The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When schools come under external legislation, we must obviously agree to compromise with regard to religious teaching, and also with regard to the curriculum. But we must keep clear what are the right and good foundations of a curriculum, so that where it imposes something which we feel to be organically inconsistent we can correct it personally here and there.

The discovery of the right curriculum for the period between the seventh and fourteenth or fifteenth year is on the whole bound up with the real knowledge of the child's development at this age. In the last lecture I drew attention to a phase in this development, which lies between the ninth and tenth year, that is, the time when the child has completed his ninth year and is beginning his tenth. When we trace the child's development from the age of seven through the eighth and ninth year, before we come to the tenth year we pass at some point the phase which I described to you, in relation to the whole development, as follows: The ego consciousness is strengthened and consolidated, so that from this time onwards we can introduce the child to the concepts of natural history, as I showed in the last lecture, from the cuttle-fish, the mouse or lamb or horse, and the human being. But you will have seen that there must still be taken into account the reciprocal relation of man to his surroundings, that attention must be paid to man as the real compendium of all other kingdoms of nature, to the importance of not isolating him sharply from the other natural kingdoms. A tremendous amount of harm is done to the growing being unless he is constantly referred, in the tenth and eleventh year, with his feelings and his experiences, to the intimacy of man with external nature, to man as a synthesis of the world of nature outside him.

But another important phase in the child's development lies between the twelfth and thirteenth year. At this time of life the spirit and soul element in man is strengthened and reinforced in so far as soul and spirit are less dependent on the ego. What we are used, in spiritual science, to call the astral body, permeates the etheric body, and unites with it. Of course the astral body is only really born as an independent entity at puberty, but it manifests itself in the etheric body in a peculiar way by charging and permeating it with its own force at the age of twelve to thirteen.

Here, then, lies another important point in the child's development. It is expressed in the fact that the child, if we deal wisely with him at this age, begins to understand the impulses of the outside world which resemble those of the spirit and soul and are expressed in the external world as historical forces. I showed you in an illustration how the sway of such historical forces can be brought within the scope of teaching in the elementary school.¹ But although it is left for you to translate into children's terms what I have explained to you, however much you adapt yourself to children you will not be able to awaken in the child the right understanding of historical impulses if you introduce him to the study of history in this way before he has completed his twelfth year. You can tell the child history earlier than this in the form of stories; you can tell him biographies. He will grasp these. But he will not grasp historical connections before he has completed his twelfth year. That is why you will do harm unless you punctually observe this phase in his development. At this point the child begins to feel a yearning to get what he once learnt in the form of stories in real historical form. And if you have told the child before, for instance, stories of this or that crusader, or of other heroes, you must now try to recast these, so that in the remodelled form he realizes the underlying historical impulses and historical connections. You will see, you will notice unmistakably, that the child responds with understanding from the twelfth year onwards to this right procedure, and you will say to yourself: “I shall confine myself chiefly, until his ninth year, to what we have already described as art, and derive from it writing and reading and later go on to arithmetic; but I shall only pass on to natural history after the age described in the last lecture, and I shall only touch on history, as far as it is more than stories, after he has reached his twelfth year.” At this point he begins to take an inner interest in the great historical connections. This will be quite especially important in the future, for more and more it will become obviously necessary to educate people to a comprehension of historical connections, whereas hitherto they have never arrived at a real conception of history. They have been more like members of an economic State system whose demands and interests they have followed as if they were machines. It has been considered sufficient to know a few paltry anecdotes about rulers and wars, and the dates of battles and famous people.

An especial subject of teaching in the future will have to be the development of the impulse in humanity towards culture. But teaching will then have to include the study of historical impulses, and these will have to be timed in the curriculum to answer to the appropriate moment in the child's development.

But there emerges in the child, when he has crossed the Rubicon of his twelfth year, a further glimmering of understanding. You may talk to the child before this about the organization of the human eye as clearly as possible—but before he is twelve he will not be able to master its formation properly and with understanding. For what are you really doing when you teach the child about the formation of the human eye? You are drawing his attention to the way in which rays of light strike the eye, enter it, are taken up by the lens and refracted, how they then pass through the vitreous humour and form an image upon the back wall of the eye, etc. You must describe all these as physical processes. You describe a physical process which really occurs in man himself, namely in a human sense-organ. If you want to do this you must already have developed the ideas in the child which enable him to respond. That is, you must have already shown the child the refraction of rays of light. That is very easily explained by showing him a lens, explaining the focus, and showing how the rays of light are refracted. But you are then describing purely physical facts which take place outside the human being. This can be done between the turning-point of the child's ninth year and the turning-point of his twelfth year. Only at the end of the twelfth year should this physical description be applied to the organs of man himself, because only then does the child begin to estimate at its right value the action of the outer world upon man, the process by which the activity of the outside world is projected into the human being and prolonged within him. He cannot understand this before he is twelve. He can understand physical processes—but not the consummation of physical processes in the human being.

There is some relation between the comprehension of historical impulses in humanity and the comprehension of the external physical impulses of nature in the human organism. The essence of real humanity lives in historical impulses, but the power concentrated in them persists as an external historical course of events and reacts on man. When you describe the human eye you describe an activity of external nature repeated in the human being. Both processes require an understanding of the same quality, and this understanding does not really emerge until the twelfth year. For this reason we shall need to arrange the curriculum so that the child is trained from the ninth to the twelfth year in the physical ideas suited to a comprehension of man himself, that is that he learns, along with natural history, simple physics, but that we wait until the twelfth year before applying the laws of physics to man himself—just as we should cultivate the telling of stories until he is twelve and then turn the stories into “history.”

My explanations so far refer to the beginnings of this subject. Naturally, the further organization of physics-teaching can then be continued into the period after twelve. But neither physics nor natural history should be embarked on before the child is nine, nor history lessons, nor lessons of a physiological kind, that is, the description of human manifestations, be given before the end of the twelfth year. If you remember that understanding something is not just what arises exclusively in the human intellect, but that it always comprises feeling and will, you will not feel quite antagonistic towards what I have just said. And if people do not observe these distinctions it is because they succumb to illusions. You can acquaint the human intellect in a scanty fashion with historical or physiological concepts before twelve years of age, but it ruins human nature, it really un-suits it for the whole of life. You will therefore find that you must talk to a child of nine to twelve, little by little, for instance, about how light-rays are broken up, how images are formed through lenses or other instruments. For instance, you will be able to discuss with him at this age how opera glasses function. At this age, too, you will be able to talk to him of the nature and the functioning of a clock, you will be able to explain the difference between a pendulum-clock and a watch and all such things. But you must not explain to him before he is twelve the application of light-refraction and image-formation to the human eye.

Now you will have realized from the approaches already indicated how you should proceed to draw up a curriculum in which the subjects of teaching are arranged so as to develop the child's aptitudes in the right way. It remains for us to make another observation from this point of view. It is undoubtedly important in teaching not to deviate too much from life, but at the same time not to accommodate yourself too much to it in trivialities. Saying to the child: “What have you got on your feet?” Answer: “A pair of shoes;” “What are your shoes for?” “To put on,” is called by many teachers an “object lesson,” and serves to reveal absurd trivialities. When you carry on an object lesson on the lines laid down in books on method you tire the child horribly in his subconscious soul, and that again does the child a great deal of harm. We should concern ourselves less with this staying “put” too close to life and this continual dragging up into consciousness of concepts which can really quite well remain in the unconscious, and which simply haul into blatant consciousness purely habitual actions. But because of this we must not keep too great a distance from life and teach the child empty abstractions too early. That will be particularly important in the teaching of physics. Indeed, physics teaching of itself will offer sufficient opportunity to bring into close relationship things near at hand in our everyday life—and things far removed from external life. You should therefore take care to develop physical concepts from life itself. As far as you are able, and according to your gift for invention, you should let the child realize such things as, for instance, these: that it is sometimes still “cold to the feet” in our room after we have turned on the heating, while it is already warm near the ceiling. In pointing this out you draw the child's attention to a fact of life, and from it you can start to explain to him that of course the air below, round the stove, is warmed first. The top of the room obviously does not get warm first of all. But the warm air has the tendency always to rise and the cold air must then fall, so that the process is explained to the child like this: “The air down below, around the stove, gets warm first; this warm air rises, so that the cold air has to fall, and so it is still cold to the feet in a room where the air up above has been warm for some time.” In this way you have set out from a fact of life from which you can now find the transition to pointing out that the warm air expands and the cold air contracts. Here you are already leaving everyday life. But in other cases, too, for instance, if you are speaking in a physics lesson of a lever, it is not wise simply to confront your class with the abstract lever. Start with the lever of a balance, and then come from this to the way a lever functions. Start, that is, from what is useful in ordinary life, and go on to what can be thought out from it in physics.

But at this point I cannot withhold from you the fact that many of our physical concepts themselves work havoc on the child, and that very much depends on the teacher's sound knowledge, on his attempts in the first place to acquire a certain maturity of mind from which to form opinions. You cannot avoid saying to the bigger children: “Here you have an electrical machine; what I have here is called a friction-electrifying machine. By rubbing certain objects I can produce electricity, but to do this I must always be careful to wipe the objects which are to be electrified, for they must be dry. If they are wet the experiment will not work; no electricity is produced.” You then enlarge to the children on the reasons why it will not do to try to produce electricity with wet instruments. Then you go on to explain how lightning is produced, and you speak of it as an electrical process. Now many people say: “There is friction between the clouds, which produces an electric discharge in the form of lightning.” The child will believe it, perhaps, because the teacher believes it himself, but in his subconscious nature a quite peculiar process is going on—of which he is naturally unaware. He says to himself: “Yes, the teacher always carefully wipes—so that they are not wet—the instruments which are to rub against each other and produce electricity, but afterwards he tells me that electricity is produced by the friction of the clouds, which, after all, are wet!” The child notices such contradictions. And much of the tormenting restlessness of life arises from the fact that the child has continuously to put up with such contradictions. They may arise in the outer world; but within our thoughts they are out of place. Because the knowledge and experience of men to-day is not profound enough, there persist, in what we teach the children and in what later we teach young people, contradictions of this kind, which really torture the unconscious inner nature of the human being. For this reason we must at least see that what we consciously teach the child does not contain too many statements which the child then visualizes differently in his subconsciousness. In science we shall not, of course, be called upon as teachers to sift such nonsense as the foolish confusion which is introduced into physics between lightning and electricity. But when we are dealing with, let us say, more transparent questions, we should always at least be conscious that we are not, of course, merely influencing the child's consciousness, but always his subconscious nature too. How can we adapt ourselves to this subconsciousness?

We can only do it by becoming, as teachers, more and more the kind of people who do not adjust their understanding to suit the child. I have already mentioned in another connection what this involves. You must cultivate in yourself the capacity for letting the lesson in which you are engaged with the child absorb you as entirely as the child is absorbed in it—no matter what the subject. You must not let yourself be infected with the thought: “Of course I know a great deal more, but I am making it up to suit the child. I am above the child and serve up whatever I have to say to him in a suitable way.” No, you must have the gift of so transforming yourself that the child literally awakens in your lessons, that you yourself become a child with the child. But not childishly. Nursemaids often make this mistake; they talk with the child in baby-talk; when he says “Daddy,” they say “Daddy,” too, instead of father. The point is not to be childish superficially, but to transform into childlike experience what is more mature. Of course, to be able to do this properly you must penetrate a little deeper into human nature. We must take seriously the fact that man must become productive in just the most important of spiritual gifts, that he must keep a childish nature all his life. You are a poet, an artist, if, as a mature man, you can always live over in your own soul the child's participation in life. To be always a solemn or stodgy person, to be no longer able to behave like a child, inwardly like a child, in your thinking and feeling and willing (which have now acquired the maturer conceptions of thirty years), to be always only a composed and rigid person, is not the attitude suited to a teacher. But the right attitude is this: always to be able to transport yourself back into childhood in every personal experience, in every new knowledge acquired. You will not transport yourself like this into childhood if you are a person who relates a newly learned fact in baby-language. But you will be able to transport yourself back by rejoicing as intensely in this new fact as the child rejoices in the realization of a new fact of life. In a word, it is the soul and spirit which must transport itself back into childhood, and not the external body.

Much, of course, will depend on the atmosphere which is created between the teacher and the pupils. For the right atmosphere is created when, for instance, in talking about life, about nature, you take a delight in it like the child himself, marvelling at it in the same way. For example, you have all learnt something about physics and understand the so-called Morse-telegraphy to some extent. You know the process by which a telegram is sent from one place to another. You know that, by means of different devices, by means of the Morse keyboard on which the telegraphic operator presses now for a short time, now for longer, the circuit is closed either for a short or a long time, while it is interrupted when there is no pressure on the keyboard. You know that the actual Morse telegraph apparatus is joined to the circuit in the form of an iron lever attracted by an electro-magnet. Then you know that there is also connected, into this current, the so-called relay. You know that this, with the help of a wire, sets up contact between the telegraph apparatus at one station and that at another, so that at the second station there is reproduced what was produced at the first station. According to whether I apply the current for a short or long time, something is heard at the other station, which, on being set down, produces what is then read by the telegraph operator at the other station. The short or long interruptions become visible as an impression on a strip of paper, a point being seen on the paper for a short duration of the current and a dash for a long duration. The strip of paper is run through rollers. For instance, you see a dot, then perhaps after an interval, three dots, etc. Out of dots and dashes the whole alphabet is composed: an A is .—, Ð’—..., and one dash is T, and so on. In this way we can read off what passes from one station to another.

But all this explanation of the telegraph apparatus is really only an object of intellectual consideration. You really do not need to exert much psychic energy to make intelligible all that is involved in this mechanical process, where the mechanism is saturated with the action of electricity, about which modern science only offers hypotheses. But one aspect of it remains a miracle, and we may as well call a miracle a miracle. I must confess that when I think of the contact which is established between the Morse apparatus of one station and that of another I am always most profoundly moved by the way in which the electrical circuit is closed. It is not, of course, closed by a wire passed from the first station to the second, and a second wire from this back to the first. That could be done; in this way the interruption would be effected by interrupting the circuit. But the closed circuit is not produced by wires which pass to and fro and into which the Morse apparatus is then fitted; actually only one part of the current is conducted by the wire. The wire from the one station goes into the earth and there enters a metallic plate, and at the other station in the same way the wire goes into the earth through a metal plate. The contact, therefore, which could be set up by a wire is established by the earth itself. In the earth itself the process takes place which could otherwise only be produced, in the case of a closed circuit, by means of the other half of the wire. And whenever you have to think how one telegraph apparatus at one station is connected with that of another you cannot but be conscious of a miracle in the fact that the earth, the whole earth, adopts the role of transmitter, that it takes, as it were, the current in its protection and delivers it faithfully up at the other station, for it is the earth alone which undertakes the transmission. All explanations of this are hypotheses. But the important thing for our human relations is that we should be able again and again to feel this as a wonderful fact, that we should not blunt our feelings to the realization of physical processes. Then we shall find the atmosphere in which to explain these to the child, in which we can always transport ourselves back again to our first experience of a fact. A physical explanation will thus transform us with the marvelling child into marvelling children. And such things are everywhere present, even in the physical processes of the world.

