The Rudolf Steiner Archive

A teacher asks Dr. Steiner to begin the meeting with a short speech.

Dr. Steiner asks about gymnastics class.

A gymnastics teacher: We tried teaching at the same time in the same room. We could just do it with the third grade, but it was completely impossible with the sixth grade. Because of the size of the gymnasium, we were unable to keep the two classes under control. We do not think there is any advantage in continuing in this way. In addition, we also need the gymnasium for teaching eurythmy some of the time.

A teacher: We do not yet have an instrument for the new small eurythmy room.

Dr. Steiner: That is only temporary.

A eurythmy teacher: The new eurythmy room is too small for some of the classes, which is why we have to use the gymnasium.

Dr. Steiner: The so-called “little eurythmy room” is large enough. It is not a little room, it is a large hall. Anything larger would be too large for eurythmy. It is not very fruitful to teach eurythmy in an enormous room. That would certainly not be fruitful.

The fact is that you need the gymnasium so much that eurythmy cannot be taught there. It was conceived as a gymnasium and thus should be used to hold gymnastics class. Where else could you teach it?

Concerning the first two grades, there is not much we can do for now. In the future, though, gymnastics is actually too much for the first two grades. Instead, they should have some supervised play. We should begin with such supervised games as soon as we have a little breathing room, so that in the third grade a transition can be made from games to actual gymnastics. The children need real movement.

The gymnastics teacher: Without increasing the number of hours, we could include the first and second grades by giving them only one hour of instruction.

Dr. Steiner: The third grade has two hours.

How are things with eurythmy in the various grades?

A eurythmy teacher: The first through fifth grades have one hour each; the sixth through eleventh grades, two.

The gymnastics teacher: Due to the large number of classes in the tenth and eleventh grades, we had to move one of the gymnastics classes into the time allocated for shop.

Dr. Steiner: Gymnastics loses less than shop if one hour is dropped. We could talk about it if the question was how to give a complete education without any manual training. That seems preferable to me since the children have a quiet form of gymnastics in their shop class. We have arranged the schedule so that the gymnastics does not adversely affect the periods following, haven’t we?

A teacher: We could arrange to have a games period.

Dr. Steiner: We have no one to teach it, so we can hardly consider that now. It will not be possible to decrease the teaching load until the end of this school year.

The gymnastics teacher: We are certainly not concerned with an overburdening.

Dr. Steiner: Fifteen hours are enough. If you teach fifteen hours, then you need to give two or three hours per day, and that is a lot for gymnastics.

The gymnastics teacher: We want to find a way.

Dr. Steiner: That is true. Nevertheless, you must take the following into consideration. In a school such as ours, we need to develop gymnastics class in a certain way, but that can happen only over time. Next year we may well be able to focus on developing gymnastics for the twelfth grade. At present, we treat it as only a stepchild. We will need to work together on that.

I think teaching gymnastics will present a number of difficulties for you as our Waldorf School develops. The main thing is that, beginning with a particular grade, the purpose of gymnastics will be conscious exercise for strengthening the human organism, a kind of hygienic whole-body massage of the human organism. I think you need to orient yourself more toward the upper grades.

In the lower grades, I am considering having the women work on the games. The authority of the gymnastics teachers should not suffer by first having them play with the children. They should represent what actually occurs in gymnastics. The children should not feel that their games teacher is now teaching gymnastics to them. I am, of course, not belittling games. A female games teacher in the first and second grades would not go on to gymnastics. The children would get a distorted feeling if we don’t make such a change. What I mean with games is movement.

What is important now is to find a replacement for Mrs. Baumann during her illness. Mrs. Fels should take over half the eurythmy classes and Mrs. Husemann, the other half. Mrs. X. would have the more mature students because she is older and more mature herself.

Marie Steiner: Mrs. X. first had quite a shock.

Dr. Steiner: I do not want Mrs. Y. to give the entire instruction, because I want the older children to have a more mature person.

A teacher: Tittmann will be free only after the first of April.

Dr. Steiner: Then there is nothing we can do other than wait. I am really sorry that this situation must continue. I thought it was very difficult that you had to do the French class immediately after art.

A teacher: There is nothing we can do about that.

Dr. Steiner: It is difficult, but there is nothing we can do. Twentyfive hours is too much, but we have to wait.

A teacher: We will lose eight teaching days due to the earlier close of school.

Dr. Steiner: We don’t need to cling to our schedule as though it were a great treasure. The exact amount of material per week is not so important.

A teacher: Should we do a longer book in tenth-grade French?

Dr. Steiner: You could use a different book. They should complete at least one book, even if they do not read a lot. Have you thought of something? I think you could choose something shorter that could be completed in the remaining two and a half months. In a class like that, it might be best to read a biography. There is a nice little book called La Vie de Molière.

Marie Steiner: Enfant célèbre.

Dr. Steiner: I would particularly recommend a biography.

A teacher: We read Livius in Latin. Next we will do Somnium Scipionis. I also included Horace, and we will read two or three odes and learn them from memory.

Dr. Steiner: You will certainly take up Cicero?

A teacher: In tenth-grade English, we completed The Tempest, and now we are doing excerpts from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

Dr. Steiner: I would prefer that, instead of excerpts, you read the whole book. Making a selection for English is not easy. As soon as you move past Shakespeare, things become difficult.

It may be good to read Macaulay in the tenth grade, but that depends upon how you treat it. This is the age of life where children should learn to characterize in a broad and comfortable way. Biographies, for example Luther’s, are very useful for children at the age of fifteen. They are not very appropriate later, as the children will find them boring. In contrast, I think it would be good to read Carlyle and Emerson in the eleventh and twelfth grades. You might recommend Walter Scott for reading by themselves, but Emerson and Carlyle would be books for the class. Emerson has such short sentences.

A teacher asks about a newly enrolled child.

Dr. Steiner: She could go into the ninth grade. In foreign languages, she would be at the very bottom, but that is not so bad. You should, however, make her acceptance dependent upon her having some place to live, but you will need to do that with some tact. You might even consider trying to find good living quarters for her yourself.

We now have two children of workers at Dornach in the eighth grade, and the tuition has to be paid out of the funds for the building. They will have to find their own living quarters, but they will have to be places where we know that the adults pay some attention to such children. The workers at the building are quite connected to these things.

A teacher: If I were a man and had an apartment I would take some children myself.

Dr. Steiner: Now you tell me you are almost a man.

A class teacher: T.M. and O.Nr. need to be separated in the fourth grade.

Dr. Steiner: With such children, much depends upon what they are accustomed to. It will not make much difference in the first half-year, but afterward for sure. They should be separated. (Speaking to the teacher of the parallel class) T.M. would go to you. He is easier to handle. I think it would be best if you took him.

A religion teacher asks if it would be all right if he were to go on a lecture tour.

Dr. Steiner: If you arrange it with the others, there should be no difficulty.

A teacher: We are striving to awaken a religious mood, but there are some problems with many of the children. X. often ruins the class. He does not like such moods.

Dr. Steiner: He certainly does not like moods, but there is nothing to be done. Even worse could occur. You could use his lack of participation to highlight the seriousness of the material.

A teacher asks about a service for the older children.

Dr. Steiner: I will soon arrange for an offering at the Sunday service.

A religion teacher asks another question.

Dr. Steiner: In connection with this question, we need to return to something we have already discussed. It is important that the youth of our Waldorf School talk less about questions of world perspective. The situation is that we need to create a mood, namely, that the teacher has something to say that the children should neither judge nor discuss. That is necessary, otherwise it will become trivial. An actual discussion lowers the content. Things should remain with simply asking questions. The children even in the tenth and eleventh grades should know that they can ask everything and receive an answer. For questions of religion and worldview, we need to maintain that longer. The religion teacher needs to retain a position of authority even after puberty. That is something I mentioned before in connection with the “discussion meetings.” They need to be avoided. If the children put forth questions of conscience, and you answer them, then there is nothing to say against that.

We also need a second thing. The older students often mentioned that we emphasize that the Waldorf School is not to be an anthroposophical school. That is one of the questions we need to handle very seriously. You need to make the children aware that they are receiving the objective truth, and if this occasionally appears anthroposophical, it is not anthroposophy that is at fault. Things are that way because anthroposophy has something to say about objective truth. It is the material that causes what is said to be anthroposophical. We certainly may not go to the other extreme, where people would say that anthroposophy may not be brought into the school. Anthroposophy will be in the school when it is objectively justified, that is, when it is called for by the material itself.

In things such as Parzival, it is already there, so that you will need to direct attention away from symbols rather than toward them. Wagner’s followers in Bayreuth have gone into much more nonsense about symbols than occurs here. We do not do that here. Parzival has to be taught as a man of the world, not a monk. I think this is something I needed to say today. For the children, of course, much is quite difficult.

It would be best if you discussed symbolism as little as possible. Stay with the facts, the historical background, without becoming trivial. Remain with the facts, not symbols.

A teacher asks about the English teachers who had visited the Waldorf School.

Dr. Steiner: Only women came, and they were quite satisfied. I certainly thought we would have to deal with much harsher judgments.

Discipline is much easier in England. When you go into a boys’ school there, you find only well-behaved boys. You might not find that so nice, but if you love discipline, you will find it wonderful. Modern Englishmen, at least in regard to their external behavior, are close to being insolent. Everybody assures you that they get better by the age of fourteen. That is certainly true in Gladstone’s school. I have observed how they go into the dining hall. It’s something that lies in the temperament of the people. The children are quieter there than here.

A teacher: N.G. is here.

Dr. Steiner: I do not want to have anything to do with that family, even indirectly. Besides N.G., I feel sorry for the children.

I am very sorry to have disturbed the harmonious mood. So much occurred that I referred to as the “Stuttgart attitude” following that terrible misfortune. I could not let things pass by without naming names, because things were really catastrophic. I have to say that was the way things had to be. Due to the nature of the problem, I repeatedly needed to put these things in the proper light. I also would have thought, considering the situation, that no one would have thought of doing something like this. It is quite strange how things that outside, in normal life, would not occur at all, blossom so well in this anthroposophical foundation, the foundation of the Waldorf School that should be kept pure. It would be hard to imagine a normal faculty meeting where someone asks the school principal to say something nice. If we have no self-discipline, we cannot move forward. It is very painful for me that things are as they are. Aside from the fact that I have been unable to determine the actual content of the problem, everything is simply swimming around. If only something would move in a particular direction, but everything is simply floating about. I do not know what people are thinking. The mood here is so tense. We need to give some thought to all this. Certainly one task of the Waldorf School faculty is to cease all of this inner comfort. The fact that things are done in the way they are is a part of these nonmethods. It is really too bad for today’s meeting, since a disharmony has now come into it.

In the interest of the Anthroposophical Society, I had to see that the methods that have arisen here since 1919 do not go any further. Something must happen in the near future in the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society. This is an important question, but people will have to think about it. It would be best not to do things in that way, and better if you helped to improve the situation. You can certainly not say that working together does not make sense, and that everyone should work individually. If that principle had been in effect in 1901, there would be no room for us. People worked together until the end of the war. This kind of separation from one another arose only since 1919 when individuals went off to the great tasks that were begun then. That is the reason for what has unfortunately occurred in the Anthroposophical Society, namely, that the Society has divided into a number of cliques. Before, there was some balance that inhibited the formation of such cliques. Now, there are big and little cliques everywhere, and everything is falling apart.

We cannot say everyone should live like a hermit. A harmonious cooperation should arise from the admonitions of our opponents that became so clear through the catastrophe at Dornach. Learn from our opponents! Our opponents know things very exactly, and they know, at least from their perspective, how to take them seriously, more seriously than is done by the Anthroposophical Society. There is a continual demand for something new, as has happened in Dornach. The Society as such needs to become a genuine reality, not simply a bureaucratic list of so-and-so-manythousand people who barely want to know anything about one another. The Society must become a reality, and there is much we can achieve through the Waldorf School if the faculty would stand as an example of harmonious cooperation. Everyone needs to really give something of themselves, and that is where individual activity comes in, namely, that everyone takes interest in each other’s work. It is simply narrow-minded to always seek the error in someone else. If we fall prey to that error, we will cease to be an anthroposophical society. There is certainly no other real example of anthroposophical activity if it is not here in the faculty. If you do not want to become enthusiastic about anthroposophy, then I do not know how it will be possible to save anthroposophy itself. That is really necessary. The catastrophe in Dornach is the culmination of our opponents’ activity. The Waldorf School faculty needs to take on the leadership of anthroposophical behavior. That is what is necessary.

A teacher asks a question.

Dr. Steiner: I would be happy to give you information. What I said recently about the incorrect methods relates to how anthroposophical matters are treated, not to the teaching methods here. What I have to say about that, I have already said. As of this morning, I cannot say that anything special has resulted. I was satisfied with the little I saw this morning. I thought things would come to a good conclusion. It was clearly noticeable, for example, that there is a greater level of seriousness in the higher grades. There is a much better tone in the higher grades. I see nothing to talk about there. I spoke about incorrect methods in connection with the extent of faculty participation in the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society.

(Speaking to a teacher) It would be good if you were careful to leave out the inner school methodology in your considerations until tomorrow.

We will overcome the problems in the school methodology. The Waldorf School has proven what lies in its basic impulse. Individual problems have arisen, but as a whole, the Waldorf School has proven what lies at its basis. We will overcome the problems. Most certainly, we will move forward with the inner methodology. There is something else that comes into question aside from the general anthroposophical aspect. In connection with methodology, we could try to lift everything from the Earth and move it to the moon where we could perfect it. But, that is something we cannot do with anthroposophical activity. We will overcome the problems at the school because that is an isolated area and can remain so.

Everything was present in the discussions with the leaders of the Movement for Religious Renewal. In the lecture I had to give in Dornach on December 30, I directed everything toward anthroposophists, not toward those working for a renewal of religion. 4 That was clear from ten paces away, but it lead to an argument between the anthroposophists and those of the Religious Renewal. There is now a tense mood and a heavy atmosphere. If we leave these things the way they are, the Anthroposophical Society will be destroyed, and other institutions along with it. It is sad that this all occurred directly following the events in Dornach. We should have guarded against that. We need to do something to relieve it. Those anthroposophists who are not involved with the renewal of religion said nothing, but the anthroposophical perspective should have been maintained, but without rancor. You cannot expect the Movement for Religious Renewal to make things easy for anthroposophists. They are taking the cream and leaving the rest, but the Anthroposophical Society needs to stand firm. That is something of concern to everyone. The school should not shine because the faculty has no concern about the Anthroposophical Society. You need to have a strong interest in it.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to share some of my thoughts about my visit to the school, specifically, about the walls. Now that everything here is so new, it is more apparent than before that it is not good for a school to merely have a somewhat lost and not particularly good picture hanging here and there. It is significant that our school does not make a particularly impressive artistic impression.

Of course, we cannot completely fulfill the ideal at this stage, but it seems to me that it would be good to at least have that ideal before us so that we could move toward it, at least in our thoughts, and that in the end we would do something in that direction. I would ask you not to understand what I have to say the way many things have been understood. For instance, when I said that this or that is a difference between eating meat or vegetables and people immediately began to promote vegetarianism as a result.

Accept it as an ideal. Out of our pedagogy itself, what should be the artistic form in our classrooms? We could perhaps extend this from what we find in the schoolrooms to what we find near the schoolrooms on the walls.

There is no doubt that we need some pictures to decorate the schoolrooms. I say this not because I think we need to do this tomorrow morning, but because our guiding principle needs to be what is needed by our pedagogy.

First, we have the lower grades. There, we need a more physical presentation of what we give the children pictorially. That can gradually move into the more artistic, on the one hand, and to more practical activities in life, on the other. Today, I only want to mention some of the main things that we can deepen in the course of time. It is important that where the subjects themselves play the main role in artistic decoration, we have no mechanically created or barren illustrations, but that things be artistically formed. These artistic creations should not be such that they emphasize special opinions or special styles, but more in the direction of what seems to genuinely human.

If we look at the first grade, the main thing would be to decorate the walls with pictures from fairy tales, and when possible, to have them in color. I need to emphasize that if it is not possible to do everything in color, we will need to use some black-and-white reproductions. It is better to have a technically good reproduction than to have some poorly done copy of something. In the first grade we need to have pictures of fairy tales, and in the second, of legends. That is something we need to strictly maintain.

You can imagine the continuous and proper effect that will have upon the children’s feelings. The only thing is that we cannot just take the pictures from picture books. They should be artistically done. It would be beneficial to set this as a task, not in some one-sided painting style, but such that everything has a general human feeling to it.

When we come to the third grade, we must take into account the state of the soul. What we hang on the walls should be what is normally called “still life” pictures of plants and of flowers. Of course, these should not be normal still lifes, but genuine representations of what is living, but not yet feeling. If we bring the children so far that they live into them with their souls, that will be good. We should save representations of the feeling of animals for the next grade because then the child’s soul begins to relate to a portrayal of feeling. Only from that time on do children have a sense that they have feeling in themselves, even though that feeling may be quite dull. Pictures of animals that the children saw earlier in children’s books have an effect such that the child cannot differentiate whether it is a picture of a real cow or a cow made of wood. Before about the age of nine or ten, children cannot differentiate in an inner living way between the picture of a real cow and a cow made of wood. However, at about that age, this capacity to differentiate begins.

In the fifth grade, when the children are ten or eleven years old, what is important is to choose pictures that show groups of people of differing ages, for instance, dancing groups, or, say, a street where people meet one another, so that you can say something to the children about it. You need groups of people so you can talk with the children about what occurs between those people.

We now come to the sixth grade. There, we should have individual human beings. You could have pictures of heads or of the whole person, for example, a person standing in nature, where nature comes to that person’s aid. You could then draw the children’s attention to what a sunny landscape is, or to one in the rain, but there should be a person in it such that the individual person is important. Perhaps a picture of a small lake where someone is rowing.

We have now come to the point where the material itself is less important and where the pictures should move more into the artistic. Here, we need to begin with the most artistic things. We must, of course, recall that if you cannot obtain good copies, then we should have black-and-white pictures. For the age of the children in the seventh grade, it would be good to have Raphael and Leonardo, things that can also remain in the eighth grade. You could divide these between the classes in both grades. What is important is that the children have these pictures in front of them. You should not believe that the proper thing to do is to choose the pictures so that they go in parallel to what is being taught. It is actually quite important that the children have the pictures before they are spoken of in art class. You should speak occasionally about the pictures, but, in general, the child’s eyes should simply be occupied with the artistic aspect of the pictures. Children should first receive only a pure sense impression and know that we consider these pictures particularly beautiful. They have already been properly prepared since they knew that previously the pictures hanging on the walls were primarily important because of their content.

In the following classes, what is important is that you tactfully connect what is artistic with the practicalities of life, so that the children have both perspectives continually in front of themselves. Thus, in the ninth grade, you might have pictures from Giotto or similar things, and in the same class, pictures of other things, more technical, for instance, a meadow or a willow tree, a pine forest, and so forth, but not done artistically, rather, technically. Purely as examples, in the way that you might draw a plan. You could put those on one wall and hang other things on the back wall, for instance, paintings by Giotto. You could also have a star chart in the ninth grade where the various constellations are connected with some figure, with stylized figures of the heavens, as used to be done in star charts.

