the Waldorf School is a true assistance to this task.

Anthroposophy as given to grown-up people is naturally not introduced into the Waldorf School. Rather do we regard it as our task to imbue our teaching with something for which man thirsts and longs: a realization of the Divine, of the Divine in Nature and in human history, arising from a true conception of the Mystery of Golgotha.

This end is also served when the whole teaching has the necessary quality and colouring. I have already said that the teacher must come to a point where all his work is a moral deed, where he regards the lessons themselves as a kind of divine office. This can only be achieved if it is possible to introduce the elements of morality and religion into the school for those who desire it, and we have made this attempt in the religious instruction given at the Waldorf School in so far as social conditions permit to-day. In no sense do we work towards a blind rationalistic Christianity, but towards promoting a true understanding of the Christ Impulse in the evolution of mankind. Our one and only aim is to give the human being something that he still needs, even if all his other teaching has endowed him with the qualities of manhood. Even if this be so, even if full manhood has been unfolded through all the other teachings, a religious deepening is still necessary if the human being is to find a place in the world befitting his inborn spiritual nature. To develop the whole man and deepen him in a religious sense; this we have tried to regard as one of the most essential tasks of Waldorf School education.

There are two sides to be considered in teaching and education. One is connected with the subject-matter of the lessons and the other with the child whose faculties it is our task to unfold in accordance with what we learn from a true observation of the human being. If we adopt the methods described in these lectures, our teaching will always appeal to the particular faculties that should be unfolded during the different life-periods. Very special attention, however, must be paid to the development of the child's memory and here it must be realized that on account of a deficient understanding of the being of man our predecessors have been prone to burden the memories of children and, as I said yesterday in another connection, there has been a reaction from this to the very opposite extreme. The tendency in the most modern systems of education is to eliminate memory almost entirely. Now both methods are wrong. The point really is that the memory ought to be left alone up to the time of the change of teeth, when in the ordinary way the child is sent to school. I have already said that during this period of life physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego-organization are working in unison. The way in which the child works out by imitation everything he unconsciously observes around him has the effect of stimulating, even in the physical body itself, the forces underlying the development of memory. During these years of life therefore the memory must be left to develop without interference.

On the other hand, from the time of the change of teeth, when the nature of soul and spirit is in a certain sense released from the body, systematic training of the memory is of the greatest importance. Through the whole of a man's life the memory makes claims on his physical body. Unless there is an all-round development of the physical body the memory will be impaired in some way. Indeed it is well known to-day that any injury to the brain at once results in defective memory.

When we are dealing with children, it is not enough to notice how in illness an element of soul is involved. As teachers, we must always be on the alert for every little intimate effect that is being produced on the bodily nature of the child by the soul and spirit. An undue development of memory will injure the child for the whole of life, will even injure his physical body.

How then can we rightly unfold the faculty of memory? Above all we must realize that abstract concepts, concepts built up by the rationalizing intellect, are a load on the memory in the period of life between the change of teeth and puberty.

Perceptions of a living nature, plastic ideas conveyed to the child in his art lessons on the other hand call forth those living forces which play down even into the physical body and allow the memory to unfold in the right way.

The best foundation for the full development of memory is laid when the whole teaching during the Elementary School period is informed with artistic quality.

Art rightly taught leads to perfect control of bodily movement. If we are able to stimulate the child to self-activity in art, if as he paints, writes or draws, his bodily nature bestirs itself together with his qualities of spirit, we shall rightly unfold the forces that must proceed from the soul and come to the aid of memory in the physical body. In tomorrow's lecture I will explain how this is achieved in Eurhythmy. We must not fall into the error of believing that a complete elimination or an insufficient feeding of memory can ever be of benefit to the child.

There are three golden rules for the development of memory: Concepts load the memory; Concrete artistic activity builds it up; activities of will strengthen it. We have splendid opportunities for applying these three golden rules if we teach nature-study and history in the way I have been indicating during these lectures. Arithmetic too may be used for the same end, for in arithmetic we ought always to begin with an artistic understanding of things. But when the children thoroughly understand the more simple operations with numbers up to ten or twenty, let us say, we need not be afraid of working upon the memory afterwards. It is not more right to overload the child with too many concrete pictures than it is to put too great a strain on his powers of memory, for concepts carried too far into complexity have the same effect. We must therefore carefully observe how the memory is unfolding in the case of each individual child. Here we see how necessary it is for the teacher and educationalist to have some understanding of tendencies to health and disease in the human being. Strange experiences have often come one's way in this connection. A gentleman whose whole life is concerned with education once came to visit the Waldorf School and I tried to explain the spirit underlying the teaching there. After a little while he said: “Yes, but if you work on those lines the teachers will have to know a great deal about medicine.” It seemed to him quite impossible that they could understand medicine to the extent necessary in such a school. I said that even though this would arise naturally out of a knowledge of the nature of man, a certain amount of medical instruction ought to form part of the training course for teachers. Questions concerning health ought not to be left entirely to the school doctor. I think we are particularly fortunate at the Waldorf School in that our school doctor himself is on the staff of the College of Teachers. Dr. Eugen Kolisko is a doctor by profession and besides looking after the children's health, he is also a member of the teaching staff. In this way everything connected with the bodily health of the children can proceed in fullest harmony with their education.

This, in effect, is necessary: our teachers must learn to understand matters connected with health and sickness in the child. To give an example: a teacher notices a child growing paler and paler. Another child may lose his natural colour because his face begins to be excessively red. The teacher will find, if he observes accurately, that the latter child is showing signs of restlessness and peevishness. We must be able to connect all such symptoms in the right way with the spiritual nature. Abnormal pallor, or even the mere tendency to it, is the result of over-exertion of the memory. The memory of such a child has been overstrained and one must put a stop to this. In the case of a child with an abnormally high colour, the memory has not been given enough to do. This child must be given things to memorize and then we must make sure that he has retained them in his mind. The memory of a child who grows paler and paler must therefore be relieved, whereas in the case of a child with excessive colour, we must set about developing the memory.

We only approach the whole human being if we are thus able to handle his nature of soul and spirit in intimate harmony with his physical body. In the Waldorf School, the child, the growing human being, is handled according to his qualities of spirit, soul and body, above all according to his particular temperament.

In the classroom itself we arrange the children in a way that enables the various temperaments—choleric, sanguine, melancholic or phlegmatic—to be expressed and adjusted among themselves. The very best way is to make the choleric children or again the melancholic children sit together, for then they tone each other down. One must of course know how to judge and then deal with the different temperaments, for this in turn affects the very roots of bodily development.

Take the case of a sanguine child, inattentive in his lessons. Every impression coming from the outer world immediately engages his attention but passes away again as quickly. The right treatment for such a child will be to reduce the quantity of sugar in his food, not unduly, of course. The less sugar he absorbs, the more will the excessively sanguine qualities be modified and a harmonised temperament take their place.

In the case of a melancholic child who is always brooding, just the opposite treatment is necessary. More sugar must be added to his food. In this way we work right down into the physical constitution of the liver, for the action of the liver differs essentially according to whether a large or small quantity of sugar is taken. In effect, every activity of outer life penetrates deeply into the physical organism of man.

At the Waldorf School we take the greatest care that there shall be an intimate contact between the teaching staff and the parents of the children. A really intimate contact of course is only possible to a certain degree, for it depends on the amount of understanding possessed by the parents. We try however to the greatest possible extent to induce the parents to come to the different teachers to obtain advice as to the most suitable diet for the individual children. This is just as important as what is taught in the classroom.

We must not imagine in a materialistic sense that the body does everything, for obviously a child with no hands cannot be taught to play the piano. The role of the body is to be a suitable instrument. Just as one cannot teach a child with no hands to play the piano, one cannot rid a child whose liver is over-active, of melancholy, no matter what physical measures are employed by abstract systems of education. If, however, the action of the liver is regulated by increasing the quantity of sugar in the child's diet, he will be able to use this bodily organ as a fit instrument. Then only and not till then will spiritual measures begin to be effective.

People often imagine that reforms can be introduced into education by the reiteration of abstract principles. All the world knows what is desirable in teaching and how education ought to proceed. Yet true education demands an understanding of the human being that can only be acquired little by little, and so, although I neither attack nor belittle the knowledge possessed by nearly everyone on the subject of education, I say that it is of no practical use. This kind of knowledge seems to me just like someone who says: “I want a house built; it must look nice, be comfortable and weather-proof ...” And then off he goes to someone who knows quite well that the house must have all these qualities and thinks he can set about building. But to know these things is of no practical use. That is approximately as much as people in general know about the art of education and yet they think they can bring about reforms. If I want a house properly built, I must go to an architect who knows in detail how the plans must be drawn, how the bricks are to be laid, how massive the girders must be to bear the weight upon them and so on. The essential thing is to know in detail how the human being is constituted, and not to speak vaguely about human nature in general as one speaks about a house being weatherproof, comfortable and beautiful to look at.

The civilized world must realize that technique, a spiritualized technique of course, is necessary in every detail of the art of education. If it becomes general, this realization will indeed be a boon to all the very praiseworthy efforts in the direction of educational reform that are making themselves felt to-day.

***

The significance of these principles is revealed above all when we come to consider the very different individualities of children. It has become the practice in schools not to allow children who cannot keep up with the work in a particular class to go on to the next. Now in an art of education where the child is taught in accordance with his particular age of life, it must gradually become out of the question to leave a child behind in a class, for then he will fall out of the sequence of the kind of teaching that is suited to his years. In the Waldorf School, of course, each class consists of children of one particular age. If therefore, a child who ought to go up to the fourth class is left behind in the third, the inner course of his education comes into variance with his age. As far as we can we avoid this in the Waldorf School. Only in very exceptional cases does it happen that a child stays behind in his class. We make every effort to handle each child individually in such a way that it will not be necessary for him to stay behind.

Now as you all know, there are children who do not develop normally, who are in some way abnormal. At the Waldorf School we have instituted a special ‘helping’ class for these children. This helping class provides for children whose faculties of thinking, feeling and willing are under-developed and it has become very dear to our hearts. A child whom we cannot have in a class because of a weakness of some power of soul is taken into this separate class. And it is really delightful at the Waldorf School to find a kind of competition among the staff of teachers arising round a child when it is found necessary to move him from his normal class into the helping class. After all I have been saying, you will realize that there is the greatest harmony between the members of the teaching staff at the Waldorf School, but there is always a certain struggle when such a thing has to be done. It means that Dr. Karl Schubert to whom, on account of his wonderful qualities, the helping class has been entrusted has to face a regular onset! The teachers never like giving up a child to him. The children too feel it rather against the grain to have to leave their normal class and the teacher whom they love to go into the helping class. But again it is a blessing that before very long they do not want to leave the helping class because they have such a love for Dr. Schubert. He is extraordinarily well-fitted to have charge of this helping class on account of his qualities of character, temperament and his great capacity of love. This capacity of love, devotion and unselfishness—and they are really the foundation of the art of teaching—are specially needed when it is a matter of bringing on children in an isolated class of this kind to a point where they can again return to the class corresponding to their age; and this is the goal we set ourselves with the aid of the helping class.

True knowledge of the nature of man brings the following facts to light. It is really nonsense to speak of abnormalities or disease of the spiritual part of man's being, although of course in colloquial language and for the purposes of everyday life there is no need to be fanatical and pedantic about such matters. Fundamentally speaking the spirit and the soul are never ill. Illness can only occur in the bodily foundation and what then passes over from the body into the soul. Since however in earthly existence the being of soul and spirit can only be approached through the instrument of the body, it is above all necessary in the treatment of so-called abnormal children to know that the body, precisely through its abnormality, makes this approach to the soul and spirit impossible. As soon as we overcome a defect of body or of body and soul in the child and are able to approach his nature of soul and spirit, we have done what is necessary. In this connection therefore our constant aim must be to perceive the delicate and intimate qualities and forces of the bodily nature of man.

If we observe that a child is slow of apprehension, that something hampers him from connecting concepts and ideas, we must always realize that there is some irregularity in the nervous system. Individual treatment will do much in such a case, perhaps by going more slowly in the teaching or particularly in rousing the will and the like. When a child is abnormal, our treatment must always be individual and we shall do infinite good by such measures as I have indicated, perhaps by teaching slowly or stimulating the element of will into greater activity. Great attention of course must be paid to bodily training and culture in the case of such a child. Let me explain certain principles by giving you a simple example.

Suppose it is difficult for a child to put together ideas. We shall achieve much by giving the child physical exercises in which his own body, his whole organic system is made to act in accordance with an activity in his soul. We may tell him for, instance, to touch the lobe of his left ear with the third finger of the right hand and make him quickly repeat the exercise. Then we may tell him to touch the top of his head with the little finger of the left hand. Then we may alternate the first and second exercises quickly, one after the other. The organism is brought into movement in such a way that the child's thoughts must flow swiftly into the movements he makes. Thus by stimulating the nervous system we make it into a good foundation for the faculty which the child must exercise when it is a question of connecting or separating ideas.

In such ways we can experience how the spiritual nature of the child may be stimulated by the culture of the body. Suppose, for example, a child returns again and again to one fixed idea. This tendency is obviously a great weakness in his soul. He simply cannot help repeating certain words or returning over and over again to the same ideas. They take a deep hold of his being and he cannot get rid of them. If we observe such a child closely, we shall generally find that he walks too much on his heels and not with the toes and the front part of the foot. (All these symptoms of course take an individual form in each child and that is why a true knowledge of the human being, by means of which one can make individual distinctions, is so necessary.) Such a child needs exercises in which he must pay attention to every step he takes and these must be repeated until they gradually become a habit. And then, if it is not too late—in fact a great deal can be achieved in this direction between the seventh and twelfth years—we shall see an extraordinary improvement in the inner condition of the child's soul. We should, for example, understand too how movement of the fingers of the right hand influences the speech organism, and how movement of the fingers of the left hand works upon all that which comes to the help of thinking out of the speech organism. We must know too how walking on the toes or walking on the heels reacts upon the faculties of speech and thought, and specially on the will. The art of Eurhythmy, working as it does with normal forces, teaches us a great deal when we come to deal with the abnormal. The movements of Eurhythmy also, although they are founded upon that which is normal, are extremely valuable where the abnormal is concerned. For while for the normal human being they are artistic in their nature, for abnormality they can be adapted for therapeutic use. Since the movements are derived from laws of the human organism itself, the faculties of spirit and soul, which always need stimulus during the period of growth, are given an impulse that proceeds from the bodily nature. This proves how very necessary it is to realize the unity between spirit, soul and body when we have to deal with abnormal children at school.

The excellent course of teaching that is being developed by Dr. Schubert in this branch of work at the Waldorf School is achieving really splendid results. A great power of love and unselfishness is of course necessary when it is a matter of individual treatment in every case. These qualities are absolutely essential in the helping class. In many cases, too, resignation is required if any results at all are to be achieved, for one can only work with what is there or can be brought out of the human being. If only a quarter or a half of what would make the child absolutely normal is attained, the parents are apt not to be quite satisfied. But the essential thing in all human action that is guided and directed by the spirit is to be independent of outer recognition and to become more and more deeply aware of the sustaining power that grows from a sense of inner responsibility. This power will increase step by step in an art of education that perceives in these intimate details of life the harmony between the child's spirit, soul and body. Insight, perception, observation, these are what the teacher needs; if he has these qualities, speech itself will come to life in his whole being. Quite instinctively he will carry over into his practical teaching, what he has learnt from observation of the human being.

At a certain age, as I told you yesterday, the child must be led on from the plant- and animal-lore which he grasps more with his faculties of soul, to mineral-lore, to physics and chemistry, where greater claims are made on his conceptual faculties and intellect, but it is all-important that these subjects shall not be taught too soon. During this period of life when we are conveying the idea of causality to the child and he learns of cause and effect in nature, it is essential to balance the inorganic, lifeless elements in nature-study by leading him into the domain of art.

If we are to introduce art to the child in the right way, not only must all our teaching be artistic from the beginning, but art itself must play its proper part in education. That the plastic-pictorial arts are to be cultivated you can see if only from the fact that the writing lessons begin with a kind of painting. Thus, according to the Waldorf School principle, we begin to give painting and drawing lessons at a very tender age of childhood. Modelling too is cultivated as much as possible, albeit only from the ninth or tenth year and in a primitive way. It has a wonderfully vitalizing effect on the child's physical sight and on the inner quality of soul in his sight, if at the right age he begins to model plastic forms and figures. So many people go through life without even noticing what is most significant in the objects and events of their environment. Learning to see is what we must learn, if we are to stand rightly in the world. And if the child is to learn to observe aright, it is a very good thing for him to begin as early as possible to occupy himself with modelling, for what his head and eyes perceive is thus guided into the movements of fingers and hand. In this way we shall not only awaken the child's taste for the artistic around him, in the arrangement of a room perhaps, and distaste for the inartistic, but he will begin to observe those things in the world which ought to flow into the heart and soul of man.