Imagine for the moment that you are giving this lesson. There stands something like a bench; on this bench lies a ball; I pull the bench quickly away—the ball falls to the ground. What will the modern teacher generally say when he is explaining a phenomenon of this kind to the child? “The ball is attracted by the earth; unless it is supported, it succumbs to gravitation.” But that really means nothing. For this phrase: “The ball succumbs to gravitation” is actually meaningless; it is one of those verbal definitions of which we have already spoken. For the physicists again confess that no one knows anything about gravitation and the nature of gravitation; but they talk about them nevertheless. But we cannot avoid speaking of gravitation. We are bound to speak of it. For otherwise our pupil will go out into the world and find himself required to qualify for some position, and quite properly is asked: “What is gravitation?” And imagine what would happen if a fifteen-year-old youngster or a fifteen-year-old lassie did not know what gravitation is! So we must tell the child what gravitation is; we must not foolishly close our eyes to the demands of the modern world. At the same time, by acting on the child's subconscious nature we can excite beautiful ideas in him. Having taught him other things, we can explain, for instance, the following fact: suppose you have here the receiver of an air-pump in which there is no air; if you now take out the stopper the air pours quickly in and fills up the void. In the same way there is everywhere the tendency in things to pour into empty space. This tendency is connected with the other case in which you speak of the action of gravitation; if you draw the stopper away in a downward direction something streams in, too. The difference is only that in the one case the outside air pours into the empty space while in the other case the action is in one direction only. Now compare the phenomena.² Do not give the child verbal-definitions, but bring out the connections between the concepts and the phenomena connected with air and those connected with solid bodies. If one were, even with firm bodies, to come to the conception of “streaming in” when they move in a certain direction unsupported, one would abandon the present idea connected with air streaming into an empty space; one would altogether come to sounder conceptions than those now spread all over the world, e.g. the Relativity Theory of Professor Einstein. I only say this as a passing observation on modern civilization, but I must draw your attention to the fact of much mischief being active in our civilization through the Relativity Theory, particularly in its latest form, and to the fact that this will have an injurious effect when the child becomes a scientist.

This already gives you a considerable idea of how the curriculum must be composed, and on what basis.

• 1. See The Art of Education (“Erziehungskunst”). Elementary school is a translation of “Volkschule,” which in these lectures includes every school up to fourteen.
• 2. See Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Pädagogik, Lecture 7.

In the Waldorf School we get children coming in at widely different ages. Besides this, we cannot immediately have—it is a pity—a university as well. So we bring our Waldorf pupils up to the required standards of other schools. And yet in spite of restrictions we can perform our task at the Waldorf School when we work according to those principles which the present evolution of man demands. We shall be able to do this if we apply a golden rule particularly to the older children whom we shall soon have to send on to the other institutions of life: this rule is, teach economically.

We shall teach economically if, above all, particularly with those children of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years, we carefully exclude everything which is really only a burden to the development of the human soul and cannot bear fruit for life. We shall have to make room in our time-table, for instance, for Latin; perhaps, too, if it proves necessary, Greek. From the first we shall have to come to a clear understanding about language teaching, for this is of real importance for our method. Take for a moment this position: you get pupils who have learnt French or Latin up to a certain stage. The teaching they have received has naturally been given on certain lines. Now you will have to use the first lesson, perhaps even the first week, for finding out what your children can already do. You will have to repeat what they have already done. But you will have to do this economically, so that your boys and girls, each according to his or her capacity, receive some benefit from this repetition.

You will achieve a great deal by simply remembering that for all so-called foreign language teaching the greatest waste of time lies in translation from the foreign language and translation into it from the native language. A colossal amount of time is wasted with secondary school children, for instance, in translating so much from Latin into German (in this case the native tongue) and German back again into Latin. Much more reading should be done, and there should be far more expressing of the children's thoughts in the foreign language than translation and retranslation. How, on these lines, will you set about teaching your pupils a foreign language—French, for example?

First of all, let us take the oldest children who are to be considered, from thirteen to fourteen years old. You will have to select carefully what you intend to read in the language in question with your children. You will select reading passages, and begin by calling on the children to read these passages aloud to you. You will save the time and energy of the children if you do not at first have the passages translated into their native language, but if you pay attention for the moment to pleasant reading by the child and to achieve, where possible, by reading aloud, a pleasant delivery of the French or Latin reading passage, with accurate pronunciation, etc. Then it is a good plan with children for whom you wish to combine revision of former work and your later teaching, to avoid translation, and to have free oral reproduction of the contents of the reading passages. Simply let the child tell in his own words the story of the passage; pay careful attention to any omission in the retelling, and try from this to find out whether there was something which he did not understand. It is more convenient for you, of course, if you simply let the child translate; then you see where he stops, and cannot go on; it is less convenient for you, not only to see where he cannot go on, but where he leaves something out; in this way you find out where he did not understand something, where he has not reproduced a phrase in his own words. There will be children there, of course, who can reproduce the passage very well; that does no harm. But first go through it with the children.

Then we proceed to do the opposite. Let us discuss in our own language some subject or other, anything which the child can think over and feel with us. And then let him try, in terms of his mastery of the language at this stage, freely to recount in the foreign language what we have discussed. In this way we shall find out how far the child who has come to us from some other class has mastered the foreign language.

You cannot study a foreign language in school without really practising grammar—ordinary grammar as well as syntax. It is especially necessary that children after the age of twelve are made fully conscious of the value of grammar. But here, too, you can proceed with extreme economy. And if, in the Allgemeine Menschenkunde (Lecture 9) I told you that you form conclusions in everyday life and then pass on to “judgement” and “concept,” you cannot of course give the child this logical teaching, but it will underlie your teaching of grammar. You will be wise to talk over the things of the world with the child in such a way as to evolve grammar as though of itself from the very use of the foreign language. The only question is the right approach to this process. Start by forming with the child something which is a complete sentence and is no more than a sentence. Draw his attention to what is going on outside. You can quite well combine your teaching of the foreign language with the child's statement; for instance, in Latin and French as well as in his own language “It is raining.” Start by eliciting from the child the statement “it is raining” and then draw his attention (you are here, of course, always concerned with older children) to the fact that when he says “it is raining” he is simply stating a mere activity. Then go from this sentence to another by saying: “Now just think for a moment of what happens, not in the whole of space where it is raining, but think of the meadow-grass in spring.” Get the child to say of the meadow-grass (“es grünt,” it greeneth) that it is growing green. And only then go on to let the child change the sentence “it greeneth” into the sentence “the grass is growing green.” Lead him on to transform this sentence “the grass is growing green” into the idea, into the concept “the green grass.”

If you excite these thoughts, as suggested, one after the other in the language lesson, you do not begin by teaching the child pedantic syntax and logic, but you direct the entire disposition of his soul into a channel by which you convey to him economically what his soul should possess. You introduce the child to impersonal sentences. They contain more activity without subject or predicate, they are shortened conclusions. Then you touch on something for which it is possible to find a subject: “The meadow greeneth,—the meadow which is green.” Then you go on to form a sentence expressing opinion. You will find it difficult to form a sentence similar to “the meadow greeneth” in regard to “it rains,” for you cannot get the subject. It is impossible to find one. This practice with the children really takes you into provinces of language about which philosophers have written an enormous amount. The Slav scholar, MiklosiÄ, for example, was the first to write about subject-less and impersonal sentences. Then Franz Brentano occupied himself with them; then Marti in Prague. They hunted up all the rules concerning subject-less or impersonal sentences like “it is raining,” “it is snowing,” “it is lightning,” “it is thundering,” etc., for their logic could give no clue for their origin.

Subject-less sentences, as a matter of fact, arise from our profoundly intimate relation with the world in some respects, from our place as microcosms in the macrocosm, and the still unsevered state of our own activity from the world's activity. When it is raining, for instance, we, too—especially if we have no umbrella—are very intimately bound up with the world; we cannot isolate ourselves properly from it; we get just as wet as the stones and houses round about us. For this reason we isolate ourselves only slightly from the world, we cannot find a subject, we describe the activity alone. Where we can detach ourselves more from the world, where we can more easily escape from it, as from the meadow grass, we make a subject: “The meadow grows green.”

From this you see that you can always bear in mind—in your very manner of talking to the children—man's reciprocal relation to his surroundings. And in introducing the child to these things—especially in the lessons devoted to foreign languages—where grammar is bound up with the practical logic of life, try to discover how much grammar and syntax he knows. But please steer clear, in teaching a foreign language, of first taking a reading passage through, and then of pulling the language about. Try to evolve the grammatical side as independently as possible. There was a time when the foreign language textbooks contained crazy sentences simply for the purpose of illustrating the right application of grammatical rules. Gradually this came to be thought foolish, and sentences taken more from life were introduced into the books which were to teach the foreign language. But here, too, the golden mean is better than extremes. You will not be able to teach pronunciation well if you confine your sentences to life, unless you intend also to use sentences such as we took yesterday for practice, like this one:

Lalle Lieder lieblich
Lipplicher Laffe,
Lappiger, lumpiger,
Laichiger Lurch,

which is based merely on the element of language itself and not on the thought content. Try, therefore, to study grammar and syntax with the children by forming sentences expressly intended to illustrate this or that rule. Only you must so arrange your teaching that these sentences in one or another foreign language, illustrating grammatical rules, are neither written down nor copied into the notebook, but so that they are practised; in this way they come into being, but are not preserved. Such a procedure is an extraordinary factor towards economy, particularly in foreign language teaching, for it instils rules into the children through their feelings without any need for the examples to be retained. If you let the children write down the examples, too vivid an impression is left with them of the outward form of the examples. In grammatical teaching the examples must be dropped and in no circumstance be carefully entered into notebooks, but the rules must remain. For this reason you do well in the living language, in conversation, to take reading passages as I have already described, and again to practise the turning of the children's own thoughts into the foreign language, in which process their thoughts are borrowed to a greater extent from everyday life. But in teaching grammar, use sentences which you actually know in advance that the child will forget, and he will therefore refrain from a mere bolstering up of the memory by writing them down. For all the work which you do when you teach the child grammar or syntax from sentences is expressed in living conclusions, and these must not lapse into the dreaminess of habit, but must always be a part of fully conscious life.

Naturally, this introduces into teaching an element which makes it slightly strenuous. You will not come to grief, because the teaching, particularly of the pupils whom you take on in the higher classes, is bound to create for you a certain exertion. You will have to proceed very economically. But the “economy” really is only a benefit to the pupil. It will take you yourself a great deal of time to discover the most economical form of teaching. Prefer to teach grammar and syntax, therefore, in the form of conversation. In doing this it is not a good plan to give the children actual books on grammar and syntax—as such books are at present—for these, it is true, include examples, but examples should only be “discussed.” As a permanent object for the child's learning in grammar and syntax there should be only rules. Consequently, it will be very economical indeed, and will do the child an incalculable amount of good, if one day you derive with the child, from some example which you have invented, a rule necessary for the mastery of the language, and then the day after, or the day after that, return in the same foreign language lesson to the rule, and let the child find an illustration for it in his own “top storey.” Only do not at any price underestimate the value for educational method of these things. In teaching, in fact, a tremendous amount depends on finer elements. It makes a gigantic difference whether you simply ask the child for a grammatical rule and make him echo, from his book, an example taken down at your dictation, or whether, on the other hand, you give him an example especially selected to be forgotten, and encourage him to invent an example himself. The work which the child does when he finds his own example is particularly educative. And you will see, even if you have the naughtiest, most inattentive children, that if you get them to find grammatical examples—and you can do this very well simply by taking an active part in the lesson yourself—the children take pleasure in these examples and particularly in the work of discovering them for themselves. And when, after the long summer holidays, you get the children back in school, after they have played and romped about for weeks in the open air, you must realize that they feel little inclination, after weeks of this life, to exchange playing and romping for quiet sitting in class and quiet listening to things which are to remain in their memory. But even if you find this disturbing the first week, perhaps even the second, if you conduct your foreign language teaching so that the child is allowed to take part in it with his soul by discovering examples, after three or four weeks you will have a class of children who take just as much delight in inventing these examples as they previously did in romping about. But you must take care, too, to think out examples of this kind, and must not omit to give the child this impression so that he is conscious of it. It is a very good thing for the child, when he joins in this work, and is always wanting to do it himself, that while one child is producing an example the other will call out; “I have one, too,” and then they all want their turn to give an example—it is a very good thing to say at the end of the lesson: “I am very glad, but most of all because you like doing this now as much as you used to like romping out of doors.” Such a remark lingers in the children's inner ear. It haunts them all the way home, and when they get home they tell their parents about it at table. But you must really say things which the children like telling their parents at table. And if you succeed in interesting the child so much that he asks his father or mother at table: “Can you find an example of this rule, too?” you have, in actual fact, won the day. These things can be done, but you yourself must take part in the lesson with your whole soul.

Only reflect on the difference, whether you discuss with the child in a spirited way the transition from “it is raining,” “it grows green” to “the meadow is growing green,” or if you evolve grammar and syntax, as is most usually done, by expounding: This is an adjective; this is a verb; and if a verb stands alone there is no sentence. Do not merely string things together as is frequently done in grammar books, but develop them in a living lesson. And compare this way of studying grammar, as it should be done in living teaching, with the other frequent procedure: the Latin or French teacher comes into the class; now the children must get out the books or exercise-books for Latin or French; then they must have done their “prep.”; now they must translate; now they are to read. By this time everything is beginning to hurt, because they feel how hard the benches are. For, as a matter of fact, there would have been no need to pay so much attention to benches and desks if children had been properly educated and taught. It is only a proof that education and teaching have not been sensible if people have had to bestow such care on the making of the benches and desks, for if children are really interested in the lesson such life enters the class that when they are supposed to be sitting they are really not quite sitting. And let us take a delight in the fact that they are not sitting properly; it is only if you are lazy yourself that you want a class to sit as rigid as possible, and go home at the end of the afternoon completely tired out. The point here again is to keep in view the principle of economy, and this point of view will be particularly useful to you in teaching a foreign language.