In the tenth grade, where you are dealing with fifteen and sixteen year olds, you should have pictures by Holbein and Dürer on the artistic side, and on the technical-scientific side, you could have—other things would be possible—a drawing of everything in the sea, all the animals, and so forth. That would have to be drawn appropriately so that it was intellectually instructive, but also had an artistic effect upon the children.

Holbein and Dürer would remain for the eleventh grade, with perhaps the addition of Rembrandt. That would also continue in the following grades. You might also include some older paintings. At that age instruction can go in parallel. Thus, for the eleventh and twelfth grades, Holbein, Rembrandt, and Dürer.

On the technical side in the eleventh grade, you should hang something like a cross-section of the Earth or geological cross-sections or perhaps elevation charts and similar things. Only in the twelfth grade would you have physiological pictures, anatomic charts in addition to Holbein, Dürer, Rembrandt.

That is what we need as an ideal. Things look terrible now, but if you have an ideal before you, at least under some circumstances, you can work in that direction, even if it takes a century. It is better to have a good woodcut than much of what is hanging now. This is what I wanted to say to you about pedagogy. It is certainly necessary that we attend to an exceptionally good treatment of art in our pedagogy, since that definitely belongs to the total picture of the anthroposophical treatment of human progress.

We can say that until the sixteenth century, there was not a sharp contrast between an intellectual and an artistic comprehension of the world. You should remember something that is no longer considered; the Scholastics created their books with a certain architectural art, very consciously, apart from the illuminations. Until the tenth century, there was absolutely no real difference between art and knowledge. Now, children in even the earliest grades are poisoned with purely intellectual material. There is an effect here in our school of something we cannot yet do differently: when teachers use reference books, not only by giving them to the children, but also for their own preparation, the intellectual tendency of such references enters the teacher. The teacher thus becomes a distorted picture of intellectualism.

You could ask, then, how should teachers prepare themselves? When the teacher wants to teach something to the children, he or she learns the material from modern presentations. When I see where teachers get their material for preparation, I would like to put another book alongside the one the teacher is using, a book that is perhaps a century older than the teacher’s. It is not possible to use only books that are centuries old, but it would certainly help in many areas to use books that are a hundred years old along with more modern books on the same subject. Now, if people are teachers, they know what someone like Goethe or some other exemplary person wrote about one work of art or another, or about something in nature. The problem is that no one looks at what people two or three generations ago, at Goethe’s time, wrote about art, but these, along with more modern works, are certainly important. Even today, when we have so many outstanding things, you can gain something by using books that are a century or so old that treat subjects similar to the subjects of more modern works. That is very important. I have often mentioned that, for example, editions of Greek and Latin from the first half of the nineteenth century are like gold in contrast to the brass printed today. The grammar texts that are thirty or forty years old are much better than the modern presentations.

I think we need to take into account that our pedagogy must everywhere counter with a thoroughly artistic activity the rule of intellectualism present throughout modern thinking. We should avoid allowing modern systematic books to affect our teaching. The systematic presentation in modern books is narrow-minded and inartistic. People are ashamed to speak of anything artistic. Modern academics are ashamed to develop their own artistic style or to artistically divide things into chapters. We need to take these things into account in our own preparations.

I would like to take this opportunity, which has arisen from a number of circumstances, to ask you all the following question. During a meeting last night, I again had the feeling that you think preparing is very difficult. Someone said that Waldorf teachers normally sleep only from 5:30 until 7:30 in the morning. Everyone needs to recognize that is much too little. People need to understand that a really enormous amount of time is used to prepare for school. From that, it seems that preparation is difficult. I would like to ask in that regard if it is true that for one reason or another you can go to sleep only at 5:30. I would also like to know if the difficulty lies in the preparation, if it is really so difficult and requires so much time. Of course, that is subjective; nevertheless, I would like to pose this question now, at the beginning of our discussions, and ask you to tell me about it so we can talk about this today or at our next meeting.

Some teachers report about it.

Dr. Steiner: Are there any specific questions about preparation?

A teacher: I usually need a long time. I used Carus for teaching about the skeleton.

Dr. Steiner: The bones of the human being have not changed. You used a book that is a hundred years old, but it is important that you use the easiest sources. This is a case where much help could have been given. The teacher of one class could help the teacher of the following class.

An upper-grades teacher: I do not actually prepare for a specific class. Instead, I read a book about the whole subject I will be teaching. Then, I read an anthroposophical book connected with it, for example, The Riddles of Philosophy, for background on the development of consciousness within the period. I read something that brings me into a mood of that time. For the specific class period, I look for something, perhaps even a small detail, from which I can form the instruction.

Dr. Steiner: That is a very good method, to begin with something you are strongly interested in yourself that brings your soul into movement, so that you make some small discovery. In that way, you will get an idea during the class. You will notice that while you are with the children, things come to you more easily than when you sit and brood by yourself. That will not happen in history and geography until you have taught for a few years. It is particularly important when you are beginning a new period that you really try to form a comprehensive picture of what occurs during the entire period, possibly only in broad outlines, so that you know what is important in that period.

The same teacher later gave Dr. Steiner some additional information when he was visiting the teacher’s class. Dr. Steiner told the teacher that while using that method he actually thought of too many things. He needed to be careful not to overload the students with what he was interested in at the moment.

A teacher: In Latin grammar, I have the feeling it could be organized according to thinking, feeling, and willing, but it falls apart when I do it.

Dr. Steiner: To orient yourself, it would be a good idea, when you have three weeks free, to simply take one author, for instance, Livius, and select some sentences, then study the sentence structure empirically. Someone should do that.

I would like you to pay more attention to developing a certain feeling regarding the Socratic method. I would like you to try to develop a feeling so that you differentiate between what the children can simply repeat and what you should ask them. It is more exciting for the children when you tell them something than when you ask them something they cannot answer. You should not believe you can get the children to say something they cannot know. You should not overdo the Socratic method because you will tire the children too much. You need to develop a feeling for what you can ask, and what you need to say. You need to develop a certain tactfulness. I would now like to hear questions about what is currently going on.

A teacher asks about the school administration. Many things within the administration need to be done by everyone.

Dr. Steiner: This is an awkward problem, but I have given it a great deal of thought. This is so difficult and we can accomplish our intentions only when we carry it out with the general support of the entire faculty, or at least the vast majority of the faculty. On the other hand, the way it is accepted necessarily affects the way it is organized.

First of all, I would ask you to consider what should be included in this new area of organization. There are a large number of operations the person in the school house needs to do. We need to exclude these things since they are connected with the person in the house. Concerning everything in the administration that represents the school to the outside, I would recommend that a small group of three or four people from the faculty take up that work in the future. This group can only work in an alternating fashion, so that they work one after another as individuals, and they should meet with one another only in those cases where a common decision is valuable. In order not to violate our republican constitution, it should be a group. I would ask you to speak your thoughts about this freely and openly, even though you might think what you have to say may contradict this in the broadest sense. I would still ask you to say what you think.

A teacher: There are some things we all know only Y. can do, and other things for which other people are better suited.

Dr. Steiner: I thought that such a small group would always represent the faculty since members would alternate, particularly for limited tasks. This group could do what you just said from case to case, namely, designate one person as capable of one task or another. Nevertheless, there will still be differences of opinion.

A teacher: I think regulating the situation would be a help. It could be very useful for the school.

Dr. Steiner: We could think still further. We would form such a group and the entire faculty would declare itself in agreement when the group decides some member of the faculty should be designated for a particular task. That is what should happen. Preparation for faculty meetings and setting the agenda could also be part of the duties of the head of the administration, but that would make the job rather difficult. It is possible that preparation for the faculty meeting could be one of the tasks of the committee member who has the task of administering the school at the time. It is important to do this in complete harmony with the whole faculty.

A committee of seven teachers had formed concerned with questions of the Anthroposophical Society.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, I now need to ask what the faculty thinks of this committee that formed itself. It is important to find a way of reaching a final resolution of this problem. That committee seems very active, and we could make an assumption that through its efforts to reorganize the Anthroposophical Society, it wanted to prepare itself for administering the school. Of course, if that committee has the complete trust of the faculty, the question can be easily answered.

A teacher proposes expanding the committee.

Dr. Steiner: I only thought that if a group of people was already working with this question, it would be best if that group continued its work because it would save time.

A teacher makes a remark.

Dr. Steiner: You are mixing up two questions. I only wanted to ask who is in that group because I know such a group exists. Apparently that group has worked with these questions and—I must emphasize from the outset that we must do the whole thing harmoniously—the first question I wanted to ask is whether that group has the complete trust of the faculty, so that it can make proposals for a final form. It would be difficult for us to begin from zero today. It would be better, since I will probably be here again soon, if we could answer the question of whether that or an extended group has the full trust of the faculty, so that the group could prepare a proposal for a final resolution of the question for the next meeting. That is the question we need to answer today. I would like to hear what you have to say about this question of trust.

A teacher: This makes an impression that there are first- and second- class Waldorf teachers, but perhaps that feeling is based upon a false assumption.

Dr. Steiner: The fact that a group has formed is their business. Since, however, it has worked with these questions, we could, in the event there is trust in that group, think we could trust them with working out such a proposal. It is more complicated to consider this question in the faculty as a whole than it would be to have a group that has the trust of the faculty consider it. Some teachers agree.

A teacher: I have an awkward feeling about the formation of that group. The people who formed the group are the same ones who are so distracting for the administration.

A teacher: I have noticed that certain groups get together, and when you go by, you hear parts of important conversations. I became uncomfortable with that, and I went to a colleague and said that it was creating cliques. I was quite fearful that the faculty was dividing into those who were more or less active.

Dr. Steiner: That is certainly a problem. The Waldorf School can prosper only if the faculty is in harmony. It is not possible for everyone to find everyone else sympathetic, but that is a personal question and does not belong in the faculty. To the extent that the faculty represents the entire Waldorf School, the prosperity of this school depends upon the inner harmony of the faculty. There is a major difference in whether someone says to someone outside, “You are getting on my nerves,” and when that is said here in the faculty meeting. Here in our meetings and in the administration of the Waldorf School there are only teachers from the Waldorf School, and the difficulties arise due solely to the more democratic constitution of the school. Of course, difficulties do arise. I am certainly against using the terms “first- and second-class” here in the faculty. That would certainly be the beginning of very bad things if something like a first- and second-class of faculty and faculty cliques played a role in our discussions. These are things we must strictly keep out.

Basically, when such a group forms, we need to accept the fact that the group exists and not use it as an occasion to say bad things about it. If there were reason to do that, it would be the start of difficult times in the faculty. As long as the group has formed and exists as such, I would like to again ask to what extent we need to take that group into account. It is perhaps not at all necessary to say anything about that. The question has been posed because it has received an official duty and that group should work on proposals. Barring some misdeed, I do not see that it should have any significance whether it is that group or a completely different small group. The only thing that is important is the usefulness of the group, since the proposal will be presented to the whole faculty and discussed. The only question is one of trust, that is, whether you consider that group capable of making the proposals. When such remarks are made, it is difficult to see that there is even the slightest movement toward forming a faculty. That is something that must not happen. Here we must have only harmony.

A teacher: I have complete trust in the group, but I did want to bring out that there may be colleagues who do not.

Dr. Steiner: When I use the expression, “getting on my nerves,” I mean that one person makes another person nervous. The subject of the group’s work would be how to organize the administration. Thus, you would make them nervous.

A teacher: I do not distrust the group.

Another teacher: I do not feel there is a faculty within the faculty. I think all of my colleagues could agree to this group.

Dr. Steiner: Some things have been said that were not taken back, so we can assume we cannot do this in the way it was originally intended. I could just as well think that according to the impulses out of which the school and the faculty arose, I could create such a group. I am not doing this because suspicions have arisen. I would like to wait until things have become clearer. Some antagonisms are apparent.

The committee that works upon these questions needs to study such things in order to make proposals for the administration. I think six people would be enough.

Dr. Steiner has the faculty vote by secret ballot for a preparatory committee of six members.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to have the committee propose people who can do things.

A teacher asks about an educational conference in England.

Dr. Steiner: There is a possibility of another conference in England. I need to try to put these two things together. Perhaps we could agree to it in principle.

A teacher: The English people want to know if you would agree to inviting Waldorf teachers who can speak English.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, they can do that.

Dr. Steiner: I have a few things to add to what I recently said. The question concerns pictures in the music rooms. Clearly, we cannot decorate music rooms with paintings of figures. A music room is best decorated with sculpture or, if you have to use paintings, use ones with harmonious colors, paintings that are effective through pure colors. In other words, paintings in which pure colors are active.

Then, we also need to consider the pictures for the eurythmy room. I differentiate them from the music rooms, although there may be conflicts in our case. Under certain circumstances, we may teach music in the eurythmy room, but that would be only temporary. We should decorate the eurythmy room with themes that form the dynamic of the human being, including the dynamics of the soul. The pictures should present the expressive human being in an artistic way.

It is important that we carry that over into the gymnasium, but direct it more toward the world. For eurythmy, it is important to find an artistic way to express the dynamics of the soul, but in gymnastics we should connect more with the human being’s relationship to the world of balance and movement. You could, for example, have a picture of someone valiantly poised at the edge of a cliff, or such things. In the gymnasium, pictures should depict the relationship to the world.

For the handwork rooms, you should use pictures of interiors that particularly express feeling.

Now, that leaves only the shop. As much as possible, we should fill that with themes of practical life and possibly crafts, so that what hangs on the walls reflects what we do in the rooms.

I think we should decorate the faculty room in a way that is harmonious with the soul of the teacher. So, we would not have any particular rules for the faculty room, but would reflect our tastes in agreement with the teachers themselves. It should reflect the particularly intimate connections, but in an artistic way. In spinning, the same applies as for shop.

For music, it is better to leave the room quite plain than to add pictures that have no psychological connection with the essence of music.

The frames should fit the pictures. The color of the frames should be some color in the picture and the picture should also determine the form.

A teacher asks about the room for the Sunday services.

Dr. Steiner: I will give another service, and the pictures should be appropriate to that.

We should also decorate the remedial classroom, but we can discuss that at our next meeting.

We should place the eurythmy figures in a glass case in the eurythmy hall. In the hallways you should see to it that you place something similar to what is in the class to the left and right of the door. That is, something connected with the classroom.

A teacher asks about the physics and chemistry rooms.

Dr. Steiner: We have such major problems there that I cannot answer that today. Next time, we also want to begin discussing medical aspects, something we have long wanted to do.

Let’s turn our attention to creating an administrative committee.

A teacher: The committee we elected last meeting proposes three teachers. They would take over some of the administration previously done by the school administrator. They would be responsible for representing the school internally and to the outside world, with the exception of the custodial work, business, and finance.

In connection with school functions, they would do the following things:

1) Preparation and minute taking for the faculty meetings;
2) Naming specific faculty for specific areas, for example, the question of student boarding or decorations in the classrooms;
3) Prepare and oversee a yard duty schedule;
4) Assigning classrooms;
5) Supervise the use of school rooms for events from outside.

They would also take over the following things related to the outside:

1) Correspondence and communication with school officials, initialing all communications to the Department of Education;
2) Everything connected with enrollment (introductions and tests) and leaving school (school reports);
3) Yearly reports;
4) Visitors;
5) Public relations, in particular, working with the Union for Independent Cultural Life in the struggle against the Elementary School Law;
6) Gathering information about salaries and administering specific gifts.

Those are all the specific areas that we can remove from the present administrator and that a group can accomplish.

Dr. Steiner: First, we want to discuss this in principle. I would like you to say whether you are in agreement or not, or to speak in general about what has been presented.

The present administrator: It seemed to me that we should give this committee everything I did that should involve the entire faculty, and that all the economic and technical things would remain with me. We would thus rest secure that the work would be done to the satisfaction of the whole faculty. Those were my basic thoughts.

A teacher: I would like to propose Mr. L. as an additional member of the administrative committee.

Another teacher: We should use Mr. L. for more artistic work and not include him in the administration.

Dr. Steiner: The committee proposed three members, and now we have a proposal for a fourth.

A teacher: If he agrees that he would like to work with it, there should be no problem.

Mr. L.: I would be happy to do that if it would be useful.

Dr. Steiner: If I understand things correctly, we designated a preparatory committee. We cannot leave everything in the air. This committee proposed an administrative committee of three people. And now Mr. Y. is proposing that Mr. L. be included. The preparatory committee, though, proposed three people. Something official needs to move along with some precision. If you are proposing that Mr. L. join as a fourth member, what we have is that the recently elected preparatory committee proposed three and Mr. Y. makes a counterproposal to include a fourth person. Who wishes to say something further?

A teacher: I would like to give my support to that proposal.

Dr. Steiner: Does someone from the committee have something to say?

One of the three teachers proposed: I would like to say that we would be happy to work with Mr. L.

Dr. Steiner: The first question is the creation of the administrative committee. The proposal of the preparatory committee was three men. Then we have here from the faculty those three men and, in addition, Mr. L.

A teacher: I don’t see why we shouldn’t add an additional person to the committee.

Dr. Steiner: If we had only the proposal of the committee, we would need only to agree to or reject that proposal. Now we have two proposals, and we will have to have a debate about them. If there is another proposal, it should also be made. We created this preliminary committee with a great deal of pain. We believe it made its proposal only after mature consideration. Taking our trust in them into account, we now need to either verify or reject the proposal. The question is whether someone has something to say that is germane to the proposal. Is there perhaps a third proposal? Now the question is whether there is something to be added or whether a third proposal will be made.

A teacher supports the addition of Mr. L. because of his nature.

Dr. Steiner: Does anyone else have something to say?

A teacher: I would like to ask Mr. L. himself what he thinks about it.

Dr. Steiner: The question is whether you would accept the position.

Mr. L.: I would if people think it is appropriate.

Dr. Steiner: The situation is thus: The administrative body should arise from the faculty, taking into consideration what we recently discussed. Recently I said that I could, according the way we created the Waldorf School, name the members of the committee myself, but I do not want to do that because of past experiences. Rather, I want the administrative body to arise from the will of the faculty. We have given the responsibility of preparing a proposal to the committee because we assumed that a preparatory committee could make better proposals than those who simply speak off the top of their heads. We must learn to become accustomed to saying things with some responsibility. Recently, we elected the members of this committee, and we now need to assume that the committee made proposals only after due consideration and in recognition of their responsibility. That is the basis of this discussion. At present, there are two proposals.

This could be very depressing. It is important that we do not work with illusions. What is happening now is very depressing. We have agreed that a committee should present us with some proposals, and we certainly do not want to simply throw those out the window. We would do that if a counterproposal is made now and the faculty gives a vote of distrust. If Y.’s suggestion is accepted, that would be a vote of no confidence against the committee. I’m telling you that the acceptance of Y.’s counterproposal means a vote of no confidence. There have been some sharp words used about the administrative body in the last days. All of those expressions could be used against the faculty if you think a vote of no confidence regarding an elected committee has no significance.

I have asked for honesty in the discussion. I have repeatedly requested your comments and have delayed closing this discussion in order to enable a discussion of the counterproposal. I once again request that you say what you have to say about this question.

The following remarks were not recorded.

Dr. Steiner: Mr. Y., do not interpret the words I have said in leading the discussion. I cannot say I am presenting a counterproposal at the same time I declare that I agree with the first proposal. I would request that you suppress nothing. If you do not agree with something, please admit that, but this system of hiding things cannot continue.