By beginning musical instruction with song, but leading on more and more to instrumental playing, we develop the element of will in the human being. This musical instruction is not only a means of unfolding his artistic qualities, but also his purely “human” qualities, especially those of the heart and will. We must of course begin with song, but we must pass on as soon as possible to an understanding of instrumental music in order that the child may learn to distinguish the pure element of music, rhythm, measure, melody from everything else, from imitative or pictorial qualities of music and the like. More and more he must begin to realize and experience the purely musical element. By leading the child into the sphere of art, by building a bridge from play to life through art, we can begin, between the eleventh and twelfth years, and that is the proper time, to teach him to understand art. In the principles of education which it is the aim of the Waldorf School to realize, it is of vital importance for the child to acquire some understanding of art at the right age. At the age when the child must realize that Nature is ruled by abstract law, by natural law to be grasped by the reason, when he must learn in physics the link between cause and effect in given cases, we must promote an understanding of art as a necessary counterpoise. The child must realize how the several arts have developed in the different epochs of human history, how this or that motif in art plays its part in a particular epoch. Only so will those elements which a human being needs for all-round development of his nature be truly stimulated. In this way too, we can unfold the qualities which are essential in moral instruction.

If he acquires an understanding of art, the relation of the human being to his fellow-men will be quite different from what it could be without such understanding. For what is the essence of the understanding of the world, my dear friends? It is to be able at the right moment to reject abstract concepts in order to attain insight into and true understanding of the affairs of the world.

The mineral kingdom and also the domain of physics can be understood in the light of cause and effect. When we come to the plant-world, however, it is impossible to grasp everything through logic, reason and intellect. The plastic principle of man's being must here come into play, for concepts and ideas have to pass into pictures. Any plastic skill that we develop in the child helps him to understand the formations contained in the plants. The animal kingdom can only be comprehended if the ideas for its understanding are first implanted and developed in us by moral education. This alone will activate such inner powers as enable us to understand the forces building up the animal structure from the invisible world. How few people, how few physiologists to-day know whence the form of an animal is derived! Indeed the origin of the animal form is the structure of organs which, in man, become the organs of speech and song. That is the origin of the organic forms and structure of the animal. The animal does not come to the point of articulate speech; it only comes to the point of song as we know it in the birds. In speech and song, form-giving forces stream outwards, giving shape to the air-waves, and sound arises. That which in the organism of speech and song develops from out of a vital principle passes back into the form of the animal. It is only possible to understand the form of an animal if we realize that it develops, musically as it were, from organs which at a later stage are metamorphosed in the human being into the organic structures connected with the element of music.

To understand man we need an all-round conception of art, for the faculty of reason can only comprehend the inorganic constituents of man's being. If at the right moment we know how to lead over the faculty of mental perception to artistic feeling, then and only then is a true understanding of man possible. This understanding of man's being must be awakened by the teaching we give on the subject of art. If the teacher himself is possessed of true artistic feeling and can introduce the child to Leonardo's “Last Supper” or Raphael's “Sistine Madonna” at the right age, not only showing the definite relations between the various figures, but how colour, inner perspective and so forth were treated in the time of Leonardo or Raphael, in short, if nature and history alike are imbued with an inner quality of soul through teaching that conveys an understanding of art then we are bringing the human element into all education.

Nothing must be left undone in the way of imbuing the child with artistic feeling at the right age in life. Our civilization will never receive an impulse of ascent until more art is introduced into schools. Not only must the whole teaching be permeated with art, but a living understanding of art, called into being by the teacher's own creative power, must set up a counterpoise to prosaic conceptions of nature and of history.

We deem this an all-essential part of Waldorf School education. True indeed it is, and every artist has felt the same, that art is not a mere discovery of man but a domain wherein the secrets of nature are revealed to him at a level other than that of ordinary intelligence, a domain in which he gazes into the mysteries of the whole universe. Not until the moment when man realizes the world itself to be a work of art and regards Nature as a creative artist, not until then is he ready for a deepening of his being in the religious sense. There is profound meaning in these words of a German poet: ‘Only through the dawn gates of beauty canst thou pass into the realm of knowledge.’ It is so indeed; when we understand the whole being of man through art, we generate in others too an all-embracing conception of the world. That is why our aim in education should be to add to what is required by prosaic culture and civilization, the purely human element. To this end, not only must cur teaching itself be full of artistic feeling, but an understanding of art must be awakened in the children.

Art and science will then lead on to a moral and religious deepening. But as a preliminary to religious and moral progress, education and teaching must set up this balance: in the one scale lie all those things that lead into prosaic life, that bind men to the earth; in the other scale lie the counterbalancing factors leading to art, factors that enable man at every moment of his life to sublimate and raise to the spirit what must first be worked out in the ‘prose’ of life.

In December, 1921, a small group of people left England to attend a Course of Lectures on Education which were to be given by Dr. Rudolf Steiner at Dornach, Switzerland. They had been brought together by Professor Millicent Mackenzie, lately professor of Education at Cardiff University. She had urged Dr. Steiner to extend his teaching upon education and it was largely due to her efforts that the Course of Lectures was now to be given. Amongst those who attended the Conference was Miss Cross, one of the principals of a co-educational school at Kings Langley Priory, and before the Course was ended she had consulted Dr. Steiner as to whether he would be willing to use the school as a nucleus for the introduction of his pedagogy into England. As a member of the Committee of the New Ideals in Education she also suggested that he should be asked to lecture at the forthcoming Conference at Stratford-on-Avon. Invitation to him to do so was given and during the Easter of 1922 Dr. Steiner lectured several times at the Conference to an audience of some four hundred people and gave the inaugural lecture on Shakespeare. On his return to London he visited the school at Kings Langley and consented to undertake the direction of the work there.

Meanwhile Mrs. Mackenzie set about organizing a conference to be held at Oxford under the title of ‘Spiritual Values in Education and Social Life.’ This took place in August, 1922, and here Dr. Steiner met such well-known men as H. A. L. Fisher, Clutton Brock, Maxwell Garnett, Gilbert Murray, Edmond Holmes and was the guest of L. P. Jacks at Manchester College.

In August, 1923, he again visited England and gave a course of lectures at Ilkley under the chairmanship of Miss Margaret McMillan.

A few years later these lectures appeared in a first edition entitled ‘The New Art of Education’ which has been out of print for some time. It has now been carefully revised and brought up to date in the present volume and the Editor is fortunate in having secured the assistance and unique experience of Miss Cross in this difficult work.

The original foreword is now out of date, but the few extracts supplied may be of interest. The two farewell lectures do not add to the understanding of the book, and were not intended to form part of it. They have therefore been omitted.

Several schools in English-speaking countries are now working successfully on Dr. Steiner's principles and among them the old historic Priory at Kings Langley, Herts, where Dr. Steiner established his plans. This school is still under the direction of Miss Cross. With its beautiful grounds and pastures, it has now a fresh interest attached to it—namely, Dr. Steiner's Agricultural Work—known as the Bio-Dynamic Method of Agriculture.

For the reader of the following pages there will be a note of sadness when he reflects that the Waldorf School at Stuttgart exists no longer. It was here that Dr. Steiner put into practical shape his work in education. But all his activities have now been suppressed by the German Government.

If we survey history as one great whole, we see it—in spite of the many valleys and lowlands breaking the heights of the ascending development of man—as a continuous education of the human race, as a process whereby a religious, a divine consciousness penetrates ever and again into mankind.

In every epoch of human evolution there has existed some kind of Initiation Science, analogous, in its own way, to the Initiation Science outlined in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. What I have there described is the Initiation Science of the present age, and it leads us from a mere knowledge of Nature to a knowledge of Spirit.

To this Initiation Science the course of human evolution is revealed in a threefold light. We can look back to a very ancient epoch which came to a close about the year 800 B.C. Then we see an epoch radiant in the light of the Mystery of Golgotha, when through Christ Jesus an everlasting impulse entered into human evolution; and so too, there can arise in our vision a third epoch, an epoch in which we stand to-day and which, by a new Initiation Science, we have to bring to a deeper reality.

Now over and above what is imparted to man by his natural development, intelligence, reason, will, feeling and by his earthly education, each of these three epochs has striven for something else. In each of these epochs man has sensed the existence of a mighty riddle, deeply interwoven with his destiny. And always this riddle has assumed a different form because the human race has passed through different conditions of soul in the several epochs. It is only in the modern age of abstractions, since the inception of the theory—invalid though it be—that the soul of man has evolved from the animal state, that the human soul could be thought of as having remained unchanged through the ages.

Those whom a deeper science has enabled to gaze with unbiased vision into the reality of life, realise that the constitution of the human soul in the first epoch of evolution was not by any means the same as in the epoch crowned by the Mystery of Golgotha. Again there is a difference in our own times, when we must learn to understand this Mystery of Golgotha if it is not to be lost as a fact of knowledge.

In this sense, then, let us consider the nature of the human soul in the ancient East, in an age which produced the wisdom contained in the Vedas and the Vedanta philosophy. Everywhere to-day men are turning back, and often with great misunderstanding, to the Vedas and the Vedanta. If we look at the souls of men in this ancient East, even at souls living in the old Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian civilisation and on into the earliest Greek period, we find that they were of quite a different nature from the souls of men living to-day. The souls of men in those ancient times passed through a much more dreamlike, spiritual existence than the souls of modern men, who in their waking life are wholly given up to sense impressions, to all that the intellect can derive from these sense impressions and the substance flowing into the human memory from them. What really constitutes the substance of the soul of man to-day, did not bear the same form in the souls of the ancients. These men possessed a much more instinctive wisdom of the inner life of soul and Spirit. What we to-day would speak of as the faculty of clear and conscious discernment, did not as yet exist. Man experienced a weaving, moving inner life, the shadowy echoes of which remain in our present dream-life. It was an inner life, in which man not only knew with certainty that a soul was weaving and moving through his body, forming part of his true manhood, but in which he also knew: A soul, born from a divine-spiritual existence before a body clothed me in my earthly existence, is living within me.

In those ancient times man experienced his own being in a kind of waking dream. He knew himself as soul and in this inner, living experience felt the body as a kind of sheath, merely an instrument for the purposes of earthly existence. Even in his waking hours man lived in this consciousness of soul—dreamlike though it was. And he knew with clear conviction that before a physical body clothed him on Earth, he had lived as soul in a divine-spiritual world. Direct inner perception revealed to him this life of soul and Spirit, and, as a consequence, his consciousness of death was quite different from that of modern man. To-day man feels that he is deeply linked with his body. His inner consciousness of soul is not detached from his bodily life as was the case in earlier times. He looks upon birth as a beginning, death as an end.

So living and intimate was the experience of the permanent, eternal nature of the soul in the ancients, that they felt themselves raised above birth and death in their contemplation of this life of soul. Birth and death were states of growth, metamorphoses of life. They knew the reality of a pre-earthly existence and hence with equal certainty that they would live on beyond the gate of death. Birth and death were transitory occurrences in an unceasing life.

It has, however, always been necessary for man's immediate experience to be widened and deepened by knowledge that penetrates to the spiritual world, by an Initiation Science that tells him more than can arise within his inner being or is imparted to him in ordinary life by earthly education. It fell to the old Initiates, the teachers of that ancient humanity, to give the answer to a definite riddle that arose in the souls of men. As I have said, these men knew of the soul' and Spirit in immediate experience. But there was a great riddle and it arose in the soul in this form: Through conception and birth I pass into physical life and move upon Earth; I am clothed in my physical body and this body contains the very same substances as those of dead, outer Nature. I am clothed in something that is foreign to my being. Between birth and death I live in a body—a body of Nature. I am born in a physical sense but this physical birth is foreign to my inner sense of being.

The mighty riddle before the man of very ancient times, as he gazed into his innermost being, was not a riddle connected with the soul or Spirit, but with Nature. And it arose before him as he sensed the full inner reality of soul and Spirit and then felt the need to understand why he was clothed in a physical body so foreign to his real being. It was the task of Initiation Science to teach man how he could direct the same forces which enabled him to gaze into the life of soul and Spirit, to outer Nature as well—to Nature whose manifestations are otherwise dumb and inarticulate. And if after adequate training—so it was taught by that ancient Initiation Science—man directs to stone, plant, animal, to clouds, stars, to the courses of Sun and Moon, the forces which otherwise lead only to inner knowledge, he can know and understand outer Nature as well. Then he beholds the Spiritual not only in his inner being but also in bubbling spring, flowing river and mountain, in the gathering clouds, in lightning, thunder, in stone, plant and animal.

Thus did an ancient Initiation Science speak to man: “Gazing into thine own being, thou hast living experience of soul and Spirit, thou hast found the Divine within thee. But Initiation Science trains the power which otherwise beholds the Divine in man alone, also to behold the Divine in the whole life of Nature. Thou art clothed in an outer physical body. Know that this body too is from God. Physical birth hath brought thee into an earthly existence which is itself of a Divine origin.”

And so the task of ancient Initiation Science was to give man this sublime teaching: “Know that thou art born of God not only when thine eyes gaze inwards. In the body that comes into the world through physical birth—there also thou art born of God.” And all that the old Father Initiation placed before the soul of man was expressed, in after times, in three penetrating words:

This was the first way in which Initiation Wisdom worked upon man and awakened a religious consciousness within him.

The old heathen cults assumed the form of Nature-religions because man felt the need for a justification of his physical birth in Nature. The riddle of Nature—this was what confronted his soul; and in this Ex Deo Nascimur the riddle of Nature was solved and he could feel his earthly existence hallowed, although in his waking life he still felt himself a being of Spirit and soul, transcending the Physical.

As the course of evolution continued, man's early, dreamlike experience of soul and Spirit—which was indeed a kind of innate knowledge of his true inner being—faded gradually into the background. He began more and more to use the instruments afforded by his physical body. Let me express it as follows: The dreams of a life of soul and Spirit that characterised a primal instinct in the human race, faded away into darkness, and for the first time indeed in the last few thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha, men learnt to make use of their outer senses and of the intellect bound up with these outer senses. What we to-day call “Nature” appeared before men as an actual experience. It was the task of the old wise Initiates to unfold the spirituality of Nature to the human soul. The purely physical quality of outer Nature was now there as a question before the soul. To the old riddle of man's earthly existence there was added the second great riddle in the history of evolution—that of man's earthly death.

It was only in the last few thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha that man really came to feel death in earthly existence with any intensity. Whereas in earlier times he had little sense of his body and a strong sense of soul and Spirit, he now felt and experienced his being in the physical body. And death, the enigmatic event that is bound up with the physical body, was experienced by him as the greatest riddle of existence in this second epoch. This riddle of death emerges with great intensity among the ancient Egyptians, for instance. They embalmed their corpses because they; experienced the terror of death, because they were aware of the kinship of the physical body (in which they sensed their own existence) with death. “How do I live in my earthly body?” This had been the first riddle. “How do I pass through earthly death?”—this was the second.

In the days when man had gazed upwards to the soul and Spirit, when the soul and Spirit were immediate experience to his instinctive clairvoyance, he knew: When the chains that bind me to this earthly existence fall away, I shall belong to the Earth no more. My earthly being will be changed and lo! I shall once again live in the super-earthly kingdom, I shall be united with the stars.—For the soul knew the stars spiritually in the living, instinctive existence of days of yore. Man read his destiny in the stars. He felt himself united with Sun and Moon; he knew the stars. “From the Spirit in the stars, from a pre-earthly existence I have come forth. To the stars to the Spirit in the stars—I shall return, when I pass through the gate of death.”

But now all this became a riddle. Man confronted death, beholding in death the body's end. He felt his soul inwardly bound to the body and with a deep awareness of this riddle he asked himself: “What becomes of me after death? How do I pass through the portal of death?” And to begin with, there was nothing on the Earth which could help him to solve this riddle.