We must obviously see to it that the grammar and syntax teaching are fairly complete. For this reason we shall find out from the pupils, who come to us from other classes, where there are gaps in their knowledge. We shall then have to start by filling these gaps, particularly in the grammar and syntax lessons, so that after a few weeks we have a class with the old gaps filled up and ready to go on with new work. But if we teach as I have described—we can do this if we have our heart in the lesson—if the lesson interests us ourselves, we are preparing the children eventually and in the right way to pass the usual college entrance examinations. And we teach the children many a thing which the ordinary schools do not give them, but which makes the children vigorous and alive and is of permanent value in their lives. It would be a particularly good plan if it could be arranged for the different languages to be taught simultaneously. A tremendous amount of time is lost when the children of thirteen to fifteen are taught Latin by one teacher, French by another, and German by a third. Very much, on the other hand, is gained when a single thought worked out by a teacher with a pupil in one language is allowed to be worked out by another pupil, too, in another language, and by a third pupil in the third language. One language would then bear out the other very effectively. Naturally, such methods can only be followed in so far as the means—in this case the teachers—are available. But what is available should be taken full advantage of. The help that one language can be to another should be taken into account. This facilitates in grammar and formation of sentences the constant reference from one language to another, and this involves something of tremendous importance for the child.

A pupil learns a thing far better if, in his soul, he can apply it in different directions. You will be able to say to him: “Look, there you have made an English [The word German in the original is changed to the word English when it refers, as it does here, to the mother tongue.] sentence and a Latin sentence; in the English sentence, if the first person is referred to, we can hardly ever miss out the ‘I;’ in a Latin sentence the ‘I’ is there already inside the verb.” You do not need to go a step further; in fact it is not at all wise to go further, but it is a good thing just to touch on this difference, so that the pupil comes to have a certain feeling for it; then from this feeling there emanates a living aptitude to understand other things in grammar, and I beg you to absorb this fact and to think it over very deeply, namely, that it is possible, in a stimulating, living lesson, to develop during the lesson the faculty necessary for teaching. The fact is, if you have only touched, for instance, on a thing, and have not enlarged on it pedantically, if you have said to the child: “The Latin language has not yet developed the ‘I,’ it still has it in the verb; but our languages have developed it,” there is momentarily awakened in him a faculty which is otherwise absent. This is stimulated into life at this moment and not before, and you can more easily study grammatical rules with the children after such insight is awakened than if you had to evoke them from the ordinary condition of the child's soul. You will have to think out how you can create the aptitudes you want for a certain lesson. The children do not need to have all the capacities which you intend to use, but you must have the skill to call them up in such a manner that they disappear when the child no longer needs them.

This process can be exceptionally important in language teaching if this is allowed to consist of correct reading, accurate pronunciation—without giving many rules—first reading yourself and letting them repeat it; then have the reading-passage retold and thoughts about it formed and expressed in the different languages—and, quite independently of this, study grammar and syntax with rules to be remembered and examples to be forgotten. There you have a framework for language teaching.

Let now try to get further in the method by keeping one eye in future on the curriculum and the other on what will form the subjects of the curriculum. It does not immediately have everything in it which it ought to contain, for we build up the method of our observations by degrees.

We have already begun to consider the lessons for the various ages. How many stages of teaching can we differentiate during the school course? We have learnt that an important break occurs towards the age of nine, which enables us to affirm: if we get a child under the age of nine we shall be concerned with the first stage of school-teaching. What subjects shall we then teach? We shall take the artistic element as our point of departure. We shall study music and painting-drawing with the child as we have discussed. We shall gradually allow writing to arise from painting-drawing. We shall therefore gradually evolve the written forms from the drawn forms and we shall then go on to reading.

It is important for you to understand the reasons for this procedure: it is important that you do not first take reading and then tack writing on to it, but that you go from writing to reading. Writing is, in a sense, more living than reading. Reading isolates man very much, in the first place, and isolates him from the world. In writing we have not yet ceased to imitate world-forms, as long as we derive it from drawing. The printed letters have become extraordinarily abstract. They have arisen, of course, without exception from written letters. Consequently, we re-create them in our teaching from the written letters. It is quite correct to preserve intact, in teaching writing at least, the thread which connects the drawing forms with the written letters, so that the child still always feels in some degree the original image behind the letter. In this way you overcome the abstract character of writing. When man adjusts himself to writing he is obviously assimilating something very foreign to the universe. But if we link the written forms with the universal forms—with f = fish, etc.—at least we lead man back again to the world. And it is very important indeed that we should not wrench him away from it. The further back we go into the history of civilization the more living do we find this relation of man to the world. You only need to picture a scene in your soul to understand what I have just said: Transport yourself to ancient times and imagine, in my place, a Greek rhapsodist is reciting Homer to his audience in the manner of those days, between song and speech which we have lost, and imagine, sitting next to this rhapsodist, someone taking down the recital in shorthand. A grotesque scene, and impossible, quite impossible. Impossible for the simple reason that the Greek had quite a different kind of memory from ours and was not dependent on the invention of anything so far-fetched as the forms of shorthand to enable him to remember the revelations to men in language. You see from this that an unusually disturbing element is bound to be constantly interfering with our culture. We need this disturbing element. We cannot, of course, dispense with shorthand in our civilization. But we should be aware that it is a disturbing influence. For what actually is the significance of this appalling short-hand-copying in our civilization? It simply means that in our civilized life we are no longer capable of adjusting ourselves to the right rhythm of waking and sleeping, and that we employ the hours of sleep in doing all kinds of things which implant in our soul-life things which from its very nature it cannot assimilate. With our shorthand-copying we keep stored up what we should do better to forget if only left to ourselves. That is, we artificially maintain in a waking condition in our civilization things which disturb it as much as the nocturnal cram of over-eager students upsets their health. That is why our civilization is no longer healthy. But we must be clear in our minds that we have already crossed the Rubicon of the Greek age. A Rubicon was crossed then, on the far side of which humanity still had a quite sound civilization. Civilization will continue to grow unhealthier and people will more and more have to turn the process of education into a process of healing of the ills created by their surroundings. As to this there is room for no illusions. That is why it is so infinitely important to link up writing with drawing again, and to teach writing before reading.

Arithmetic should be begun somewhat later. This can be adjusted according to outer necessities as there is no point marked for it in life evolution itself. But into this complete plan there can always be inserted at the first stage a certain study of foreign languages, because this has been made essential by civilization. At this stage these foreign languages must only be studied in the form of practice of speaking.

Only in the second stage, from nine to about twelve, do we begin to develop the self-consciousness more. And we do this in grammar. At this point the human being is already capable, because of the change which he has undergone and which I describe to you, of absorbing into his self-consciousness the significance of grammar. At this point we take “word teaching” in particular. But we also embark on the natural history of the animal kingdom, as I showed you with the cuttle-fish, mouse, and human being. And only later do we add the plant kingdom.

Further, at this stage in the life of the human being we can go on to geometry, whereas we have hitherto restricted the elements of geometry to drawing. In drawing, of course, we can evolve for him the triangle, the square, the circle, and the line. That is, we evolve the actual forms in drawing, by drawing them and then saying: “This is a triangle, this is a square.” But what geometry adds to these, with its search for the relations between the forms, is only introduced at about nine years of age. At the same time, of course, the foreign language is continued and becomes part of the grammar teaching.¹

Last of all we introduce the child to physics. Here we come to the third stage which goes to the end of the elementary school course, that is to fourteen and fifteen years of age. Here we begin to teach syntax. The child is only really ready for this at about twelve years of age. Before this we study instinctively those elements of language which the child can make into sentences.

Here, too, the time has come when, using geometrical forms, we can go on to the mineral kingdom. We take the mineral kingdom in constant conjunction with physical phenomena which we then apply to man, as I have already explained: light refraction—the lens in the eye. The physical aspect, that is, and the chemical. We can also go on to history. All this time we study geography, which we can always reinforce with natural history by introducing physical concepts and with geometry by the drawing of maps, and finally we connect geography with history. That is, we show how the different peoples have developed their characteristics. We study this subject throughout these entire stages of childhood, from nine to twelve, and from twelve to fifteen. The foreign language teaching is, of course, continued and extended to syntax.

Now naturally various things will have to be taken into account. For we cannot take music with little beginners who have come to us, at the same time and in the same classroom as a lesson with other children for whom everything should be quite still if they are to learn. We shall therefore have to arrange the painting and drawing with the little children as a morning lesson and music late in the afternoon. We shall also have to divide up the space available in the school so that one subject can be taken side by side with another. For example, we cannot have poems recited aloud and a talk about history going on if the little ones are playing flutes in the next room. These matters are involved in the drawing up of the time-table and we must carefully take into account, when we organize our school, that many subjects will have to be arranged for the morning and others for the afternoon, and so on. Now our problem is: to be able, with our knowledge of these three stages in the curriculum, to pay attention to the greater or lesser aptitudes of the children. Naturally we shall have to make compromises, but I will now assume rather ideal conditions and throw light later on the time-tables of modern schools for the purpose of striking an adequate balance. We shall generally do well to draw a less sharp distinction between the classes within the different stages than we draw at the transition from one stage to the next. We shall remember that a general move up can actually take place only between the first and second, and between the second and third stage. For we shall discover that the so-called less-gifted children generally speaking understand things later. Consequently, in the years comprised in the first stage we shall have the intelligent children who can simply understand more quickly and who assimilate later, and the less able, who have difficulties at first but at last understand. We shall definitely make this discovery and must not therefore form an opinion too early as to which children are unusually able and which are less able.

Now I have already emphasized the fact that we shall, of course, get children who have gone through the most various classes. Dealing with them will be all the more difficult the older they are. But we shall nevertheless be able to remould to a great extent whatever about them has been badly started, provided that we take enough trouble. We shall not delay, after having done what we have found important in a foreign language, in Latin, French, English, Greek, to go on as soon as possible to what gives the children the greatest imaginable pleasure: to let them talk to each other in class in the language concerned and, as teachers, to do no more than guide this conversation. You will discover that it gives the children really great pleasure to converse with each other in the language concerned and to have the teacher confining himself to correcting their efforts or, at the most, guiding the conversation; for example, a child who is saying something particularly tedious is diverted to something more interesting. Here the presence of mind of the teacher must do its quite peculiar work. You must really feel the children in front of you like a choir which you have to conduct, but you have to enter into your work even more intimately.

Then comes the point to ascertain from the children what poems or other memorized reading passages they have previously learnt, that is, what treasure they can produce for you from the store of their memories. And with this store in the child's memory, you must link every lesson in the foreign language, especially grammar and syntax, for it is of quite particular importance that anything the children have learnt by heart—poems, etc., should be remembered. I have said that it is not a good thing to abuse the memory by having written down the sentences which are formed during grammar lessons to illustrate rules. These may well be forgotten. On the other hand, the points learnt from these sentences must be applied to the store of things already memorized, so that this possession of the memory contributes to the mastery of the language. If, later, you are writing a letter in the language, or conversing in it, you should be able rapidly to recall a good turn of phrase from things once learnt in this way. The consideration of such facts is part of the economy of teaching. For we must know what makes the teaching of a foreign language particularly economical and what wastes time. Delay is caused by reading aloud to the children in class while they follow in the books in front of them. That is nothing but time stolen from the child's life. It is the very worst thing that you can do. The right way is for the teacher to introduce the desired material in the form of a story, or even for him to repeat a reading passage verbatim or to recite a poem, but to do this without book himself, from memory, and for the children to do nothing at the time but listen to him; not, that is, follow his reading: then, if possible, the children reproduce what they have listened to, without first reading it at all. This is valuable in teaching a foreign language. In teaching the mother tongue it need not be so carefully considered. But in a foreign language greater regard must be paid to making things intelligible by speech and to aural comprehension, rather than to visual comprehension. Now when this has been sufficiently practised, the children can take the book and read after you, or, if you do not abuse this suggestion, you can simply give them for homework to read in their book the passage taken orally in school. Homework in foreign languages should first and foremost be confined to reading work. Any written work should really be done in the school itself. In a foreign language the least possible amount of homework should be given, none before the later stages, that is, before thirteen, and then only work connected with real life: the writing of letters, business correspondence, and so on. Only, that is, what really happens in life. To have compositions written in a foreign language during school hours, compositions unrelated to life, is really, in the deepest sense, a monstrosity. We ought to be content with work of a letter-character, concerned with business and similar things. At the most we should go as far as cultivating the telling of pieces of narrative. In the elementary school, to fourteen, we should practise, far more than the so-called free composition, the recounting of incidents that have occurred, of experiences. Free composition does not really belong to this elementary school course. But the narrative description of things seen and heard certainly does belong there, for the child must learn this art of reporting; otherwise he will not be able to play his proper social part in human social life. In this respect our cultured folk to-day only see half the world, as a rule, and not the whole.

You know, of course, that experiments are now being carried on in the service of criminal psychology. These experiments are planned, for example—I will take a case—in this way. Everybody to-day tries to ascertain facts by means of experiment. Somebody decides to undertake a course of lectures. The experiments are carried out in connection with advanced education and are held in the universities. In order to organize this course of lectures as an experiment the following arrangement is very carefully made beforehand with a student, or “listener,” as he is called: “I, as Professor, will mount the platform and will say the first few words of a lecture.—Good, write that down.—At this moment you jump on to the platform and tear from its hook the coat which I have previously hung up.” The listener then has to carry out accurately some plan as arranged. Then the professor behaves accordingly. He makes a rush at the student to prevent him from unhooking the coat. The next step is then arranged: we have a free fight. We decide on the exact movements to be made. We study our part carefully and learn it well by heart, in order to enact the whole scene as arranged. Then the audience, which knows nothing of this—all this is only discussed with a “listener”—reacts in its own way. This is impossible to calculate. But we will try to draw a third person into the secret, and he now carefully notes the reaction of the audience. Well, there is the experiment carried out. Afterwards we have an account of the scene written down by the audience, by every single listener.