At present we have three proposals: The proposal from the committee, the proposal by Mr. Y., and a third proposal by B. and S. to skip Y.’s proposal and go on to the agenda. The proposal from B. and S. is more extreme, since it would skip Y.’s proposal and simply go on to the agenda.

Mr. Y.: I support the suggestion from B. and S.

Dr. Steiner: This is where understanding simply stops. Either you have a reason to make a counterproposal, or you do not. If the committee presents a proposal, and you suggest a counterproposal, then I cannot see any degree of seriousness in your proposal if you yourself are in favor of skipping the proposal and going on to the agenda. If we continue on in this way about important things.... Simply because we need to decide the matter....

Marie Steiner: Mr. Y. had suggested L. because of his good nature.

Dr. Steiner: But that can only mean complete distrust.

A teacher: I understood Y.’s proposal as the beginning of a debate.

Dr. Steiner: The work of the committee ends today. Of course, a counterproposal can be made, but distrust arises because of the desire to vote for the four by acclamation without further ado. It would, of course, show no distrust in the committee if the four were chosen. However, the way things are going now, it would be a vote of distrust if the committee’s proposal was simply thrown out without any further discussion. The distrust arises because we formed a committee with the assumption that they would check into everything and make a proposal in full awareness of their responsibility. Then, a counterproposal was made. Now, we are voting on all four people. What that means is that we take one of our own actions with very little seriousness. To be rid of the matter, we simply vote for all four, and that constitutes a distrust in the committee. To handle the matter so that we can create an illusion that we are harmonious and united constitutes a distrust in the committee.

We need to honestly speak our minds. It is important that everyone has their own well-founded opinion. The way the Waldorf School was founded, it was based upon the blood of our hearts, and now so much is moving toward this terrible system of not taking matters seriously. That is even coming into the faculty. It is significant whether the faculty is united in accepting a proposal or not. That is something that goes straight to our hearts. I would like to emphasize that we may not take such matters lightly. I have no illusions about the fact that there are things in the background here. When such proposals are made, then something is playing in the background. In the realm of anthroposophy, honesty, not intransigence, should rule. That is what I am asking you to do, at least here at the seat of the Waldorf School, to begin for once to seriously stand upright, so that we do not fall into an atmosphere where we shut our eyes to the disharmony, but, instead, honestly say what we have to say.

Is it so impossible that people say they have one thing or another against you, but that they nevertheless still like you and are still ready to work together? Why couldn’t you say the truth in private and, in spite of that, still respect and value one another? Difficult things need to be done when there is reason for doing them. Now that there are two proposals, we first have to vote on the third proposal, or we would have to handle the two proposals in parallel.

The fact is that you demanded to be included in the discussions with the committee. I found that to be a first vote of distrust.

A teacher: I would like to ask if Mr. Y. could give his reasons.

Dr. Steiner: I also think that when a counterproposal is made, there should be reasons given.

Y. attempts to give his reasons.

Dr. Steiner: I can assure you that I do not allow anything that goes through my hands to be in any way imprecise. I do not skip over a situation when one arises. We have before us the proposal of the committee, and separate from that, a proposal by Mr. Y. They represent two opinions. Now that we have these two opinions, and the committee has come here with the intention of proposing a threeman group, after they had already decided not to propose a fourman group, there is an even greater contradiction when Mr. Y. proposes that. It is not our problem that Mr. Y. did not hear the matter. There is, in any event, a precise fact before us that the committee did not think they should propose a four-man group. Mr. Y.’s proposal is significantly different from that of the committee.

The debate we now have concerns the proposal of B. and S. to skip Y.’s proposal and to go on to the agenda.

The motion has been made to skip Y.’s proposal and to go on to the agenda.

Who is in favor of concluding the debate…. The discussion is closed.... We now come to the proposal that three men are to form the administrative committee. We now come to a vote about that motion. Now that the motion is before us, I would like to ask you formally whether you desire to vote on the motion by acclamation or by secret ballot.

A teacher: I suggest by acclamation.

Dr. Steiner: Does anyone wish to speak to the motion to vote by acclamation? No one wishes to speak, so we can now vote on whether to accept the motion to decide by acclamation.... I request that those in favor of creating the administrative committee with these three men, raise their hands.

I have always attempted to maintain a friendly tone, and it may be that we can return to that again. However, these kinds of discrepancies that are not said aloud cannot remain. Aside from that, it is not bad if we occasionally use parliamentary procedures so that we gain some precision in our work. That is something we must have here.

We now come to the other proposals of the committee. The committee proposed that the administrative committee should take over certain areas of representing the school. The proposal was to leave certain tasks with Mr. Y. and remove others. What we are dealing with here is that the following things should be removed from the administrator: First, the preparation and minute taking of the faculty meetings. Second, requesting colleagues to take over certain areas of work, the yard-duty plan, the distribution of the classrooms, usage of schoolrooms by people outside the school. These are the things connected with the inner administration of the school.

I would ask you to say what you have to say regarding these points. Do you agree that the administrative committee take over these areas? Those in agreement, please raise your hands. It is accepted.

In regard to the external representation of the school, the committee would take over correspondence and communications with the authorities as proposed, and, aside from Mr. Y., the member of the committee who is active at the time would countersign. A teacher: Requiring a countersignature makes things more difficult than they were. It would cause delays.

Dr. Steiner: If a member of the committee assumes that it cannot always be done, then I would like to know why we have the committee in the first place. We must always be able to do this. There can be no question of a difficulty. A bureaucracy depends upon attitude, not upon authority. If you imagine you can fight bureaucracy by installing chaos in its place, you have an incorrect picture, and that, of course, cannot be done.

A teacher moves to close the debate.

Dr. Steiner: Does anyone want to say something about the motion to close the debate? Then I ask those who are in favor of closing the debate… . The motion is accepted.

We now need to vote on whether the administrative committee should take on the activities of interaction with the officials, countersigning documents and so forth. I ask those who are in favor to raise their hands.

Dr. Steiner then asks for discussion about each of the various points concerning external representation of the school, and a vote is taken upon each point.

Dr. Steiner: You have all agreed to each of the specific points. I would now like to have a vote on the question as a whole with the exception of the public relations work and the relationship to the Waldorf School Association. I want you to vote on the question as a whole, that is, about all the areas we have discussed. Passed. Dr. Steiner now enumerates all the individual functions for which the present school administrator will continue to be responsible.

Dr. Steiner: Now that you have heard all these points, is there anything you would like to say?

A teacher asks about enrolling students.

Dr. Steiner: We have decided that that will be done by the administrative committee. If what we are doing is to have any meaning at all, then we cannot remove such an important matter from the administrative committee. We need to eliminate this bureaucratic way of thinking. If you think we should remove important discussions with parents from the administrative committee, then you are thinking bureaucratically. The administrative committee should participate from the very beginning, from the beginning of the enrollment of the student. The administrative committee should also be aware that it cannot let its duties slowly slide.

A teacher: I wanted to ask you to speak about the whole thing so that it will become clearer for us.

Dr. Steiner: The situation is that over time I have been made aware of things from many different people, that the faculty wanted such a group. From my perspective, I could answer such questions by saying that I thought it was necessary. I have a certain satisfaction in knowing it is now happening, but I also think it should happen with all seriousness. Is there still some argument about the matter?

I could ask, perhaps, that this committee include what we have voted upon as a kind of addition to our by-laws exactly how we will divide the agenda, then we can make a final decision about that at our next meeting. The activities we have now decided upon should be taken up as quickly as possible.

I would now like to ask for some discussion about how long the members of the committee should be in office, and about the rotation.

A teacher proposes a longer period of rotation, two to three months, otherwise the continuity would be continually disrupted.

Dr. Steiner: What you mentioned, that a person does not receive a reply, could also happen with a longer period of rotation. In any event, an orderly transfer of activities is necessary. I think a period of two months would be appropriate. We need to be careful that the work does not become a burden, and it seems to me that a period of two months would be appropriate.

A teacher: I would like to ask if the current executive would work alone or whether all three would work together.

Dr. Steiner: When not actually in the executive position, the activities of the others would be advisory. That is clear from the situation itself. However, the executive should ask the advice of the other committee members. What we are now deciding is something else. What we now need to decide is the relationship of the faculty to the administrative committee. I think two months would be the right amount of time. Would you like to have that extended or shortened? Is anyone against two months? Then we will do it that way. The administrative committee will begin tomorrow and the first period of rotation would be February and March, that is, two months. In what order should the members rotate?

A teacher: I would suggest alphabetical order.

Dr. Steiner: We can now go on to the question of public relations and our relationship to the Waldorf School Association.

Concerning public relations, you have made a connection with the Union for Independent Cultural Life, namely, a fight against the Elementary School Law. The way the situation is, I do not think it is a good idea if the Waldorf School as such takes a position for or against normal public questions, as they are generally trivial. We can move forward much better when we energetically work upon our own concerns and positively present what we are doing with Waldorf pedagogy. We should not involve ourselves with questions formulated from outside. I often had a bitter taste in my mouth when one of us gave a lecture about the Elementary School Law. We should be involved in the situation. The things we should present should represent our own concerns. In that way we can accomplish much more than when people who want to learn about the Elementary School Law ask us about our position. Of course, we are against it, but we should not be involved in discussions about mundane daily questions.

How do you envision working against the Elementary School Law? Certainly, we must handle these things practically—I usually say “real” instead of “practical.” The world should have the impression that people from the Waldorf School handle such questions practically.

If you look at the essays that have been published as weekly reports in Anthroposophy, they certainly look as though they were written without any understanding of the relationship between the parliament and the executive and the bureaucracy and so forth. The way they are written, those people active in everyday life will have a feeling that they are impractical, and then that opinion is hung around the neck of an Independent Spiritual Life or the Movement for Threefolding. By doing that, we increasingly foster the opinion that we are an impractical group of people. That is something that must cease. I am not speaking about our opponents, but about those insightful people who stand with us in the Threefold Social Movement.

If we include the Union for Independent Cultural Life in our work here at the Waldorf School, it is important that we do not fall prey to the same error the union itself does, namely, that we don’t fall into a kind of theorizing. What I mean is that it is important that any work we do in public relations stand upon a sound foundation. Certainly, we can work with the union, but when we do something, we should be aware that it must be practical, for instance, when we present the Waldorf School pedagogy as a contrast to the Elementary School Law. The more widespread the Waldorf School pedagogy becomes, the less possible such terrible laws will be. We don’t need to base our work upon the politics of the beer hall. All this is a question of tact. We should actually not participate. That is something we should never have done. That is the main problem with the Movement for Threefolding, we should never have become involved in mundane daily questions.

I have given special consideration to this area because I think it is particularly important that we take a higher position. For years I tried to form a World School Association that would not work toward handling pedagogical questions in some mundane manner, but would try to present them to the public from a higher position. That would be the difficult task of such a world school association.

A teacher: Couldn’t we have some evenings for discussing pedagogical questions to which we can invite some people, and also officials?

Another teacher: It is apparent that some leading school officials would like to know more, but are afraid to take the first step.

Still another teacher: Perhaps we could create something here at school so that we co

Dr. Steiner: That would make sense only if such meetings with people from outside were the result of public announcements in which we invited others to attend. It would make sense only if the Waldorf School started such things and then people came to us with their requests. Otherwise, all we would have would be the normal blather.

A teacher: I am thinking about the question of final examinations, that will certainly be important a year from this Easter.

Dr. Steiner: That is, of course, a task that does not actually belong in the school administration, but is more connected with the work of the Waldorf School. As soon as we would want to decide about such things, nothing would happen. That is a question that belongs among the general tasks of the Anthroposophical Society and is the task of everyone who is in any way concerned about the flourishing of the Waldorf School pedagogy. Actually, the answer should be apparent from the question itself. It is difficult to arrange anything in that regard because it needs to be handled individually so that we can take everything into account. We should take every opportunity to put the Waldorf School in the best light. On the other hand, we need to say that those who want to learn could also learn in England if they were there. So, it should really not be so difficult for someone who wants to learn about the Waldorf School to find out about it.

A teacher says something.

Dr. Steiner: What you just said is not serious. People are not happy about things, but as soon as you go beyond the general level of dissatisfaction and want to say something particular, they turn away. What ruins things is our participation, in any degree, in that turning away. We need to stand upright upon our foundation. We need to do everything that properly represents the Waldorf School pedagogy and not allow ourselves to make compromises. Such illusions are most detrimental to our goals. From what I have heard about these things, and such opinions come up all the time, we should have no illusions about them. We need to follow our own path and not treat these cases bureaucratically. If each of us recognizes our responsibility to do what we can, it may be better to teach these officials than to arrange things so that people could attend who would prefer to enter unseen through the back door. We went through all this when the union was formed in July 1919. There, we discussed pedagogical things. We held meetings where it was dark but nothing came out of it because people did not stay, not even the teachers. At the moment when things become serious—remember how people said they are dissatisfied, but that they have a wife and child. Do not misunderstand me. Work as uprightly as possible and use each individual connection, but do not believe that if you hold a meeting you can expect something from it.

We can best resolve the question of final examinations if we attempt to prepare the students as well as possible and then go to the examiners in question. The others will have forgotten it by then. In general, personal discussions are useful, but it depends upon how. We certainly cannot treat questions in the way you did today at the beginning, by deciding to allow the nicest person to take care of some particular problem. If that would work, then I would suggest that those people who are less gracious should take lessons from the others.

Marie Steiner: You prefer the Austrian form of charm.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to ask you to be personally involved. That is certainly something we need. I would certainly offer to fail every professor of botany in botany if that is what it took.

If you have some old connections and you could find out a little from those who have more experience, then your old connections would be more useful than if you brought others without such connections. The other thing is that you are a woman, and these are male examiners. If it is a female examiner, then see to it that you bring a man. Things need to be done individually. You should not believe that the impression you make will continue when you drag other people in.

The relationship to the Waldorf School Association does not seem to me to be resolvable except by a change in the statutes of the association. Of course, it should not be that the person who is the executive should not have a seat and a voice in the Waldorf School Association.

A teacher: Now, every teacher is a regular member of the Waldorf School Association.

Dr. Steiner: That does not fit with these regulations. This regulation requires that the faculty send a representative who will have that position for five years. We must clearly express that the person taking care of the administration here will also sit in the Waldorf School Association for two months. The by-laws have been changed so often that we can easily do that. That is something the Waldorf School Association must do. Is that all right with you? Thus, the current administrator would be our representative for two months and would sit in the council of the Waldorf School Association and have a vote. That person would not simply be one of the members, but would be on the council, and, in that way, the relationship would be self-regulating. So now we have taken care of this question. The necessary change in the by-laws should be made at the next meeting of the Waldorf School Association. Of course, for the time being, the representative of the faculty could be at the next meeting of the association. Are there any other remarks?

A teacher: Should we send a donation to the people in the Rhineland? It would be important for us if you could give us some information about the situation.

Dr. Steiner: It is not so easy to discuss the general situation now because the situation is as I described it quite clearly while I was giving the lectures about threefolding here, namely, that something needs to be done before it is too late. Today, it is too late to accomplish anything in the area of what people have called European politics. The only suggestion I made was to transform the old Threefold Association into the Union for Independent Cultural Life. I made that suggestion out of the recognition that we could do something for the future of Europe and for present Western civilization by supporting cultural life as such. That is where everything else must begin. The economic things that have been done by the present government as well as all political impulses are useless now. It is only possible to support spiritual life and hope that something will happen. What is important is to collect everything we are doing in that direction under one roof. At one time I quoted something Nietzsche said in one of his letters from 1871 about the fact that the German spirit has been exterminated in favor of the German empire. Today, it is important to achieve the opposite, namely, to restore the German spirit in spite of the decay of all political institutions. In that way, we can move forward, but we must stand firmly upon that basis. Everything else needs to be decided case by case.

The Rhineland occupation should be handled from the perspective that it is being done by a drowning man. A hysterical policy is being created from the drowning and thrashing. The tragedy is that the death throes are causing so much suffering. For that reason, I favor sending a donation if possible. It is a humanitarian deed. We can neglect all the nationalism and consider the question from a purely human perspective. I am in favor of all such things to the extent that they are purely human situations.

Today, we stand before the abyss of European culture, and we must prepare to jump over that abyss. I have long since stopped writing articles about it. I wrote the last one at the time of the Genoa conference, drawing attention once again to the whole situation. When I give lectures to the workers in Dornach, they no longer want to hear anything about politics. They are interested in things about science because they understand that all political talk today no longer has any sense to it.

If you think you could make a collection, you should probably be aware that it will not be much. It could be very little.

A teacher: I have divided the 8b class into two groups.

Dr. Steiner: I will have to agree to that until I can see it.

A teacher: The Latin class is a double period. I have the impression it is not very good.

Dr. Steiner: It is difficult to discuss such questions without having a meeting about purely pedagogical questions that could perhaps provide an ideal toward which we can work. Today, I have heard quite a bit about your class. Normally, I try to look at a number of things. Recently, I have been paying more attention to the question of the extent to which individual students have reached the learning goals and how many are falling behind. I cannot say I am convinced there are greater differences in the students you had today than in those in the geography class.

We will need to take care of this in the next meeting when we will be able to handle pedagogical questions more completely, because I noticed that the differences in ability and capability are quite large in that class.

(Speaking to another teacher) In contrast, I noticed when I taught the class myself that your class was much more homogenous. The differences are not so large. That is how the classes differ. We will discuss such questions and how to proceed at another time.

Dr. Steiner: Today, we want to have our agreed-upon discussion with Dr. Kolisko on health in the school. I will not go into the details of treating students because there are a number of principle things we need to present first. They will form the basis for further work that must also occur. We will proceed, then, by selecting some typical cases that could arise here. You will also have an opportunity to ask questions about specific cases.

I would first like to draw your attention to the fact that all of our Waldorf School pedagogy has a therapeutic character. The entire teaching method is itself oriented toward healing the child. If you create a pedagogy that does the proper thing during childhood, then educating children takes on a healing aspect. In particular, if we properly handle the child as an imitative being before the change of teeth, then use authority properly, and then appropriately prepare the child to form judgments, all of that will have a thoroughly health-giving effect upon the child’s organism.

It is fundamentally necessary that the direction of our behavior at school be hygienic. That is, that the teacher, in flesh and blood, has penetrated the three aspects of the human organism. The teacher should have an instinctive feeling for each child, that is, for whether one of the three aspects of the human organism, the nerve-sense system or the rhythmic system or the metabolic -limb system, predominates, and for whether we need to stimulate one of the other systems in order to balance a harmful lack of balance in the other systems.

For that reason, we will look at the threefold human being in a way particularly important for the teacher. We have the nervesense system. We can properly understand that only if we are aware that there is a regularity in the nerve-sense system that is not subject to the physical and chemical laws of earthly matter. We need to be aware that the human being rises above the laws of earthly matter through the nerve-sense system. The form of the nerve-sense system is completely the result of prenatal life. The human nerve-sense system is received by the human being in accordance with pre-earthly life. The nerve-sense system is thus capable of independently developing all activities related to the spirit-soul, because all material laws of the nerve-sense system are removed from earthly matter.