The old Initiates knew how to explain to man the riddle of Nature. Ex Deo Nascimur—this was how they answered, if we translate their words into a later tongue. But now, all consciousness of the pre-earthly existence whither man would return after he had passed the gate of death, all that was so clearly revealed to the ancients, was obliterated from the human soul. The instinctive knowledge, arising in man as his life of soul and Spirit flowed upwards to the stars, was no longer there. And then a mighty event occurred.—The Spirit of the world of stars—He Whom a later age called “Christ” and an earlier Greek age, the “Logos”—descended upon Earth, descended in His Substance as a Spiritual Being and took flesh upon Himself in the human body of Jesus of Nazareth. It was given to mankind to experience the greatest event of earthly existence. He Whose life had been divined by the ancients as they gazed upwards to the stars, the Godhead of Whom the Divine-Earthly is also part, passed through earthly life and through death. For the death and resurrection of Christ were, in the first place, the most essential features for those who truly understood Christianity.

And so, this passing of the God Who in earlier times only revealed Himself from the stars—this passing of the Godhead through a human body—contained the solution of the second riddle of existence, the riddle of death, inasmuch as the mystery was revealed in the so-called Gnosis by the Initiates of the age of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Initiates could now teach men: The Being Who erstwhile dwelt in Eternity, in the stars, has descended into a human body and has vanquished death in a human body. The Christ has now become an “extract” of the Spirit, of the Logos, of the Universe. The old Initiates had pointed to Nature, saying: “Out of God is this Nature born.” Now the Initiates could teach man how he can be united with the Divine Being Who descended into Jesus of Nazareth, Who in the man Jesus of Nazareth passed, as all men pass, through the gate of death, but Who had conquered death. And once again it was possible for man to solve this second riddle of death, even as he had formerly solved the riddle of Nature.

In Buddhism we are told that the Buddha found the four great Truths, one of which awoke within him at the sight of a corpse, when he was seized by the despair of the human body in death. About six hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha, as a last remnant of ancient thought, the Buddha had the vision of death. Six hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha, men began to gaze at the dead human form on the Cross. And just as Buddha believed that in the corpse he had discovered the truth of suffering as a last fragment of ancient thought, so now a humanity permeated with the Christ impulse gazed at the dead figure on the Cross, at the crucifix, and felt in this figure the heavenly guarantee of a life beyond death—for death had been conquered by Christ in the body of Jesus.

Because of their fear of death, the Egyptians embalmed their corpses, to preserve, as it were, the Nature-forces in man from death. This was in the age of Ex Deo Nascimur. The early Christians, in whom the impulse of esoteric Christianity was still living, buried their dead but held divine service over the grave in the sure conviction that death is conquered by the soul that is united with Christ; the tomb became an altar. From the Mystery of Golgotha flowed the certainty that if man is united with Christ, Who as the spiritual essence of the stars descended upon Earth and passed through life, death and resurrection in a human form, he himself as man, will conquer death.

Thus God the Father was the answer to the riddle of Nature. Christ was the answer to the riddle of death. Death had lost its sting. Henceforth death became a powerful argument (which formerly had not been necessary) for the metamorphosis of life.

The Gnosis—which was later exterminated, and of which fragments only have been preserved—proves that as the Christian Initiates contemplated the Mystery of Golgotha, in the certainty that Christ had descended to Earth and had awakened to new life the death-bringing forces in the Earth, they were able to instil into humanity the truth of the union of mortal man on Earth with Christ. Through Christ, man redeems the forces of death within him and awakens them to life. And so the Initiates were now able to impart a new consciousness of immortality to men, saying: “Your souls can be united with Him Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha; you can live in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. If your earthly life is more than a mere natural existence, if it is such that. Christ's Kingdom is awakened in your dealings with all your fellow-men, you live in communion with Christ Himself. Christ, the Divine Being, becomes your brother; in death and in life you die in Christ.” The truth of life in God the Son, in Christ, could now be added to the primeval truth of birth from God the Father, and to Ex Deo Nascimur was added:

In Christo Morimur

“In Christ we die”—that is to say—“As soul, we live!”

Such was the wisdom of man in the epoch that began about a thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha and came to its close in the fifteenth century A.D. We are now living in a third epoch which we must learn to understand aright. So in the education of the human race directed by the great Divine Teachers of the world, there was added to the truth “Out of God the Father we are born”—this truth—“In Christ the Son we die, in order that we may live.”

The great riddles of the first and second epochs stand clearly before us when we look back over history. The riddle of the third epoch in which we have been living for some centuries is as yet little known or felt, albeit it exists subconsciously in the feeling life of man and he yearns for its solution as deeply as he once yearned for the solution of the riddle of his earthly nature and then of his earthly death.

Since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries man has acquired a knowledge that penetrates deeply into Nature. Think only of the starry heavens which were once revealed to the dream-consciousness of the ancients and from which they read their destiny. External calculations, geometry and mechanics have taught man more and more about the stars since the approach of our present age. The science of the stars, of animals and plants has spread abroad in the form of a pure science of Nature. It was very different in the first epoch of human evolution and different again in the second, when in the depths of their souls men knew the truth of that which the old clairvoyant powers of the soul read in the stars, and which had descended in Christ into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus Christ lived among men, and men of the second epoch looked to the Christ, felt Him in their hearts and in this deep communion with Him they experienced what the Spirit of the Cosmos had once revealed to an old dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness as the justification of earthly existence. In the second epoch, man lived in cosmic spheres, as it were, inasmuch as he lived in communion with the Christ Who had descended from these cosmic spheres to Earth.

Then came the third epoch, when the world of stars was understood merely through calculation, when men looked through the telescope and spectroscope and discovered in the stars the same dead elements and substances as exist on the Earth. In this epoch men can no longer see Christ as the Being Who descended from the stars, because they do not know that the stars are the expression of the Spiritual Essence weaving through the Cosmos. And so the Cosmos is void of God, bereft of Christ, for mankind to-day.

Therefore it is that the inner consciousness of man is now menaced by the danger of losing Christ. The first signs are already visible. The ideas of Divine Wisdom, of Theology, which for centuries contained full knowledge of the Christ revelation, are now in many respects powerless to find the Christ, the God in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Many who contemplate the age of the Mystery of Golgotha no longer find Christ as a Cosmic Being, they find only the man—Jesus of Nazareth. The starry heavens are bereft of God, they are a part of Nature and men can no longer recognise in Him Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Being Whose “physical kingdom” is the whole cosmos, but Who dwelt in, the man Jesus of Nazareth in the age of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Inasmuch as these things can be deeply experienced in the inner being, there is a difference between one who treads the path of Initiation Wisdom and one who merely stands within external Natural Science. This Natural Science has lost the Spirit of the Cosmos and the danger approaches that humanity will also lose sight of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth.

Therefore it is that those who in our age penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of Nature that has blossomed forth in the third period of evolution since the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, feel the third great riddle of man's earthly development. They look back in history to the first great riddle—that of man's earthly nature; to the second riddle of his earthly death. And the third riddle arises within them, whispering something that as yet they do not like to face, although they feel it subconsciously and with a certain emphasis in their hearts. The Initiates of our age say to themselves: “We are living in the world which once spoke to man from out of the cosmos—spoke as the Spirit. In days of yore man lived a life of full wakefulness in the cosmos. Gradually this waking life in the cosmos, this feeling of oneness with the Christ Who descended to Earth as the Being Who preserves this awareness of the spiritual cosmos in man, faded away, and we are now living in a cosmos that is revealed to us merely in its outer aspect. Cosmic ideas are experienced by us only in dreams. The cosmos is weighed in the scales of a balance, observed by the telescope. Such is our dream! And instead of uniting us with the Spirit of the cosmos, this dream separates us from Him.”

And so the third great riddle of the sleep of knowledge, the sleep into which mankind has fallen, stands before those who live in the third epoch of evolution, the third epoch, not only of “uninitiated” but of Initiation Science.

Deeper spirits of the human race have felt this. Descartes felt it, for he finally began to doubt the validity of all knowledge yielded by outer Nature. But, to begin with, it was felt only dimly. More and more deeply there must enter into men the consciousness that the whole domain of knowledge of which they have been so proud for some five centuries, represents a sleep of existence. This third great riddle must stand more and more clearly before them. Why do we dwell in an earthly, physical body? Why do we pass through earthly death? And in the third epoch this question arises in the hearts of men: Why this sleep of a knowledge directed merely to outer Nature? How can we awaken from the dream that this “calculated” universe represents, how can we pass from this cosmos whose external aspect is revealed through Astro-Physics and Astro-Chemistry, and stand face to face with the cosmos that in the depths of our innermost being unites us once again with its deepest Essence? How can we wake from the dream into which knowledge has fallen in recent times?

Ex Deo Nascimur—this was the answer given by the Initiates in the earliest times to man's question, “Why do I live in an earthly body?” In the age of the Mystery of Golgotha the Initiates sought to solve the riddle of death by linking man with Christ Jesus Who had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, answering in the words of a later tongue, In Christo Morimur. And it is the task of modern Initiation Science in this our age and in the following centuries, gradually to lead mankind to a divine consciousness, to a religious life, and make it possible for him to awaken in his innermost being a spiritual knowledge of the cosmos. The Initiation Science that must arise through Anthroposophy does not wish merely to be an extension of our present sleeping knowledge—although men are proud of this knowledge and its outer successes have been so splendid. Anthroposophical Initiation Science would awaken this sleeping knowledge, would awaken man, who is fettered in the “dreams” of reason and intellectuality.

Hence, the Initiation Science that would be borne by Anthroposophy is not a mere extension of facts and discoveries of knowledge, but an impulse to an awakening, an attempt to answer the question: How can we wake from the sleep of life? And so, just as the earliest Initiates had explained Ex Deo Nascimur, and those who came later In Christo Morimur—the Initiation Wisdom which bears within itself a future life of conscious spiritual knowledge, a life leading to a deepening of religious feeling, a divine consciousness—this Initiation Wisdom would fain lead man once again to know that the Christ Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha is the Logos, weaving and working through the cosmos. And inasmuch as man will gradually grow to be conscious of his cosmic existence, the Initiation Science that is intended to inaugurate a spiritual Christology in the truest sense (as well as an Art of Education, for instance, in a narrower sphere), will strive to bring a religious mood into the practical life it ever seeks to serve.—“Out of God we are born as physical human beings”—“In Christ we die”—that is to say, “As soul, we live.” To these truths Initiation Science will ever strive to add the third: “When we press forward through the new Initiation to the Spirit, then even in this earthly existence we live in the Spirit.” We experience an awakening of knowledge whereby all our life is bathed in the light of true religion, in the light of a moral goodness proceeding from inward piety. In short, this new Initiation Science endeavours to supplement the answers to the first and second riddles of Initiation as expressed in Ex Deo Nascimur and in, In Christo Morimur—although at the same time it solves them anew and restores them to the soul of man. It endeavours to bring afresh and in full clarity to the human heart, this other truth—a truth that will awaken the Spirit in heart and soul: In the understanding of the living Spirit, we ourselves, in body, soul and Spirit, shall be re-awakened—

Dear friends! Our assignment for this educational conference is to answer the question: What is the role of education and teaching to be for the future in terms of both the individual and society? Anyone who looks with an unbiased eye at modern civilization and its various institutions can hardly question the importance of this theme today (by “today” I mean the current decade in history). This theme touches on questions deep in the souls and hearts of a great many people.

Knowledge of the Whole Human Being

In our modern civilization, we have seen people develop a peculiar attitude toward their own being. For over a century, our civilization has witnEssentialEd the ambitious development of natural science and its consequences for humanity; indeed, all of contemporary life has been affected by the knowledge and ideas engendered by natural science. From the perspective of natural science, however, wherever we look and no matter how exactly we observe the mineral kingdom and develop ideas of nature’s other realms, one thing is clear: although there was close and intimate self-knowledge of human beings in earlier cultural epochs, this is no longer the situation today. Whatever achievements natural science may have brought to humankind, it cannot be applied directly to the human being.

We can ask: What are the laws that govern the development of the world beyond humankind? However, none of the answers come close to the essence of what lives within the limits of the human skin. Answers are so inadequate that people today haven’t a clue about the ways that external natural processes are actually transformed within the human being through breathing, blood circulation, nutrition, and so on.

Consequently, we have come to the point where, even in terms of the soul, we do not look at the soul itself, but study its external manifestations in the human body. Today people experiment on human beings. However, I don’t intend to criticize psychological or pedagogical experimentation. We must acknowledge what can be accomplished in this way, but mostly this approach is a symptom of our cultural milieu, since in fact the results of such experiments tell us little about the human being.

In earlier times, people had a sense of inner empathy with the spirit and soul of other human beings, which gave them an intuitive impression of the soul’s inner experiences; it made sense that what one knew about the inner spirit and soul life would explain external physical manifestations. Now, we do just the opposite. People experiment with external aspects and processes very effectively, since all contemporary natural science is effective. The only thing that has been demonstrated, however, is that, given our modern views of life, we take seriously only what is sense-perceptible and what the intellect can comprehend with the help of the senses. Consequently, we have come to a point where we no longer have the capacity to really observe the inner human being; we are often content to observe its outer shell. We are further removed from the human being. Indeed, the very methods that have so eagerly illuminated life in the outer world—the working of nature—have robbed us of the most basic access between souls.

Our wonderfully productive civilization has brought us very close to certain natural phenomena, but it has also driven us away from the human being. It should be obvious that the aspect of our culture most harmed by this situation is education—everything related to human development and teaching children. Once we can understand those we are to shape, we will be able to educate and teach, just as painters must understand the nature and quality of colors before they can paint, and sculptors must first understand their materials before they can create, and so on. If this is true of the arts that deal with physical materials, isn’t it all the more true of an art that works with the noblest of all materials, the material that only the human being can work with—human life, the human being and human development?

These issues remind us that all education and all teaching must spring from the fountain of real knowledge of the human being. In the Waldorf schools, we are attempting to create such an art of education, solidly based on true understanding of the human being, and this educational conference is about the educational methods of Waldorf education.

Knowledge of the human being! I can hear people saying how far we have come in our knowledge of the human being in our time! I must reply that, although we have made extraordinary advances in our knowledge of the human physical body, the human being is really body, soul, and spirit. The worldview at the foundation of Waldorf education—that is, anthroposophic spiritual science—consists equally of knowledge of the human body, the human soul, and the human spirit, being careful to avoid any imbalance.

In the following lectures, I will have much more to say about such knowledge of the human being. But first, let me point out that true knowledge of the human being does not come from merely looking at an isolated individual with three aspects. Knowledge of the human being primarily tries to keep sight of what happens among human beings during earthly life.

When one human being encounters another, a fully conscious knowledge of each other’s being does not develop between them—such a thing would be absurd. We couldn’t begin to interact socially if we were to view one another with analytical questions in mind. But we all carry an unconscious knowledge of the other within ourselves as unconscious perceptions, feelings, and, most importantly, impulses that lead to action. We will see that knowledge of the human being has suffered a great deal in the modern world, and this has given rise to many social evils. In a sense, however, knowledge of human beings has only withdrawn to deeper levels of the unconscious than ever before. Nevertheless, it is still available to us, since, if it weren’t, we would pass each other with no means of understanding one another.

It is certainly true that when one person meets another—whether or not we are aware of it—sympathies and antipathies arise, and impressions are formed. They tell us whether the other person can be allowed to get close, or if we would prefer to stay clear of that other person. Other impressions arise as well. Immediately, we may say, “This is an intelligent person,” or “that person is not very gifted.” I could mention hundreds and hundreds of impressions that spring from the depths of the soul. During most of our life, such impressions are pushed back down again, where they become a part of our soul’s attitude toward the other person; we guide our behavior toward that person in terms of these first impressions. Then, too, what we call empathy—which is essentially one of the most significant impulses of human morality—also belongs to such unconscious knowledge of the human being.

The Relationship between Teacher and Child

In our adult interactions, we use our knowledge of the human being so unconsciously that we are unaware of it, but we nevertheless act according to it. In our capacity as teachers, however, the relationship between our human soul as teacher and the child’s human soul must be much more conscious so that we have a formative effect on the child. But we also must become aware of our own teacher’s soul so that we experience what is necessary to establish the right mood, the right teaching artistry, and the right empathy with the child’s soul. All of these things are necessary to adequately performing our educational and teaching task. We are immediately reminded that the most important aspect in education and teaching is what occurs between the teacher’s soul and the child’s soul.

Let’s start with this knowledge of the human being; it is knowledge with “soft edges.” It lacks sharp contours to the extent that it is not pointed directly at any one person. Rather, over the course of the educational relationship it glides, as it were, weaving here and there between what happens in the teacher’s soul and in the child’s soul. In certain ways, it is difficult to be very sure of what is happening, since it is all very subtle. When we teach, something is present that flows like a stream, constantly changing. It is necessary to develop a vision that allows us to seize anything that is developing between human beings in this intimate way.