Such experiments have been carried on in universities. The one which I have described has, in fact, been tried, and the result was as follows: In an audience of about thirty people, at the most four or five gave an accurate account of the occurrence. This can be verified because everything was previously discussed in detail and carried out according to plan. Hardly a tenth of the spectators write out the experiment correctly. Most of them make absurd statements when surprised by an occurrence of this kind. In these days, when experiments are popular, such incidents are staged with great enthusiasm, and the important scientific result is obtained that the witnesses who are called up in a court of law are not reliable. For when the educated people of a university audience—they are, after all, all “educated” people—respond to an incident in such a way that only a tenth of them write anything true about it and many of them write quite senseless stuff, how are we to expect of the witnesses in a trial an accurate account of what they saw perhaps weeks or months ago? Sound common sense is aware of these facts from experience. For after all, in life, too, people report on what they have seen almost always incorrectly, and very seldom accurately. You simply have to scent out whether a matter is being reported wrongly or rightly. Hardly a tenth of what people say around you is true, in the strict sense of being a report of what happened in actual fact.

But in the case of this experiment people only half-achieve their aim: they emphasize the half which, if one uses sound common sense, can be left out of the calculation, for the other half is more important. We ought to see that our civilization develops in such a way that more reliance can be placed on witnesses and that people speak the truth more and more. But to achieve this aim we must begin with childhood. And for this reason it is important to give descriptions of what has been seen and heard rather than to practise free composition. Then there will be inculcated in the children the habit of inventing nothing in life or, if need be, in a court of law, but to relate the truth about external physical facts. In this field, too, the will-element ought to be considered more than the intellect. In the case of that audience I took, with the previous discussion of the experiment and the deductions made after it from the statements of the spectators, the aim was to find out how far people are liars. This is quite conceivably understood in an intellectually minded age like our own. But we must convert the intellectually minded age back to the will-element. For this reason we must notice details in education, such as letting the children, once they can write, and particularly after twelve years of age, tell about what they have really seen, and not practise free composition to any great extent in the elementary school,² for it does not really belong to this stage of childhood.

It is further particularly important in a foreign language gradually to bring the children to the point of being able to reproduce in a short story what they have seen and heard. But it is also necessary to give the children orders: “Do this, do that”—and then let them carry these out, so that in such exercises in class the teacher's words are succeeded less by reflection on what has been said or by a slow spoken answer than by action. That is, the will-element, the aspect of movement, is cultivated in the language lesson. These, again, are things which you must think over and absorb, and which you must take especially into account in teaching foreign languages. We have, in fact, always to know how to combine the will-element with the intellect in the right way.

It will be indeed important to cultivate object lessons, but not to make them banal. The child must never have the feeling that what we do in our object lessons is simply obvious. “Here is a piece of chalk. What colour is the chalk? It is yellow.—What is the chalk like at the top? It is broken off.” Many an object lesson is given on these lines. It is horrible. For what is really obvious in life should not be turned into an object lesson. The whole object lesson should be elevated to a much higher level. When the child is given an object lesson he should be transported to a higher plane of the life of his soul. You can effect this elevation particularly, of course, if you connect your object lesson with geometry.

Geometry offers you an extraordinarily good opportunity of combining the object lesson with geometry itself.

You begin, for instance, by drawing on the board a right-angled isosceles triangle (∆ Ð Ð’ C in the given figure) and make the children realize—if you have not already taught it—that AC and BC are the sides which contain the right-angle and AB is the hypotenuse. Then you add a square underneath, adjacent to the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle and divide it by its diagonal lines. (Dr. Rudolf Steiner used colours to mark the various parts.) Now you say to the child: “I am going to cut out this part here (∆ A Ð’ D) and put it to one side of our figure (follow the arrow). Now I take another part (∆ B D F), bring it also to the side, and place it above the other one already removed (follow the arrow). So I have set up a square composed of the two triangles and you can see that it is equal to the square on one of those sides of the original right-angled triangle which contain the right-angle. At the same time it has the size of half the area of the square on the hypotenuse.”

Now you do the same on the other side (follow the arrows to the left) and finally prove that the square on the hypotenuse equals in area the sum of both the squares on the sides of the right-angled triangle which contain the right-angle.

Schopenhauer in his day was furiously angry because the theorem of Pythagoras was not taught like this in the schools, and in his book Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (“The World as Will and Idea”), he says as much in his rather

drastic way: “How stupid school is not to teach things of this kind simply, by placing one part on top of another, and making the theorem of Pythagoras clear by observation.” This only holds, in the first place, of an isosceles triangle, but exactly the same can be done for a scalene right-angled triangle by fitting one part over another as I have explained. That is an object lesson. You can turn geometry into an object lesson. But there is a certain value—and I have often tested it myself—if you wish to give the child over nine a visual idea of the theorem of Pythagoras—in constructing the whole theorem for him directly from the separate parts of the square on the hypotenuse. And if, as a teacher, you realize what is taking place in a geometry lesson, you can teach the child in seven or eight hours at the most all the geometry necessary to introduce a lesson on the theorem of Pythagoras, the famous Pons Asinorum. You will proceed with tremendous economy if you demonstrate the first rudiments of geometry graphically in this way. You will save a great deal of time and, besides that, you will save something very important for the child—which prevents a disturbing effect on teaching—and that is: you keep him from forming abstract thoughts in order to grasp the theorem of Pythagoras. Instead of this let him form concrete thoughts and go from the simple to the composite. First of all, as is done here in the figure with the isosceles triangle, you should put together the theorem of Pythagoras from the parts and only then go on to the scalene triangle. Even when this is practised in pictures in these days—for that happens, of course—it is not with reference to the whole of the theorem of Pythagoras. The simple process, which is a good preparation for the other, is not usually first demonstrated with the isosceles triangle and only then the transition made to the scalene right-angled triangle. But it is important to make this quite consciously part of the aim of geometry-teaching. I beg you to notice the use of different colours. The separate surfaces must be coloured and then the colours laid one on top of the other.

1. (Until the ninth year of age.)
   Music. Painting with drawing.
   Writing. Reading.
   Foreign languages. A little later, arithmetic.
2. (Up to the twelfth year of age.)
   Grammar. (Parts of Speech: Word Teaching.)
   Natural history of the animal kingdom and of the plant kingdom.
   Foreign languages. Geometry.
   Physics.
3. (To the end of the elementary school course, age fourteen.)
   Syntax.
   Mineralogy.
   Physics and Chemistry.
   Foreign languages.
   History.

• 1. See the Table at the end of this lecture.
• 2. Up to fourteen.

I have told you that the teaching of geography can first be begun at the second stage of the elementary school course. We can very well begin it after the age of nine. It remains to arrange it suitably. Wherever the elementary-school teaching of the future is in question—and this even holds good of teaching in senior schools (age 12-18)—we must see that geography embraces far more than it does at present. Geography at the moment retires only too much into the background; in fact, a step-motherly treatment is meted out to it. The achievements of the other subjects ought really in many ways to culminate in geography. And even if I said that the teaching of mineralogy should only begin at the third stage, round about twelve, mineralogy in the form of description and direct observation can be partly interwoven with geography as early as the previous stage. The child can absorb an extraordinary amount of geography between nine and twelve, if only we go about teaching it rightly. It is a question in geography above all of setting out from the child's own knowledge of the face of the earth and the processes which occur on its surface. We try first of all to convey to the child, again artistically, by a kind of picture, the relations of mountain and river and other aspects of his surroundings. In fact, we really work out with the child, in an elementary way, a map of the immediate surroundings in which he has grown up and with which he is familiar. We try to take the child through the difference between the view we have of a landscape if we ourselves stand on the land or look down to it from the air; that is, we show him the transformation into a map of the landscape immediately familiar to him. We try to show him how rivers flow through this stretch of land; that is, we actually draw the river and stream system of the surrounding country on the map into which we gradually transmute our view of the country. And we draw on it the physical features of the mountains and hills. It is a good thing to do this with colours, marking the rivers with blue and the mountains with brown chalk. But then we add to it the other features connected with human life. We mark the different configurations of the district, drawing the child's attention to them like this: “You see that part of the country is planted with orchards;” and we draw the fruit-trees.

We point out to him in addition the presence of needle-trees or pine woods and draw the stretches which are covered with conifers.

We direct his attention to the fact that part of the district is covered with corn and we draw these stretches too.

Then we direct his attention to the fact that there are meadows, which again we draw.

This drawing represents meadows which can be mown. We say so to the child. We also draw in the meadows which cannot be mown but which can be used for pasturing the cattle, which eat the grass and thus it remains short.

And we tell the child that this is pasture land. In this way we make the regional map live for him. It gives him some sort of survey over the economic foundations of the district. Then, too, we point out to him that mountains contain all kinds of things: coal, ore, etc. And we further point out that the rivers are used for shipping the produce or manufactures of one place to another. We thus lead him to deduce therefrom a good deal about the economic implications of the structure of the country. When we have made clear the economic foundations in the form of rivers and mountains, meadows and forest, etc., as far as the child is able to understand our knowledge of these, we draw in, at the corresponding spots, the villages or towns included in the district which we are studying first. And then we begin to point out the connection between the growth and development of villages at definite spots and the wealth of the mountains or the courses of streams and rivers. In short, we try by means of the map to give the child some simple idea of the economic connections between the natural formation of the land and the conditions of human life, and of the difference between the conditions of life in the country and in the towns. As far as the child can understand this aspect we must not fail to pursue it. And last of all we go as far as to show how man, by his labour, overcomes natural conditions. That is: we begin to open the child's eyes to the fact that man lays out artificial rivers in canals, that he builds railways for himself. Then we show how these railways determine the part played by provisions, and so on, and even people, in life. When we have tried for some time to give the child an idea of the economic connection between natural relations and the conditions of human life, we can put the idea thus introduced into the vaster terms of the earth. Here, if we have only taken the first stage correctly, we shall not need to display much pedantry. The pedant will say at this point: “It is natural first to study the geography of the immediate neighbourhood and then, concentric with this, to extend the study on every side.” That, of course, is pedantry. There is no need to enlarge in this way. But when a foundation has been laid for an understanding of the connection between nature and human beings, another aspect can perfectly well be studied. Accordingly, you now pass on to some aspect from which you can develop as well and intensively as possible the economic relations between men and natural conditions. For instance, in the case of our Swabian district, after developing the necessary ideas from familiar stretches of land and indicating to the child, as you go on, the direction you are taking—widening, as it were, his horizon—tell him about the Alps, study the geography of the Alps. You have taught him how to draw maps. You can now extend his drawing of maps by marking for him the line where the Southern Alps touch the Mediterranean Sea. In drawing for him the Northern part of Italy, the Adriatic Sea, etc., you indicate the great rivers and draw their course on the surrounding country. You can go on from this to draw for him the Rhone, the Rhine, the Inn, the Danube, with their tributaries. Then you can draw in the separate arms of the Alpine range. And the child will be extraordinarily fascinated by the sight of the different arms, for instance, of the Alpine range, parted from each other by the course of the rivers. Do not hesitate to mark, all along the blue lines of the rivers, red lines, which are now imaginary lines, up the Rhone from Lake Geneva to its source, and along the Rhine. Then continue the line over the Arlberg Pass, etc., then draw another line along the Drau, etc., dividing the Alps by these red lines drawn from west to east, so that you can say to the child: “You see, along the course of the rivers, I have drawn red lines. The Alps lying between the two red lines are different from those lying above and below.” And now you show him—here the teaching of mineralogy springs from geography—a piece of Jura limestone, for instance, and say: “You see, the mountain masses above the top red line are made of limestone like this, and the mountains beneath the red line are made of different limestone.” And for the mountains lying between, show him a piece of granite, or gneiss, and say: “The mountain range between the two is made of rock like this, which is primary rock.” And he will be tremendously interested in this Alpine structure, which you perhaps explain to him from a regional map showing the lateral perspective as well as the aerial view, and if you make clear to him plastically that the river-courses divide the Alps into limestone and gneiss and slate, and that these stand side by side the whole length of the mountain range from south to north, bending towards the north: limestone mountains—granite mountains—limestone mountains, parted from each other by the river courses. Without any pedantic object lessons the child's range of ideas can be enlarged by many illuminating features relating to this study.

Then you go on—you have already created the necessary elements for this in your nature-teaching—to describe to the child what grows down in the valley, what grows further up, and what grows at the very top. You approach vegetation vertically.

And now you begin to show the child how people establish themselves in the kind of country which is chiefly dominated by the mountain structure. You begin to describe quite vividly a little mountain village situated really high up, you draw this, and tell of the people living there. And you describe a village lying down below in the valley, with roads. Then the towns lying at the confluence of a tributary with its river. Then you describe again, in these wider terms, the relation of human economics to natural formations. You build up, as it were, human economic life out of nature, by pointing out to the child where there is ore, and coal, and how these determine human settlements, etc.

Then you draw for him a district poor in mountains, a flat district, and treat this in the same way. First describe the natural aspects, the constitution of the soil, and show at this early point that different things flourish in a poor soil from a rich soil. You show the internal composition of the soil—this can be done quite simply—in which potatoes grow; the composition of the soil in which wheat grows, in which rye grows, etc. You have already taught the child, of course, the difference between wheat, rye, and oats. Do not hesitate at this early stage to teach him many facts which he will only understand for the time being in a general way, and will only understand more clearly when they are referred to in a later lesson from another point of view. But up to twelve years of age familiarize the child chiefly with economic relations. Make these clear to him. Prefer to show him many points of view in geography rather than a complete picture of the earth at this time. It is, however, important to show that the sea is very vast. You have already begun to draw it with the Southern Alps, where you drew the outline of the Mediterranean Sea. You show the sea by a blue surface. Then draw for the child the outlines of Spain, of France, and then show in your drawing how, towards the west, there lies a great ocean, and gradually open his eyes to the fact that there is America besides. He should get this idea before he is twelve.