The case is exactly the opposite with the metabolic-limb system. Of the three human systems, the metabolic-limb system depends most upon external material processes. When people understand the earthly processes playing out in physics and chemistry, they also understand which processes continue within the human being, at least to the extent that human beings have a metabolic- limb system. However, they learn nothing about the laws of the nerve-sense system.

The rhythmic system lies between these two and, in a certain way, naturally balances the two extremes.

These things form quite individually within every human being. This is particularly true of children. The activity of one system always predominates over the others, and we need to do what is necessary to create a balance. For that, we must have a capacity to really listen to how children express themselves, so that expression can become a revelation of what we need to do with the child in order to help it achieve a completely harmonious health. It is important that we become clear about the fact that, for example, we can have a beneficial effect upon the nerve-sense system by adding the proper amount of salt to the foods the children eat. Thus, if we notice that a child tends to be inattentive, to be flighty and turn away from what you present, that the child is what we might call too sanguine or too phlegmatic, we will need to see to it that we strengthen the child’s pictorial forces so that he or she becomes better able to pay attention to the outer world. We can do that by providing the child with more salt. If you have, for instance, children who are inattentive or who tend to wander, then, if you look into the matter, you will find that the child’s organism does not properly process salt.

In more severe cases, it will often not be enough to simply suggest putting more salt into the child’s food. You will notice that because of some lack of knowledge, or perhaps inattentiveness, the parents salt the food too little. There, you can help with such suggestions. It is, on the other hand, also possible that the child’s organism refuses to accept salt. In such cases, you can help achieve the proper intake of salt by using a very dilute dosage of lead compounds. Lead is what, to a certain extent, enlivens the human organism to properly process salt. Of course, if you go beyond that boundary, the organism will become ill. What is important is to achieve the proper limit, which you may notice when a child has the first traces of a tendency for mental dysfunction. That is something many children have. You will then see that you will have to bring the whole healing process into line with what I have just described.

It is certainly a major deficiency that many educational systems pay no attention to such things as, for example, the external appearance of the children. You can stand in front of a school and see both large and small-headed children. We should treat those children with larger heads, in general, in the way I just presented. Those with small heads should not be treated that way, but in a way I will shortly describe. In those children with a physically oversized head, you will be able to find what I have just described as deficiencies, namely, lack of attention or a too-strongly developed phlegma. Now, however, we have all those children who have the contrasting tendency, that is, those whose limb-metabolic system is not sufficiently active throughout their being. Of course, such children feed their organic metabolism, but what the metabolism should be for the human organism does not sufficiently extend throughout their entire being. External observation of such children shows that they like to brood over things, but that they are also very strongly irritated by external impressions, that is, they react too strongly to external impressions. We can help such children improve throughout their entire organic system by taking care that they receive the proper amount of sugar.

You should also study the development of children in the following way. There are parents who overfeed their young children with all kinds of candy and so forth. When such children come to school, from the perspective of the soul and spirit, and thus also physically, they are concerned only with themselves. They sit and brood when they do not feel enough sugar in their organism. They become nervous and irritated when they have not had enough sugar. You need to pay attention, because when such children have too little sugar for a period of time, their organism slowly decays. The organism becomes fragile, the tissue becomes brittle, and they slowly lose the capacity to properly process even the sugar in their food. For that, you need to take care to properly add sugar to their food. Nevertheless, the organism may, in a sense, refuse to properly process sugars. In that case, you again need to assist the organism by giving a small dose of silver.

Now you see how, for the teacher, the spirit-soul life of the child can become a kind of symptomatology for the proper or improper functioning of the body. If a child shows little tendency for differing imaginations, if the child simply tosses everything together in a fantasy, if it cannot properly differentiate, then the nerve-sense system is not in order. In your attempts to teach the child to differentiate, you have at the same time a symptom indicating that the nerve-sense system is not in order, and you must, therefore, do what I just described.

If a child shows too little capacity for synthetic imagining, that is, for constructive imagining where the child cannot properly picture things, if he or she is a little barbarian in art, something common in today’s children, that is a symptom that the metabolic-limb system is not in order. You must, therefore, provide assistance in the other direction, in the area of sugar. From a hygienic therapy perspective, it is very important that you look at whether differentiating imagination or analytical imagination or artistic synthetic imagination is missing in the child.

There is now something else. Imagine you have a child whose analytical imagination is clearly missing. That could also be a sign that the child is directing his or her astral body and I too much away from the nerve-sense functions. You must, therefore, see to it that the child’s head is cooled in some way, for instance, that you give the child a cool wash in the morning.

You should not underestimate such things. They are extremely important. You should certainly not see it as a kind of deviation into materialism to advise the parents of a child who shows no capacity for painting or music to give the child a warm stomach wrap two or three times per week, so that the child has it on overnight.

People today have too little respect for material measures, and they overestimate abstract intellectual measures. We can attempt to correct that modern, but incorrect, perspective, by attempting to show that the divine powers have used their spirit for the Earth in order to fulfill everything materially. Godly powers allow it to be warm in summer and cold in winter. Those are spiritual activities accomplished by divine powers through material means. Were the gods to attempt to achieve through human education, through an intellectual or moral instruction, what they can achieve by having human beings sweat in the summer and freeze in the winter, then they would be incorrect. You should never underestimate the effects of material means upon children. You should always keep them in mind.

There is also another symptom for the same organic problem that arises when there is a deficiency in synthetic thinking, namely, children become pale. Children are often pale in school. We can handle that similarly to the condition of the astral body not being properly integrated into the metabolic-limb system. You can improve the paleness of children through the same means, because when you give a child, say, a warm stomach wrap, it sets the entire metabolic-limb system into motion so that the full metabolism develops greater activity throughout all systems of the organism.

If that system develops too strongly, so that you need to make only a small remark to a child and he or she immediately gets a red face and is terribly annoyed, treat that in exactly in the same way as when the astral body and the I are not properly integrated into the nerve-sense system. In that case, you need to give the child’s head a cool washing in the morning.

It is extremely important for the teacher to be able, in a sense, to foresee the child’s state of health and act preventively. Of course, there is much less thanks for that than when you heal when the illness already exists, but for children it is much more important.

Now, of course, things that have been used upon a child’s organism to direct a process in one direction or another may need to be subdued. If you treat a child for a time with lead in the way I described, you will need to stop the process at a later time. If you have, for instance, treated a child for a time with lead and have accomplished what you wanted, it would be good to treat that child with some copper compound for a short time, so that nothing remains of the lead process. If you found it necessary to treat a child with silver for a period, you should later treat him or her with iron, so that the inner process is arrested.

There is one more thing I want to say. If you notice a child is, in a sense, lost in its organism, that is, does not have the requisite inner firmness—for example, the child suffers a great deal from diarrhea or is clumsy when moving its limbs, so that it dangles its arms and legs when picking up things and then lets them fall again—such things are the first symptoms of what will develop into processes that strongly affect the person’s health later in life. You should never ignore it when a child often has diarrhea or urinates too much or picks things up so clumsily that they fall again or shows any kind of clumsiness in grasping objects. You should never simply ignore such things. A teacher should always keep a sharp eye open for such things as, for example, whether a child dexterously or clumsily holds a pencil or chalk when writing upon the board. In that way, you can act as a hygienic doctor. I mention these things because you cannot accomplish very much by simply reprimanding the child. Only someone who is always active in the class can affect anything. On the other hand, you can achieve a great deal through external therapeutic means. If you give the child in such a case a small dose of phosphorus, you will see that it will become relatively easy to reach the child with reprimands about clumsiness, even with organic weaknesses of the sort I just described. Give the child phosphorus, or if the problem is deeper, for example, when the child tends toward flatulence, use sulfur. If the problem is more visible outwardly, then phosphorus. In such cases, suggest to the parents that they should feed the child foods connected with colorfully flowering plant blossoms. Speaking in an extreme case, suppose a child often wets the bed. Then you can accomplish a great deal through a therapeutic treatment with phosphorus, but still more by working with the diet. Suggest adding some paprika or pepper to the food as long as the condition persists. You will need to determine that based upon the child’s further development.

In such questions, it is absolutely necessary that members of the faculty work together properly. We are in the fortunate situation of having Dr. Kolisko as the medical member of our faculty, and we should not undertake such therapies without speaking with him first, since a certain understanding of chemical and physiological things is necessary to arrive at the correct opinion. Nevertheless, every teacher needs to develop an eye for such things.

I once again need to take this opportunity of mentioning that in teaching it is of primary importance to take care to bring the nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system into a proper balance. When that is not done, it shows up as irregularities of the rhythmic system. If you notice the slightest inclination toward irregularity in breathing or in the circulation, then you should immediately pay attention to it. The rhythmic system is the organic barometer of improper interaction between the head and the limb-metabolic system. If you notice something, you should immediately ask what is not in order in the interaction of these two systems, and second, you should be clear that in teaching you need to alternate between an element that brings the child to his or her periphery, to the periphery of the child’s body, with another element that causes the child to withdraw within. Today, I cannot go into all the details of a hygienic schoolroom; that is something we can speak of next time.

A teacher who teaches for two hours without in some way causing the children to laugh is a poor teacher, because the children never have cause to go to the surface of their bodies. A teacher who can never move the children in such a way as to cause them to withdraw into themselves is also a poor teacher. There must be an alternation, grossly expressed, between a humorous mood when the children laugh, although they need not actually laugh, but they must have some inner humorous feeling, and the tragic, moving feeling when they cry, although they do not need burst into tears, but they must move into themselves. You must bring some life into teaching. That is a hygienic rule. You must be able to bring humor into the instruction.

If you bring your own heaviness into class, justified as it may be in your private life, you should actually not be a teacher. You really must be able to bring the children to experience the periphery of their body. If you can do it in no other way, you should try to at least tell some funny story at the end of the period. If you have caused them to work hard during the period on something serious, so that their faces are physically cramped from the strain on their brains, you should at least conclude with some funny story. That is very necessary.

There are, of course, all kinds of possibilities for error in this regard. You could, for example, seriously damage the children’s health if you have them work for an entire period upon what is normally called grammar. You might have children work only with the differences between subject, object, adjective, indicative, and subjunctive cases, and so forth, that is, with all kinds of things in which the child is only half-interested. You would then put the child in the position that, while determining whether something is in the indicative or the subjunctive case, the child’s breakfast cooks within the child, uninfluenced by his or her soul. You would, therefore, prepare for a time, perhaps fifteen or twenty years later, when genuine digestive disturbances or intestinal illnesses, and so forth, could occur. Intestinal illnesses are often caused by grammar instruction. That is something that is extremely important. Certainly, the whole mood the teacher brings into school transfers to the children through a tremendous number of very subtle connections.

A great deal has been said on various occasions during our earlier discussions on this topic. The inner enlivening of our Waldorf School teaching still requires considerable improvement in that direction. Even though I might say something positive, I would nevertheless emphasize that it is highly desirable, even though I am aware that we cannot always achieve ideals immediately, for Waldorf teachers to teach without preconceptions. teachers should really be so prepared that they can give their classes without preconceptions, that is, that the teacher does not need to resort to prepared notes during class. If the teacher needs to look at prepared notes to see what to do, the necessary contact with the students is interrupted. That should never occur. That is the ideal. I am not saying this just to complain, but to make you aware of something fundamental. All these things are hygienically important. The mood of the teacher lives on in the mood of the children, and for that reason, you need to have a very clear picture of what you want to present to the class. In that way, you can more easily help children who have metabolic difficulties than if you had the children sit in a classroom and taught them everything from a book.

It is a fact that in earlier periods of human development, teaching was generally understood as healing. At that time, people understood the human organism as tending to cause illness itself and knew that teaching brought a continual healing. It is extraordinarily good to become aware that, in a certain sense, every teacher is a doctor for the child.

In order to have healthy children in school, teachers must know how to overcome themselves. You should actually attempt to keep your private self out of the class. Instead, you should picture the material you want to present during a given class. In that way, you will become the material, and what you are as the material will have an extraordinarily enlivening effect upon the entire class. teachers should feel that when they are not feeling well, they should, at least when they are teaching, overcome their ill feeling as far as possible. That will have a very favorable effect upon the children. In such a situation, teachers should believe that teaching is health-giving for themselves. They should think to themselves that while teaching, they can move away from being morose and toward becoming lively.

Imagine for a moment you go into a classroom, and a child is sitting there. After school, the child goes home. At home—of course, I am referring to a different cause, I am not saying the teaching would cause this—the child needs to be given an emetic by the parents. Of course, that could not have been caused by the instruction given by Waldorf teachers, that would only occur in other schools. However, if you went into a class with the attitude that teaching enlivens me and brings me out of my morose state, you could spare the child the medicine. The child can digest better when you have the right attitude in the classroom. In general, a moral attitude of the teacher is significantly hygienic.

This is what I wanted to say to you today. We will continue to work on this later.

Is there anything in particular you would like to ask me now?

A teacher: I had wondered about how the three systems relate to the temperaments.

Dr. Steiner: Phlegmatic and sanguine temperaments are connected with the nerve-sense system; choleric and melancholic with the metabolic system.

A teacher: You spoke of flighty children having large heads. In my class, I have a very flighty child with a small head.

Dr. Steiner: A small head is connected with brooding and reflecting, whereas large-headed children are more flighty. If that is not the case, your judgment is incorrect. A small-headed child who is very flighty has not been evaluated from the proper perspective. You can orient yourself with these things. You first need to look at the nature of the child from the proper perspective. Show me the child some time. It is possible to mistake a child’s brooding for superficiality. It is possible that the brooding is hidden behind a kind of superficiality. That is easily possible with children. A teacher: Is this description valid for a specific age?

Dr. Steiner: It is valid until approximately the age of seventeen or eighteen.

A teacher asks about a girl in one of the upper grades who often wants to drink vinegar.

Dr. Steiner: You can understand that by seeing that the child has absolutely no tendency toward concentration. She lacks a capacity for concentration, but now and then she has to concentrate upon something, not because of outside demands, but from her own organism. She wants to rid herself of that requirement by drinking vinegar. She simply cannot concentrate, so the physical body demands it sometimes. She tries to overcome it by drinking vinegar, but you should not allow it.

A teacher: How can we work with children who absolutely cannot concentrate?

Dr. Steiner: With such children it might not be so bad if you tried to give them something moderately sweet, that is, to put them more on a sweet, rather than a salty, diet.

A teacher asks about a girl in the first grade.

Dr. Steiner: First try to get the parents to give her a warm stomach wrap, perhaps even a little damp, for a longer period, so that the astral body becomes more firmly seated in the limb-metabolic being. Silver would be the right remedy for her. For her, much depends upon getting the metabolic-limb system to take over the activities of the astral body. Give her silver and stomach wraps. She is a child who does not live in herself and is not in her metabolism at all. You need to have the entire picture when attempting to treat specific cases.

The school doctor: I thought we would arrange things later on so that I can see the children everyday.

Dr. Steiner: Today, I was speaking specifically about children’s organisms. Perhaps it would be good go through this again in relation to the physicians’ course, so we could be more specific.

We now have a report about the new administrative organization.

A teacher: I wrote the report about what we decided at the last meeting. It contains the results of the work of the preparatory committee. The other things we need to do are the concern of the administrative committee.

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps it would be good if faculty members said something about any of the individual points they think we need to speak about.

Current committee administrator: I think it is important that we work toward a new attitude in our meetings. There should be no one here who thinks the meetings are not necessary. The indifference we now bring to our meetings must disappear. I think we could bring an attitude to the meetings that would give them some meaning. I think our meetings would then have something that was much stronger earlier, when the effects of the seminar were still active in us. This is not a new thought. We will try to leave the concerns of the administrative committee outside the meetings.

The parents have asked for a lecture.

Dr. Steiner: We first must work with the Anthroposophical Society so that it can continue to exist, so we will have to put that off. I feel like I have contracted lockjaw from the bad attitude toward the meetings.

A teacher: We should not present things to the full plenum that we can easily take care of in private discussions. Bad forces have taken over the meetings. I have given some thought to how we could form the meetings so that only good forces are present.

Dr. Steiner: As in all such things, those who are most dissatisfied with our gatherings could do the most toward making them better by personally trying to make them better. If the meetings appear ugly, couldn’t you try to make them as nice as possible? If you notice they are difficult for you, and that you need to rid yourself of something after the meeting, then the situation will be better if you behave so that others will feel good when they leave. At the next meeting, you will also feel better. We should not ask anything from the meetings, but rather believe we should give. It is not very fruitful to criticize such things; instead try to improve things in yourself.

Much of what you have said concerns the interactions of faculty members and really requires much more consideration than you give it. We can say that, aside from some individual things that need improvement, the teaching has been very satisfactory recently. It has greatly improved. In contrast, there is a certain coldness, a kind of frigidity, in the interactions between faculty members. The meetings can create a bad atmosphere only if that coldness becomes too great. We can counteract that by working with the interactions between teachers.

When you say you cannot meet one another at the meetings, that seems rather strange to me in a group that is together from morning to night and sees one another during every break. During every break you have an opportunity for smiling at one another, for speaking in a friendly way to each other, for exchanging warmth. There are so many opportunities for developing a certain kind of vivacity, that I cannot understand why you need to do that only in the meetings. In the meetings, we should each present our best side. The problem is that you simply pass by one another and do not smile enough at each other. We can certainly speak the truth bluntly to one another, as that aids digestion and hurts nothing when said at the proper time. On the other hand, though, our relationships must be such that each one knows that the others feel that way about me not only because I am sympathetic or unsympathetic, but also because I am a teacher in the Waldorf School. That is something that is generally necessary in anthroposophy here in Stuttgart. Here, people meet one another in the Anthroposophical Society in just the same way as they would anywhere else, but what is necessary is that they meet one another in a certain way because the other is also an anthroposophist. teachers should meet one another in the Waldorf School in just the same way. That gives a special tone in every expression made during the school breaks, whether smiling or making accusations. I see too many sour faces. We need to pay more attention to that.

That is why I got a kind of lockjaw when there was so much discussion about the bad atmosphere in the meetings, because it meant that there must be a bad attitude toward one another, or an attitude of indifference. I cannot understand why there isn’t an atmosphere of great happiness when all the Waldorf teachers sit around one table. The proper attitude would be to think to ourselves, we haven’t had a meeting for a week, but now I am so happy to be able to sit with everyone again. When I see that is not the case, I get a kind of cramp. There should be no Waldorf teachers who do not look on the others with good intent. We do not need to resolve questions of conscience here in the plenum. When we have such relationships between members of the faculty, we can certainly take care of those questions individually. I can easily imagine everything moving quite smoothly.

It would certainly be quite nice if the teachers met now and then for a picnic. Each of you should try to make the meetings as lively as possible for everyone, so there is no need to complain. If someone thought of complaining, they should change their thought into asking, “What should I do so that things are better next time?” Otherwise, they would be a kind of outcast, and they would be that only if they had a bad attitude toward the meetings. Are there any other malcontents?

A teacher: The problem of discipline is continually discussed without any positive conclusion.

Dr. Steiner: In general, there are a number of things we could object to regarding discipline in the lower grades, but in the upper grades there is not so much. I do not know how you could expect to have better behaved children. They are just average children. Aside from the fact that the children in the lower grades need to be more active, I can only say that, in a certain sense, I have seen classes that are really very good in regard to discipline. This question of discipline can be a cause of distress forever, and if it were, we would have to discuss it continually. We cannot have the attitude that we do not want to discuss the question of discipline in our meetings simply because it is unpleasant. That is exactly why we do need to discuss it. I would like to mention a concern about discipline that has a kind of legendary significance. This may be important only outside of the school, in the [Waldorf-Astoria] Company. Many of you may think this is not a question for our meetings, but I do not know which members of the faculty I would call together to discuss this problem. In this question, we do not need to point to one person or another.