We might consider a few specific examples as an introduction to the way these currents form. In doing this, we must consider one thing: when we deal with a human being “in-process,” a growing child, knowledge of the human being is too often applied in an exact way. We take the child at a specific point in life and get to work, asking about the child’s developmental forces, how they operate at that particular age, and so on, and we ask how we can properly meet these developmental forces at this particular time. But knowledge of the human being as intended here is not concerned only with these moments of experience, but with the person’s whole earthly life. It is not really as easy as observing a precise time span in a human life. But educators and teachers must be able to look at the whole human life; whatever we do in the eighth or ninth year will have effects upon the forty- or fifty-year-old adult, as we will see a little later.

As a teacher, anything I do to a child during the years of education will sink deeply into the physical, psychological, and spiritual nature of that individual. Whatever I do that plants a seed at the beginning of life will in some way go on living and working for decades beneath the surface, reappearing in remarkable ways many years later, perhaps not until the very end of life. It is possible to affect childhood in the right way if we consider not just childhood but all of human life as seen from the perspective of a real knowledge of the human being.

This is the knowledge I have in mind as I give you a few examples about the intimate ways the teacher’s soul can affect the child’s soul. I will present only a few indications for today—we will go into greater detail later. We can understand how to prepare the intellect for activities of the will only if we can answer this question: What happens between the teacher and the child, simply because the teacher and the child are present together, each with a unique nature and temperament—a particular character, level of development, constitution of body and soul? Before we even begin to teach and educate, the teacher and the child are both present. There is already an interaction. The teacher’s relationship to the child presents the first important question.

Rather than wandering off in abstractions, let’s just look at specifics; we shall examine one particular characteristic in human nature—the temperament. Let’s not view a child’s temperament, which of course offers us no choice—we must educate each human being regardless of temperament (we will speak later of the children’s temperaments); but let’s begin rather by looking at the teacher’s temperament. The teacher approaches the child with a very specific temperament—choleric, sanguine, melancholic, or phlegmatic. The question is: As educators, what can we do to control our own temperaments; how can we perhaps educate ourselves in relation to our own temperament? To answer this question we must first look directly at the fundamental question: How does a teacher’s temperament affect the child, just by being what it is?

The Choleric Temperament

We will begin with the choleric temperament. The teacher’s choleric temperament may be exprEssentialEd when the teacher lets loose and vents anger. We will see later how teachers can control themselves. Let’s assume for starters that the teacher has a temper, which is exprEssentialEd in powerful, vehement expressions. It may drive the teacher to act or handle the child in ways that arise from a choleric temperament, which is regretted later on. The teacher may do things in the presence of the child that cause fright (we will see the fragile nature of a child’s soul). The child’s fright may not last for long, but nevertheless take root deep in the child’s physical organism. A choleric adult may have such an effect that the child always approaches the teacher in fear, whereas another child may just feel pressured. In other words, there is a very specific way the choleric temperament works on a child, having subtle, intimate effects.

Let’s consider the preschool child. At that stage a child is a single entity; the child’s three members—body, soul, and spirit—separate later on. Between birth and the change of teeth (which is a very important point in the child’s development) there is a period of time when the child is, for all practical purposes, entirely a sensory organ; this is not generally emphasized enough.

Let’s imagine a sensory organ—the eye, for example. This eye is organized in very integral ways that unite with the impressions made by colors. Without a person having any say in the matter, the slightest external impression is immediately transformed into activity, which is only then experienced in the soul. The entire life of the child before the change of teeth is ruled in this way by sensory perceptions that impress the soul. All inner experiences are a kind of soul experience.

Children absorb impressions from all the people around them with the same intensity that sensory organs receive impressions from the environment. The way we move around children—whether slowly, displaying a relaxed soul and spirit or with stormily, showing a heavy soul and spirit—is absorbed by them; they are completely sensory. We might say that an adult tastes with the mouth, or with the palate or tongue. Children, however, experience taste in the very depths of their organism; it’s as though the sense of taste were spread throughout the whole body. This is also true of the other senses. The effects of light relate internally to a child’s respiratory system and circulation. What is to an adult a separate visual perception, the child experiences in the whole body; and without any forethought, a child’s will impulses take the shape of reflexes. A child’s whole body responds reflexively to every impression in the environment.

This means that the spirit, soul, and body of a small child are still undifferentiated, still interwoven as a unified whole. The soul and spirit work in the body and directly influence the circulatory and digestive processes. It is remarkable how close a child’s soul and metabolism are to each other and how closely they work together. Only later, at the change of teeth, does the soul element become differentiated from the metabolism. Every stimulation of a child’s soul is transcribed in the blood circulation, breathing, and digestion. This means that a child’s environment affects a child’s whole body.

And so, when a choleric teacher gets near a child and lets loose with fits of temper, anything done under this influence—if the teacher has not learned to deal with this—enters the child’s soul and takes root in the body. The remarkable thing is that it sinks into the foundations of the child’s being, and anything implanted in the growing human body reappears later. Just as a seed is planted in the autumn and reappears in the spring as a plant, so whatever is planted as a seed in a child of eight or nine comes out again in the adult of forty-five or fifty. And we can see the effects of an uncontrolled choleric teacher’s temperament in the form of metabolic illnesses in the adult, or even in the very old.

If we could only verify the reason this or that person suffers from arthritis, or why another has all kinds of metabolic disorders, poor digestion, or gout, there would be only one answer: many of these things can be attributed to the violent temperament of a teacher who dealt with the child at an early age.

If we achieve pedagogical understanding by looking at the whole human being and not just at the child—which is much more comfortable—it becomes clear that education and teaching play a central role in the course of human life. We see how often happiness or unhappiness in the spirit, soul, or physical life is related to a person’s education and schooling. Just consider this: doctors are asked by older people to correct the mistakes of their educators, when in fact the problems have sunk so deeply into the person that no more can be done. The impressions on the child’s soul have been transformed into physical effects, and the psychological interacts with the physical; knowing all this, we begin to pay attention in the right way, and we acquire a proper appreciation for teaching methods and what is required for a viable education according to the reality of human nature.

The Phlegmatic Temperament

Now, let us consider the phlegmatic teacher. We will assume again that this teacher makes no attempt at self-knowledge or self-education regarding temperament. It can be said of the phlegmatic that whatever comes to the child from such a person is not strong enough to meet the inner activity of the child’s soul. The inner impulses want to come out, to flow out, and the child wants to be active, but the teacher is phlegmatic and just lets things be. This teacher is unable to engage what flows out of the child, failing to encounter it with enough impressions and influences. It’s as if one were trying to breathe in a rarefied atmosphere, to use a physical analogy. The child’s soul “asphyxiates” when the teacher is phlegmatic. When we see such a child in later life, we can understand why some people are nervous or suffer from neurasthenia, and so on. By going back to their childhood, we find that it is related to the uncontrolled phlegmatic temperament of an educator who failed to do important things with the child.

We might even be able to explain widespread cultural pathologies in this way. Why is it that nervous diseases such as depression are so widespread today? You might be thinking I’m trying to convince you that, when the current generation of neurasthenic adults was being educated, the whole teaching profession was phlegmatic! I will reply that it did consist of phlegmatics—not in the usual sense of the word, but in a much deeper sense. We are speaking of the historical period of the nineteenth century when materialism rose. The materialistic worldview turns away from the human being, and develops a monstrous indifference in the teacher toward the most intimate movements of the souls of those being educated.

If, in an unbiased way, we can observe the cultural manifestations of the modern era, we find that a person may be a phlegmatic in that sense, even though that same person might angrily react to a child who spilled ink yelling: “You should not do that! You should not throw ink because you are angry; I’ll throw it back at you, you rascal!” Such outbursts of choleric temper were not the exception during the time I just described, nor am I suggesting that there was any shortage of sanguine or melancholic teachers. But in their actual teaching, they were still phlegmatics and acted phlegmatic. The materialistic worldview was uninterested in meeting the human being, and certainly not the growing human being. Phlegma became an aspect of all education in the materialistic era. And it has a lot to do with the appearance of nervous disease, or nervous disorganization, in our culture. We will look at this in detail later. Nevertheless, we see the effect of phlegmatic teachers whose very presence next to children triggers nervous disorders.

The Melancholic Temperament

If a teacher succumbs to a melancholic temperament and becomes too self-absorbed, the thread of the child’s spirit and soul nature is constantly in danger of breaking, dampening the feeling life. In this way, the melancholic teacher’s influence causes the child to suppress soul impulses. Instead of expressing them, the child retreats within.

If a teacher gives in to a melancholic temperament while with children, it can lead in later life to breathing and circulatory problems. Teachers should not educate with only childhood in mind. And doctors should look beyond the specific onset of disease to a particular age, with a capacity to observe human life as one connected whole. In this way, people can see that many cases of heart trouble between forty and forty-five began with the whole mood generated by the uncontrolled melancholic temperament of a teacher.

Obviously, when we observe the spiritual and psychic imponderables that play between the teacher’s soul and that of the child, we must ask: How should teachers and education professionals educate themselves about the various temperaments? We can understand that it is not enough for the teacher to say, “I was born with my temperament; I can’t help myself.” First of all, this is untrue, and even if it were true, the human race would have died out long ago due to wrong education.

The Sanguine Temperament

The teacher who gives full vent to a sanguine temperament is susceptible to all kinds of impressions. When a student makes a mess, the teacher looks the other way instead of getting angry. A student may whisper to a neighbor, and the teacher again looks the other way. This is typical of the sanguine temperament; impressions come quickly, but do not penetrate deeply. Such a teacher may call on a little girl to ask a brief question; but the teacher is not interested in her for long and almost immediately sends her back to her seat. This teacher is completely sanguine.

Again, if we look at the whole human life, we can trace many cases of insufficient vitality and zest for life—which may even be pathological—to the effects of a teacher’s undisciplined sanguine temperament. Without self-knowledge, a teacher’s sanguine temperament suppresses vitality, dampens the zest for life, and weakens the will that wells up from the child’s essential being.

These relationships, as revealed by a spiritual science, help us understand the human being. With this in mind, we can realize how comprehensive the real art of education is; we can see the way teaching must view the nature of the human being and the limits of looking only at what is immediately present and obvious. This is not enough, and we are faced with the essential demand of our current civilization—the civilization that has already brought enough discord to human existence.

But, given the various simple and superficial observations of research, statistics, and other ingenious methods—which form the basis of almost all education and didacticism—how can we educate in a way that equally considers the whole human experience and the eternal nature of the human being that shines through human experience? Something much deeper appears in relation to these matters. As an introduction, I have tried to show you what is at play between teacher and student just because they are there—even before anything is done consciously, but merely because the two are there. This is especially revealed in the different temperaments.

It will be argued that there comes a point where we must begin to educate. Yes, and immediately we encounter the opinion that anyone can teach someone else whatever one has already learned. If I have learned something, I am, so to speak, qualified to teach it to someone else. People frequently fail to notice that there is an inner attitude of temperament, character, and so on, behind everything a teacher brings to teaching, regardless of self-education, formal training, or assimilated knowledge. Here, too, a real knowledge of the human being leads more deeply into human nature itself.

Let’s inquire, then, about teaching an unschooled child something we have learned. Is it enough to present it to the child just as we learned it? It certainly is not. Now I will speak of an observed phenomenon, the results of a real observation of the whole life of a human being in body, soul, and spirit. It concerns the first period of life, from birth until the change of teeth.

The Teacher and the Three Stages of Childhood

When we understand the interrelationship between teacher and child in terms of the temperaments, we see that, during this first stage of life, what we have learned is relatively unimportant to teaching and educating a child. The most important considerations have to do with the kind of person one is, what impressions the child receives, and whether or not one is worthy of imitation.

As far as this life period is concerned, if a civilization never spoke of education and in its elementary, primitive way simply educated, it would have a much healthier outlook than ours. This was true of the ancient Eastern regions, which had no education in our sense of the word. There the adult’s body, soul, and spirit was allowed to affect the child so that the child could take this adult as a guide, moving a muscle when the teacher moved a muscle and blinking when the teacher blinked. The teacher was trained to do this in a way that enabled the child to imitate. Such a teacher was not as the Western “pedagogue,” but the Eastern data. A certain instinctive quality was behind this. Even today, it is obvious that what I have learned is totally irrelevant in terms of my ability to effectively teach a child before the change of teeth. After the change of teeth, the teacher’s knowledge begins to have some significance; but this is again lost, if I merely impart what I learned as it lives in me. It must all be transformed artistically and made into images, as we shall see later. I must awaken invisible forces between the child and myself.

In the second life period, between the change of teeth and puberty, it is much more important that I transform my knowledge into visual imagery and living forms, unfolding it and allowing it to flow into the child. What a person has learned is important only for children after puberty until the early twenties.

For the small child before the change of teeth, the most important thing in education is the teacher’s own being. The most important element for teaching the child between the change of teeth and puberty is the teacher who can enter living artistry. Only after the age of fourteen or fifteen can the child really claim what the teacher has learned. This continues until after the early twenties, when the child is fully grown (even though it’s true that we call the teenager a young lady or young gentleman). At twenty years, the young person can meet another human being on equal terms, even when the other is older.

Things like this enable us to look deep into the human nature—and we shall see how this is deepened in the presence of true human wisdom. We come to realize what has often been thought—that we do not become acquainted with the teacher by examining what the person knows after going through college. That would show us only a capacity for lecturing on some subject, perhaps something suitable for students between fourteen and twenty. As far as earlier stages are concerned, what the teacher does in this sense has no relevance whatever. The qualities necessary for these early periods must be assEssentialEd on a very different basis.

Thus, we see that a fundamental issue in teaching and education is the question of who the teacher is. What must really live in the children, what must vibrate and well up into their very hearts, wills, and eventually into their intellect, lives initially in the teachers. It arises simply through who they are, through their unique nature, character, and soul attitude, and through what they bring the children out of their own self-development. So we can see how a true knowledge of the human being, cultivated into embracing everything, can be the single foundation for a true art of teaching and fulfill the living needs of education.

In the lectures that follow, I want to go into these two things more fully—the pedagogy, and the living needs of education.

Yesterday I spoke of the teacher’s encounter with the children. Today I will try to describe the child, as a growing being, and the experience of encountering the teacher. A more exact observation of the forces active in the development of the human being shows that at the beginning of a child’s earthly life we must distinguish three distinct stages of life. After we have gained a knowledge of the human being and the ability to perceive the characteristics of these three stages, we can begin to educate in a way that is true to the facts—or rather, an education that is true to the human being.

The Nature of Proof in Spiritual Matters

The first stage of life ends with the change of teeth. Now I know that there is a certain amount of awareness these days concerning the changes that occur in the body and soul of children at this stage of life. Nevertheless, it is not sufficient to enable perception of all that happens in the human being at this tender age; we must come to understand this in order to become educators. The appearance of teeth—not the inherited, baby teeth—is merely the most obvious sign of a complete transformation of the whole human being. Much more is happening within the organism, though not as perceptible outwardly; its most radical expression is the appearance of the second teeth.

If we consider this we can see that contemporary physiology and psychology simply cannot penetrate the human being with any real depth, since their particular methods (excellent though they may be) were developed to observe only outer physical nature and the soul as it manifests in the body. As I said yesterday, the task of anthroposophic spiritual science is to penetrate in every way the whole human development of body, soul, and spirit.

First, however, we must eliminate a certain assumption. This preconception is inevitably a stumbling block to anyone who approaches the Waldorf education movement without a basic study of anthroposophy. I do not mean for a moment that we simply ignore objections to this kind of education. On the contrary. Those who have a spiritual foundation such as anthroposophy cannot be the least bit fanatical; they will always fully consider any objections to their viewpoints. Consequently, they fully understand the frequent argument against anthroposophic education. But, these things still must be proven.

Now, people have a lot to say about proofs with no clear idea of what that means. I cannot present a detailed lecture on the methods of proof in the various spheres of life and knowledge; but I would like to be clear about a certain comparison.

What do people mean when they say that something requires “proof”? The whole trend of human evolution since the fourteenth century has been to validate judgments through visual observation—that is to say, through sense perception. It was a very different matter before the current era, or before the fourteenth century. But we fail to realize today that our ancestors had a very different view of the world. In a certain sense we feel proud when we consider the development that has occurred in recent centuries. We look condescendingly at what people did during the Middle Ages, for example, considering them childish and primitive. But it is an age about which we really know nothing and call the “Dark Ages.” Try to imagine how our successors will speak of us—if they are as arrogant in their thinking as we are! If they turn out to be so conceited, we will seem just as childish to them as medieval people appear to us.