You see, if you begin like this with a good foundation, when the child is about twelve, you can expect him to respond easily to a more systematic survey with the five continents, the seas, and with a description—rather briefer, indeed, than the earlier one—of the economic life of these different parts of the earth. You ought to be able to develop all this from the foundations already laid. When—as I said—you have summarized for the whole earth the knowledge of economic life which you have implanted in the child, go on—when you have been teaching history for six months on the lines we have discovered—to talk to the children of the spiritual condition of the people who inhabit the different parts of the earth. But be careful only to introduce this lesson when you have attuned the child's soul to it in some degree by the first history lessons. Then speak, too, about the spatial distribution of the characteristics of the different peoples. But do not speak of the different characters of the individual peoples earlier than this, for, on the basis which I have described, it is at this point that the child brings the greatest understanding to bear on such teaching. You can now describe to him the differences between the Asiatic, the European, the American peoples, and the differences between the Mediterranean races and the Nordic races of Europe. You can then go on to combine geography gradually with history. You will find it a beautiful and enjoyable task when you do what I have recommended chiefly between the age of twelve and the end of the elementary school course; that is, in the end of the fifteenth year. You see that a tremendous amount should be put into the teaching of geography, so that, in fact, the geography lesson is like a resume of much that is learnt. What cannot flow together and merge in geography! Finally, you will even come to a wonderful interplay of geography and history. Here, if you have contributed generously in this way to the geography teaching, you will be able to extract as many things out of it. This, of course, involves a demand on your imaginative powers, on your gift for invention. When you tell the child that here or there a certain thing is done, for instance: “The Japanese make their pictures like this,” try to encourage the child to make something of the same kind in his simple primitive way. Do not omit, even at the beginning, when showing the child the connection between agriculture and human life, to give him a clear idea of the plough, of the harrow, etc., in connection with his geographical ideas. And try especially to make the child imitate the shapes of some of these implements, even if only in the form of a little plaything or piece of handiwork. It will give him skill and will fit him for taking his place properly in life later on. And if you could even make little ploughs and let the children cultivate the school garden, if they could be allowed to cut with little sickles, or mow with little scythes, this would establish a good contact with life. Far more important than skill is the psychic intimacy of the child's life with the life of the world. For the actual fact is: a child who has cut grass with a sickle, mown grass with a scythe, drawn a furrow with a little plough, will be a different person from a child who has not done these things. The soul undergoes a change in doing these things. Abstract teaching of manual skill is really no substitute. And the laying of little sticks and plaiting paper should be avoided as much as is reasonably possible, because these tend to unfit man for life rather than fit him for it. It is far better to encourage the child to do things which are really done in life, than to invent things foreign to it. In arranging the child's geography lessons in the way I have described we make him familiar in the most natural possible way with the fact that human life is made up in different ways from different sides. And at the same time we are dealing with what he can understand perfectly. We describe to him first, from nine to twelve years of age, economic and external aspects in the geography lessons. We then lead him on to understand the cultural conditions, the spiritual conditions of the different peoples. And at this point, saving up everything else for a later time, we gently indicate the relations of right (Rechtsverhältnisse: legal conditions) which prevail among these peoples. But we only let the first and most primitive ideas of this kind glimmer through the picture of economic and spiritual life. For the child cannot yet fully understand conditions of right. If he is acquainted too early with these ideas of conditions of right, the forces of his soul for the whole of life will be impoverished, because conditions of right are a very abstract matter.

It is, in fact, a good thing to employ the geography lesson to bring unity into the rest of teaching. It is, perhaps, precisely for geography the very worst thing that could happen that it has been assigned a place in the severely demarcated time-table, which we do not want in any case.

Our whole attitude from first to last will be one of dealing with the same subject of study for some length of time. We receive the child into school and devote our attention first of all to teaching him to write. That is: we occupy the hours which we claim from his morning in teaching him to paint, draw, write. We do not draw up a time-table according to which we write in the first lesson, read in the second, etc., but we deal for longer periods at a time with things of the same nature. We only go on later to reading, when the child can already write a little. He learns to read a little, of course, while writing. But an even better combination can be effected. For the later subjects, too, we set definite time-limits within which they are to be studied, but not so that we always have a lesson in one subject following on a lesson in another, but so that we keep the children busy for some time at one subject, and then, only when they have been engaged on it for weeks, turn to something else. This concentrates the teaching and enables us to teach much more economically than if we were to allow the appalling waste of time and energy involved in taking one subject first and extinguishing it in the next lesson. But particularly with geography, you can see how it is possible to pass from every imaginable subject to geography. You will not have it laid down beforehand: geography must be taught from nine to ten years of age; but it will be left to you to choose the time suitable for going on, from what you have already taught, to geographical explanations.

This, of course, imposes upon you a great responsibility, but without this responsibility teaching is impossible. A system of teaching which lays down beforehand the teacher's time-table and every imaginable limitation, actually, and, moreover, completely, excludes the teacher's art. And this must not be. The teacher must be the driving and stimulating element in the whole being of the school. Particularly from the way in which I have shown you how to teach geography you should get a correct idea of the right procedure in teaching from first to last. Geography can really be a vast channel into which everything flows, from which in return much can be drawn. For instance, you have shown the child in geography the difference between limestone mountains and primary mountains. You show him the constituents of the primary mountain-rock, granite or gneiss. You show him how they contain different minerals, how one of these is a sparkling substance whose presence is shown by a glitter—the mica. And then you show him all the others that are contained in granite or gneiss. Then you show him quartz and try to evolve the mineral element from rock-substance. Particularly here you can do a great deal towards developing a sense for the association of facts and a united whole. It is much more helpful to show the child granite and gneiss first, and then the minerals of which they consist, than to teach him first of all: granite consists of quartz, mica, feldspar, etc., and only afterwards show him that these are combined in granite or gneiss. Particularly in mineralogy you can go from the whole to the part, from the structure of mountains to mineralogy. And it helps the child.

With the animal kingdom you will proceed in the opposite way, by building it up from the separate animals. We must treat the plant kingdom, as you saw in our discussion in the seminary class,¹ as a whole, and then enter into the details. In the mineral kingdom nature itself often gives us the whole and we can go from this to the part.

But here you must not omit—again connecting mineralogy with geography—to speak about the uses to which the economic resources of nature are put. We shall link up our discussion of the rock-formation of mountain ranges with all the uses of such things as coal for industry. At first we shall only describe it simply, but we shall connect it descriptively with the talk about the mountains.

Nor should we neglect, in describing the forest, for instance, to describe the saw-mill. First we lead over from the forest to the wood, and from the wood to the saw-mill.

We can do a tremendous amount in this direction if we do not begin with a time-table marked out like Regimental Orders, but follow the suggestions of past lessons. We must simply have a good idea of the demands of the child's nature at the age when he begins school up to nine years of age, from nine to twelve, and from twelve to fifteen.

• 1. See R. Steiner, “The Training of Teachers” (“Pädogogisches Seminar”), published in the periodical, The Art of Education (“Erziehungskunst”), Nos. 6 and 7.

We must not close our minds to the fact that the relations of man to his surroundings are far more complicated than the part of which we are always conscious. I have attempted to make clear to you from the most various angles the nature and significance of the unconscious and subconscious soul-processes. And it is especially important in the sphere of education, and of educational method, that man should be educated in a way suited not only to his consciousness, but also to his subconsciousness, to the subconscious and unconscious forces of his soul. In this sense, if we are to be true educators and teachers, we must enter into the subtleties of human nature.

We have learnt that there are three stages of human development traceable between the losing of the first teeth and puberty (seven to nine, nine to twelve, twelve to fourteen). We must realize that particularly in the last of these stages of life the subconscious plays a great part along with consciousness—a part which is significant for the whole future life of the individual.

I should like to make the position plain to you by approaching it from another angle.

Just think how many people to-day travel in electric trains without the ghost of a notion of the real nature of locomotion by electric rail. Just think how many people to-day see even a steam-engine, a railway-engine, steam past them, without any suspicion of the physical and mechanical processes involved in the motion of the steam-engine. But think further, in what relation, in view of such ignorance, we stand as human beings to the surroundings of which we even make a convenience. We live in a world produced by human beings, moulded by human thought, of which we make use, and which we do not understand in the least. This lack of comprehension for human creation, or for the results of human thought, is of great significance for the entire complexion of the human soul and spirit. In fact, people must benumb themselves to escape the realization of influences from this source.

It must always remain a matter of great satisfaction to see people from the so-called “better classes” enter a factory and feel thoroughly ill at ease. This is because they experience, like a shaft from their subconsciousness, the realization that they make use of all that is produced in the factory, and yet, as individuals, have not the slightest intimacy with the processes taking place there. They know nothing about it. When you notice the discomfiture of an inveterate cigarette smoker going into the Waldorf-Astoria tobacco factory without any idea of the process of manufacture to provide him with a cigarette, you can at least notice the satisfaction that human nature shows of being itself worried through its ignorance. And there is at least some pleasure in seeing people who are completely ignorant of the workings of an electric railway, get in and out of it with a slight feeling of discomfort. For this feeling of discomfort is at least the first glimmering of an improvement in attitude. The worst thing is participation in a world made by human heads and hands without bothering in the least about that world.

We can only fight against this attitude if we begin our fight as early as the last stage of the elementary school course, if we simply do not let the child of fifteen or sixteen leave school without at least a few elementary notions of the most important functions of the outside world. The child must leave with a craving to know, an insatiable curiosity about everything that goes on around him, and then convert this curiosity and craving for knowledge into further knowledge. We ought, therefore, to use the separate subjects of study towards the end of the school course as a social education of the individual in the most comprehensive sense, just as we employ geography on the lines already described as in a resume. That is, we should not neglect to introduce the child, on a basis of such physical, natural-history concepts as we can command, to the workings of at least the factory systems in his neighbourhood. The child should have acquired some general idea at fifteen and sixteen of the way a soap-factory or a spinning-mill is run. The problem will be, of course, to study things as economically as possible. It is always possible, if a comprehensive process is being studied, to arrange some kind of abbreviated epitome and very primitive demonstration of complicated processes. I think that Herr Molt [General Managing Director of the Waldorf-Astoria tobacco factory and founder of the Waldorf School as a school for the children of his employees.] will agree with me when I say that one could teach the child, in an economical fashion, the entire factory process for preparing cigarettes, from beginning to end, in a few short sentences. Such shortened instructions of certain branches of industry are of the very greatest benefit to children of twelve to fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. If people at this age were to keep a kind of notebook containing: manufacture of soap, spinning, weaving, etc., it would be an excellent thing. There would be no immediate need to teach him mechanical or chemical technology, but if the child could keep such a notebook he would derive a great deal of benefit from it. Even if he lost the notebook the residue would be there. The individual, that is, would not only retain the knowledge of these things, but, most important of all, he would feel, in going about life and in his own vocation, that he once knew these things, that he once went into them. This influences him, as a matter of fact, and gives him the assurance with which he acts and the self-possession with which the individual effects a footing for himself in life. It is very important for the individual's will-power and his capacity to make decisions. In no profession will you get people with real initiative unless their relation to the world is instinct with the consciousness that, even about things which do not fall within their province, they once acquired a certain knowledge, however elementary. Whether they have remembered it or not, they have the residue, the traces. Granted, we learn a good deal in the average school. But there, in the object lesson, which so often degenerates into platitudes, the child learns many such things, but it probably happens that he does not retain the feeling that he went into a thing with pleasure and felt himself lucky. On the contrary, he feels: I have forgotten what I learnt about that, and a good thing, too. We should never be responsible for producing this feeling in a person. When, later, we go into business and other walks of life, innumerable recollections will flicker up from our subconsciousness if we have been taught in our childhood with the care which I have described. Life to-day is exclusively specialized. This specialization is really fearful, and the excess of it in practical life is chiefly due to the fact that we begin to specialize already at school.

The gist of these remarks might well be summarized as follows: All that the child learns during his school years should ultimately and in some way be so applied that he can everywhere trace its connections with practical human life. Very many features, indeed, which are unsocial to-day could be transformed into social ones if we, at least, could have glimpsed an insight into things not immediately connected with our occupation.

For example, certain things should really be respected by the outside world which are, in fact, respected in spheres still dominated by older, better, if perhaps rather atavistic principles of teaching. In this connection I should like to refer to a very remarkable phenomenon. When we, now elderly folk, went through the senior school in Austria, we had relatively good geometry and arithmetic textbooks. They have disappeared now. A few weeks ago I ransacked all the imaginable bookshops in Vienna to get older geometry books, because I wanted to see again, with my physical eyes, what gave us young fellows such joy in Vienna-Neustadt, for instance: when we got into the first or lowest class of the senior school the lads of the second class always used to come into the corridor the first day and yell: “Fialkowski, Fialkowski! You'll have to pay up tomorrow!” That is, as pupils of the first class we took over the Fialkowski geometry books from the boys of the second class and brought the money for them the next day. I have hunted up one of these Fialkowskis again, to my great joy, because it proves that geometry books written in this older tradition are really much better than the later ones. For the modern books which have replaced them are really quite horrible. The arithmetic and geometry books are very bad. But on thinking back only a little way and taking the generations before us as our models, there were better textbooks then. They nearly all came from the school of the Austrian Benedictines. The mathematics and geometry books had been written by the Benedictines and were very good ones, because the Benedictines are a Catholic order who take a great deal of care that their members receive a good education in geometry and mathematics. The Benedictine feeling in general is that it is really ludicrous for anyone to mount a pulpit and address the people unless he is familiar with geometry and mathematics.

This ideal of unity, inspiring the human soul, must pervade our teaching. In every vocation something of the whole world must be alive. In every vocation there must exist something of its very opposite, things which we believe are almost inapplicable to that vocation. People must be interested in more or less the opposite extreme of their own work. But they will only feel the desire to do this if they are taught as I have described.

It was, of course, just at the time in which materialism reached its final expansion, in the last third of the nineteenth century, and penetrated so deeply into our educational method, that specialization came to be considered very important. Do not imagine that the effect is to make the child idealistic if you avoid showing him in his last years at the school the relation of subjects of school study to practical life. Do not imagine that the child will be more idealistic later in life if, at this time, you let him write essays on all kinds of sentimentalism about the world, on the gentleness of the lamb, on the fierceness of the lion, and so on, on the omnipresence of God in nature. You do not make the child idealistic in this way. You will do far more, in fact, to cultivate idealism itself in the child if you do not approach it so directly, so crudely. What is the real reason why people have become so irreligious lately? Simply because preaching has been far, far too sentimental and abstract. That is why people have become so irreligious—because the Church has respected the divine commandments so little. For instance, there is, after all, a commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” If people respect this and do not say “Jesus Christ” after every fifth sentence, or speak of “divine Providence,” accusations are immediately levelled against them by the so-called Church-minded people, by those who would be happiest hearing “Jesus Christ” and “God” in every sentence. The reverent surrender to the presence of the divine Immanence, which hesitates to be for ever saying “Lord, Lord,” is sometimes considered an irreligious attitude. And if human teaching is pervaded by this modest divine activity, not just a sentimental lip-service, you hear people say on all sides, because they have been wrongly educated: “Ah yes, he ought to speak far more than he does about Christianity.” This attitude, even in teaching, must be clearly kept in mind, and what the child learns at thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen must be given less of a sentimental turn; on the contrary, it must be directed into the channel of practical life. In fact, no child ought really to reach the age of fifteen without being led from arithmetic to a knowledge of the rules of at least the simplest forms of book-keeping. And in this way the principles of grammar and language-teaching should be applied instead of that form of essay which represents human mind by introducing phrases.