There may be teachers in the Waldorf School who slap the children, and so forth. That is something I would like to take care of in private discussions. I have heard it said that the Waldorf teachers hit the children, and we have discussed that often. The fact is, you cannot improve discipline by hitting the children, that only worsens things. That is something you must take into account. Perhaps no one wants to say anything about this, but my question is whether that is simply a story that has been spread like so many other lies, or have children, in fact, been slapped in the Waldorf School? If that has occurred, it could ruin a great deal. We must hold the ideal of working without doing that; discipline will also be better if we can avoid it.

A teacher: I teach English to the eighth grade, and I found the discipline there terrible.

Dr. Steiner: What do you as the class teacher have to say? The teacher reports.

Dr. Steiner: It would be pedagogically incorrect if we did not take the personal relationship to the children into sufficient account. It is certainly difficult to create, but you must create it and you can create it in individual cases. You should, however, remember that our language instruction is extremely uneven. In spite of the fact that we have a Waldorf pedagogy, there is, for example, sometimes too much grammar in the classes, and the children cannot handle that. Sometimes I absolutely do not understand how you can keep the children quiet at all when you are talking, as sometimes happens, about adverbs and subjunctive cases and so forth. Those are things for which normal children have no interest whatsoever. In such instances, children remain disciplined only because they love the teacher. Given how grammar is taught in language class, there should be no cause for any complaints in that regard. We can really discuss the question only if all the language teachers in the Waldorf School meet in order to find some way of not always talking about things the children do not understand. That, however, is so difficult because there are so many things to do. What is important is that the children can express themselves in the language, not that they know what an adverb or a conjunction is. They learn that, of course, but the way such things are done in many of the classes I have seen, it is not yet Waldorf pedagogy. That is, however, something we need to discuss here in the meetings. There are so many language teachers here and each goes their own way and pays no attention to what the others do, but there are many possibilities for helping one another. I can easily imagine that the children become restless because they do not know what you expect of them. We have handled language class in a haphazard way for too long.

A teacher: We language teachers have already begun.

Dr. Steiner: Recently, I was in a class and the instruction had to do with the present and imperfect tenses. What do you expect the children to do with that when it is not taught in Latin class? How should they understand these expressions? You need to feel that there is so much that is not natural to human beings, particularly in grammar. It is clear that in schools where discipline is maintained through external means, discipline is easier to maintain than where the children are held together through the value of the instruction. I am not saying that such expressions as present and indicative should be done away with, but that you should work with them in such a way that the children can do something with them. What I noticed was that the children did not know what to do with such expressions.

A teacher: There is examination fever in the highest grade. The middle grades are missing the basics.

Dr. Steiner: That is not what they are missing. Look for what they are missing in another area. That is not what they are missing! It is very difficult to say anything when I am not speaking about a class in a specific language, since I find them better than the grammar instruction. Most of our teachers teach foreign languages better than they teach grammar. I think the main problem is that the teachers do not know grammar very well; the teachers do not carry a living grammar within them. Please excuse me that I am upset that you now want to use our meeting to learn grammar. I have to admit that I find the way you use grammar terms horrible. If I were a student, I certainly would not pay attention. I would be noisy because I would not know why people are forcing all of these things into my head. The problem is that you do not use time well, and the teachers do not learn how to acquire a reasonable ability in grammar. That, then, affects the students. The instruction in grammar is shocking, literally. It is purely superficial, so that it is one of the worst things done at school. All the stuff in the grammar books should actually be destroyed in a big bonfire. Life needs to come into it. Then, the problem is that the students do not get a feeling for what the present or past tense is when they really should have a lively feeling for them. The genius of language must live in the teacher. That is also true for teaching German. You torture the children with so much terminology. Do not be angry with me, but it is really so. If you used mathematical terminology the same way you do grammatical terminology, you would soon see how horrible it is. All your horrible habits do not allow you to see how terrible the grammar classes are. This is caused by the culture that has used language to mistreat Europe for such a terribly long time, it has used a language that was not livingly integrated, namely, Latin. That is why we have such a superficial connection to language. That is how things are. The little amount of spirit that comes into grammar comes through Grimm, and that is certainly something we need to admire. Nevertheless, it is only a little spirit. As it is taught today, grammar is the most spiritless thing there is, and that gives a certain color to teaching. I must say there is much more to it than what we do. It is just horrible. We cannot always have everything perfect, which is why I do not always want to criticize and complain. You need a much better inner relationship to language, and then your teaching of language will become better.

It is not always the children’s fault when they do not pay attention in the language classes. Why should they be interested in what an adverb is? That is just a barbaric word. Things only become better when you continually bring in relationships, when you repeatedly come back to the connections between words. If you simply make a child memorize and yourself have no interest in what you had them memorize, the children will no longer learn anything by heart. They will do that only if you return to the subject again in a different connection so that they see there is some sense in learning.

You should not so terribly misunderstand some things, Mr. X. I got a kind of cramp when I saw how you presented The Chymical Wedding today. I said you could do that if you wanted to learn about spiritual activity for yourself, but then you did it in class. After you have done the conclusion, you will see how impossible it is to do The Chymical Wedding in school. It could be very useful if you know something about it yourself, as then you can handle other things appropriately. Now, however, you can do nothing more than present the question of the kings in The Chymical Wedding as pictorially as possible so that the children become aware of how one theme makes a transition into another.

A teacher: How should I do that?

Dr. Steiner: The theme of the three kings goes throughout it. You can find it in The Chymical Wedding and again in Goethe’s Tales. You could show how the same idea was active over centuries, and then tell stories about other themes that lived for centuries. There are a large number of such themes. If you recall, I once mentioned to you how you can see Faust and Mephistopheles as Robert and Trast in Sudermann’s Ehre.

A teacher: In the tenth-grade art class I showed how Schiller developed the word into a musical effect in The Bride of Messina and how Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony moved toward the word through human voice. In the end, Beethoven met Schiller in the “Ode to Joy.” Richard Wagner felt this quite strongly.

Dr. Steiner: It may be quite important to emphasize this relationship of Schiller to Beethoven. That is something the children will feel quite deeply at their age. You can best carry out what you wanted to say about Parzival if you also put the choir in Schiller’s Bride of Messina at the center.

Dr. Steiner: We have received a request from Dr. Karutz regarding the next parent evening; it requires a thorough discussion in the faculty before any public discussion of it. We need to discuss this proposal and, at least within the faculty, we need to arrive at a common perspective. For that reason, I have asked Dr. Karutz to spend the first hour of our meeting with us, so he can give us more information on what he wrote in his letter, and so that we can clearly understanding his request. (The letter is read aloud.)

Now that we have all heard the letter, we can see this is a question we must discuss in regard to basic principles. It would certainly be difficult to carry on a considered and objective discussion during the parent evening, and, since I cannot attend, I would like to discuss the question here. I would like to ask you to say what you would like to say first.

Dr. Karutz says his proposal has a cultural, not a political, intention. His objective is that the parents make a unanimous decision that the French language should no longer be required. He proposes Russian as a replacement.

Dr. Steiner: This question has a number of different aspects. The first is on the cultural side, and any serious pedagogical system must take that into account.

We see in the current activities of the French something that fundamentally cannot be explained from the outside. It is inexplicable because anyone should be able to see, even from the French perspective, that France will not reach its own goals by what it undertook today. We should not view this merely from a cursory political standpoint, but from a historical political perspective. What France is doing today is something like death throes—of course in history such things last a longer time—the death throes of a people in decline and in the process of disappearing from earthly development. Such views arise, of course, from spiritual observation of European history. The French nature is, in a sense, an initial wave of the demise of Romanism—the demise of the Romantic peoples of Europe. Naturally, the Spanish and Italian portions have somewhat more life than the French, who have the least life among the Romantic population.

We can clearly see the decadence of French culture in the language. Among the common languages of Europe, French is the language that, in a sense, most forces the human soul to the surface. It is the language in which it is possible (and this is a paradox) to lie in the most honest way. In that language, it is easiest to lie in the most naïve and honest way, because it lacks any real connection with the inner human being. French is spoken entirely at the surface of the human being.

Consequently, the French language, and thus the French nature, has a certain attitude of the soul. The attitude of the French soul is directed by the French language, whereas in German, the soul controls the inner configuration of the language, the mobility of the language. The French language is currently something that paralyzes—it directs the soul. It rapes the soul, and thus makes the soul hollow, so that French culture is hollowed out under the influence of the French language. Those who have a feeling for such things can see that the soul does not speak in French culture, only a petrified formalism has a voice. The difference is that, in speaking French, the language rules the speaker. The infinite freedom possible in German, and that we should use more than we normally do, that enables you, for instance, to put the subject in any position, depending upon your inner life, does not exist in French.

The reason Germany has brought French into education is not due to pedagogy; we do not teach French in our schools for any pedagogical reasons. We teach it because what was considered useful for a certain group of young people was modified and masked when the old college preparatory high school system was replaced by a number of modern institutions. It is significant that people believed what was available in the old system through Latin could be found in French. People had assumed French had a pedagogical effectiveness similar to that of Latin. That is, however, not true. Latin has a kind of inner logic and brings logic to people instinctively. That is not true of French, which has slipped into clichés and is no longer based on logic. It is only clichés—such things must be stated in a radical way—so that learning French brings a great deal to the surface in children, and that is why a desire to remove French from education has gradually arisen. It is obvious that French will disappear from education in the future.

In the Waldorf School, which exists to make a radical new beginning, we have a different perspective. The school can make a beginning only through the understanding our teachers have for the character of the French language, in that they teach it with an awareness that they are actually teaching something decadent. You do not have to tell that to the children, but we certainly should be clear about it. We are clear about it, but from a different perspective, it is completely out of the question that we here at the Waldorf School begin by fighting to remove French from the curriculum. We cannot do that for purely external reasons. We do not yet have an independent cultural life. We have, of course, a Waldorf School pedagogy based upon the idea of an independent cultural life, but that is only an ideal that we cannot completely implement under the present conditions.

For that reason, we had to sign a declaration when we founded the Waldorf School in which we agreed we would always meet the learning goals of the public schools at appropriate stages. For instance, we have to insure that our nine-year-old children meet the learning goals of the public third grades. We are pedagogically free for periods of three years. In general, we would place ourselves in an impossible position if we did not fulfill these responsibilities. We cannot keep our children from being able to transfer to another educational institution through testing. If we did that, we would rob our children of the possibility of finding their own path in life. There is, therefore, nothing we can do other than attempt to bring as much of the ideal Waldorf pedagogy as possible into the school. We cannot go further than the possibilities allow. If the building in Dornach had not burned down, we would still have been far from obtaining accreditation for the Dornach University. We could not have given doctoral diplomas. Since we must take into account that those children who complete our school may transfer into other learning institutions and universities, we have to allow them to meet learning goals at a particular age.

All this assumes that we teach foreign languages the way we do for inner pedagogical and psychological reasons. Seen from outside, people could say we do not need to begin teaching foreign languages as early as we do. If, however, we are to achieve in a pedagogical way what eighteen-year-old boys and girls need of foreign languages for their final examinations, there is nothing else we can do. Under the assumption that it is justifiable that our children achieve a certain level of education, we must form foreign language instruction as we have. We must swallow the bitter pill of French until we can do something else.

That brings me to what is of primary importance for the work of our movement. You see, well-intended people are always asking our movement to undertake this or that remedy. In the area of medicine, people make all kinds of demands. We need to take the position that we cannot do such things individually, but only through major movements. We have begun to develop medicine in the light of an independent cultural life. Thus, in such a question where we can best find the pedagogical basis through the practical experiences of the Waldorf School, a major movement would need to begin. A single private school, where the light of life could be instantly snuffed out if it undertook such things, cannot do it.

Aside from that, we could not accomplish much. Whether or not our students learned French would make little difference in the cultural status of the German empire. In contrast, a major cultural deed could occur if people overcame all the things connected with the false valuing of French in Middle Europe through a genuine understanding of the things I mentioned and Dr. Karutz also indicated. If people saw that and it became part of their flesh and blood, and if, therefore, the French language disappeared from the schools in a healthy way, then that would be a path toward a major cultural deed. A cultural movement directed toward removing French from the schools could begin that in a proper way while retaining a proper appreciation of French itself. Today, it is no longer valid to teach French for practical reasons. I do not believe that was true even before the war. In countries outside France, people respected French and valued it in teaching, not because of its commercial significance, but because it was used as the language of diplomacy, and because it was used in conversation in the salons of the so-called better circles in society. That, too, came from using French in diplomacy. If this was done with the necessary force and motivation, it could kill two birds with one stone by hitting the decadence of both French and diplomacy. It could show that diplomacy is just as decadent, because it is necessary to lie when being diplomatic. In war, success results in surrounding the opposing forces. The technique of winning a war is to mislead the opponent. Diplomacy is well described by a peculiar statement, namely, “War is the continuation of policies by other means,” something as insightful as “Divorce is a continuation of marriage by other means.” Diplomacy consists of using the same means, but at a different level, as those used to mislead the opponent in war. In this case, a language that can mislead others is required. Nietzsche made a major error when he spoke of the German language as the language of deception. The French language is not the language of deception, but the language of stupefaction that actually brings people outside themselves. Someone who is enthusiastic about speaking French seems like someone who is not quite in control of themselves. That is, of course, expressed in an extreme way. You need to look at things that way, otherwise you will not come to the subtle feelings you need to present in teaching French.

The parents of the Waldorf children can be very sure that we will contribute nothing to the false estimation of the French language. However, we do live under the compulsion of the state and, for that reason, cannot include anything in the constitution of our Waldorf School that would do anything against the French language. We depend upon the creation of a major cultural movement in this regard, one that is objective, one that at some time can also present these views and that values spirituality. If we were to once begin such an action, then we would see that a much different culture would replace today’s. It is important to put forward the differences in evaluation of the languages. We would win some trust and strength from certain people for the mission the German language still has in Western civilization. However, people would still need a feeling for what is declining or rising in the language. In the German language, many elements are still positively developing, although, since High German entered, there is much that can no longer develop. We still have the inner strength to transform words. Under certain circumstances, we can still transform words that have petrified in the substantive into verbs. I have used the word kraften as a verbal form of kraft. And we may also do similar things. People understand them. German still has a lot of inner strength. French no longer has that. Everything is prescribed. When language takes over everything, it corrupts the human soul.

That is what I have to say, Dr. Karutz. You see, we understand your request, but our hands are tied. At the moment, we cannot really discuss the question.

A teacher: The public schools in Bavaria no longer require French.

Dr. Steiner: We will have to wait until Württemberg does something. Since things can quickly change from one day to the next, we will have to make our decisions accordingly. I am not sure that, if French were removed today, it would not be included again later if something did not take hold of human souls at a deeper level.

A teacher: The decision in Bavaria occurred several years ago.

Dr. Steiner: It occurred only now. We will certainly shed no tears about the French language if it comes to that here. Perhaps some of the teachers would like to say something about French.

A teacher: It would not be so easy to do here.

Dr. Steiner: We will address these questions when they become more pressing.

A teacher: I thought it was easier to comprehend the spirit of a language when it is in the process of dying.

Dr. Steiner: That is the case with human beings, but not with languages. The French language is now more dead than Latin was in the Middle Ages when it was already a dead language. There was more spirit living in Latin when it was clergy- and kitchen-Latin than lives in the French language now. What keeps the French language going is the furor, the blood, of the French. The language is actually dead, but the corpse continues to be spoken. This is something that is most apparent in French nineteenth- century poetry. The use of the French language quite certainly corrupts the soul. The soul acquires nothing more than the possibility of clichés. Those who enthusiastically speak French transfer that to other languages. The French are also ruining what maintains their dead language, namely, their blood. The French are committing the terrible brutality of moving black people to Europe, but it works, in an even worse way, back on France. It has an enormous affect on the blood and the race and contributes considerably toward French decadence. The French as a race are reverting.

Marie Steiner: You can notice the superficiality and hollowness of the language when you compare it with Italian. In Italian you can still present the spirituality of the content. That is often lacking in French, the depth disappears.

Dr. Steiner: We had the strangest experiences. Mrs. Steiner translated two major works by Schuré. At the time, there were some reasons for the translation, but we always had a feeling that only through the translation was the actual content of these two works apparent. The reason for that was Schuré’s own development. His first work was L’histoire du Lied, in other words, a history of German lyrics written in French. He was thinking in German but wrote in French. He thinks substantially in German, and had his first cultural impressions from the Wagnerian school. I still remember Mrs. Schuré’s genuinely French fury when she told me that as a student he had sold his gold watch in order to be able to go to Tristan. You can see how the translations of these two works appears as though they were translations into the original language, that is, as though they had originally been written in German. They are thought in German, and the French can feel that in Schuré’s work.

A teacher mentions that German style was transformed by Heine and anti-romantic journalism.

Dr. Steiner: The effects of Heine and Börne have been very colorfully described by Treitschke. There is a wonderful chapter in one of Treitschke’s books on history about the rise of journalism. In it you can see all of Treitschke’s fury. He could be very radical and was often not very tactful.

We once both received an invitation in Weimar, where he saw me for the first time. He couldn’t hear, and you had to write everything for him. He always asked where people came from, and he said that the Austrians are either very clever people or scoundrels.

A teacher: I would like to say how it is for me when I teach French. I overdo it. I get right into it, but nothing is so strenuous as teaching French.

Dr. Steiner: If you meant that in a good sense, I would advise you to overdo yourself in other things more.

Marie Steiner: It is very funny how that affects Rostand in Chantecler. It is a real mess.

Dr. Steiner: The conclusion we should draw is that as long as we have French, we should teach it with the proper attitude and under the proper estimation of its pedagogical value. The remainder we must leave to the future.

Dr. Karutz leaves.

Dr. Steiner: We needed to take care of this matter or it would have come up at the next parent meeting, and I must admit it does not seem right to me to broach the question at this quasi-public occasion. We may not expose ourselves too much in regard to such current questions. This is not a question where we can make compromises. The fact is, we can only maintain our general direction and path if we do not put hurdles in our own way and do not allow ourselves to be drawn into such current questions about pedagogy. If we do, the light of our lives will be snuffed out. We must take this position also regarding less significant questions. Today’s questions about elementary schools will find their answer the moment there is support for the Waldorf School method. Discussions over such things really become quite trivial. When such problems come up, we can certainly participate in the discussion, but we must maintain our position.

Is there anything else to discuss? There is not enough time for a lecture on medicine. Perhaps you could bring some current problems for discussion in the time remaining.

They discuss the many children who are absent from school.

Dr. Steiner: That is certainly something to be concerned about. In the first grade, I found only nine of twenty-seven children. That is really terrible. How is it in the other classes?

A teacher: In the 1b class, I had only half the children.

Dr. Steiner: These things are connected with the general state of nutrition. We should be aware that such things appear as illnesses about three and a half years later, that is, malnutrition then appears as an illness. That is something reasonable physicians were aware of at the beginning of the war. Only Abderhalden claimed that hunger during the war had no effects, though he was sometimes reasonable about other questions.