During the ages before the fourteenth century, humans perceived the world of the senses, and also comprehended with the intellect. The intelligence of the medieval monastic schools is too often underestimated. The inner intelligence and conceptual faculty was much more highly developed than the modern and chaotic conceptual faculty, which is really driven by, and limited to, natural phenomena; anyone who is objective and impartial can observe this. In those days, anything that the intellect and senses perceived in the universe required validation from the divine, spiritual realm. The fact that sense revelation had to be sanctioned by divine revelation was not merely an abstract principle; it was a common, very human feeling and observation. A manifestation in the world of the senses could be considered valid only when knowledge of it could be proven and demonstrated in terms of the divine, spiritual world.

This situation changed, gradually at first, one mode of knowledge replacing the other. Today, however, it has come to the point where we only acknowledge the validity of something—even in the spiritual world—when it can be proven through the senses. Something is validated when statements about spiritual life can be confirmed by experiment and observation. Why does everyone ask for a demonstration of matters that are really related to spirit? People ask you to make an experiment or sense observation that provides proof.

This is what people want, because they have lost faith in the reality of the human being’s inner activity; they have lost faith in the possibility that intuitions can emerge from the human being when looking at ordinary life, at sensory appearances and the intellect. Humanity has really weakened inwardly, and is no longer conscious of the firm foundation of an inner, creative life. This has had a deep influence on all areas of practical life, and most of all on education.

Proofs, such as external sensory appearances, through observation and experiment, may be compared to a man who notices that an unsupported object falls, and that it is attracted by the Earth’s gravity and therefore must be supported until it rests on solid ground. And then this man says, “Go ahead, tell me that the Earth and the other heavenly bodies hover freely in space, but I cannot understand it. Everything must be supported or it will fall.” Nevertheless, the Earth, Sun, and other heavenly bodies do not fall. We must completely change our way of thinking, when we move from earthly conditions into the cosmos. In cosmic space, heavenly bodies support one another; the laws of Earth do not apply there.

This is also true of spiritual facts. When we speak of the material nature of plants, animals, minerals, or human beings, we must prove our statements through experiment and sense observation. This kind of proof, like the example mentioned, suggests that an object must be supported. In the free realm of the spirit, however, truths support one another. The only validation required is their mutual support. Thus, in representing spiritual reality, every idea must be placed clearly within the whole, just as Earth or any other heavenly body moves freely in cosmic space. Truths must support one another. Anyone who tries to understand the spiritual realm must first examine truths coming from other directions, and how they support the one truth through the free activity of their “gravitational force” of proof, as it were. In this way, that single truth is kept free in the cosmos, just as a heavenly body is supported freely in the cosmos by the countering forces of gravity. A capacity to conceive of the spiritual in this way must become an essential inner quality of human beings; otherwise, though we may be able to understand and educate the soul aspect, we will be unable to understand and educate the spirit that also lives and moves in the human being.

The Individual’s Entry into the World

When human beings enter the physical world of sensation, their physical body is provided by the parents and ancestors. Even natural science knows this, although such discoveries will become complete only in the remote future. Spiritual science teaches that this is only one aspect of the human being; the other part unites with what arises from the father and mother; it descends as a spirit and soul being from the realm of spirit and soul.

Between the previous earthly life and the present one, this being passed through a long period of existence from the previous death to rebirth; it had experiences in the spiritual world between death and rebirth, just as on Earth, between birth and death, we have bodily experiences communicated through the senses, intellect, feelings, and will. The essence of these spiritual experiences descends, unites at first only loosely with the physical nature of the human being during the embryonic period, and hovers around the person, lightly and externally like an aura, during the first period of childhood between birth and the change of teeth. This being of spirit and soul who comes down from the spiritual world—a being just as real as the one who comes from the body of the mother—is more loosely connected with the physical body than it is later in human life. This is the why the child lives much more outside the body than an adult does.

This is only another way of expressing what I said in yesterday’s lecture, namely, that during the first period of life the child is in the highest degree and by its whole nature a being of sense. The child is like a sense organ. The surrounding impressions ripple, echo and sound through the whole organism because the child is not so inwardly bound up with its body as is the case in later life, but lives in the environment with its freer spiritual and soul nature. Hence the child is receptive to all the impressions coming from the environment.

Now, what is the relation between the human being as a whole and what we receive from the father and mother strictly through heredity? If we study the development of the human being with vision that truly creates ideas instead of mere proofs as described—a vision that looks at the spiritual and the evolution of the human being—we find that everything in the organism depends on hereditary forces in exactly the same way as the first, so-called baby teeth do. We only need to perceive, with precise vision, the difference in the ways the second teeth and the first are formed. In this way, we have a tangible expression of the processes occurring in the human being between birth and the change of teeth.

During this stage the forces of heredity hold sway in the physical body, and the whole human being becomes a kind of model with which the spirit and soul element work, imitating the surrounding impressions. If we place ourselves in the soul of a child relative to the environment and realize how every spiritual impulse is absorbed into the whole being—how with every movement of the hand, every expression, every look in the eyes of another the child senses the spirit inherent in the adult and allows it to flow in—then we will also perceive how, during the first seven years, another being is building itself on the foundation of the model provided by heredity. As human beings, the earthly world actually gives us, through hereditary forces, a model on which to build the second human being, who is really born with the change of teeth. The first teeth in the body are eliminated by what wants to replace them; this new element, which belongs to the human being’s individuality, advances and casts off heredity. This is true of the whole human organism. During the first seven years of life, the organism was a product of earthly forces and a kind of model. As such it is cast off, just as we get rid of the body’s outgrowths by cutting our nails, hair, and so on. The human being is molded anew with the change of teeth just as our outer form is perpetually eliminated. In this case, however, the first being, or product of physical heredity, is completely replaced by a second, who develops under the influence of the forces that the human being brings from pre-earthly life. Thus, during the period between birth and the change of teeth, the human hereditary forces related to the physical evolutionary stream fight against the forces of a pre-earthly existence, which accompany the individuality of each human being from the previous earthly life.

The Religious Nature of Childhood

It is essential not to merely understand these things theoretically, which is the habitual way of thinking today. This is the kind of fact that must be understood by the whole inner human being from the perspective of the child, and only then from the standpoint of the educator. If we understand what is happening from the perspective of a child, we find that the soul-being of the child—with everything brought from preearthly life from the realm of soul and spirit—is entirely devoted to the physical activities of human beings in the surroundings. This relationship can be described only as a religious one. It is a religious relationship that descends into the sphere of nature and moves into the outer world. It is important, however, to understand what is meant by such term.

Ordinarily, one speaks of “religious” relationships today in the sense of a consciously developed adult religion. Relevant to this is the fact that, in religious life, the spirit and soul elements of the adult rise into the spiritual element in the universe and surrender to it. The religious relationship is a self-surrendering to the universe, a prayer for divine grace in the surrender of the self. In the adult, it is completely immersed in a spiritual element. The soul and spirit are yielded to the surroundings.

To speak of the child’s body being absorbed by the environment in terms of a religious experience thus seems like we are turning things around the wrong way. Nevertheless, it is a truly religious experience—transposed into the realm of nature. The child is surrendered to the environment and lives in the external world in reverent, prayerful devotion, just as the eye detaches itself from the rest of the organism and surrenders to the environment. It is a religious relationship transferred to the natural realm.

If we want a picture, or symbol, of the spirit and soul processes in the adult’s religious experience, we should form a real idea in our souls of the child’s body up to the change of teeth. The life of the child is “religious,” but religious in a way that refers to the things of nature. It is not the soul of the child that is surrendered to the environment, but the blood circulation, breathing activities, and the nutritional process through the food taken in. All of these things are surrendered to the environment—the blood circulation, breathing, and digestive processes pray to the environment.

The Priestly Nature of Teaching

These expressions may seem contradictory, but their very contradiction represents the truth. We must observe such things with our whole being, not theoretically. If we observe the struggle unfolding in the child before us—within this fundamental, natural religious element—if we observe the struggle between the hereditary forces and what the individual’s forces develop as the second human being through the power brought from pre-earthly life, then, as teachers, we also develop a religious mood. But, whereas the child with a physical body develops the religious mood of the believer, the teacher, in gazing at the wonders that occur between birth and the change of teeth, develops a “priestly” religious attitude. The position of teacher becomes a kind of priestly office, a ritual performed at the altar of universal human life—not with a sacrificial victim to be led to death, but with the offering of human nature itself, to be awakened to life. Our task is to ferry into earthly life the aspect of the child that came from the divine spiritual world. This, with the child’s own forces, forms a second organism from the being that came to us from the divine spiritual life.

Pondering such things awakens something in us like a priestly attitude in education. Until this priestly feeling for the first years of childhood has become a part of education as a whole, education will not find the conditions that bring it to life. If we merely try to understand the requirements of education intellectually, or try to rationally design a method of education based on external observations of a child’s nature, at best we accomplish a quarter education. A complete educational method cannot be formulated by the intellect alone, but must flow from the whole human nature—not merely from the part that observes externally in a rational way, but the whole that deeply and inwardly experiences the secrets of the universe.

Few things have a more wonderful effect on the human heart than seeing inner spirit and soul elements released day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, during the first period of childhood. We see how, beginning with chaotic limb movements, the glance filled with rapture by the outer, the play of expressions that do not yet seem to belong to the child, something develops and impresses itself on the surface of the human form that arises from the center of the human being, where the divine spiritual being is unfolding in its descent from pre-earthly life. When we can make this divine office of education a concern of the heart, we understand these things in such a way that we say: “Here the Godhead Who has guided the human being until birth is revealed again in the impression of the human organism; the living Godhead is there to see; God is gazing into us.” This, out of the teacher’s own individuality, will lead, not to something learned by rote, but to a living method of education and instruction, a method that springs from the inner being.

This must be our attitude to the growing human being; it is essential to any educational method. Without this fundamental attitude, without this priestly element in the teacher (this is said, of course, in a cosmic sense), education cannot be continued. Therefore, any attempt to reform the methods of education must involve a return of the intellectual element, which has become dominant since the fourteenth century, to the domain of soul and feelings, to move toward what flows from human nature as a whole, not just from the head. If we look at the child without preconceptions, the child’s own nature will teach us to read these things.

The Effects of a Teacher’s Inner Development on the Child

Now, what has been the real course of civilization since the fourteenth century? As a result of the great transition, or cultural revolution, that has occurred since then, we can only perceive what is exprEssentialEd, as it were, from internal to external existence. Grasping at externals has become a matter of course for modern human beings to the degree that we are no longer aware of any other possibility. We have arrived at a condition in historical evolution that is considered “right” in an absolute sense—not merely a condition that suits our time.

People can no longer feel or perceive in a way that was possible before the fourteenth century. In those days, people observed matters of the spirit in an imbalanced way, just as people now observe the things of nature. But the human race had to pass through a stage in which it could add the observation of purely natural elements to an earlier human devotion to the world of spirit and soul that excluded nature. This materializing process, or swing downward, was necessary; but we must realize that, in order that civilized humanity not be turned into a wasteland in our time, there must be a new turn, a turning toward spirit and soul. The awareness of this fact is the essence of all endeavors such as that of Waldorf school education, which is rooted in what a deeper observation of human evolution reveals as necessary for our time. We must find our way back to the spirit and soul; for this we must first clearly recognize how we removed ourselves from them in the first place. There are many today who have no such understanding and, therefore, view anything that attempts to lead us back to the spirit as, well, not really the point, shall we say.

We can find remarkable illustrations of this attitude. I would like to mention one, but only parenthetically. There is a chapter (incidentally, a very interesting chapter in some ways) in Maurice Maeterlinck’s new book The Great Riddle. Its subject is the anthroposophic way of viewing the world. He describes anthroposophy, and he also describes me (if you will forgive a personal reference). He has read many of my books and makes a very interesting comment. He says that, at the beginning of my books, I seem to have a level-headed, logical, and shrewd mind. In the later chapters, however, it seems as if I had lost my senses. It may very well appear this way to Maeterlinck; subjectively he has every right to his opinion. Why shouldn’t I seem levelheaded, logical and scientific to him in the first chapters, and insane in later ones?

Of course, Maeterlinck has a right to think this way, and nobody wants to stop him. The question is, however, whether such an attitude is not really absurd. Indeed, it does become absurd when you consider this: I have, unfortunately, written a great many books in my life (as you can see from the unusual appearance of the book table here). No sooner have I finished writing one, than I begin another. When Maurice Maeterlinck reads the new book, he will discover once again that, in the first chapters I am shrewd, levelheaded and scientific, and lose my senses later on. Then I begin to write a third book; the first chapters again are reasonable and so forth. Consequently, if nothing else, I seem to have mastered the art of becoming at will a completely reasonable human being in the early part of a book and—equally by choice—a lunatic later, only to return to reason when I write the next book. In this way, I take turns being reasonable and a lunatic. Naturally, Maeterlinck has every right to find this; but he misses the absurdity of such an idea. A modern man of his importance thus falls into absurdities; but this, as I say, is only an interpolation.

Many people are completely unaware that their judgments do not spring from the source of human nature but from elements implanted in our outer culture since the fourteenth century as a result of the materialistic system of life and education. The duty of teachers, of educators—really the duty of all human beings that have anything to do with children—is to look more deeply into the human being. In other words, we need to become more aware of how anything acting as a stimulus in the environment continues to vibrate in the child. We must be very clear that, in this sense, we are dealing with imponderables.

Children are aware, whenever we do something in their environment, of the thoughts behind a hand-gesture or facial expression. Children intuit them: they do not, obviously, interpret facial features, since what operates instead is a much more powerful inner connection between the child and adult than will exist later between adults. Consequently, we must never allow ourselves to feel or think anything around children that should not be allowed to ripple on within the child. The rule of thumb for all relationships in early education must be this: Whether in perception, feeling, or thought, whatever we do around children must be done in such a way that it may be allowed to continue vibrating their souls.

The psychologist, the observer of souls, the person of broad practical experience, and the doctor thus all become a unity, insofar as the child is concerned. This is important, since anything that makes an impression on the child, anything that causes the soul’s response, continues in the blood circulation and digestion, becoming a part of the foundation of health in later years. Due to the imitative nature of the child, whenever we educate the spirit and soul of the child, we also educate the body and physical nature of the child. This is the wonderful metamorphosis—that whatever approaches children, touching their spirit and soul, becomes their physical, organic organization, and their predisposition to health or illness in later life.

Consequently, we can say that if Waldorf schools educate out of spirit and soul, it is not because we choose to work in an unbalanced way with only the soul and spirit; rather, it is because we know that this is how we physically educate the inner being in the highest sense of the word. The physical being exists within the envelope of the skin.

Perhaps you recall yesterday’s examples. Beginning with the model supplied by the human forces of heredity, the person builds a second human being, experienced in the second phase of life between the change of teeth and puberty. During the initial phase of life, human beings win for themselves a second being through what resulted of a purely spiritual life between death and rebirth. During the second stage of life, however, between the change of teeth and puberty, the influences of the outer world struggle with what must be incorporated into the individuality of the human being.

During this second stage, external influences grow more powerful. The inner human being is strengthened, however, since at this point it no longer allows every influence in the environment to continue vibrating in the body organization as though it were mainly a sense organ. Sensory perception begins to be more concentrated at the surface, or periphery, of the being. The senses now become more individual and autonomous, and the first thing that appears in the human being is a way of relating to the world that is not intellectual but compares only to an artistic view of life.

The Teacher as Artist

Our initial approach to life had a religious quality in that we related to nature as naturally religious beings, surrendered to the world. In this second stage, however, we are no longer obligated to merely accept passively everything coming from our environment, allowing it to vibrate in us physically; rather, we transform it creatively into images. Between the change of teeth and puberty, children are artists, though in a childish way, just as in the first phase of life, children were homo religiosus—naturally religious human beings.

Now that the child demands everything in a creative, artistic way, the teachers and educators who encounter the child must present everything from the perspective of an artist. Our contemporary culture demands this of teachers, and this is what must flow into the art of education; at this point, interactions between the growing human being and educators must take an artistic form. In this respect, we face great obstacles as teachers. Our civilization and the culture all around us have reached the point where they are geared only to the intellect, not to the artistic nature.