Yes, indeed, this “sort” of essay which children have to write between thirteen and sixteen, is often employed as a sort of improved edition of the mentality arising when men gather round their beer in the evening or women have their chitter-chatter at tea-time. Far more attention should be given to applying language teaching to the essay of a business type, to the business letter. And no child should pass the age of fifteen without taking a course of writing specimen practical business letters. Do not say that he can learn this later. Certainly, by overcoming great difficulties, he can learn it later, but the point is: not without overcoming these difficulties. You do the child a great kindness if you teach him to apply his grammar knowledge, his language knowledge, to essays of a business nature, to business letters. In our day there should really be no single individual who has not learnt to write a decent business letter. Certainly he may not have to apply this knowledge in later life, but there should not be one single individual who has not been at one time trained to write a respectable business letter. If the child has become satiated with sentimental idealism from thirteen to fifteen, he will later experience a revulsion from idealism and become a materialist. If, at this early age, he is introduced to the practical side of life, he will also retain a healthy relation to the ideal needs of the soul. But these will just be extinguished by senseless indulgence in them in early youth.

This is extremely important, and in this connection even certain externals, such as the division of subjects, might be of great significance. We shall have to make compromises, as you know, with regard to religious instruction, which will have the disadvantage that the religious element will not come in close connection with the other subjects. But even to-day, if the religious parties would make the same compromises from their side, much might be achieved by the close association of religious instruction with other subjects. If, for example, the teacher in religious instruction condescended now and then to take up some other aspect of study; if, for instance, he were to explain to the child, as an incidental part of his religious teaching, and connected with it, the steam-engine or something of a quite worldly nature, something having to do with astronomy, etc., the simple fact that the teacher of religion is doing this would make an extraordinary impression on the consciousness of the growing children. I am mentioning this extreme case because in the other subjects things must be noticed which unfortunately cannot in our case be observed in the course of religious instruction. We must not have to think, like pedants: Now teach geography, now history, and don't care two pins for anything else. No, we must remember, when explaining to the child that the word “sofa” came from the East during the Crusades, to find room for some explanation of the manufacture of sofas as part of the history teaching. Then we proceed to other more Western fashions of furniture and extract something quite new from the so-called “subject.” This will be a tremendous boon to the growing child, particularly from the point of view of method, for the reason that the transition from one subject to another, the association of one fact with another, has the most beneficent influence imaginable on the development of the spirit, the soul, and even the body. For one can say: A child to whose joy, in the middle of a history lesson, the teacher suddenly begins to talk about the manufacture of sofas, and perhaps from that goes on to discuss designs of Oriental carpets, all so that the child really has a survey of the whole topic, will have a better digestion than a child who simply has a geometry lesson after a French lesson. It will be healthier for the body, too. In this way we can organize the lessons inwardly according to the principles of hygiene. In these days, as it is, most people have all kinds of digestive troubles, bodily indispositions, which come about very often from our unnatural methods of teaching, because we cannot adjust our teaching to the demands of life. The most badly organized in this respect, of course, are (in Germany) the High Schools for Girls (höhere Töchterschulen). And if someone were to study some day, from the point of view of the history of civilization, the connection between women's illnesses and the educational methods used in the Girls' High Schools, it would form quite an interesting chapter. People's thoughts must be directed to things of this kind simply so that, when aware of much that has grown up recently, healthier conditions may be brought about. Above all, people must know that the human being is a complex being, and that the faculties which it is desired to cultivate in him must often be prepared beforehand.

If you want children to gather round you so that you can convey to them in profoundly religious feeling the glory of the divine powers in the world, and you do it with children who come just anyhow from anywhere, you will see that what you say goes in at one ear and out at the other without touching their feelings. But if, after the children have written business letters in the morning, you have them back again in the afternoon and try to regain what was in their subconsciousness while writing the business letters and you then try to instil religious ideas into them, you will be successful, for you yourself will then have created an atmosphere which craves for its antithesis. Seriously, I am not making these proposals to you from the point of view of abstract didactic method, but because they are of enormous importance for life. I should like to know who has not discovered in the world outside how much unnecessary work is done. Business people will always agree if you say: “Take a person employed in some business; he is told to write a business letter to some branch connected with the firm or to people who are to take a matter in hand. He writes a letter; an answer is received. Then another letter has to be written and another answer received, and so on. It is particularly in business life a very deep-seated evil that time is wasted in this way.” The fact simply is, that by this means public life is carried on with colossal extravagance. It is noticeable, too. For if, with nothing but ordinary sound human intelligence and common sense to your credit, you get hold of a modern duplicating book and carbon-copy belonging to a business, you literally endure agonies. And this is not in any way because you feel disinclined to show sympathy for the jargon of words or dislike the interests represented there, but you experience agonies of exasperation that things are written down as un-practically as possible, when the copy-book in question could be reduced to at least a quarter of its size. And this is simply and solely because the last year of elementary school teaching is not suitably organized. For the loss during this year cannot be made good in later life without almost invincible difficulties. You cannot even repair in the continuation schools (Fortbildungsschule) the omissions of this period because the powers which develop in it become choked as with sand and are no longer active later on. You have to reckon with these powers if you wish to be certain that a person will not just superficially concoct a letter with half his mind on it, but that he will have his mind on the work and will draw up a letter with discretion and foresight.

The point in the first stage, when the child comes to school until he is nine, is that we should be well grounded in human nature and that we should educate and teach entirely from that point of view; from thirteen to fifteen the point in drawing up the time-table is that as teachers and instructors we should be rooted in life, that we should have an interest in and a sympathy for life. I had to say all this to you before going on to the ideal time-table, to compare it with time-tables which will concern your teaching as well, because, of course, we are surrounded on all sides by the outside world and its organization.

You will have seen from these lectures, which lay down methods of teaching, that we are gradually nearing the mental insight from which should spring the actual timetable. Now I have told you on different occasions already that we must agree, with regard to what we accept in our school and how we accept it, to compromise with conditions already existing. For we cannot, for the time being, create for the Waldorf School the entire social world to which it really belongs. Consequently, from this surrounding social world there will radiate influences which will continually frustrate the ultimate ideal time-table of the Waldorf School. But we shall only be good teachers of the Waldorf School if we know in what relation the ideal time-table stands to the time-table which we will have to use at first because of the ascendancy of the social world outside. This will result for us in the most vital difficulties which we must therefore mention before going on, and these will arise in connection with the pupils, with the children, immediately at the beginning of the elementary school period and then again at the end. At the very beginning of the elementary school course there will, of course, be difficulties, because there exist the time-tables of the outside world. In these time-tables all kinds of educational aim are required, and we cannot risk letting our children, after the first or second year at school, fall short of the learning shown by the children educated and taught outside our school. After nine years of age, of course, by our methods our children should have far surpassed them, but in the intermediate stage it might happen that our children were required to show in some way, let us say, at the end of the first year in school, before a board of external commissioners, what they can do. Now it is not a good thing for the children that they should be able to do just what is demanded to-day by an external commission. And our ideal time-table would really have to have other aims than those set by a commission of this kind. In this way the dictates of the outside world partially frustrate the ideal time-table. This is the case with the beginning of our course in the Waldorf School. In the upper classes ¹ of the Waldorf School, of course, we are concerned with children, with pupils who have come in from other educational institutions, and who have not been taught on the methods on which they should have been taught.

The chief mistake attendant to-day on the teaching of children between seven and twelve is, of course, the fact that they are taught far too intellectually. However much people may hold forth against intellectualism, the intellect is considered far too much. We shall consequently get children coming in with already far more pronounced characteristics of old age—even senility—than children between twelve and fourteen should show. That is why when, in these days, our youth itself appears in a reforming capacity, as with the Scouts (Pfadfinder) and similar movements, where it makes its own demands as to how it is to be educated and taught, it reveals the most appalling abstractness, that is, senility. And particularly when youth desires, as do the Wandervögel, to be taught really youthfully, it craves to be taught on senile principles. That is an actual fact to-day. We came up against it very sharply ourselves in a commission on culture, where a young Wandervögel, or member of some youth movement, got up to speak. He began to read off his very tedious abstract statements of how modern youth desires to be taught and educated. They were too boring for some people because they were nothing but platitudes; moreover, they were platitudes afflicted with senile decay. The audience grew restless, and the young orator hurled into its midst: “I declare that the old folks to-day do not understand youth.” The only fact in evidence, however, was that this half-child was too much of an old man because of a thwarted education and perverted teaching.

Now this will have to be taken most seriously into account with the children who come into the school at twelve to fourteen, and to whom, for the time being, we are to give, as it were, the finishing touch. The great problems for us arise at the beginning and end of the school years. We must do our utmost to do justice to our ideal time-table, and we must do our utmost not to estrange children too greatly from modern life.

But above all we must seek to include in the first school year a great deal of simple talking with the children. We read to them as little as possible, but prepare our lessons so well that we can tell them everything that we want to teach them. We aim at getting the children to tell again what they have heard us tell them. But we do not adapt reading-passages which do not fire the fantasy; we use, wherever possible, reading-passages which excite the imagination profoundly; that is, fairy tales. As many fairy tales as possible. And after practising for some time with the child this telling of stories and retelling of them, we encourage him a little to tell very shortly his own experiences. We let him tell us, for instance, about something which he himself likes to tell about. In all this telling of stories, and telling them over, and telling about personal experiences, we guide, quite un-pedantically, the dialect into the way of educated speech, by simply correcting the mistakes which the child makes—at first he will do nothing but make mistakes, of course; later on, fewer and fewer. We show him, by telling stories and having them retold, the way from dialect to educated conversation. We can do all this, and in spite of it the child will have reached the standard demanded of him at the end of the first school year.

Then, indeed, we must make room for something which would be best absent from the very first year of school and which is only a burden on the child's soul: we shall have to teach him what a vowel is, and what a consonant is. If we could follow the ideal time-table we would not do this in the first school year. But then some inspector might turn up at the end of the first year and ask the child what “i” is, what “l” is, and the child would not know that one is a vowel and the other a consonant. And we should be told: “Well, you see, this ignorance comes of Anthroposophy.” For this reason we must take care that the child can distinguish vowels from consonants. We must also teach him what a noun is, what an article is. And here we find ourselves in a real dilemma. For according to the prevailing time-table we ought to use German terms and not say artikel. We have to talk to the child, according to current regulations, of Geschlechtswort (gender-words) instead of artikel, and here, of course, we find ourselves in the dilemma. It would be better at this point not to be pedantic and to retain the word artikel. Now I have already indicated how a noun should be distinguished from an adjective by showing the child that a noun refers to objects in space around him, to self-contained objects. You must try here to say to him: “Now take a tree: a tree is a thing which goes on standing in space. But look at a tree in winter, look at a tree in spring, and look at a tree in summer. The tree is always there, but it looks different in winter, in summer, in spring. In winter we say: ‘It is brown.’ In spring we say: ‘It is green.’ In summer we say: ‘It is leafy.’ These are its attributes.” In this way we first show the child the difference between something which endures and its attributes, and say: “When we use a word for what persists, it is a noun; when we use a word for the changing quality of something that endures it is an adjective.” Then we give the child an idea of activity: “Just sit down on your chair. You are a good child. Good is an adjective. But now stand up and run. You are doing something. That is an action.” We describe this action by a verb. That is, we try to draw the child up to the thing, and then we go from the thing over to the words. In this way, without doing the child too much harm, we shall be able to teach him what a noun is, an article, an adjective, a verb. The hardest of all, of course, is to understand what an article is, because the child cannot yet properly understand the connection of the article with the noun. We shall flounder fairly badly in an abstraction when we try to teach him what an article is. But he has to learn it. And it is far better to flounder in abstractions over it because it is unnatural in any case, than to contrive all kinds of artificial devices for making clear to the child the significance and the nature of the article, which is, of course, impossible.

In short, it will be a good thing for us to teach with complete awareness that we are introducing something new into teaching. The first school year will afford us plenty of opportunity for this. Even in the second year a good deal of this awareness will invade our teaching. But the first year will include much that is of great benefit to the growing child. The first school year will include not only writing, but an elementary, primitive kind of painting-drawing, for this is, of course, our point of departure for teaching writing. The first school year will include not only singing, but also an elementary training in the playing of a musical instrument. From the first we shall not only let the child sing, but we shall take him to the instrument. This, again, will prove a great boon to the child. We teach him the elements of listening by means of sound-combinations. And we try to preserve the balance between the production of music from within by song, and the hearing of sounds from outside, or by making them on the instrument.

These elements, painting-drawing, drawing with colours, finding the way into music, will provide for us, particularly in the first school year, a wonderful element of that will-formation which is almost quite foreign to the school of to-day. And if we further transform the little mite's physical training into Eurhythmy we shall contribute in a quite exceptional degree to the formation of the will.

I have been presented with the usual time-table for the first school year. It consists of:

Religion—two hours a week.
The mother tongue—eleven hours a week.
Writing—there is no figure given for the number of hours, for it is included in the mother tongue.

Then:

Local geography—two hours ² a week.
Arithmetic—four hours a week.
Singing and gymnastics together—one hour a week.

We shall not be guilty of this, for we should then sin too gravely against the well-being of the growing child. But we shall arrange, as far as ever it is in our power, for the singing and music and the gymnastics and Eurhythmy to be in the afternoon, and the rest in the morning, and we shall take, in moderation—until we think they have had enough—singing and music and gymnastics and Eurhythmy with the children in the afternoon. For to devote one hour a week to these subjects is quite ludicrous. That alone proves to you how the whole of teaching is now directed towards the intellect.