The school doctor: The children’s health is getting continually worse. Of six hundred and fifty children, about one hundred and eighty are severely undernourished.

Dr. Steiner: When we think about the physiological corruption of the children’s organism, we now need to try to make those forces that support the necessary functions of the human organism more effective. We need to make those forces more effective. We need to be aware that the correct view of the human organism views human nutritional and growth forces as located in a kind of reservoir. The way we should imagine that reservoir is a question that leads deeply into occult physiology. Actually, you need to think of a created reservoir out of which the forces for nutrition and digestion and rhythmical processes arise.

Perhaps you can best understand that if I draw your attention to the difference between vegetarian and meat nutrition. If you look at a plant, you will see that the plant completes the mineral and vegetable processes to a certain point, so that as a human being we have to work further upon what the plant has made of earthly substances. We must further transform the substances into the form they should have in the human body. Thus, when I eat plants, I must further transform the final stages of plant existence into what is necessary for human existence. These forces are available in various ways in the human organism, that is, there are forces that create sugar, transform fat or protein. The salts are used in a certain almost physical-chemical way in the organism. These forces exist.

If I eat meat, the mineral and vegetable processes have been continued beyond the stage reached by the plant to that of the animal, and I do not need to change the meat in the same way I need to change plants, because that has already happened in the animal. The animal has already made the changes I should undertake. Thus, if I eat, say, some grass or something like that, I would have to do what a cow would otherwise do. But, if I eat some beef, the cow has relieved me of this inner work. In a sense, I thereby leave the work of the cow in my reservoir of forces. Thus, I fill myself with unused forces. I leave those unused forces within me. Actually, I carry them with me.

That was not meant as some sort of fanaticism for vegetarianism. This can definitely have to do with heredity. Nevertheless, it is correct that when people eat meat, they do not fully use their inner functions. They sentence themselves more easily to gout than when they train their inner functions so that they become vegetarians.

Under some circumstances, the work required with fruit is even greater because it has to be transformed backwards. If you can perform this reverse transformation, you awaken even more forces within your organism. You should, however, not believe that awakening such forces is tiring. Under some circumstances, allowing forces to lie fallow is much more tiring because those forces collect. Thus, you can see that we either fully use the forces in that reservoir, or we leave them unused. I have mentioned all this only as a kind of discussion of how forces act in the organism. All the aspects of human nature, the I, the astral, etheric, and physical bodies, participate in using those forces. The situation in the human being is such that, in general, the development of forces acts in what we might call a centrifugal manner, that is, from within, outward, and from below, upward, depending upon the various parts of the physical body. In general, the development of those forces follows the path of the blood, and it is their responsibility to carry what lies in the blood’s path.

There exists another force counter to those forces, one that goes parallel to the paths of the nerves and is particularly important for the child’s organism,. Everywhere within the human being you will find these two extremes. For example, the blood moves from within toward the outside in the eye, whereas you observe the nerves properly only when you consider that they go from outside, inward. The centripetal forces go parallel to the nerve pathways. These two forces achieve their general harmony through the breathing and circulatory systems and are the two poles of the human threefold organism. The nerves act centripetally. The metabolic- limb system works centrifugally, parallel to the path of the blood. What is important is that the liveliness of all inner functions depends upon the proper interaction of these two systems, and thus these two forces. The centrifugal and centripetal forces need to be properly activated in each individual organ.

Malnutrition during and after the war caused what I saw yesterday in a little child in the first grade. The centrifugal forces in that child have developed only to a dangerously weak point, so that those forces need to be enlivened by support from the outside. That was why I advised giving the child those baths, since they support the centrifugal forces from outside. Those are things that are important when dealing with such acute cases, but of course, they must be applied very individually.

On the other hand, it is necessary to work on improving general nutrition in Germany and Austria. There we can enliven both sides, namely, the centrifugal and centripetal forces. We can enliven the centripetal forces, so that they support the blood stream, primarily through dietary means or through providing medications based upon calcium phosphate. In the reverse situation, we can enliven the centrifugal forces by using calcium carbonate. I said in the reverse situation because calcium carbonate enlivens the nerve system and enlivening the nerves achieves a greater activity in the centrifugal forces. Calcium phosphate enlivens the centrifugal forces, the blood, and thus has a reverse effect upon the nerves.

The effect of the carbon is to enliven the centrifugal forces through the nerves. You can see this enlivening in a coarse way when you simply drink some carbonated water. There, it is the carbon that has the effect. Since we are using a calcium compound, people will have to work with things right into their bones. You can see quite clearly that the bones are included, and that is why this compound should be used, so that people can work right into their bones. This may seem like a strange statement, but physiologically it is correct to say that the bones are the final extension of the nerve system. The nerves are bones at the lowest level of development. They are bones that have been stopped from developing into bones. Nerves tend to become bone-like, only they have been stopped at a very early stage. For that reason, calcium carbonate enlivens the nervous system right into the bones. In contrast, calcium phosphate enables the bones to participate in distributing the blood. The bones play a role in the formation of red blood cells, and that can be increased through calcium phosphate. Oyster shells are an empirical proof of that. Oysters have no blood, which is why we find only calcium carbonate in them.

What you can see from all this is that if you properly combine calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate, you can enliven the organic functions and thus strengthen the organism when it is too weak to digest what comes into the stomach.

That is the cause of modern malnutrition. The problem is not that there is no food, but that the food is not used beyond the intestine because the organism is so weak. The body actually takes in only a little bit of the chyme. That could be improved if we strengthened those forces related to organic forces.

This needs to be done alternately, so that the calcium carbonate is taken at the night and the calcium phosphate is taken in the morning so that it is effective during the day. Thus, the calcium phosphate would be connected with the activity of the nervous system, and the calcium carbonate active during the night will strengthen the blood system.

I think that a sufficient dose of calcium carbonate would be 5% and of calcium phosphate, .5% at a potency of 5X or 6X. In connection with calcium phosphate, the higher the potency, the better, but calcium carbonate is allopathic.

What we actually have here is a genuine illness that we should, therefore, heal. No one should complain that we want to give all the children some medicine. Since we actually have an epidemic, we should undertake mass treatment. That is a commandment of genuine love of humanity.

A teacher: We would have to discuss that with the parents.

Dr. Steiner: That is something we cannot easily do in a parent evening, although I think it would be basically proper. Nevertheless, we should not become too prominent, so you should speak with the parents individually.

The school doctor: If we did that on a broad scale, we could discuss it with the parents. There are some financial difficulties, and we would also be entering the realm of the local doctors.

Dr. Steiner: We can expect the support from the Clinical Therapeutic Institute. The other thing is, it is advisable not to treat such things as medicine at all. Nevertheless, some of these things lie right at the limits of diet, so we do not really have to consider this a question for physicians. To restate it, first, Palmer at the institute could give us some support, and second, we do not need to see this as medicine. It is a dietary question and therefore we do not need any medical justification. The third thing is that the parents would pay nothing for it. Doctors start to get nasty if you require payment. I think it would be difficult to use genuine medications. In connection with calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate, we could take the position that they are simply dietary supplements. We could even extend this and make it into a kind of popular movement, so that people simply received a dietary supplement through one of these preparations at the table, just as we might put salt on the table. You certainly do not need a doctor for that. Today, I wanted to handle only the general question. This is how we would have to take care of it if we are to handle public questions with the slightest bit of reason.

A teacher presents the request of a mother who wants to have her son put in a parallel fourth-grade class.

Dr. Steiner: The lady told me she believes that her child cannot work in the present class, and the class teacher also wants the child to leave. She is not bothered by that, but now she is asking that he be put in a parallel class. I have nothing against that if it is best for the child. My only question is whether Mr. K. would take him. He is one of the few boys who does not want to be taught by a female teacher. If the parallel class were also taught by a woman, he would have no interest in it. Now that we have the request, and you don’t have anything against it, perhaps it is best to do it. Is there anything else we need to do?

A teacher: S.R. does not want to participate in shop because of his music instruction.

Dr. Steiner: If such things come up often, then we will have to create a category of special students who can have such changes, and whose parents are ready to be responsible for the student not meeting the goals of our teaching. We would have to handle each case that way. We would have to treat him as a special student.

A teacher: The children often ask what is the deeper meaning of learning to spin yarn.

Dr. Steiner: It is something that enhances the life of their souls, and they also learn something about genuinely practical life through spinning. You cannot really learn anything about practical life by just watching how something is done, only by doing it the way it is really done. The children should also notice that you can learn to make a pair of shoes in a week, but a shoemaker’s apprenticeship lasts three years.

A teacher asks how to present The Song of the Niebelungs in the tenth grade.

Dr. Steiner: You have already done that, haven’t you? You need to first teach the children about the whole context of The Song of the Niebelungs, so that they understand how it fits into the historical perspective. You should do that as pictorially as possible, similar to the way I did Parzival and Christianity in Dr. Stein’s class. It took place during the time of the Great Migrations. Present it in a very lively way and then give the children some examples. Teach it so that the children first have a complete picture, not with boring lectures, but in an exciting, pictorial way. Give them a picture of what you will read to them as an example. Above all, see to it that you are not the only one who reads. The children should also read in a way that is not boring, through the way you gave them a proper picture. It is not possible to read in a boring way if you have given them the proper picture. Stop for a moment at some of the interesting passages where you can say something about the beautiful words. It is possible to create some real excitement and illuminate the whole scene from some individual words or phrases. If you do that, you will have given the children enough.

A teacher: What could I use as a historical source?

Dr. Steiner: You can use any book on the history of the Middle Ages. The history has been so worked over that any fool could do it in the same way. A person would not need to be particularly insightful. Those history books are all the same.

A teacher asks whether a book on mathematics should be written for the use of the teachers.

Dr. Steiner: A teaching guide for mathematics and geometry in the upper grades would be good. You would need to write it so that the material is presented in a very clear way, so the reader does not drown in the amount of material and important things are not missing. All textbooks are really unusable. They are not very helpful. It should be a text without any remarks or figures that you can read like a novel.

As a boy of about fourteen or fifteen, I once wrote one myself, because all of the geometry books were so boring. It is too bad I no longer have it. It was not bad, you could read it like a novel. It might be interesting if you put it together as connected text that reads like a novel. It does not need to be as voluminous as things are today, and we could even have one edition for teachers and a still shorter edition for children, like a short story. Children would be very thankful if every day in class they could read a page or two about geometry written in a readable form. There are no good books anymore. The books on geography are horribly written. The grammar books are terrible. This is something that The Coming Day publishing company could do.

A teacher asks about speech exercises for a child in the first grade who has a very soft voice.

Dr. Steiner: I would have to see and hear him. Perhaps you could show him to me when I am here for the delegates’ conference.

At the beginning, Graf Bothmer gave a lecture about teaching gymnastics with approximately the following content:

Should boys and girls participate together or exercise in the same room, but separately? Girls hold the boys up. Should we group the children according to their temperaments? That would be the ideal.

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps I can say something more general about gymnastics later. When we have time before the beginning of the new school year, I can discuss gymnastic exercises in relationship to the child’s age and how to make them whole. That is what we will do. Today, I would like to speak about what you just presented. Please consider what I do not speak about as meaning I agree with what you said. I will not emphasize anything I agree with.

Concerning the relationship of gymnastics to eurythmy, there can actually not be any conflict between gymnastics and eurythmy. In general, we can generally see gymnastics exercises and how they are presented as a continuation of eurythmy exercises. Suppose we take a particular movement of the arm in eurythmy and a corresponding movement in gymnastics. In eurythmy we need to take care that the form of the movement itself lies nearer the center of the body than it would in gymnastics. Thus, there can actually be no conflict.

You can best understand that when you realize that in eurythmy you are primarily concerned with that part of the human organism that is directly connected with the inner breathing process. Thus, what an arm or leg, a finger or toe does in eurythmy is directly connected with what plays out as the inner breathing process, that process of the transition from air to blood. On the other hand, what happens in gymnastics is primarily connected with the human organic process basic to the transition from blood to muscle. That is primarily physiological and sheds complete light upon what we develop. As soon as we understand that instinctively or intuitively, we will see that every movement in gymnastics is connected with strengthening the muscles, with their growth, and with making them elastic by forcing blood into the muscles. The more you understand that, the more you will be able to develop free exercises.

We can say the same thing from a different perspective. Eurythmy is primarily a pliable forming of the organism. Or, I could also say that eurythmy exists in the sculpting of the organism. Gymnastics lives in the statics and the dynamics of the organism. Of course, you, Graf Bothmer, felt that when you mentioned that the children feel the room during gymnastics. You can best understand that through the picture of how an arm or leg moves in space, or their relationships to weight.

That we do not have any conflict with eurythmy, we can see if we take character into account. We do that much too little in pedagogical eurythmy because it is not so important in artistic presentations, but it is much more important in pedagogy. If you have seen the eurythmy figures, you will have noticed that we differentiate between movement, feeling, and character. In movement and feeling, which you have taken into account almost exclusively, things are going well. However, character has not permeated eurythmic movements to any great extent. That is natural because it has no great importance in artistic eurythmy that is viewed by others.

In contrast, the character of a movement should be a significant part in pedagogical eurythmy. A person doing the eurythmy should feel how a movement or position flows back into their own feeling. For example, such a person should feel the pressure of one limb upon another in a eurythmy movement and how that pressure flows back into the center of the body. For that reason, I colored the eurythmy figures so that it would be clear. You will find three colors in all the eurythmy figures. One is for the movement, the second, which is like a veil over the first, is for feeling, and the third is for character. For a person doing eurythmy, it indicates the specific part of the body where the muscles should be tensed, and the feeling that muscle tension should produce. That is part of the life of eurythmy within the form of the body.

The students have asked if we could present the figures during the pedagogical week at Easter, so I will bring them here. We should have such a series here. The Waldorf teachers should study those figures because they are also important for a more psychological physiology. The Waldorf teachers should study them to gain greater understanding of the human organism. At the same time, they can form the basis of a more general feeling for art, for a greater understanding of the inner aspects of the human organism.

We can, therefore, say that the gymnastics teacher should have an idea of the spiritual relationship of statics and dynamics in the human organism. The gymnastics teacher should have a clear picture of what it means to raise a leg or to drop an arm in relationship to gravity. On the other hand, the eurythmy teacher should have a strong feeling for what will develop the limbs sculpturally. It is incorrect to say that the gymnastics teacher is like a sculptor. That would be true for the eurythmy teacher. The work of gymnastics teachers is to picture an ideal human being in terms of lines, forms, and movements to which they must develop these lazy, sloppy people they have before them. You were certainly correct when you mentioned how children should carry themselves. Whereas the eurythmy teacher should work so that the muscles feel themselves, feel how they gain strength through the character of the movement, the gymnastics teacher should feel how people can properly perceive the heaviness or lightness of a limb. The child should learn, not through reason, but instinctively, how to perceive the lifting of an arm or leg in relationship to gravity. Children should, for example, develop a feeling for how their foot becomes heavy when they stand on one leg and lift the other.

The task of the gymnastics teacher is, therefore, to place the dynamic ideal human being he or she carries in his or her soul into another person. Of course, the artistic must also play a role, since we can realize human statics or dynamics only through artistic feeling. Whereas, artistic feeling plays a major role in eurythmic sculpturing, it must precede the forms the gymnastics teacher creates statically and dynamically.

Concerning the question of breathing, it is significant that eurythmy lies closer to the breath, whereas gymnastics lies closer to the blood process. Aside from the fact that the tempo of breathing increases during the course of the exercises, something that is a physiological process, it is important that we should develop gymnastic technique in such a way that it does not affect the breathing process. We could call a gymnastics exercise incorrect if, while maintaining the proper physical position, the exercise negatively affects the breathing process. We should exclude those gymnastic exercises that disturb the breathing process, even though the body is properly held. Now that I have seen everything you are doing, it seems to me that all the breathing exercises in modern gymnastic methods are directed toward maintaining proper posture, and that breathing is treated as a reaction. I have noticed that all the things presented are directed primarily toward creating proper posture, at least to the extent it is expressed through the breathing process. That is something Swedish gymnastics for the most part takes into account. That is what I want to say about that.

In gymnastics, it is important that we take the will into account. The teacher must, therefore, whether instinctively or intuitively, live directly into the connection between movements of the body and expressions of the will. The teacher must have a feeling for what the connection between movement and will is. In eurythmy, there is also a development of will, but one that uses a more indirect path through inner feeling and occurs at a level where will is expressed through feeling. That is what I just referred to as character, and it is the experience of feeling in an act of will. The gymnastics teacher works directly with the act of will, but the eurythmy teacher works with experiencing the feeling in an act of will. You can see how there is everywhere a very strict separation and we need to take that into account when developing a curriculum. Perhaps we cannot immediately do that, but we should certainly see it as our ideal. Then, from these two things we will clearly see why it is much easier for girls in eurythmy and for boys in gymnastics. Things are more clearly differentiated with boys. For that reason, we will, in fact, have to allow the boys and girls to do their gymnastics in the same room, but in different groups. The girls can form a group for themselves and do those exercises that create a relationship between them. If we do such exercises that are modified for boys and girls, they will enjoy them more.

I think we will see that when we discuss the curriculum in detail. That is also true of the differences in age.

Concerning exercises with equipment, I would like to remark that we could modify the form of the equipment and make it more appropriate. In that way, at least to an extent, we can make the most common pieces of equipment not quite so bad, so we can do something with them. Although I do not want to be fanatical about this, I would also like to see that we have no climbing poles, but I don’t want to complain about them too much.

Those people who have observed what boys in the villages do when a tree is brought from the woods and placed atop a pole on a church holiday will know how valuable such climbing poles can be. Up there, a few branches remain with a small kerchief, a piece of candy, or maybe a small bottle of wine, and the boys have to climb their way up to that little tree attached to the top of the pole from which the bark has been removed. The victor is the boy who brings it down. That very strongly connects the activity of the will to the nature of the body. We do this same thing artificially with a climbing pole. It is certainly better when the children have to learn how to climb a rope. The pole has a rather limited significance in gymnastics, I would say, but I do not want to completely remove it. With the parallel and high bars, with the horse and so forth, if they are properly used, you can certainly gain something from them.

I also agree you should do the exercises, at least to an extent, by combining the different pieces of equipment, because that emphasizes what equipment exercises should achieve, namely, more presence of mind. That has a secondary effect of also strengthening the muscles. The children thus develop proper strength and elasticity.

I also agree that the high bar should be more prominent, and that it will gain that through a kind of observation, not an observation with the eyes, but through bodily feelings. One useful exercise would be to have the children swing so they must then catch the bar. They would need to hold themselves in the air. That is only an example to give the direction I am thinking of. It could be done with the hands or also with the entire arms, but the movement really becomes significant only if it is done with the arms. You could, however, allow the children to begin with their hands.

These things that allow the children to feel the device with their entire body can also give them a greater sympathy for the equipment. That is particularly true with the high bar when the children learn to work on it with their legs. You could combine exercises with the high bar by first having them do what I mentioned above and then having them “walk” the bar with their legs dangling.

All that simply gives the spirit of the direction. I don’t think I need to speak about dead equipment and simple routine. That is the way things were, but things do not need to be routine when we emphasize this way of experiencing the equipment. The children can use their legs in wonderful ways on the bars.