Let us consider the most wonderful natural processes—the description of embryonic life, for example, as portrayed in modern textbooks, or as taught in schools. I am not criticizing them, merely describing them; I know very well that they had to become the way they are and were necessary at a certain point in evolution. If we accept what they offer from the perspective of the spiritual force ready to reawaken today, something happens in our feeling life that we find impossible to acknowledge, because it seems to be a sin against the maturity attained by humanity in world-historical evolution. Difficult as it may be, it would be a good thing if people were clear about this.

When we read modern books on embryology, botany, or zoology, we feel a sense of despair in finding ourselves immediately forced to plunge into a cold intellectuality. Although the life and the development of nature are not essentially “intellectual,” we have to deliberately and consciously set aside every artistic element. Once we have read a book on botany written according to strict scientific rules, our first task as teachers is to rid ourselves of everything we found there. Obviously, we must assimilate the information about botanical processes, and the sacrifice of learning from such books is necessary; but in order to educate children between the change of teeth and puberty, we must eliminate what we found there, transforming everything into artistic, imaginal forms through our own artistic activity and sensibility. Whatever lives in our thoughts about nature must fly on the wings of artistic inspiration and transform into images. They must rise in the soul of the child.

Artistically shaping our instruction for children between the change of teeth and puberty is all that we should be concerned with in the metamorphosis of education for our time and the near future. If the first period of childhood requires a priestly element in education, the second requires an artistic element. What are we really doing when we educate a person in the second stage of life? The I-being journeying from an earlier earthly life and from the spiritual world is trying gradually to develop and permeate a second human being. Our job is to assist in this process; we incorporate what we do with the child as teachers into the forces that interwove with spirit and soul to shape the second being with a unique and individual character. Again, the consciousness of this cosmic context must act as an enlivening impulse, running through our teaching methods and the everyday conditions of education. We cannot contrive what needs to be done; we can only allow it to happen through the influence of the children themselves on their teachers.

Two extremes must be avoided. One is a result of intellectualizing tendencies, where we approach children in an academic way, expecting them to assimilate sharply outlined ideas and definitions. It is, after all, very comfortable to instruct and teach by definitions. And the more gifted children learn to parrot them, allowing the teacher to be certain that they retain what has been taught them in the previous lesson, whereas those who don’t learn can be left behind.

Such methods are very convenient. But it’s like a cobbler who thinks that the shoes made for a three-year-old girl should still fit the ten-year-old, whereas only her toes fit into the shoes but not the heels. Much of a child’s spiritual and psychic nature is ignored by the education we give children. It is necessary that, through the medium of flexible and artistic forms, we give children perceptions, ideas, and feelings in pictorial form that can metamorphose and grow with the soul, because the soul itself is growing. But before this can happen, there must be a living relationship between child and teacher, not the dead relationship that arises from lifeless educational concepts. Thus, all instruction given to children between approximately seven and fifteen must be permeated with pictures.

In many ways, this runs counter to the ordinary tendencies of modern culture, and we of course belong to this modern culture. We read books that impart much significant substance through little squiggles we call a, b, c, and so on. We fail to realize that we have been damaged by being forced to learn these symbols, since they have absolutely no relationship to our inner life. Why should a or b look the way they do today? There is no inner necessity, no experience that justifies writing an h after an a to express a feeling of astonishment or wonder.

This was not always the situation, however. People first made images in pictographic writing to describe external processes, and when they looked at the sheet or a board on which something had been written, they received an echo of that outer object or process. In other words, we should spare the child of six or seven from learning to write as it is done today. What we need instead is to bring the child something that can actually arise from the child’s own being, from the activities of his or her arms and fingers. The child sees a shining, radiant object and receives an impression; we then fix it with a drawing that represents the impression of radiance, which a child can understand.

If a child strokes a stick from top to bottom and then makes a stroke on the paper from top to bottom, the meaning is obvious. I show a fish to a child, who then follows the general direction of the form, followed by the front and back fins that cross in the opposite direction. I draw the general form of the fish, and this line across it, and say to the child, “Here, on the paper, you have something like a fish.” Then I go into the child’s inner experience of the fish. It contains an f, and so I draw a line crossed by another line, and thus, out of the child’s feeling experience, I have a picture that corresponds to the sound that begins the word fish. All writing can be developed in this way—not a mere copying of the abstract now in use, but a perception of the things themselves as they arise from a child’s drawing and painting. When I derive writing from the drawing and painting, I am working with the living forces of an image.

It would be enough to present the beginning of this artistic approach; we can feel how it calls on the child’s whole being, not just an intellectual understanding, which is overtaxed to a certain extent. If we abandon the intellectual element for imagery at this age, the intellect usually withdraws into the background. If, on the other hand, we overemphasize the intellect and are unable to move into a mode of imagery, the child’s breathing process is delicately and subtly disrupted. The child can become congested, as it were, with weakened exhalation. You should think of this as very subtle, not necessarily obvious. If education is too intellectual between the ages of seven and fourteen, exhalation becomes congested, and the child is subjected to a kind of subconscious nightmare. A kind of intimate nightmare arises, which becomes chronic in the organism and leads in later life to asthmas and other diseases connected with swelling in the breathing system.

Another extreme occurs when the teacher enters the school like a little Caesar, with the self-image of a mighty Caesar, of course. In this situation, the child is always at the mercy of a teacher’s impulsiveness. Whereas extreme intellectualism leads to congested exhalation, the metabolic forces are thinned by overly domineering and exaggerated assertiveness in the teacher. A child’s digestive organs are gradually weakened, which again may have chronic effects in later life. Both of these excesses must be eliminated from education—too much intelectualizing and extreme obstinateness.

We can hold a balance between the two by what happens in the soul when we allow the will to pass gently into the child’s own activity and by toning down the intellect so that feelings are cultivated in a way that does not suppress the breathing, but cultivates feelings that turn toward imagery and express the buoyant capacity I described. When this is done, the child’s development is supported between the change of teeth and puberty.

Thus, from week to week, month to month, year to year, a true knowledge of the human being will help us read the developing being like a book that tells us what needs to be done in the teaching. The curriculum must reproduce what we read in the evolutionary process of the human being. Specific ways that we can do this will be addrEssentialEd in coming lectures.

Before education can be helpful, teachers and educators must gain the right perspective, one that allows them to fully understand the source and the formation of a child’s organism. For the sake of clarity in this area I would like to begin with a comparison.

Let’s take reading—the ordinary reading of adults. If we wanted to describe what we gain from our usual reading of a book, we would not say, “the letter B is shaped like this, the letter C like that” and so on. If I read Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, it wouldn’t occur to me to describe the individual letters as a result of my reading, since the real substance assimilated is not on the paper at all, it’s not even contained within the covers of the book. Nevertheless, if I want to comprehend in any way the content of Wilhelm Meister, I would have had to have learned how to read the letters and their relationships—I must be able to recognize the forms of the letters.

The Ability to Read the Human Being

A teacher’s relationship with children is similar; it must constitute a reading of the human being. What a teacher gets from a strictly physical understanding of the physiology and anatomy of the organs and their functions amounts to no more than learning the letters. As teachers and educators, it is not enough to understand that the lungs or heart have this or that appearance and function in the physical realm; that kind of an understanding of the human being is similar an to illiterate person who can only describe the forms of letters but not the book’s meaning.

Now in the course of modern civilization, humankind has gradually lost the habit of reading nature and, most of all, human nature. Our natural science is not reading but mere spelling. As long as we fail to recognize this specifically, we can never develop a true art of education that arises from real knowledge of the human being. This requires knowledge that truly reads, not one that only spells. People are obviously unhappy at first when they hear such a statement, and it is left at that. They argue: Isn’t the human race supposed to be making continual progress? How can it be, then, that during our time of momentous progress in the natural sciences (which philosophical anthroposophists are the first to acknowledge) we are moving backward in terms of penetrating the world more deeply?

We must answer: Until the fourteenth or fifteenth century, human beings were unable to “spell out” nature. They saw natural phenomena and received instinctive, intuitive impressions, primarily from other human beings. They did not get as far as describing separate organs, but their culture was spiritual and sensible, and they had an instinctive impression of the human being as a totality. This kind of impression only arises when one is not completely free in one’s inner being, since it is an involuntary impression and not subject to inner control.

Thus, beginning with the fourteenth or fifteenth century, a time had to come in the historical evolution of humanity—an epoch of world history that is about to end—when human beings would forgot their earlier, instinctive knowledge, and become more concerned with learning the “alphabet” of human nature. Consequently, in the last third of the nineteenth century and, in effect, until the present period of the twentieth century, as human beings we were faced with a larger culture whose worldview is void of spirit. This is similar to the way we would face a spiritual void if we could not read, but only perceived the forms of the letters. In this age, human nature in general has been strengthened, just because the involuntary life and being of the spirit within it were absent, especially among the educated.

We must have the capacity to observe world history in depth, since otherwise we would be incapable of forming a correct assessment of our position as human beings in the sequence of eras. In many ways, modern people will be averse to this, because we are endowed, as I have already indicated, with a certain cultural pride, especially when we think we have learned something. We place an intrinsically higher value on a “letter” reading of nature than we do on what existed in earlier periods of earthly evolution. Of course, anatomists today think they know more about the heart and liver than those of earlier times. Nevertheless, people then had a picture of the heart and liver, and their perception included a spiritual element.

We must be able to empathize with the way the modern anatomist views the heart, for example. It is seen as something like a first-rate machine—a more highly developed pump that drives the blood through the body. If we say that an anatomist is looking at a corpse, the response would be denial, which from that viewpoint is appropriate, since an anatomist wouldn’t see the point of such a distinction. Ancient anatomists, however, saw a kind of spiritual entity in the heart, working in a spiritual and psychic sense. The sensory content of perception was permeated and simultaneous with a spiritual aspect. Such perception of the spiritual could not be fully clear and conscious, but was involuntary. If humankind had been forced to continue to experience a simultaneous revelation of spirit in sense perception, complete moral freedom could not have been attained. Nevertheless, at some point it had to enter historical evolution.

When we go back over the whole course of history since the fourteenth century, we find a universal struggle toward freedom, which was ultimately exprEssentialEd in the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth century (particularly in the widespread fermentation in the more developed regions, beginning with the Bohemian-Magyar brotherhoods in Central Europe, where a definite pedagogic impulse was trying to make itself felt) and onward to Wycliffe, Huss, and the so-called Reformation. This struggle of humanity for the inner experience of freedom still continues.

None of this could have happened while the old perceptual mode persisted. Human beings had to be liberated for a while from the spirit working involuntarily within them so that they could freely assume that spirit itself. An unbiased observation of the activity of spiritual culture leads one to say: It is of primary importance that educators develop full awareness of the process of human evolution on Earth. Whereas there used to be an unconscious bond between teacher and student—which was true of ancient times—they must now develop a conscious bond. This is not possible if culture arises from mere spelling, which is the way of all science and human cognition today. Such a conscious relationship can arise only if we learn to progress consciously from spelling to reading. In other words, in the same way we grasp the letters in a book but get something very different from what the letters say (indeed, the letters themselves are innocent in terms of the meaning of Wilhelm Meister), so we must also get from human nature something that modern natural science cannot express by itself; it is acquired only when we understand the statements of natural science as though they were letters of an alphabet, and thus we learn to read the human being.

This explains why it is not correct to say that anthroposophic knowledge disregards natural science. This is not true. Anthroposophic knowledge gives a great deal of credit to natural science, but like someone who respects a book through the desire to read it, rather than one who merely wants to photograph the forms of the letters. When we try to truly describe the culture of our time, many interesting things can be said of it. If I give someone a copy of Wilhelm Meister, there is a difference between someone wanting to quickly get a camera to photograph every page, not bothering at all about the content of the book, and someone else who longs to know what the book is about. If I can be content with only natural science to help me understand the human being, I am like the first person—all I really want is photographs of the external forms, since the available concepts allow no more than a mere photograph of the forms.

We are forced to use radical expressions to describe the relationship that people today have with one another and with the world. This relationship is completely misunderstood. The belief is that human beings really have something higher today than was available before the fourteenth century; but this is not true. We must develop to the degree that we learn to manipulate consciously, freely, and deliberately what we have, just as in earlier times we gained our concepts of human nature through instinctive intuition. This development in modern culture should pass through teacher training education like a magic breath and become a habit of the soul in the teachers, since only it can place the teachers at the center of that horizon of worldview, which they should perceive and survey.

Thus, today it is not as necessary that people take up a scientific study of memory, will, and intelligence. It is more important that pedagogical and didactic training be directed toward evoking the attitude I described within the teachers’ souls. The primary focus of a teacher’s training should be the very heart of human nature itself. When this is the situation, every experience of a teacher’s development will be more than lifeless pedagogical rules; they will not need to ponder the application of one rule or another to a child standing in front of them, which would be fundamentally wrong.

An intense impression of the child as a whole being must arise within the whole human nature of the teacher, and what is perceived in the child must awaken joy and vitality. This same joyful and enlivening spirit in the teacher must be able to grow and develop until it becomes direct inspiration in answer to the question: What must I do with this child? We must progress from reading human nature in general to reading an individual human being. Everywhere education must learn to manipulate (pardon this rather materialistic expression) what is needed by the human being. When we read, what we have learned about the relationships between the letters is applied. A similar relationship must exist between teacher and pupils. Teachers will not place too much nor too little value on the material development of the bodily nature; they will adopt the appropriate attitude toward bodily nature and then learn to apply what physiology and experimental psychology have to say about children. Most of all, they will be able to rise from a perception of details to a complete understanding of the growing human being.

The Implications of the Change of Teeth

A deeper perception reveals that, at the elementary school age, children are fundamentally different after their change of teeth. Let’s look into the nature of the human being before the change of teeth. The teeth are the outer expression of something developing within the human organism as a whole (as I described yesterday). There is a “shooting up” into form—the human soul is working on the second bodily nature, like a sculptor working at shaping the material. An inner, unconscious shaping process is in fact happening. The only way this can be influenced externally is to allow children to imitate what we do. Anything I do—any movement I make with my own hand—passes into the children’s soul building processes when they perceive it, and my hand movement causes an unconscious shaping activity that “shoots up” into the form.

This process depends completely on the element of movement in the child. Children make movements, their will impulses change from chaotic irregularity into inner order, and they work on themselves sculpturally from without. This plastic activity largely moves toward the inner being. When we meet children at the elementary age, we should realize that in the development of their spirit, soul, and body, the process that initially lived only in the movements passes into a very different region. Until the change of teeth, blood formation in the child depends on the system in the head. Think of a human being during the embryonic period, how the head formation dominates, while the rest of the organic structuring depends on external processes; regardless of what takes place in the mother’s body, everything that proceeds from the baby itself begins with the formation of the head. This is still true, though less so, during the first period of life until the change of teeth. The head formation plays an essential role in all that happens within the human organism. The forces coming from the head, nerves, and sensory system all work into the motor system and the shaping activity. After the child passes through the change of teeth, the activities of the head move to the background. What works in the limbs now depends less on the head and more on the substances and forces passing into the human organism through nourishment from outside.

I would like you to consider this carefully. Suppose that, before the change of teeth, we eat some cabbage, for example. The cabbage contains certain forces intrinsic to cabbages, which play an important part in the way it grows in the field. Now, in the child those forces are driven out of the cabbage as quickly as possible by the process of digestion being carried on by forces that flow down from the child’s head. Those forces flow from the head of the child and immediately plunge into the forces contained in the vegetable. After the change of teeth, the vegetable retains its own forces for a much longer time on its way through the human organism; the first transformation does not occur in the digestive system at all, but only where the digestive system enters the circulatory system. The transformation takes place later, and consequently, a completely different inner life is evoked within the organism. During the first years before the change of teeth, everything really depends on the head formation and its forces; the important thing for the second life stage from the change of teeth until puberty is the breathing process and meeting between its rhythm and the blood circulation. The transformation of these forces at the boundary between the breathing process and the circulatory system is particularly important. The essential thing, therefore, during the elementary school age, is that there should always be a certain harmony—a harmony that must be furthered by the education—between the rhythm developed in the breathing system and the rhythm it encounters in the interior of the organism. This rhythm within the circulatory system springs from the nourishment taken in. This balance—the harmonization of the blood system and the breathing system—is brought about in the stage between the change of teeth and puberty.

In an adult, the pulse averages four times as many beats as breaths per minute. This normal relationship in the human organism between the breathing and the blood rhythms is established during the time between the change of teeth and puberty. All education at that time must be arranged so that the relationship between the breathing and blood rhythms may be established in a way appropriate to the majesty and development of the human organism.