In the first year in the elementary school we are concerned, after all, with six-year-old children or with children at the most a few months over six. With such children you can quite well study the elements of painting and drawing, of music, and even of gymnastics and Eurhythmy; but if you take religion with them in the modern manner you do not teach them religion at all; you simply train their memory and that is the best that can be said about it. For it is absolutely senseless to talk to children of six to seven of ideas which play a part in religion. They can only be stamped on his memory. Memory training, of course, is quite good, but one must be aware that it here involves introducing the child to all kinds of things which have no meaning for the child at this age.

Another feature of the time-table for the first year will provoke us to an opinion different from the usual one, at least in practice. This feature reappears in the second year in a quite peculiar guise, even as a separate subject, as Schönschreiben (literally, pretty writing = calligraphy). In evolving writing from “painting-drawing” we shall obviously not need to cultivate “ugly writing” and “pretty writing” as separate subjects. We shall take pains to draw no distinction between ugly writing and pretty writing and to arrange all written work—and we shall be able to do this in spite of the outside time-table—so that the child always writes beautifully, as beautifully as he can, never suggesting to him the distinction between good writing and bad writing. And if we take pains to tell the child stories for a fairly long time, and to let him repeat them, and pay attention all the time to correct speaking on our part, we shall only need to take spelling at first from the point of view of correcting mistakes. That is, we shall not need to introduce correct writing, Rechtschreiben (spelling), and incorrect writing as two separate branches of the writing lesson.

You see in this connection we must naturally pay great attention to our own accuracy. This is especially difficult for us Austrians in teaching. For in Austria, besides the two languages, the dialect and the educated everyday speech, there was a third. This was the specific “Austrian School Language.” In this all long vowels were pronounced short and all short vowels long, and whereas the dialect quite correctly talked of “Die Sonne” (the sun), the Austrian school language did not say Die Sonne but Die Sohne, and this habit of talking becomes involuntary; one is constantly relapsing into it, as a cat lands on his paws. But it is very unsettling for the teacher too. The further one travels from north to south the more does one sink in the slough of this evil. It rages most virulently in Southern Austria. The dialect talks rightly of Der Suu; the school language teaches us to say Der Son. So that we say Der Son for a boy and Die Sohne for what shines in the sky. That is only the most extreme case. But if we take care, in telling stories, to keep all really long sounds long and all short ones short, all sharp ones sharp, all drawn-out ones prolonged, and all soft ones soft, and to take notice of the child's pronunciation, and to correct it constantly, so that he speaks correctly, we shall be laying the foundations for correct writing. In the first year we do not need to do much more than lay right foundations. Thus, in dealing with spelling, we do not yet need to let the child write lengthening or shortening signs, as even permitted in the usual school time-table—we can spend as long as we like over speaking, and only in the last instance introduce the various rules of spelling. This is the kind of thing to which we must pay heed when we are concerned with the right treatment of children at the beginning of their school life.

The children near the end of the school life, at the age of thirteen to fourteen, come to us maltreated by the intellectual process. The teaching they have received has been too much concerned with the intellect. They have experienced far too few of the benefits of will- and feeling-training. Consequently, we shall have to make up for lost ground, particularly in these last years. We shall have to attempt, whenever opportunity offers, to introduce will and feeling into the exclusively intellectual approach, by transforming much of what the children have absorbed purely intellectually into an appeal to the will and feelings. We can assume at any rate that the children whom we get at this age have learnt, for instance, the theorem of Pythagoras the wrong way, that they have not learnt it in the way we have discussed. The question is how to contrive in this case not only to give the child what he has missed but to give him over and above that, so that certain powers which are already dried up and withered are stimulated afresh as far as they can be revived. So we shall try, for instance, to recall to the child's mind the theorem of Pythagoras. We shall say: “You have learnt it. Can you tell me how it goes? Now you have said the theorem of Pythagoras to me. The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.”

But it is absolutely certain that the child has not had the experience which learning this should give his soul. So I do something more. I do not only demonstrate the theorem to him in a picture, but I show how it develops. I let him see it in a quite special way. I say: “Now three of you come out here. One of you is to cover this surface with chalk: all of you see that he only uses enough chalk to cover the surface. The next one is to cover this surface with chalk; he will have to take another piece of chalk. The third will cover this, again with another piece of chalk.” And now I say to the boy or girl who has covered the square on the hypotenuse: “You see, you have used just as much chalk as both the others together. You have spread just as much on your square as the other two together, because the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.” That is, I make it vivid for him by the use of chalk. It sinks deeper still into his soul when he reflects that some of the chalk has been ground down and is no longer on the piece of chalk but is on the board. And now I go on to say: “Look, I will divide the squares; one into sixteen, the other into nine, the other into twenty-five squares. Now I am going to put one of you into the middle of each square, and you are to think that it is a field and you have to dig it up. The children who have worked at the twenty-five little squares in this piece will then have done just as much work as the children who have turned over the piece with sixteen squares and the children who have turned over the piece with nine squares together. But the square on the hypotenuse has been dug up by your labour; you, by your work, have dug up the square on one of the two sides, and you, by your work, have dug up the square on the other side.” In this way I connect the child's will with the theorem of Pythagoras. I connect at least the idea with an exercise rooted significantly in his will in the outside world, and I again bring to life what his cranium had imbibed more or less dead.

Now let us suppose the child has already learnt Latin or Greek. I try to make the children not only speak Latin and Greek but listen to one another as well, listen to each systematically when one speaks Latin, another Greek. And I try to make the difference live vividly for them which exists between the nature of the Greek and Latin languages. I should not need to do this in the ordinary course of teaching, for this realization would result of itself with the ideal time-table. But we need it with the children from outside, because the child must feel: when he speaks Greek he really only speaks with the larynx and chest; when he speaks Latin there is something of the whole being accompanying the sound of the language. I must draw the child's attention to this. Then I will point out to him the living quality of French when he speaks that, and how it resembles Latin very closely. When he talks English he almost spits the sounds out. The chest is less active in English than in French. In English a tremendous amount is thrown away and sacrificed. In fact, many syllables are literally spat out before they work. You need not say “spat out” to the children, but make them understand how, in the English language particularly, the word is dying towards its end. You will try like this to emphasize the introduction of the element of articulation into your language teaching with those children of twelve to fourteen whom you have taken over from the schools of to-day.

• 1. Dr. Steiner refers to the beginning of the Waldorf School when the higher classes were from the ages of 12 to 14.
• 2. The word hours is the translation of Schulstunden—50 minutes with intervals between.

If you were to look back at the time-tables which were issued fifty or sixty years ago, you would see that they were comparatively short. A few short sentences summarized the ground to be covered in every school year in the different subjects. The time-tables were at the most two or three or four pages long—all the rest in those days was left to the actual process of teaching itself, for this out of its own powers should stimulate teachers to do the part left to them by the curricula. To-day things are different. To-day the syllabus for the schools has more and more increased. The Official Gazette has become a collection of books. And in this book there is not only a suggestion of what is required, but there are all kinds of instructions as to how things should be taught at school. That is, in the last decades people were on the way to letting State legislation swallow up the theory of education. And perhaps it is an ideal of many a legislator gradually to issue as “Official Publication,” as “Decrees and Regulations” all the material formerly contained in old literary works on pedagogy. The Socialist leaders quite definitely feel this subconscious impulse—however ashamed they may be to admit it; their ideal is to introduce in the form of decrees what was until recently common spiritual property even in the sphere of education.

For this reason those of us here who wish to preserve the educational and teaching system from the collapse which has overtaken it under Lenin—and which might overtake Central Europe—must approach the curriculum with a quite different understanding from that in which the ordinary teacher approaches the Official Gazette. This, even in the days of the monarchy and in the days of ordinary democratic Parliamentarianism, he has solemnly studied, but he will study it with feelings of greater obedience if it is sent to his house by his Dictator-Comrades. The potential tyranny of socialism would be felt quite particularly in the sphere of teaching and education. We have had to approach the curriculum differently.

That is, it has been incumbent on us to approach this curriculum with an attitude of mind which enabled us really to create it for ourselves at every turn, so that we learnt to tell the needs of all children at any age. Let us put side by side this ideal curriculum and the curriculum at present in use in other schools of Central Europe. This we shall do and we shall have prepared ourselves thoroughly for this estimate if we have really assimilated into our feelings all that we should absorb on the way to an understanding of a curriculum.

Here, again, is a very important aspect which is falsely estimated in these days in official pedagogy. I concluded my last lecture¹ with a direct talk on the “Morality of Educational Theory;” the moral tendencies which must be the basis of all pedagogy. It will only result in the practice of teaching if the many examples given in modern books on didactics are ignored. These speak of “object lessons.” They are quite sound, and we have referred to the way in which they should be conducted. But we have constantly had to emphasize the fact that these object lessons should never become trivial, that they should never exceed a certain limit. This eternal cross-questioning of the child on self-evident things in the form of object lessons simply extends a pall of weariness over the whole of teaching, and this should not be. And it robs teaching of precisely what I emphasized at the end of my last lecture² as so necessary: the cultivation of the child's imaginative faculty or the faculty of fantasy. If, for the sake of giving an object lesson, you discuss with the children the shape of any cooking utensil you like to choose, you undermine his imagination. If you describe the shape or origin of a Greek vase, you may do more for his understanding of what he finds around him in daily life. Object lessons, as given to-day, literally stifle the imagination. And you do not do amiss in teaching if you simply remember to leave many things unspoken, so that the child is induced to continue working with his own soul-force on what he has learnt in the lesson. It is not at all a good thing to want to explain everything down to the last dot on the “i.” The child simply leaves the school feeling that he has learnt everything already, and looking out for other things to do. Whereas if you have sown his imagination with seeds of life he remains fascinated by what the lesson offered him and is less ready to be distracted. That our children to-day are such rough tomboys is simply due to the fact that we go in for far too much false object teaching and too little training of the will and the feelings.

But in still another respect we really need to identify ourselves quite inwardly in our souls with the curriculum.

When you receive a child in the first years at the elementary school he is quite a different being from the same child in the last years of the school course. In his first years he is still very much immersed in his body, he is still very much part of his body. When the child leaves school you must have enabled him to cling no longer to his body with all the fibres of his soul, but to be independent of his body in thinking, feeling, and willing. Try to penetrate rather more deeply into the nature of the growing being and you will find, relatively speaking, particularly when the children have not been spoilt in their very first years, that they still have very sound instincts. They have then not acquired the craving to stuff themselves with sweets and so on. They still have certain sound instincts with regard to their food, as, of course, the animal too, because he is still very much dominated by his body, has very good instincts in the matter of his own nourishment. The animal, just because he is limited to his body, avoids what is hurtful to him. The animal world is not likely to be overrun by any evil like the spreading of alcoholic consumption in the human world. The spread of evils such as alcohol is due to the fact that man is so much a spiritual being that he can become independent of his bodily nature. For physical nature, in its reasonableness, is never tempted to become alcoholic, for instance. Comparatively sound food instincts are active in the first years at school. These cease in the interests of human development with the last years of school life. When puberty comes upon the individual he loses his food-instincts; he must find in his reason a substitute for his earlier instincts. That is why you can still intercept, as it were, the last manifestations of the food and health instincts in the last school years of the growing being. Here you can still steal a march on the last manifestations of the sound food-instincts, of the instinct of growth, etc. Later you can no longer find an inner feeling for the right care of food and health. That is why particularly the last years of the elementary school course should include instruction in nourishment and the care of personal health. Precisely in this connection object lessons should be given. For these object lessons can reinforce the fantasy or imagination quite considerably. Put before the child three different substances; place these before him, or remind him of them, for he has, of course, already seen them: any substance which is composed primarily of starch or sugar, a substance composed primarily of fat, a substance composed primarily of albumen. The child knows these. But remind him that the human body owes its activity primarily to these three constituents. From this explain to him in his last years of school the secrets of nutrition. Then give him an accurate description of the breathing and enlarge on every aspect of nutrition and breathing connected with the care of personal health. You will gain an enormous amount in your education and teaching if you undertake this instruction precisely in these years. At this stage you are just in time to intercept the last instinctive manifestations of the health and food instincts. That is why you can teach the child in these years about the conditions of nutrition and health without making him egoistic for the rest of his life. It is still natural to him to satisfy instinctively the conditions of health and nutrition. That is why he can be talked to about these things and why they still strike a chord in the natural life of the human being and so do not make him egoistical. If the children are not taught in these years about matters of nutrition and health they will have to inform themselves later from reading or from other people. What the child learns later, after puberty, about matters of nutrition and health, makes him egoistic. It cannot but produce egoism. If you read about nutrition in physiology, if you read a synopsis of rules about the care of the health, in the very nature of the case this information makes you more egoistic than you were before. This egoism, which continually proceeds from a rationalized knowledge of how to take personal care of oneself, has to be combated by morality. If we had not to care for ourselves physically we should not need to have a morality of the soul. But the human being is less exposed to the dangers of egoism in later life if he is instructed in nutrition and health in his last years at the elementary school, where the teaching is concerned with questions of nutrition and health rules, and not with egoism—but with what is natural to man.

You see what very far-reaching problems of life are involved in teaching a particular thing at the right moment. You really provide for the whole of his life if you teach a child what is right at his particular age. Of course, if one could imbue children of seven or eight with precepts of nutrition, with precepts of health, that would be the best way of all. They would then absorb these rules of nutrition and health in the most unegoistic way, for they are hardly aware at that moment that the rules refer to themselves. They would see themselves as objects, not as subjects. But they cannot understand it so early. Their power of judgement is not yet sufficiently developed to be able to understand it. For this reason you cannot take rules for nutrition and health at this age, and you must save them up for the last school years, when the fire of the inner instinct of food and health is already dying down, and when, in contrast to these dying instincts, there has already emerged the power to comprehend what comes into consideration. At every turn it is possible to intermingle for the older children some reference to rules of health and nutrition. In natural history, in physics, in the lessons which expand geography to its full scope, even in history lessons, every moment lends itself to an opportunity of instruction in dietetics and health. You will see from this that we do not need to accept it as a subject in the school time-table, but that much of our teaching must contain such vitality that it absorbs this with it. If we have a right feeling for what the child is to learn—then the child himself, or the community of children in school, will remind us every day of what we have to introduce into the rest of our teaching. And for this purpose we have to cultivate and practise, because we are teachers, a certain alertness of mind. If we are drilled as specialists in geography or history we shall not develop this mental alertness, for then we are exclusively concerned, from the beginning of the history lesson to the end of the history lesson, with teaching history. And then there can come into play those extraordinarily unnatural conditions whose injurious effects on life are not by any means fully appreciated.