I completely agree with what you said about games and sports. Our gymnastics should lead to what you described.

We want to discuss the gymnastics curriculum at the next opportunity. Then, we will also consider the temperaments at various ages.

The school doctor: Some of the anemic older girls often become tired easily.

Dr. Steiner: This is where the pathology and therapy of gymnastics begins. What you have termed “gymnastics pain” arises because the process between the blood and the muscles in such children leads to the crystallization of uric acid. What is important is that we combat this nearly inorganic metabolic process through diet. That is, of course, a task only when we see that gymnastics tires the children beyond a certain degree. At that point, we need to try therapy. Through gymnastics we can most easily see whether a child is healthy or not. If you wanted to determine whether someone will have gout in three years, you could have that person do some physical exercise, and if he or she shows some kind of gout-like feelings, that person will most certainly have gout within three years. Today, when children are so malnourished, many of them will have such symptoms because the process between the blood and muscles no longer functions properly.

I would like to take this opportunity to ask you to do something. Mrs. R. gave me a donation. I have discussed the matter with her, and these million Marks should be used to start a fund so that something can be done about the children’s nutrition. I would like to see these million Marks she gave used to improve the children’s health. We should create such a fund, and this could be its foundation.

A teacher asks about how to occupy the children during breaks and on field trips.

Dr. Steiner: The question of children’s play is certainly appropriate. We should not overdo play since it could soften the children. It is valid to object if there is insufficient time for play, but we could also make a valid objection now. Nevertheless, I would say that it is not sufficient to speak just about play. When the children need a break, what is important is to allow them to sit. First, they need to sit and eat. They need to be able to occupy themselves with that, but quite consciously and with real appetite. When they have fully satisfied their hunger, you can allow them to play, as you have done. If you lead this activity, you must try to see to it that they eat as slowly as possible, so that they use the time available for eating to savor every bite.

Games where the children just crawl around are not very good. Children’s play should require their attention, and their games should offer them some enjoyment. What you have described gives them some enjoyment because of their anticipation. Amusement is necessary in games. You also need to be sure the children drink, so they have fluid throughout their bodies before you continue the field trips. There is no harm in allowing them to drink when they sit down during a break. During the break, they should begin with eating, and drink at the end. The time in between should be amusing, so that their souls are occupied with anticipation, with solving a problem, with excitement or disappointment. That is how we should include the element of entertainment. What you are doing now is simply boring. Sports are not particularly exciting, they are actually boring. In games, we need to avoid being like the English. Our games should not be influenced by the West. They should be healthy, entertaining games.

I certainly do not want to imply that the old games are very good simply because they come from older times. They need to be replaced. Blind Man’s Bluff or such things are the right thing. Or, A-Tisket, A-Tasket. In other words, games that do not require a lot of effort, but that are amusing. When the children are resting, they should first have something good to eat. I would also have them stretch, or perhaps sing. After they have played for a while, they could sing, have something to drink, and end the break.

A teacher asks about marching and singing.

Dr. Steiner: These military or war-like games can be done in a healthy way if they are done artistically. What was done where I grew up was pure nonsense. Someone composed some sentences, and then two from the group of children shouted out one sentence. The others standing further away could no longer understand what was said. We need to drop things like that. On the other hand, if we connect something genuinely rhythmic with walking as a group or with marching, that is quite proper. When art plays a part, you can allow people to do something as a group, allow them to think together, or something of that sort. It is important that there is no fooling around. Playing Cowboys and Indians and so forth is healthy if it is done with spirit. We can differentiate among all those things, between play at the right time and sport. Healthy play occupies you with something you enjoy because of the movement in healthy thinking and feeling. Sports are so bad because you simply move without any thinking, and thus become lazy in your thinking. People want to do things so they do not have to be mobile in their thought and feeling. It would be good if we could remove from our bodies those things that exist in the English-speaking world due to their belief in sports.

A question is asked about cooking outdoors.

Dr. Steiner: That is good to do since it extends mealtime, that is, it extends the time used for eating. There is nothing better. When you take the children outside, you should extend their mealtime during rest period as far as possible. It is best if you make them as uncomfortable as possible, so that they have to make some effort.

A teacher: Should we have swimming in school?

Dr. Steiner: That would hurt nothing and could be quite good. However, I think that for technical as well as scheduling reasons, it would not be possible. We need to do what is possible under present circumstances.

The gymnastics teacher: Could we arrange to have showers?

Dr. Steiner: That would be good. The only problem then is that when it becomes known that a child is lacking in that area, then people think that the child has to be bathed. If we had showers, we would have to avoid that kind of negative thought, but that is, of course, often difficult to do. If we had a boarding school, we could do all sorts of such valuable things. I have, however, found no way of avoiding such negative thoughts. We should see to it, however, that the children come to school properly dressed and washed. There would be no negative opinions if we required children to come to school clean and well-kept. In such cases, there is sometimes something pathological present. There are people who cannot avoid looking dirty and smelling bad even when they are washed. I would agree to having showers, but we would have to find some way to connect it with a moral perspective.

A teacher: Should I take up Virgil in Latin? Perhaps the Fourth Song of the Aeneid.

Dr. Steiner: That would be very good if you could connect it with other things. Very good indeed.

Dr. Steiner: We want to take a look at how things should run.

They decide upon a provisional assignment of subjects for the coming school year.

Dr. Steiner: We have always divided the subjects beginning with the ninth grade, so that the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades have separate subjects. We have had some difficulties in that regard, and I would ask you to look into them. We are still missing eight hours of ancient languages since we are missing one teacher. Tittmann is coming to teach modern languages. If possible, I would like to have Dr. Lehrs teach mathematics and natural sciences for the higher grades. I think that Lehrs could also teach Latin for the lower grades. He has much goodwill and is also very capable in mathematics and physics, so I think he will do well here.

We have still not decided upon the 1a, 1b, and 3b classes. Miss Bernhardi could still take over one of the lower grades, and we are also considering two other ladies. For the upper grades, we will need to find some way of unburdening the teachers. In any event, we will still have Tittmann and Lehrs.

Now I can think about other things. In handwork, I am thinking of Miss Christern. Mrs. Baumann will not return until fall. Mrs. Fels will continue with her class. The question now is whether the one more teacher can handle remaining periods.

Marie Steiner: I would suggest Miss Wilke.

Dr. Steiner: She could teach for the time being and replace Mrs. Husemann who had been substituting for Mrs. Baumann.

Aside from the question of scheduling, I would like to know if there are any other wishes.

A teacher: The twelfth grade are anxious about their examinations.

Dr. Steiner: We still need to discuss the schedule for the twelfth grade. It would be good if someone got a description of the standard college preparatory teaching goals for the twelfth grade. I would then arrange the class plan so that we could promise people—of course, they could always fail, we cannot guarantee anything.

The difficulty is that there is much too much lecturing, and in spite of the fact that we have often discussed this, you are still not having the students participate enough. We therefore need to be certain that the students in the twelfth grade participate more. We cannot say they are incapable, but what they have learned doesn’t stick to them strongly enough for them to get past their anxiety about the upcoming examinations. They cannot get past their anxiety. Those wonderful lectures are quite nice for the students, but they do not retain them.

It would be a good idea if you gave me the standard teaching goals for the eleventh and twelfth grades when I am here tomorrow, so we can see how things actually are. We need to see if we can help the children past their anxiety.

We have no reason to have a thirteenth grade as they do in Bavaria. Imagine the problems we would have if we had to say we needed a thirteenth grade.

I don’t think the question of the examination problem will change. We will, however, have to limit our lecturing and allow the students to participate more.

A teacher asks about admitting the students to anthroposophical lectures.

Dr. Steiner: The school cannot possibly state it agrees with that. It would be difficult to keep them out according to the Society regulations, but this must not be a school question. The school could even raise an objection.

It is not a good idea that they attend Society lectures without being members. Earlier, very young members were also accepted. It is a shame the Waldorf School cannot raise an objection, since it is actually nonsense for the middle-grade students to attend the lectures.

Marie Steiner: It seems that some of the children have witnessed the self-destructiveness present in the Society. It might be possible for the Society to object to their presence.

Dr. Steiner: It would be best if such young children did not attend things not intended for them. In the Waldorf School, we assume they do not do such things, but if we forbid it, there will be a revolution. We need to assume that the children are so occupied by the Waldorf School that they could not possibly meet the learning goals if they also attended other lectures. That is an obvious perspective. We may expect that Ch. O., now in the first grade, will be listening to anthroposophical lectures. Part of the regulations of the Anthroposophical Society is that only adults are accepted, and minors are accepted only with the approval of their parents.

Marie Steiner: How can children who are not members get in? At occasions such as this, we can certainly see how idiotic that is. It is disastrous. This is impossible.

Dr. Steiner: The school should advise against it and we need to have at least enough connection with the students that that has an effect, but we cannot simply throw out those who are already members.

A religion teacher: We are introducing the 8a and 8b classes to the Youth Service. H.R. and L.F. would like to be confirmed in the Christian Community, and that is also their parents’ desire.

Dr. Steiner: That does not concern us here. Those children who participate in the Independent Religious Instruction can be confirmed there when they have reached the required age. It is, of course, also possible that they do not want that, but if they do, why shouldn’t we allow them to participate? If they do not want to, then they do not need to. But if they want to participate in both of the youth services, we can do nothing about that. There isn’t any real difference. It’s all the same to us what occurs there. In the end, what is important is whether the children want to participate in the Sunday services. We can leave it up to the children whether they want to or not. We cannot require them to go to the Youth Service. The answer to the question is obvious. We cannot discuss it. We have no reason to negotiate with the Free Religious Movement. We can do what we want, and they can do what they want. The children would then have it twice. I have always understood that we do not need to worry about it because it is a question for the Free Religious Movement. We cannot stop parents from sending their children there to be confirmed. Religious instruction is not obligatory. We cannot make any draconian rules. The children will certainly stay away if we make draconian rules. Someone might participate in the Independent Religious Instruction without going to the Youth Service, but not the other way around. That girl can certainly participate in both. If she does not do something, it would not be good if she went to our Youth Service, but perhaps the father doesn’t notice that at all. It is the parents who are responsible, not us.

A teacher: One girl occasionally faints at the Sunday service.

Dr. Steiner: We should do it twice, one for each half of the children. A teacher: The tenth and eleventh-grade children could come to the sacrament. Should the ninth-grade children also participate?

Dr. Steiner: Yes, they can. We can divide the Youth Service by class. Mr. Uehli will be the main celebrant at both.

A teacher: Should B.B. receive additional instruction? Also, N.N.?

Dr. Steiner: This all began last year. Is it possible he could be handled alone? Perhaps he would realize he is not really very nice at school. Perhaps we could give him individual instruction for the remainder of the year. It looks as if that would have a purpose, but only if we were to make it so that he realized he had done something wrong here at school, so that for the weeks until Easter, he has to attend such a class. I think that he is really a very nice boy, but he is asleep. In this way, he may wake up.

There are a lot of new bright children around. The question is whether they are really so bright when you ask them to do something. Concerning N.N., he is not very good in handling money. B. needs individual instruction. I will take another look at these two boys.

A teacher asks about two students in the fourth grade who are completely incapable in foreign languages.

Dr. Steiner: We could ask the parents if they would forego the language class. That is something we could ask parents. In fact, that is something we can generally do for the children in the remedial class.

A teacher: P.M. in the fifth grade cannot add.

Dr. Steiner: We could ask the parents if they would allow him to repeat the class.

A teacher: L.B. has been mistreated and is afraid.

Dr. Steiner: Treat her with patience.

A teacher: A girl in my eighth-grade class has only attended a country school in Silesia.

Dr. Steiner: We will need to carry her along. She should remain in the class, and she will find her way.

This meeting took place following the Pedagogical Conference.

Dr. Steiner: The first thing I would like to say is that we can be deeply satisfied when we look back over the previous years. The conference was extremely satisfying. The way the Waldorf School was described, the way the various subjects were presented, the way individual speakers gave their presentations, made the conference very good both inwardly and outwardly. The conference most certainly made a great impression upon the visitors. We will undoubtedly overcome the difficulties we confront, particularly the financial difficulties, through presenting such conferences, if we can just hold out long enough to reach as many people as possible.

We certainly need to be thankful to all those who worked to make the conference such an extraordinary success. We need to recognize the significant efforts you made for the conference in spite of all the work you have to do in the school during the year. I only hope that you are not too tired to make this new school year just as good as the ending of the last. You can, of course, assume I fully support everything you have done. I particularly want to thank the people who organized the conference for their enormous work. I think the entire faculty needs to be very thankful to those individuals.

There are two things I believe are important to say now. I want to mention them to the extent that they are appropriate within the faculty. The first concerns general anthroposophical activities, and the second relates to what I believe may be important for future conferences. Nevertheless, I want to expressly emphasize that this past conference was extraordinarily successful.

The first thing I would like to say is that if we want future conferences to be successful, we will need to really understand what is going on in Stuttgart when such a conference is held. In particular, we will need to understand what happens within the Anthroposophical Society itself. If we do not understand the environment in which we live, we will run a certain risk. The Waldorf School did not create this difficult situation, but in the future we must see that the school reaches an understanding with the Society so that if the majority of participants at our next conference are anthroposophists, they will not be in the position of having no opportunity to hear anything specifically anthroposophic. That is, we must avoid having people travel a long distance to a conference where nothing is said about Anthroposophy. This completely ignores the anthroposophical movement as such. That situation clearly formed the background and significantly affected the whole conference, which was itself the result of enormous effort and sacrifice. It would, of course, have been an enormous advantage had someone asked for a specifically anthroposophical session during the conference.

Of course, the anthroposophical committee (actually, there are two) gave no thought to the fact that such meetings would be entirely appropriate, even though they knew a large number of anthroposophists would be here. You should have no illusions about that. A large number of people came with the justifiable expectation of meetings more connected with anthroposophy, an expectation that would be unjustifiable if the conference did not have an anthroposophic background.

You will find genuine supporters for the Waldorf School only among people who understand anthroposophy. You should not expect that the impressions of the moment will have any lasting effect on others or that this conference will not give rise to opposition, which will then be unloaded on me. Even the most wonderful conference, if we forget such things, will give rise to opposition that will be unloaded on me. Things will be better in such cases if we are careful to create an understanding within the Anthroposophical Society. Then we could show that anthroposophy exists within the school, but because of its nature, anthroposophy does not tend to turn what it creates into something specifically anthroposophical. Anthroposophy exists to make something more generally human.

Dr. Schubert emphasized that very well. If you create wonderful rules and find them to be very valuable, but then put them over a hole, you will soon find that those rules no longer exist. That is what we do not consider. We create the most beautiful things, but they exist without any foundation. The foundation must be the anthroposophical movement. We are slowly coming to the same place as the old Austrian empire when the various realms disintegrated and the empire no longer existed. We are faced with the absurdity that there are two newsletters containing absolutely nothing. We face the danger of the Anthroposophical Society disintegrating into a number of individual movements. We face the danger that we will have the Waldorf School, The Coming Day, and so forth, but no longer an Anthroposophical Society. In that situation, there will no longer be any interest for our movement as a whole.

We can be polite to school officials, but you should not expect any success through them. If you believe they can be a source of our success, you are creating an illusion for yourself. That is just the problem, we create illusions. That is something we should not do, or else one day we will find the most beautiful forces poised over a hole. That is something we must avoid, something we must seriously consider. We should not limit the future of the whole movement by allowing the brilliance of such a conference to blind us.

I would also like to mention that in the future we must avoid emphasizing the negative and critical aspects too strongly. The first mention will not have much influence because the people who heard it will soon forget it unless opposition was lying dormant in their souls. That negative aspect existed in even the best lectures, and is something we must significantly reduce. I am certainly not against hitting people with a sledgehammer, but we should avoid being negative. Dr. N.’s lecture was filled with negative examples. Such things eat away at people if they hear them repeatedly. You spoke about experience in history, but then argued horribly against documents in connection with Herman Grimm. Grimm often stressed that we can speak about history only to the extent we have material about it. If you tell people they should base history upon inner experience and ignore documents, they will object, saying, “What does this Dr. N. know about history? He never even studied it!” Then, what you said simply collapses. (Speaking to another teacher) On the next day, you had to show that you do use documents.

In such cases, we certainly need to place documents in the proper light. You can tell people only that we must first illuminate every document. The sun that sheds light on a document cannot come from the documents themselves. If you throw the baby out with the bathwater, you give people new points of attack at each step. Without documents, you cannot do the least thing in history. You can do nothing unless you develop a counterpoint and show that each document has its proper value only when properly illuminated. Such negative situations are enormously detrimental because they continue to grow. It was quite good that you (speaking to another teacher) corrected the situation in a mild way. It was necessary to say that an error had occurred, so that you could present the whole thing as a complete picture. It needed to be corrected from a different perspective. You seem to have been quite near, but could not say something positive about the documents. You should have done that.

Another thing that was a kind of error was to try to enliven the discussion of religion in the lecture “The Artistic Element in Religion Class.” You didn’t say anything in the lecture about the artistic presentation of religion, so the title was not justified. You didn’t connect the discussion about teaching religion with that. Such things simply have a negative effect.

We must make a serious effort to avoid such negative situations. I intentionally wrote an essay about Richard Wahle because I wanted to show how the Anthroposophical Society should interact with the rest of the world, both verbally and in writing. I wrote that essay to illustrate the attitude we should have. When you read the essay, I would ask you to recognize that it handles the question of how we should orient ourselves when working with people in the world outside.

We have to take the positive things into account also; otherwise we will never get past our illusions. It is destructive to work with illusions, and we cannot permit ourselves to be devoted to them in our judgments. We need to be clear that we can move forward only through people who come to us as spiritual virgins. We can move forward only with such people. If you think all of your politeness can change the opinion of a school official, then you have one of the strongest illusions, one that can be terribly harmful. It is important that you keep people’s good intentions, but have no illusion that they will help you. At best, they may help in externalities by not forbidding that you do something. We might summarize the school officials’ impression as, “Things are not so bad at the Waldorf School. It, of course, represents things we believe in.” If you think that opinion is true, then we should close the Waldorf School tomorrow. It would not have been necessary to have started it at all.

You must have no illusion. It is easy to criticize. You do not need to avoid criticizing, but you should allow the criticism to result in something positive. It is important to use these things we learn clairvoyantly to illuminate these things that approach us from outside. If you understand the intent of Truth and Science, you will find that reality lies in the interpenetration of perception and the results of human activity.

Well, that is what has happened recently, at least to the extent that the Waldorf School is affected, and I want to do everything to bring our movement forward. What we need, however, is some kind of communication with the central directors, in the normal sense of the word, about anthroposophical work. That is slowly disappearing in spite of the fact that important members of the committee are on the faculty. You seem to forget you are anthroposophists the instant you become Waldorf teachers. That is not acceptable.

The major failing of the conference was that no one thought of doing something for these anthroposophists who had traveled here from afar and to whom we should have brought something more anthroposophical. It is very curious that we are approached from all sides to convey something about anthroposophy. It is really so; I couldn’t take a step without someone saying something, and those who volunteered to direct such activities did nothing to meet the concrete wishes of members of the Society. On the contrary, they did not even take their own wishes into account. They certainly have wishes themselves. That would change immediately if the various streams, such as the pedagogical, suddenly shifted toward the other side. Now that we have finished the conference, we need to be conscious about taking that into account in the future.