This relationship between pulse and breath always differs somewhat among people. It depends in each individual on the person’s size, or whether one is thin or fat; it is influenced by the inner growth forces and by the shaping forces that still emanate from hereditary conditions during the early years of childhood. Everything depends on each human being having a relationship between the breathing and the blood rhythms suited to one’s size and proportions. When I see a child who is inclined to grow up thin, I recognize the presence of a breathing system that, in a certain sense, affects the blood system more feebly than in some fat little child before me. In the thin child, I must strengthen and quicken the imprint of the breathing rhythm to establish the proper relationship. All these things, however, must work naturally and unconsciously in the teacher, just as perception of individual letters is unconscious once we know how to read. We must acquire a feeling of what should be done with a fat child or with a thin child, and so on. It is, for example, extremely important to know whether a child’s head is large or small in proportion to the rest of the body. All this follows naturally, however, when we stand in the class with an inner joy toward education as a true educational individual, and when we can read the individual children committed to our care.

It is essential, therefore, that we take hold, as it were, of the continual shaping process—a kind of further development of what takes place until the change of teeth—and meet it with something that proceeds from the breathing rhythm. This can be done with various music and speech activities. The way we teach the child to speak and the way we introduce a child to the music—whether listening, singing, or playing music—all serve, in terms of teaching, to form the breathing rhythm. Thus, when it meets the rhythm of the pulse, it can increasingly harmonize with it.

It is wonderful when the teacher can observe the changing facial expressions of a child while learning to speak and sing—regardless of the delicacy and subtlety of those changes, which may not be so obvious. We should learn to observe, in children between the change of teeth and puberty, their efforts at learning to speak and sing, their gaze, physiognomy, finger movements, stance and gait; with reverence, we should observe, growing from the very center of very small children, unformed facial features that assume a beautiful form; we should observe how our actions around small children are translated into their developing expressions and body gestures. When we can see all this with inner reverence, as teachers we attain something that continually springs from uncharted depths, an answer in feeling to a feeling question.

The question that arises—which need not come into the conscious intellect—is this: What happens to all that I do while teaching a child to speak or sing? The child’s answer is: “I receive it,” or, “I reject it.” In body gestures, physiognomy, and facial expressions we see whether what we do enters and affects the child, or if it disappears into thin air, passing through the child as though nothing were assimilated. Much more important than knowing all the rules of teaching—that this or that must be done in a certain way—is acquiring this sensitivity toward the child’s reflexes, and an ability to observe the child’s reactions to what we do. It is, therefore, an essential intuitive quality that must develop in the teacher’s relationship with the children. Teachers must also learn to read the effects of their own activity. Once this is fully appreciated, people will recognize the tremendous importance of introducing music in the right way into education during the elementary years and truly understand what music is for the human being.

Understanding the Fourfold Human Being

Anthroposophy describes the human physical body, a coarse, material principle, and the more delicate body, which is still material but without gravity—in fact, its tendency is to fly against gravity into cosmic space. The human being has a heavy physical body, which can fall to the ground when not held upright. We also have a finer etheric body, which tends to escape gravity into cosmic space. Just as the physical body falls if it is unsupported, so the etheric body must be controlled by inner forces of the human organism to prevent it from flying away. Therefore, we speak of the physical body, the etheric body, and then the astral body, which is no longer material but spiritual; and we speak of the I-being, which alone is completely spirit. If we want to gain a real knowledge of these four members of the human being—a true understanding of the human being—we might say: The methods of modern anatomy and physiology allow for an understanding of the physical organism, but not the etheric human being and certainly not the astral human being.

How can we understand the etheric body? This requires a much better preparation than is usual for understanding the human being today. We understand the etheric body when we enter the shaping process, when we know how a curve or angle grows from inner forces. We cannot understand the etheric body in terms of ordinary natural laws, but through our experience of the hand—the spirit permeated hand. Thus, there should be no teacher training without activities in the areas of modeling or sculpture, an activity that arises from the inner human being. When this element is absent, it is much more harmful to education than not knowing the capital city of Romania or Turkey, or the name of some mountain; those things can always be researched in a dictionary. It is not at all necessary to know the masses of matter required for exams; what is the harm in referring to a dictionary? However, no dictionary can give us the flexibility, the capable knowledge, and knowing capacity necessary to understand the etheric body, because the etheric body does not arise according to natural laws; it permeates the human being in the activity of shaping.

And we shall never understand the astral body simply by knowing Gay-Lussac’s law or the laws of acoustics and optics. The astral body is not accessible to such abstract, empirical laws; what lives and weaves within it cannot be perceived by such methods. If we have an inner understanding, however, of the intervals of the third or the fifth, for example—an inner musical experience of the scale that depends on inner musical perception and not on acoustics—then we experience what lives in the astral human being.

The astral body is not natural history, natural science, or physics; it is music. This is true to the extent that, in the forming activity within the human organism, it is possible to trace how the astral body has a musical formative effect in the human being. This formative activity flows from the center between the shoulder blades, first into the tonic of the scale; as it flows on into the second, it builds the upper arm, and into the third, the lower arm. When we come to the third we arrive at the difference between major and minor; we find two bones in the lower arm—not just one—the radius and ulna, which represent minor and major. One who studies the outer human organization, insofar as it depends on the astral body, must approach physiology not as a physicist, but as a musician. We must recognize the inner, formative music within the human organism.

No matter how you trace the course of the nerves in the human organism, you will never understand what it means. But when you follow the course of the nerves musically—understanding the musical relationships (everything is audible here, though not physically)—and when you perceive with spiritual musical perception how these nerves run from the limbs toward the spine and then turn upward and continue toward the brain, you experience the most wonderful musical instrument, which is the human being, built by the astral body and played by the I-being.

As we ascend from there, we learn how the human being forms speech through understanding the inner configuration of speech—something that is no longer learned in our advanced civilization; it has discarded everything intuitive. Through the structure of speech, we recognize the I-being itself if we understand what happens when a person speaks the sound “ah” or “ee”—how in “ah” there is wonder, in “ee” there is a consolidation of the inner being; and if we learn how the speech element shoots, as it were, into the inner structure; and if we learn to perceive a word inwardly, not just saying, for example, that a rolling ball is “rolling,” but understand what moves inwardly like a rolling ball when one says “r o l l i n g.” We learn through inner perception—a perception really informed by the spirit of speech—to recognize what is active in speech.

These days, information about the human organism must come from physiologists and anatomists, and information about what lives in language comes from philologists. There is no relationship, however, between what they can say to each other. It is necessary to look for an inner spiritual connection; we must recognize that a genius of speech lives and works in language, a genius of speech that can be investigated. When we study the genius of speech, we recognize the human I-being.

We have now made eurythmy part of our Waldorf education. What are we doing with eurythmy? We divide it into tone eurythmy and speech eurythmy. In tone eurythmy, we evoke in the child movements that correspond to the form of the astral body; in speech eurythmy we evoke movements that correspond to the child’s I-being. We thus work consciously to develop the soul by bringing physical elements into play in tone eurythmy; and we work consciously to develop the spirit aspect by activating the corresponding physical elements in speech eurythmy.

Such activity, however, only arises from a complete understanding of the human organization. Those who think they can get close to the human being through external physiology and experimental psychology (which is really only another kind of physiology) would not recognize the difference between beating on a wooden tray and making music in trying to evoke a certain mood in someone. Similarly, knowledge must not remain stuck in abstract, logical rules, but rise to view human life as more than grasping lifeless nature—the living that has died—or thinking of the living in a lifeless way. When we rise from abstract principles to formative qualities and understand how every natural law molds itself sculpturally, we come to understand the human etheric body. When we begin to “hear” (in an inner, spiritual sense) the cosmic rhythm expressing itself in that most wonderful musical instrument that the astral body makes of the human being, we come to understand the astral nature of the human being.

What we must become aware of may be exprEssentialEd this way: First, we come to know the physical body in an abstract, logical sense. Then we turn to the sculptural formative activity with intuitive cognition and begin to understand the etheric body. Third, as a physiologist, one becomes a musician and views the human being the way one would look at a musical instrument—an organ or violin—where one sees music realized. Thus, we understand the astral human being. And when we come to know the genius of speech as it works creatively in words—not merely connecting it with words through the external memory—we gain knowledge of the human I-being.

These days, we would become a laughing stock if in the name of university reform—medical studies, for example—we said that such knowledge must arise from the study of sculpture, music, and speech. People would say: Sure, but how long would such training take? It certainly lasts long enough without these things. Nevertheless, the training would in fact be shorter, since its length today is due primarily to the fact that people don’t move beyond abstract, logical, empirical sense perception. It’s true that they begin by studying the physical body, but this cannot be understood by those methods. There is no end to it. One can study all kinds of things throughout life—there’s no end to it—whereas study has its own inner limits when it is organically built up as a study of the organism in body, soul and spirit.

The point is not to map out a new chapter with the help of anthroposophy, adding to what we already have. Indeed, we can be satisfied with what ordinary science offers; we are not opposed to that. We are grateful to science in the sense that we are grateful to the violin maker for providing a violin. What we need in our culture is to get hold of all of this modern culture and permeate it with soul and permeate it with spirit, just as human beings themselves are permeated with soul and spirit. The artistic must not be allowed to exist in civilization as a pleasant luxury next to serious life, a luxury we consider an indulgence, even though we may have a spiritual approach to life in other ways. The artistic element must be made to permeate the world and the human being as a divine spiritual harmony of law.

We must understand how, in facing the world, we first approach it with logical concepts and ideas. The being of the universe, however, gives human nature something that emanates from the cosmic formative activity working down from the spheres, just as earthly gravity works up from the central point of the Earth. And cosmic music, working from the periphery, is also a part of this. Just as the shaping activity works from above, and physical activity works from below through gravity, so cosmic music works in the movements of the starry constellations at the periphery.

The principle that really gives humanity to the human being was divined in ancient times when words were spoken—words such as “In the primal beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and a God was the Word.” That Cosmic Word, Cosmic Speech, is the principle that also permeates the human being, and that being becomes the I-being. In order to educate, we must acquire knowledge of the human being from knowledge of the cosmos, and learn to shape it artistically.

Teaching Writing before Reading

This morning I attempted to describe the way knowledge itself must be transformed inwardly from mere knowledge about nature into higher forms of cognition. This allows our understanding of the whole human being and the growing child to be translated into an artistic approach to education and instruction. I can imagine that a certain question may arise: Assuming that a teacher thoroughly understands the physical body through pure observation and intellect, the etheric body through shaping activity, the astral body through the concept of music, and the I-being through insight into the true nature of speech, what practical application does this have?

Certainly, if we must describe education and instruction as a whole—as we have for Waldorf methods in these lectures—then we would have to say that the most important aspect of a teacher’s perspective on life and the world is not what we generally understand as a “worldview”—that would be completely theoretical. Instead, it is an aspect that, as a soul force, can enter the whole activity of the human being. Any teacher who tries to acquire the principles of education from today’s recognized knowledge of the human being would have to look elsewhere for the necessary inspiration. Hence the continual references to educational ideals that, however convincing they appear, always remain ineffective, because they are rooted in abstractions.

Nevertheless, true insight that penetrates the nature of the world and the human being will, by its very nature, enkindle inspiration in the human heart. While practicing their profession, teachers can always draw inspiration from the feeling of their relationship to the world and to their own being—like artists, whose work seems to live in their very marrow. The artist doesn’t need to go anywhere else for inspiration—it comes from the thing itself. Similarly, the inspiration found by teachers in their worldview, experienced internally and constantly renewed, is carried into the soul constitution of the children entrusted to them. Such inspiration lives in everything the teacher does at school.

Those who have insight into the human being have the ability to perceive that a musical element flows into harmony with the formative processes in the inner being of the child during the elementary years, between the change of teeth and puberty. Such a person will never be likely to stray from the right way of teaching, writing, and reading to children. They have a living understanding that writing—particularly as described here—mobilizes the whole being; it uses the arms and hands and permeates them with spirit that exercises the whole person.

These are the very aspects of the human being that will be perceived in a living way if we begin with a view of the world such as I described this morning. It also helps to become clear that reading is merely a pursuit of the head, an unbalanced activity for the human being. The teacher will sense that such onesidedness is suitable only for children whose whole being has become active. Thus, teachers who take hold of this insight into the human being will be careful to develop writing from painting and drawing (as I described) until children can write what they experience in their deepest being in words or sentences.

When children have reached a certain level of development, they can speak and then write what they have said. This is when it becomes appropriate to teach reading. Reading is easy to teach once writing has been somewhat developed. After children have begun work within their own being—in the nervous system and limbs, in the substance of their writing and reading, and in their inner participation in producing reading material—only then are they ready for one-sided activity. Then, without any danger to their development as human beings, the head can become active, and what they first learned by writing is turned into reading.

It really comes down to this: week after week and month after month, the germinating human being must be promoted to activity that suits the developing forces of the human organization. It is important to decide what should be done at each stage by reading the particular way each human being tries to evolve. It doesn’t work to use schedules that limit some activity to an hour or forty-five minutes, then jump to something else, and again to a third lesson, and so on. Consequently, we have introduced a system of instruction into the Waldorf school where the same subject is taught during the early morning hours for several weeks at a time. In this approach to teaching—so-called “block” teaching, which is characteristic of Waldorf education—students immerse themselves in the subject; they are not torn away as soon as they meet it.

In everything that must be presented to children between the change of teeth and puberty we have to discover ways of reading what is needed through the demands of human nature itself. When it is a matter of gradually leading children into a real relationship to their own being and the world, it is most important that the teachers themselves have a real relationship to the world. In contemporary culture, of course, no matter how educated people may be, they cannot really acquire an inwardly alive and rich relationship to the world and their own being. This is yet another radical statement, but we must not be afraid of real insight into what must be gradually introduced into our civilization.

Understanding Cosmic Forces

Above all, it is necessary that the teachers themselves should not, in their own development, fall into what might be called a “cosmic parochialism,” but rather look beyond what is strictly earthly and realize that, as human beings, they depend on nourishment not only from their immediate environment, but from the whole cosmos. Naturally, it is very difficult to speak of these things today in an unbiased way, since our culture offers little support for people’s attempts to look beyond their dependence on the earthly elements. Consequently, old teachings emanating from earlier instinctive concepts are often carried into the present without any understanding, which leads to superstition. In reality, all that the modern mainstream culture can offer is no more than a kind of “cosmic parochialism,” because this culture has not as yet produced ideas that would extend from Earth into the cosmos. We have calculations, or at least spectrum analysis, to teach us (or purport to teach us) about the course and position of the stars, their substance, and so on. Nevertheless, the intimate knowledge that comes from entering into a close relationship with the essential nature of the Earth cannot be acquired—in terms of the extraterrestrial cosmos—from the mainstream culture of today. The concepts that human beings formulate about such things as cabbage, spinach, venison, and so on, are completely different from those acquired through abstract, intellectual science. We eat those things, and abstract thought has nothing to do with eating! We do not eat to gain practical experience in what modern science tells us about the hare, for example; we get a much more concrete and intimate experience of it through taste and digestion.

In terms of the surrounding cosmos beyond Earth, our knowledge is such that we have no intimate relationships at all. If everything we knew about the hare were equivalent to what astronomy and spectrum analysis know about the extraterrestrial universe, and if we only knew the results of calculations of the relative positions of the bones and relative proportions of various substances within the hare, our relationship to it would be merely scientific; we would never find our way into any human relationship. It could never give us what the experienced human relationship to the hare can provide. People do not realize these days that in a more ancient, instinctive wisdom, people had an equally intimate relationship with the cosmos. If only they could acquire a true concept of that ancient wisdom, they would, at this more advanced stage of their soul’s growth, again receive the impulse to look for a new wisdom in this area, a wisdom that can be as intimate in the human sense as the science of the natural objects in the earthly realm.

I would like to illustrate this with an example to show how important it is that teachers acquire a living relationship to the world. Teachers derive from that relationship the necessary enthusiasm to translate what should exist in the teacher’s own soul into simple, visual pictures for the child. A teacher needs a truly consecrated relationship to the world. In the presence of the active child, this becomes the world of imagery that a child needs for help in progressing properly in harmony with the demands of human evolution. For example, we are surrounded by the world of plants; to ordinary sense-perception it presents many enigmas.