It is profoundly true that we do the human being a service, and one that discourages his egoism, when we teach him the rules of dietetics and health, as I have explained, in the last years at the elementary school.

But here, too, it is possible to refer to many aspects which permeate the whole of teaching with feeling. And if you attach a certain amount of feeling to every step of your teaching, the results at which you are aiming will persist throughout life. But if in the last years at the elementary school you only teach things of interest to the reason, to the intellect, very little lasting impression will be made. You will have to permeate your own self with feeling whenever you give something to the children in the years from twelve to fourteen. You must try to teach, not only graphically, but with vivid feeling, geography, history, natural history, in the last school years. Imagination or fantasy is not enough without feeling.

Now in actual fact the curriculum for the elementary school (aged seven to fourteen) falls into three distinct periods which we have traced: first, up to nine years of age, when we introduce to the growing child chiefly conventionalities, writing, reading; then up to twelve, when we introduce to him the uses of this conventionality, and on the other hand to all learning based on the individual power of judgement. And you have seen that into this school period we put the study of animals, and nature-study, because the individual at this stage still has a certain instinctive feeling for the relationships here involved. I laid down lines for you on which to develop, from the cuttle-fish, the mouse, the lamb, and the human being, a feeling of the relationship of man with the whole of the world of nature. We have taken great pains, too—and I hope not in vain, for they will flower and come to fruition in the teaching of botany—to develop man's relation to the plant world. These ideas of things must be rooted in feeling during the middle period of the elementary school course, when the instincts are still alive to this feeling of intimacy with the animals, with the plants, and when, after all, even if the experience never emerges into the ordinary light of reasoning consciousness, the child feels himself now a cat, now a wolf, now a lion or an eagle. This identification of oneself now with one animal, now with the other, only occurs up to about the age of nine. Before this age it is even more profound, but it cannot be used, because the power to grasp it consciously is non-existent. If children are very precocious and talk a great deal about themselves when they are still only four or five, their comparisons of themselves with the eagle, with the mouse, etc., are very common indeed. But if we start at the ninth year to teach natural history on the lines I have suggested, we come upon a good deal of the child's instinctive feeling of relationship with animals. Later this instinctive feeling ripens into a feeling of relationship with the plant world. Therefore, first of all the natural history of the animal kingdom, then the natural history of the plant kingdom. We leave the minerals till the last because they require almost exclusively the power of judgement. So it is in accordance with human nature to arrange the curriculum as I have suggested. The intermediate school period, from eight to eleven, presents a fine balance between the instincts and the powers of discernment. We can always assume that the child will respond intelligently if we rely on a certain instinctive understanding, if we are not—especially in natural history and botany—too obvious. We must avoid drawing external analogies particularly with the plant world, for that is really contrary to natural feeling. Natural feeling is itself predisposed to seek psychic qualities in plants; not the external physical form of man in this tree or that, but soul-relations such as we tried to discover in the plant system.³

And the actual power of discernment, the rational, intellectual comprehension of the human being which can be relied on, belongs to the last school period. For this reason we employ precisely the twelfth year in the child's life, when he is gravitating in the direction of the power of discernment, for merging this power of judgement in the activities still partly prompted by instinct, but already very thickly overlaid with discerning power. These are, as it were, the twilight instincts of the soul, which we must overcome by the power of judgement.

At this stage it must be remembered that man has an instinct for gain, for profiteering, for the principle of discount, etc., which appeals to the instincts. But we must be sure to impose the power of discernment very forcibly upon this, and consequently we must use this stage of development for studying the relations existing between calculation and the circulation of commodities and finance, that is, for doing percentage sums, interest sums, discount sums, etc.

It is very important not to give the child these ideas too late, for that would really be appealing to his egoism. We are not yet reckoning on his egoism if we teach him at about the age of twelve to grasp to some extent the principle of promissory notes and so on, commercial calculations, etc. Actual book-keeping could be studied later; this already requires more intelligence. But it is very important to bring out these ideas at this stage. For the inner selfish appetite for interest, bills of exchange, promissory notes, and so on, is not yet awake in the child at this tender age. These things are more serious in the commercial schools when he is older.

You must absorb these facts quite completely into your being as instructors, as teachers. Try not to do too much, whatever your inclination may be, let us say, in describing plants. Try to teach about plants so that a great deal is left to the child's imagination, that the child can still imagine for himself, in terms of his own feeling, the psychic relations prevailing between the human soul and the plant world. The person who enthuses too freely on object lessons does not know that there are things to be taught which cannot be studied externally. And when people try to teach the child by object lessons things which ought only to be taught through moral influence and through the feelings, this very object teaching does him harm. We must never forget, you see, that mere observation and illustration are a very pronounced by-product of the materialistic spirit of our age. Naturally, observation must be cultivated in its proper place, but you must not apply the method when it would only spoil the intimate relation between the child and the world in the sphere of his imaginative mind.

• 1. See Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Pädagogik, Lecture 14.
• 2. Ibid.
• 3. See The Art of Education (“Erziehungskunst”), No. 7; Rudolf Steiner, The Training of Teachers (“Pädagogisches Seminar”).

This ends the lectures of Rudolf Steiner on 5th September, 1919.

On the following day he sketched the teaching aims in the different subjects, at the different ages, in the different classes; he indicated the subjects which could be connected in practice.

In concluding this fortnight's work for teachers Rudolf Steiner made the following remarks:

“I should now like to bring these observations to a close by reminding you of what I should like you to take to heart: that is, to keep to four principles:

“Firstly that the teacher in general and in detail, in the general spiritualizing of his profession and in his manner of uttering individual words, of stating individual ideas, of creating every single feeling, reacts on his pupils. Remember that the teacher is a person of initiative, that he must never be slack; but must put his whole being into what he does in school, in his behaviour with the children. That is the first thing: The teacher must be an individual of initiative in general and in detail.

“The second is that as teachers we must take an interest in everything in the world and everything that concerns people and mankind. As teachers we must be interested in all worldly and all human matters. To keep ourselves aloof on any occasion from anything of possible interest to man—if we were to do this as teachers, it would be greatly to be deplored. We ought to be able to take an interest in the biggest and smallest matters that concern the individual child. That is the second thing: The teacher must be interested in every aspect of the world's life and human life.

“And the third thing is: The teacher must be an individual who never strikes a bargain with untruth. The teacher must be profoundly and inwardly true, he must never make a compromise with untruth, otherwise we should see falsehood coming into our teaching by many and devious channels, especially method. Our teaching will only bear the stamp of truth if we are ourselves unfailingly intent on aspiring to truth.

“And then something easier said than done, but which is also a golden rule for the teacher's work: The teacher must not dry up and not become soured; he must have an un-withered, fresh disposition of the soul. He must not get dry, and he must not get sour. To the very contrary is what the teacher must aspire.

“And I know that if you have absorbed properly into your souls the vision of the task which we have elucidated this last fortnight from the most various angles, what lies apparently far beyond your grasp will come very near to you in your teaching by this detour through the world of feeling and will. I have not said anything in this last fortnight which cannot be of direct practical use to your teaching if you allow it to ripen in your souls. But the Waldorf School will be dependent on your real inner response to the things which we have studied here together and to their activity in your soul.

“Remember the many things which I have tried to explain so that the human being should be understood, particularly the growing being, from a psychological point of view, and if you are at a loss how to introduce this or that point into your lessons, or at what juncture, you will always find inspiration from what has come up for discussion here, if you have remembered it sufficiently. Naturally a great many things ought to be repeated much oftener, but I have no desire to turn you into teaching machines, but into free, independent, individual teachers. It is in this sense that I have addressed you this last fortnight. The time, of course, has been so short that I have had to appeal to your generous, sympathetic participation.

“But you must think ever and again over the suggestions which have been made towards understanding man, and in particular the growing child. In all questions of method they will be useful to you.

“You see, when you and I look back on our thoughts during this last fortnight, however different our impulses have been, our thoughts have met. I myself—I can assure you—shall often look back. This Waldorf School weighs very heavily to-day on the hearts of the people concerned in initiating and organizing it. This Waldorf School must succeed. Much will depend on its success. Its success will furnish, as it were, a proof of much that we represent in spiritual development.

“If I may now say a few personal words in conclusion. I should like to say this: For me personally this Waldorf School will be a true child of care. My thoughts and cares will be continually returning to this Waldorf School. But if we realize the full gravity of our position we shall be able to work really well together. Let us be particularly faithful to the thought that fills our hearts and minds: that with the spiritual movement of the present day there are also united the spiritual powers of the living universe. If we trust in these good spiritual powers they will pervade our life and inspire it, and we shall find ourselves able to teach.”

In this translation an intimate conversational style has been preserved in order to convey as far as possible some idea of the local colour and scene at the time the lectures were held.

The occasion was the opening of the Waldorf School, Stuttgart—the first school to be started by Dr. Steiner. And in these lectures he was to instruct those who aspired to be teachers under this new system. As far back as 1907 he had given his views in lectures to the public and in printed books, but his proposals had not materialized until 1919.

In that year, thanks to the initiative and financial help of Herr Molt, the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria Tobacco Factory at Stuttgart, a school had been built. At the inauguration, Dr. Steiner gave three parallel courses of instruction, one called Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Pädagogik dealing with the Theory of Education on the basis of the entire human being. It is quoted frequently in this volume, but has not yet been published in English. These lectures were followed every morning by the ones now given in this book. In the afternoon came the third series as a sort of practical seminary (the English publication is being prepared).

It seems, therefore, more consistent with the intimate relationship existing between the lecturer and his audience to translate the original text in the frank and homely style in which Dr. Steiner dealt with the questions put to him, omitting a few paragraphs which have no bearing at all outside Germany.

It is only through the public-spirited generosity of Frau Dr. Steiner that these lectures have now come into the hands of the public. They appeared in book form in the original German in 1933 and 1934. Until that time they had been kept in the custody of a few teachers to guide them in their work.

After the opening of the Waldorf School, news of its rapid success soon reached English and American Educationalists, and in 1922, upon the invitation of the Educational Union for the Realization of Spiritual Values, Dr. Steiner lectured at Stratford-on-Avon and Oxford, and on Shakespeare's birthday gave the inaugural lecture at Stratford-on-Avon.

In that year he spoke at several places in England and gave a course of lectures at Ilkley in 1923.

Dr. Steiner died in 1925, but interest in his life's work is increasing, and the result can be seen especially at the Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland.

But it is increasing also in America and other English-speaking countries. Schools are starting and are already promising good results.

The Goetheanum, Dornach, is the recognized centre of all Dr. Steiner's activities, and its educational agency in England is the Rudolf Steiner Educational Union.

The Rudolf Steiner Educational Union has been formed for the co-ordination and representation of educational work on the lines laid down by Rudolf Steiner.

The offices in England are at 54 Bloomsbury Street, London, W.C.I.

At the end of this volume will be found a short description of those translations into English of Dr. Steiner's Educational works now available. These and other works by Rudolf Steiner are procurable from the Rudolf Steiner Educational Union.

THE EDITOR

A question concerning the pictures used for sounds and letters—for example, the f in fish, mentioned in the first lecture of Practical Advice to Teachers, which was given in the morning.

RUDOLF STEINER: One must find such things, these pictures for example, for oneself. Don’t rely on what other people have already done. Put your own free, but controlled, imagination to work, and have faith in what you find for yourselves; you can do the same thing for letters that express motion, the letter s for example. Work it out for yourselves.

A question about the treatment of melancholic children.

RUDOLF STEINER: The teacher should view the melancholic child in this way: melancholic tendency arises when the soulspirit of the human being cannot fully control the metabolic system. The nerve-sense human is the least spiritual part of a human being—it is the most physical. The least physical part is the metabolic human. The spiritual human is most firmly rooted in the metabolic organism, but nevertheless, it has realized itself least of all within it. The metabolic organism must be worked on more than any other. Thus, when the metabolic presents too many hindrances, the inner striving toward spirit is revealed in a brooding temperament.

When we deal with a melancholic children, we should try to arouse an interest in what they see around them; we should act, as much as possible, as though we were sanguine, and characterize the world accordingly. With sanguine children, on the other hand, we must be serious, with all inner earnestness, giving them clear strong pictures of the external world, which will leave an impression and remain in their minds.

Spirit has entered most into human beings in the nerve-sense system;⁴ and spirit has entered least into the metabolic; spirit has the strongest tendency to penetrate into and to be absorbed by the nerve-sense system.

A question about school books.

RUDOLF STEINER: You will have to look at those commonly used. But the less we need to use books the better. We only need printed books when the children have to take public examinations. We have to be clear about how we want to reach our goal in education. Ideally we should have no examinations at all. The final exams are a compromise with the authorities. Prior to puberty, dread of examinations can become the driving impulse of the whole physiological and psychological constitution of the child. The best thing would be to get rid of all examinations. The children would then become much more quick-witted. The temperament gradually wears down its own corners; as the tenth year approaches the difference in temperaments will gradually be overcome. Boys and girls need not be separated; we only do this for the benefit of public opinion. Liaisons will be formed, which need not worry us, although we will be criticized for it. As long as the teacher has authority the teaching will not suffer.

Specialty teachers will be needed for the art subjects, which work on the will, and also for languages, which are taught apart from the Main Lesson. The subjects that the class teacher brings belong together as a whole, and the class teachers can base their work very largely on this unity. In all teaching they will work especially on the intellect and on the feelings.⁵ The arts, gymnastics, eurythmy, drawing, and painting, all work on the will. The teacher goes along in the school with the class. The teacher of the highest class (the eighth grade) then begins again with the lowest (the first grade).

• 4. 4. That is, as free spirit, not absorbed in physical processes. On this important distinction see The Foundations of Human Experience.
• 5. The German word is Gemüt, which has no exact English equivalent. It expresses “the feeling mind” in the medieval sense—the mind coming from the heart, permeated with feeling, as expressed in an old poem: God be in my head, And in my understanding; God be in mine eyes, And in my looking; God be in my mouth, And in my speaking; God be in my heart, And in my thinking God be at mine end, And at my departing. Anon. From a Sarum Primer of 1558.