Goethe encountered many of these questions. He followed the growing plant forms in their various metamorphoses, and through observing the plants’ growth he was led to a remarkable principle that pours new life into all our knowledge of the plant world. His principle may be described in this way: Let’s begin by observing the seed, which we place in the ground and from which the plant grows. Seen from the outside, the life of the plant is comprEssentialEd to a point in the seed. We then see the seed unfold, and life spreads out farther and farther, until it has fully unfolded in the first budding leaves. Then it contracts into the narrow channel of the stem, continues to the next leaf connection, and there it spreads out again, only to contract again into the stem toward the next leaf cluster, and so on. Eventually there is a final contraction when a new germ, or seed, is formed, and within that, the whole life of the plant again contracts to a single physical point. This is Goethe’s contribution—how the growing plant shows an alternation: expansion, contraction, expansion, contraction.

Goethe looked deep into plant formation as an effluence of the plant’s own life. However, the time was not ripe for him to relate to the world as a whole the formula he found for plant life, since the whole world and its forces are always involved in the ways any being lives and has its own being. With the help of contemporary spiritual science, or anthroposophic science, however, we now can extend Goethe’s formula, as you can see for yourself in the spiritual scientific literature (and here I will only touch on this).

One will find there that what lives in the expansion of the plant’s being is what comes from the Sun. The Sun is not merely what is described by astronomy and spectrum analysis; with the Sun’s rays, spiritual forces stream and interweave down to the Earth. In this ensoulment of sunlight we have the element that, for example, determines expansion in the growth of the plant. It is not just that the Sun shines on the plant and causes it to expand; rather, the forces of growth in the plant itself have a sun-like quality that plants reflect back. On the other hand, whenever we witness contraction—whenever plant growth contracts back to a point in the passage from one leaf bud to the next, or in the formation of the seed—these are being influenced by the Moon’s forces. Just as we see a rhythmic interchange of sunlight and moonlight in the cosmos, so we also see it reflected in the budding plant that responds to the activity of the Sun in the expansion of the leaves, and the Moon activity in the phenomena of contraction. Expansion and contraction in the plant are the reflected image of what pours down to Earth from cosmic, etheric space in an interchange of forces coming from Sun and Moon.

Here we have expanded our gaze from the Earth to etheric, cosmic spaces, and we get an impression of how the Earth, in a certain sense, nourishes her forces of fruitfulness and growth from what flows to her from the cosmos. We come to feel how, by making a detour through the plants, we grow together with the spirit of Sun and Moon. Here we are brought into contact with things that are usually left to the domain of calculation or spectrum analysis. The inspiration necessary for teaching growing children anything about humankind’s relationship to the universe cannot be gotten from mere abstract observation—that a leaf is or isn’t indented at its edges, or has this or that appearance. No inspiration will flow from this. Such inspiration does come, however, when the rhythmic reflection of Sun and Moon is revealed to us in the growth of various plants.

How wonderful the perception of surrounding nature becomes when we observe a plant that has a regular growth—for example, the buttercup. Here we find something sent up by the Earth as it surrenders itself lovingly to cosmic Sun and Moon forces, paying homage equally to both. Or look at a plant, such as the cactus, with its stalk portion widened out. What does this reveal? In the contraction manifested elsewhere by the stalk, we perceive Moon forces. When the stalk itself wants to expand, we see a struggle between Sun and Moon influences. The form of each plant reveals how Sun and Moon act together within it. Each individual plant is a “miniature world,” a reflection of the greater world. Just as we see our own image in a mirror, in the mirror of growth on Earth, we see what is happening beyond in the cosmos.

Ancient, instinctive wisdom was conscious of such things, and what follows offers proof of this. In the plant life that buds from the Earth in spring, people saw a cosmic reflection of the relationship between Sun forces and Moon forces. Thus, spring was celebrated with the Easter festival, whose date was determined by the relationship between Sun and Moon. The Easter festival occurs on the first Sunday after the spring full moon. The time of the Easter festival is therefore determined in reference to the cosmos—the relationship between Sun and Moon. What people of those ancient times might have implied was this: When we see plants budding in spring, we are faced with the enigma of why they appear sometimes earlier and sometimes later. The fact that the time of the spring full moon plays an essential role in all these processes of budding and sprouting allows us to get to the heart of this riddle.

There are other factors, of course, but it is generally apparent that the interplay between Sun and Moon is exprEssentialEd in what happens in spring, when one year the plants appear earlier and another, later. What might people say, however, if they acknowledge only parochial, scientific thinking about the Earth’s dependence on the cosmos? They will say: The reason plants appear earlier in a particular year is due to less snow or because the snow melted more quickly; or that the delayed appearance of plants means that there was more snow. This is, of course, an easy explanation, but in fact it is not an explanation at all. Real insight comes only when we perceive that plant growth depends on the activity of Sun and Moon forces, and then go on to recognize that a shorter or longer duration of snow also depends on the Sun and Moon. The timing of the plants’ appearance is determined by the same thing that determines the duration of the snow; the climatic and meteorological conditions in any given year are themselves subject to cosmic influences.

By continuing to develop these matters, we gain insights into the life of the Earth on her journey through the cosmos. We say that human beings thrive when there are plenty of cows, and they get a lot of milk, because we can point to the obvious human dependence on the immediate earthly environment. When we consider this connection, we are looking at human life from a nutritional perspective. Things come alive for us only when we perceive their relationship to their surroundings and how they transform what they receive from their environment.

When we behold the Earth wandering through cosmic space and taking into herself elements flowing from the Sun, Moon, and stars, we see the Earth as alive in the cosmos. We do not evolve a dead geology or geography but raise what these dead sciences have to offer into a description of the Earth’s life in the cosmos; the Earth becomes a living being before our spiritual vision. In the plants springing from the Earth, we see the Earth reproducing what she received from the cosmos. The Earth and her plant growth become a unity; we realize what nonsense it is to tear a plant out of the Earth and then examine it from root to blossom, imagining that we are viewing reality. It is no more reality than a hair torn from a human head. The hair belongs to the whole organism, and it can be understood only as a part of the whole organism. To tear out a hair and study it in isolation is just as absurd as uprooting a plant to study it in isolation. The hair must be studied in connection with the human organism and the plant in connection with the whole living Earth.

In this way a person’s own being is woven with the living Earth; an individual no longer goes around feeling subjected only to the Earth’s forces, but also perceives in the environment what is working in from etheric distances. We have a living perception of the way forces from the cosmos are active everywhere—drawing the etheric body to themselves just as the physical body is drawn to the Earth. We then acquire a natural perception of the etheric body’s tendency to pass into cosmic space, just as we sense gravity drawing our physical body down to Earth. Our vision continues to expand so that knowledge becomes inner life and can become truly effective. Having believed the Earth to be a lifeless body in the cosmos, such knowledge now gives life to her. We must return again to a living cognition, just as we still see the after-effects in such things as the determination of Easter time. But such insight into the cosmos must result from consciously developed knowledge—not from the instinctive knowledge of earlier ages.

The Child’s Need for Imagery in the Tenth Year

This cosmic insight lives in us in such a way that we can artistically shape it into the pictures we need. Someone who, when confronting the cosmos, sees the Sun and Moon determining all plant growth, feels the inspiration that can arise from these living intuitions; and that person’s story of the plants is very different from the story of someone else who absorbs and elaborates the abstract concepts of modern texts on botany. The concept can grow rich in feeling and be communicated artistically to the child.

At around the tenth year, children are ready for what the teacher can make of this far-reaching vision. If one shows in living pictures how the Earth as a whole is a living being—how it has plants the way a person has hair, though in greater complexity—and if one builds a living unity between the living being Earth and the plants growing here or there, a kind of expansion occurs in the child’s soul. Whenever we communicate something about the nature of the plants in this way, it is like bringing fresh air to someone who had been living until now in a stifling atmosphere—one can breathe freely in this fresh air. This expansion of the soul is the real result of this kind of knowledge—a knowledge that is truly equal to the task of understanding the mysteries of the universe.

Do not say that children are too immature for ideas such as this. Any teacher in whom these ideas are alive, and who is backed by this worldview, will know how to express them in ways children are prepared for, in ways that their whole being can agree with. Once such things are internalized by the teacher, the capacity to simplify them pictorially is also present, Whatever a teacher gives to the child must flow from this background, and thus a relationship between the child and the world is truly established. This leads the teacher to transform everything naturally into living pictures, since it simply becomes impossible to explain abstractly what I have said about the plant realm. The only way to convey this to children is to unfold it in vivid pictures, which appeal to the whole human being and not merely to the intellect.

You will quickly see the animation in children as they grasp something presented to them pictorially. They will not answer with a concept that merely comes from the lips—one that cannot be really formed yet—but they will tell a story using their arms and hands and all kinds of body language. Children will act in a way that uses the whole being; above all, these actions and signals will reveal the children’s inner experience and their difficulty in understanding a subject. The best and most noble thing in acquiring knowledge is the feeling that it is difficult, that it costs effort to get hold of things. Those who imagine they can get to the heart of something—insofar as it is necessary—merely through clever words have no reverence for the things of the world, and such reverence is a part of what makes a whole and perfect human being—to the degree that perfection is possible in earthly existence.

The only way human beings can build a right relationship to the world is by feeling how helpless they are when they want to arrive at the real essence of things, and how the whole being must be brought into play. Only when the teacher has a proper relationship to the world can the child also establish one. Pedagogy must be alive. It involves more than just applying oneself; it must come to flower from the very life situations of education. And it can do this when it grows from the teachers’ living experience of their own being in the cosmos.

The Human Being as a Symphony of the Tones in Animals

If musical understanding—which I mentioned this morning—has truly taught the teacher about the reality of the human astral body, providing a concept of the human being itself as a wonderful, inwardly organized musical instrument, such an understanding of the astral body will open an even broader understanding of the whole relation between the human being and the world. Naturally, this cannot be conveyed to children in the way I am going to express it, but it can be presented in pictures.

Teachers who have a knowledge of their own astral body, sounding inwardly in musical forms, should view the human being and the various animal forms that exist in the world. They can then understand the deep meaning contained in an old instinctual wisdom, which represented the human being as a coalescence of four beings—three lower and one higher: lion, bull, eagle, and angel. The bull represents an unbalanced development of the lowest forces of human nature. Picture the forces in the human metabolic-limb system without any balancing forces in the head and rhythmic systems; in other words, imagine an unbalanced and prevailing development of the metabolic-limb system. Here we have a one-sided formation that presents itself to us as the bull. We can thus imagine that if this bull nature were toned down by the human head organization, it would develop into something like the human being. If the central rhythmic system is developed in an unbalanced way—for example, through a contraction of the abdominal system or a stunting of the head system—we can picture it as lion nature.

If, however, there is one-sided development of the head organism in such a way that the forces otherwise existing in the inner part of the head push out into “feathers,” we get a bird, or eagle nature. If we imagine forces that enable these three qualities to harmonize as a unity that can manifest by adding the angelic fourth, we get a synthesis of the three—the human being. This is a schematic way of presenting these things, but it shows our human relationship to the surrounding animal world. In this sense; human beings are not related just to the bull, eagle, and lion, but to all earthly animal forms. In each animal form we can find an unbalanced development of one of the organic systems of the human being. These things were alive in the instinctive wisdom of ancient times.

There was still a tradition in later times that was exprEssentialEd paradoxically, because people themselves no longer had such vision but created intellectual elaborations of the old perceptions. In an odd passage, Oken asks us to suppose that the human tongue were developed in a one-sided way. Actually, it is toned down, or moderated, by the forces of the head, because the tongue serves the stomach (regardless of its spatial distance from it), and so on. Suppose, however, that it were developed one-sidedly. If a being were only tongue and all the rest only appendage, what would the tongue be then—a cuttlefish; the tongue is a cuttlefish! Now, of course, this is an exaggeration, but it retains something of the ancient perception translated into modern intellectualism. It is nonsense, but it originated with something that once had deep meaning. The soul attitude that underlies ancient knowledge can be rediscovered; we can rediscover how to conceive of the human being as divided, as it were, into all the various animal forms that exist on Earth. And if we bring them all together—so that each is harmonized by the others—we get the human being.

Thus, when we determine humankind’s relationship to the animal kingdom through observation, we find the relationship between the astral body and the outer world. We must apply a musical understanding to the astral body. I gaze into the human being, and out toward the myriad animal forms. It’s as if we were to take a symphony where all the tones sound together in a wonderful, harmonious, and melodious whole and, over the course of time, separated each tone from the others and juxtaposed them.

As we look out into the animal world, we have the single tones. As we look into the human astral body and what it builds in the physical and etheric bodies, we have the symphony. If we go beyond an intellectual view of the world and have enough cognitive freedom to rise to artistic knowledge, we develop an inner reverence, permeated with religious fervor, for the invisible being—the marvelous world composer—who first arranged the tones in the various animal forms, and then created the human being as a symphony of the phenomena of animal nature. This is what we must carry in our souls as teachers. If I understand my relationship to the world in this way, a true enthusiasm in the presence of world creation and world formation will flow into my descriptions of the animal forms. Every word and gesture in my teaching as a whole will be permeated by religious fervor—not just abstract concepts and natural laws.

Such things show us that instruction and education must not come from accumulated knowledge, which is then applied, but from a living abundance. A teacher comes into the class with the fullness of this abundance, and when dealing with children, it’s as though they found before them a voice for the world mysteries pulsating and streaming through the teacher, as though merely an instrument through which the world speaks to the child. There is then a real inner, enlivening quality in the method of instruction, not just superficial pedantry. Enthusiasm must not be artificially produced, but blossom like a flower from the teacher’s relationship to the world; this is the important thing.

In our discussion of a genuine method for teaching and the living foundations of education, we must speak of enthusiasm stimulated not by theoretical, abstract insight, but by true insight into the world. When we approach children who are between the change of teeth and puberty in this way, we can guide them in the right way toward puberty. As soon as puberty arrives, the astral body begins to unfold its independence. What was previously absorbed as the “music of the world” continues to develop within them. It is remarkable that the intellect now comprehends what has been developed in pictures and what was appropriated by the soul in an inwardly musical, sculptural sense and in living pictures during the period between the change of teeth and puberty. The human intellect does not absorb anything of what we force on it intellectually from outside; before the intellect can receive anything, it must first develop within the individual in a different way.

An important fact then comes into play. Something that one had all along is understood in an inwardly directed way—something that was prepared and supports puberty in the person who developed in a healthy way. All that was understood through images now arises from the inner wellspring. Proceeding to intellectual activity involves the human being looking into the self. I now take hold of my own being within myself and through myself. The astral body with its musical activity beats in rhythm with the etheric body with its shaping activity. In a healthy person, after puberty, a chord is sounded within the human being; it results in an awareness of one’s self. And when there is this concordance between the two sides of an individual’s nature, after puberty the person truly experiences inner freedom as a result of understanding for the first time what was merely perceived earlier.

The most important thing for which we can prepare a child is the experience of freedom, at the right moment in life, through the understanding of one’s own being. True freedom is an inward experience and is developed only when the human being is viewed in this way. As a teacher, I must say that I cannot pass on freedom to another human being—each must experience it individually. Nevertheless, I must plant something within the person—something intact because I have left it untouched—to which that person’s own intact being feels attracted and into which it may become immersed. This is the wonderful thing I have accomplished. I have educated within the human being what must be educated. In reverence to the Godhead in every individual human being, I have left untouched those things that may only be taken hold of by the self. I educate everything in the human being except what belongs to the self, and then I wait for it to take hold of what I have invoked. I do not coarsely handle the development of the human I, but prepare the soil for its development, which takes hold after puberty.

If I educate intellectually before puberty—if I offer abstract concepts or ready-made, sharply outlined observations instead of growing, living pictures—I am violating the human being and crudely handling the I within. I truly educate only when I leave the I untouched and wait until it can grasp what I have prepared through education. In this way, together with the child, I look forward to a time when I can say, “Here the I is being born in freedom; I have only prepared the ground so that the I may become conscious of its own being.

If I have educated the child this way until puberty, I find before me a human being who may say, “When I was not yet fully human, you gave me something that, now that it is possible, enables me to become fully human myself.” In other words, I have educated so that, with every look, every movement, the human being says to me, “You have accomplished something with me; and my freedom has been left whole. You have made it possible for me to grant myself my own freedom at the right moment in life. You have done something that enables me to stand before you now, shaping myself as a human being from my individuality, which you left reverently untouched.”

This may never be said in so many words, but it lives, nonetheless, in the human being who has received the right kind of education during the elementary school years.

The next lecture will show that there is much more to be done so that education and teaching may accommodate what the human being encounters after puberty.