A teacher makes a remark.

Dr. Steiner: Now we need to make a final decision about the classes. The main problems are the 1a and 1b classes. Before Miss Hofmann can continue her work here in the Waldorf School, she will need a year to recover. She cannot use her strength here until she has recuperated for a year. I therefore propose that Dr. von Heydebrand take over the 1a class. I believe that is also her desire. I think we can resolve such problems in this way. The question of who teaches the classes needs to be considered by the whole faculty. I would ask that you say everything you have to say about who teaches each class, both for and against. In the case of Dr. von Heydebrand, there is, of course, no “for” or “against.” Everyone will be happy if she takes over the 1a class. Are there any proposals for 1b? I ask that all of you say what you have to say, since the faculty as a whole needs to agree with who teaches each class.

There is some discussion about Miss N.

Dr. Steiner: Much of the problem lies in the fact that you cannot speak. You can never teach in that way. You really need to get used to the idea of taking a course in speech. You did not complete last year because of the way you present yourself, how you used to present yourself. You cannot speak. When you stand in front of the class that way, you will never finish.

Z. says something about that.

Dr. Steiner: That is true for many. Mr. Z. does not understand that because he has developed a language for himself that works right down into the fibers. You should not underestimate what a difference working to develop your speech makes. If someone does it instinctively, as you do, and it is certainly positive that your voice is so effective, then you should not be surprised that the subject comes up here. Miss N. will have difficulties as long as she does not accept the need of taking a course in proper speaking. (Speaking to Mr. Z.) Your speech carries, and so much depends upon the speech. (Speaking to Miss N.) You will see that you will have a completely different attitude after you have taken some instruction in speech. The one you have now gives the children the impression you are a dried-up old lady. That is what is important. Mr. Z. makes the impression of a lively young man. Why shouldn’t we say such things? So much depends upon these things in pedagogy. You need to get used to them if you are to make any progress in putting aridness aside.

If you took some good speech instruction, you would not have as many colds. I am not at all surprised. Do not underestimate the hygienic influence proper speech can have. Being able to speak properly is very significant. As long as you cannot use your organs of speech properly and one thing runs into another, as long as you do not properly cultivate your organs of speech, you will have colds. I think it is terrible that so many of you have colds. If people would properly “onion” themselves by learning how to speak, colds would disappear.

Marie Steiner: Proper speech often helps getting past colds, but not always.

Dr. Steiner: Well, the fact is that we really need to do something in this direction. I don’t mean that in a moral sense, but aesthetically. There is a discussion about whether Miss N. could or should stay at the Waldorf School. Some of the teachers object to her teaching.

Miss N.: I would find it most valuable if you, Dr. Steiner, would say something.

Dr. Steiner: I already said what I think. If things continue in this way, then we will have enormous difficulties. I would like you to recall, however, that what happens to A could also happen to B. I think that if we continue with this depressing way of looking at things, we could close.

The general opinion has been that I should select the teachers. We should continue with that, but now the problem is that although that opinion has not changed in fact, it has changed in feeling, in how we look at the situation. I may have to pose the question now of whether the faculty members want to select the teachers themselves.

On the other hand, today’s discussion has not changed the fact that it may be better if you were to go to C. I think that might be better. It is not easy to overcome such a mood. That just occurred to me.

It is too bad. How can we make a decision when you want to discuss everything within the faculty? This could happen to anyone tomorrow. In deciding who will take a position here at the Waldorf School, there are so many things to consider that are no longer the same thing when they are spoken in words. It is really very difficult to do when things are said such as, “A person is completely unfit to teach a class.” That is something that could happen to someone else tomorrow, and should not happen here. One such case is enough. It is terribly sad that we have even one such case. I do not think it is completely unfounded, though. Miss N. has been unable to gain the sympathy of a number of colleagues, not just in the question concerning her class. That, however, could happen to any of you.

For those who have experienced the things I have, this may be an interesting story. In Vienna there was a lecturer, Lorenz, who was appointed as the rector, and who then gave a speech about Aristotle’s view of politics. He was now God. His predecessor was a theologian. The assistant rector was very much disliked for a speech he had given in the state assembly. The students decided to stamp him out. This situation was now presented to the rector for a decision. Lorenz went into the class and was greeted with, “Rise.” He said, “Gentlemen, your ‘rise’ is quite insignificant to me. Your ‘rise’ is quite unimportant to me after you have trampled out a man who, regardless of his political opinion, is such a scientific great, someone standing far above me.” Then the students shouted, “Die, Lorenz!” You can learn a great deal from this story. The question is, therefore, who will take over the 1b class. Perhaps we should leave it open for now.

Dr. Steiner reviews the teaching schedule for the 1923–1924 school year and makes a number of decisions.

Dr. Steiner (speaking to one of the teachers): You need to go on vacation for a year. I cannot take the responsibility for your taking a leave due to illness and then reappearing here shortly afterward. When you have been as sick as you were, then you were so sick that I would ask you to go on vacation for a year. Since you participated in the pedagogical conference, it is clear you could have waited to take your sick leave. I am affronted by the fact that you went away and caused so much confusion, then returned and participated in the conference; I cannot say I have very much trust that you will be able to take up your teaching at the beginning of school. I can only suggest that you take a year off. The whole thing is a ridiculous situation.

I have to say that from my perspective, the situation was such a major disappointment that I no longer believe you will be able to teach successfully. This is not a severe rebuke. The work here in the Waldorf School is not a game. We cannot allow people to take things lightly.

You can see that it is not easy for me to take up a second case. Of course, we had to bow to health, but then you must want to become healthy again. It is not a harsh decision to ask you to go on leave for a year.

Anyone can attack me through their personal ambition. Everyone can trample around on me. Those are things I don’t discuss with others. Before 1918, I did not need to speak in that way. Things are terribly misused. This is no harsh rule. It was enormously foolish for you to come again. You really need to gain some strength, and you should not undertake such foolish things again. Were you to continue to teach as you have, I could have no trust. The events have shown that you needed to leave, but then you come back at a time when it is silly to return.

I know those sayings. When people want to come to such a conference, they say it is terribly important. You need to be clear that I can do nothing more than say you need to recuperate for a year. I do not understand why you find that so difficult. You need to get used to undertaking things conscientiously and to feeling responsibility, and not simply skip recuperating because you want to hear certain things now. If you have something important to do, you should also be careful with your health. I am saying that in a very decent way and have good intentions toward you. Nevertheless, you need a year’s leave. (Speaking to one of the upper-grade elementary-school teachers) There is a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction with you. A whole group of parents think that you are rude and that the children cannot handle the way you present yourself. That saddened me because I thought the way you taught botany was very good. It is difficult, because people do not see that things come from various directions.

A teacher: I will try to improve that.

Dr. Steiner: I think you should not be too childish in the way you present things to illustrate the subject. It seems to me that you underestimate the children’s souls. You do not live with their souls at the stage in which they now exist. You need to teach without presenting things too childishly.

I wonder if we need to change things in the ninth grade so that we no longer have the normal main lesson. The eighth grade is really the last year of elementary school. In the following grades, we change teachers. It is a question whether we can continue. Let’s take a look at the teachers.

Dr. Steiner discusses in detail the teaching schedule, the subjects, and the class schedule.

Dr. Steiner: In the upper grades a thorough review of mathematics would be included in main lesson. Two hours would be enough for that. If the mathematics teacher takes over the main lesson, then we do not need more time for review.

(Concerning a new teacher) X. will come and be integrated here so that he is not ruined by having to go through the Stuttgart system. It would be good if he could jump in wherever we need a replacement in academic subjects. First of all, we would then have a substitute teacher, and second, he might effectively take over teaching academic subjects in the upper grades. He would have to be guided if he were to take over such a class. We could achieve some kind of relief if we used him to continue what was introduced by one of you teaching a core subject. Otherwise, we could not develop new teachers. This is something that might work well. The problem with these subjects is that there is not enough time for preparation; the teachers are simply not well enough prepared. That is the situation. We can only improve that if you are relieved.

I would like to have X. here for that reason, but there is an additional reason. X. may really achieve something someday. I don’t see that the Research Institute is in such a condition that we should send him there. If we did, he would only stand around. We cannot afford to simply throw young people away when we can include them here. He will do something. That needs to be our standpoint, as then we can properly fill out the positions for teaching academic subjects.

A teacher says something.

Dr. Steiner: (During the discussion concerning hiring somebody to teach humanities) Could your wife take over teaching the humanities in the ninth grade? I have not proposed that as yet, because I thought she had too much to do with the children. We cannot allow it to become common that man and wife are both employed here. When the children are no longer in diapers, it would be a good idea if she could take over literary history and history.

We need to fulfill other conditions when we are under the pressure of having to prepare the twelfth grade for their final examinations. In that case, the teaching has to be very concentrated. We will have to take up the question of final examinations soon. We will have to ask the students questions in such a way that they can easily fail.

The best thing would be if we were in a position to work only with those students who really want to take the final examination. This final examination question is really a burden for us, but there will probably not be very many who really want to take it. Are there many girls who want to take the final examination?

A teacher: In the other upper grades, there are many who want to go into eurythmy.

Dr. Steiner: Then they should not take the final examination. When the eurythmy school is halfway established, we will have to form eurythmy more completely. It cannot remain the way it is now, but will have to be more completely developed. When someone wants to become a ballet dancer, she must undergo training for seven years. We also need to have some supplementary subjects. In time, it will be absolutely necessary to have a genuinely human education there. Related arts such as dance and mime will also have to be taught. If the eurythmy school is to be successful, we must develop it further. Such training will most certainly need five years. We cannot afford to just wildly produce eurythmists. Those who are later to become teachers certainly need to have a complete education. They need to know something about the human being, also. They will need an education in literary history, for example. Slowly, we will have to develop a proper curriculum.

The question now is whether we could free those who are to become eurythmists from those classes they do not want to take. They could then go over to the eurythmy school and learn there.

It would be best if we did not split the curriculum at the Waldorf School with eurythmy. We would have to do things so that when there is a split, those who are moving on would not take the final examination. That is, those who want to have further education in art could not take Latin and Greek.

A teacher asks if the twelfth grade should learn bookbinding and working with gold leaf.

Dr. Steiner: It would be wonderful if we could continue with that.

Dr. Steiner: I think it would be good if we took care of the formal things today. If there is still something to say about the beginning of school, it might be better to do that after we have taken care of the formal things. We will probably need to meet again tomorrow to speak about the beginning of school from a more spiritual perspective. Today, I think we should try to take care of the various needs that have arisen from the faculty.

The classes and the foreign language classes are assigned.

Dr. Steiner: The question now is if anyone has a particular wish regarding these assignments.

Changes are made to meet some expressed desires.

A teacher: I would like to ask if we can define an order of presentation for art. I thought that I would begin tomorrow in the ninth grade with those things connected with the curriculum as a whole, that is, related to history and literary history. I want to show how art arose from mythology.

Dr. Steiner: It would be good to bring the art class into step with history and literary history. You could try to make a transition from Germanic mythology to art and then remain with that for a time. Then, perhaps you could show how the Germanic myths reappear in a different artistic form as aesthetics. You could certainly show, for example, the connection between Dürer and German mythology. They are fifteen-year-old children. You could use this as an occasion to show how the old Germans painted their gods just as Dürer painted his figures later.

You could then go on into the tenth grade, since the curriculum depends upon the previous year. In the tenth grade, we have Goethe’s poems and style, and that can stay. In the eleventh grade, summarize music and poetry.

Dr. Steiner confirms the teacher’s understanding about art instruction in the previous grades. The same teacher now proposes artistically treating what is done in the twelfth-grade German class, literature beginning in 1740, in preparation for the final examination.

Dr. Steiner: Then, we would no longer need a special literary history class. We need to see to it that the students learn the things they may be asked. In connection with modern literary history, they will certainly be asked about things that began with Gottsched and Bodmer and what followed them. German and art class can certainly cover the same material.

In order not to make compromises, I think it would be good to recognize that a large number of Goethe’s works are based upon impressions of paintings, and also that we can trace back much romantic art to musical impressions. Try to develop how the arts are intertwined.

An essay by Burdach, “Schiller’s Chordrama und die Geburt des tragischen Stiles aus der Musik” (Schiller’s choral drama and the birth of the tragic style from music) in the Deutschen Rundschau (German review) is mentioned.

Dr. Steiner: Burdach’s research has a problem in that it has an underlying tendency. He wants to show that somehow certain themes arise out of some primal forces, and then he follows them further. This is really very contrived. Schiller was certainly not as dependent upon earlier streams as Burdach claims. We certainly cannot ignore Schiller’s dramatic experimentation and the fact that he created a choral drama after many attempts. In Demetrius, he created a romantic drama in a style much like Shakespeare’s. You cannot ignore the details Burdach cites, since they may be useful. However, you will probably arrive at a different conclusion, probably that Schiller would have created something quite different from The Bride of Messina had he really swum in that stream.

That essay belongs with the series of things Burdach has produced. He has an idée fixe. He wants to show that a theme arises out of a subhuman source. All these things are similar, so you need to be cautious with Burdach. He also wrote other things where he derives the minstrel from Arabic provincials by finding the original impulse in the middle of the Middle Ages and using it as the beginning of the literary stream. Faust and Moses also belong in this group, as do Shakespeare’s dramas.

A teacher speaks about his tenth-grade class in Western history and Middle High-German literature.

Dr. Steiner: You need to do that harmoniously. Even if you do not like the material, we have to begin with what you have already done as a basis. There is nothing from the present we could use as a basis. We have to use an older historical picture as our basis and then present our perspective as history. Couldn’t you use Heeren as a basis? You could just as well take Rotteck, though he is a little bit old-fashioned and one-sided. It would also be good if you brought out the correspondences with artistic styles. Young people today could learn a tremendous amount if you were to read some chapters from Johannes Müller’s Vierundzwanzig Bücher allgemeiner Geschichte (Twenty-four books of history) with them. That is historical style, almost like Tacitus. Such attempts to work in a unified way have been made time and again, something that needs to be renewed from our perspective.

If you lean too heavily upon geology, you are in danger of taking the basement, leaving out the ground floor, and then taking the second floor, whereas you should actually begin with what geology offers for historical themes, such as the Great Migrations and dependence upon territory. My public lectures in Stuttgart could be helpful for that. Of course, you cannot present that in class. It was intended for enlightened older people in Stuttgart. You will need to translate it for the students and, in the future, be sure to leave out the Chymical Wedding.

If you begin preparing for this now and immediately begin with literature, you will have to use something like Heeren, Rotteck, or Johannes Müller. It is certainly not right to transform history into religious history alone. That is something for the religion teachers. I will give you the curriculum tomorrow.

A teacher: Where should I begin in this class?

Dr. Steiner: You said yourself you wanted to begin with the dependence upon the Earth. Therefore, you should take the climates of the various regions, today’s cold and temperate zones, and geological formations as a basis for history. Show how a people changed when they moved from the mountains down into the valleys, but do all this from a historical perspective, not a geographical one, so that you speak about a particular people during a particular period. Show, for example, why the Greeks became Greeks. Here, you could use Heeren as a guide. What is important is that things be done properly.

A teacher (who is to take over teaching history and German in the ninth grade): I would like some guidance for ninth-grade history. What should I particularly emphasize?

Dr. Steiner: You need to deepen their understanding.

The previous class teacher: In the eighth grade I presented history in pictures and biographies. I particularly emphasized cultural history in the nineteenth century.

Dr. Steiner: According to our curriculum, the children in the eighth and ninth grades should gain a picture of the inner historical themes, the major movements. They should learn how the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought an enlarged viewpoint to human beings, an increase in all directions, geography and astronomy. They should learn how that played out historically. Then they should learn how the effects of the seventeenth- and eighteenth- century enlightenment played out in history and how, in the nineteenth century, the integration of peoples and nations had an effect. Taking each century, you can present the facts from these perspectives.

Regarding your preparation, it would be very good if you could create a picture for yourself of what story would result if Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years War were continued to the present time, that is, what modern history would be like. In regard to Middle Europe, Treitschke’s summaries are very good. In the first chapter of his German History, he brought all the threads together. A teacher wants to begin the twelfth grade with series and then go on to integral and differential calculus.

Dr. Steiner: Differential and integral calculations are not really demanded. If you want to do this efficiently, you can begin integration earlier, and use series to explain both. I would try to get far enough that the students can use differential and integral computations with curves. That is sufficient for the final examination. If the students can work with second- and third-degree equations, that is enough. The problems that will be given are published.

Dr. Steiner learns that there are also more difficult problems.

Dr. Steiner: I would certainly like to know what is left to learn at college. There is really not much more. In any event, you can begin tomorrow with series.

A teachers asks about chemical formulas.

Dr. Steiner: We will have to find out what is required for the final examination. That is the problem; we start making these compromises, but we need to go far enough that the students can pass the final examination. This is terrible.

There would be some sense in it if they at least used stereometric formulas, but they mostly use planar formulas, which is quite senseless. The students need to know the processes. All this is senseless and very sad, but we have to take it into account.

Tomorrow, we can meet again at the same time to discuss questions concerning the curriculum, but for now I would like to take care of any other questions and desires.

A teacher asks about texts for English. Dickens’s Christmas Carol is too difficult for the eighth grade.

Dr. Steiner: You can be certain that you can read Dickens with children who know almost nothing, and what they need to learn, they can quite easily pick up. Tell them how the story goes on. Perhaps you could solve the problem if you first told the children about the content and selected some simpler excerpts for them to read. You can certainly overcome such difficulties. These texts are the very best for those children who cannot read English.

An eighth-grade teacher: E.B. is not very happy with me.

A teacher: One of his comrades would like to be in your class because it is more artistic.

Dr. Steiner: You could exchange the two.

There are problems with the class schedule, and the religion classes are too large.

Dr. Steiner: It cannot be any different than last year. There must be some way of solving the scheduling problem. I cannot imagine that we cannot solve it. There should be no more than fifty students in a religion class.

A teacher asks about a deaf-and-dumb child in the remedial class.

Dr. Steiner: She is not deaf. She can hear and can also be taught to speak. She is only a little slow. She does not respond, so you will simply have to try everything. You need to say something slowly, then have her speak it after you. Continue in that way; first speak slowly, then increase the speed so that she gradually needs to understand things more quickly. You could also do the exercise by speaking loudly, then having her speak softly, and then the other way around. You could do it slowly and have her do it quickly. Do variations of that. If possible, use a series of words that have some connection. Do them forward and backward in order to develop the center of speech. I would also have her do the curative eurythmy exercises connected with the head. She should do them daily, even if for only a short time.

(Speaking to the school doctor) She should also receive edelweiss at 6X potency, which is an effective means for healing the connection between the hearing nerves and the hearing center. It has a strong effect and is effective even when the hearing organs are hardened. The hardening has a relationship to edelweiss; it absorbs the flowers. You will find that the relationships that exist within this mineral, but not mineralized, material are within the flower also, and that they have an extreme similarity to the processes that constitute the hearing organ. We have used this remedy for ten years. Be sure to soak the flowers well first. A teacher asks about decorating the room for religious services.

Dr. Steiner: Unfortunately, our main problem is that we must give up the Waldorf School ideal for the twelfth grade. We cannot base the twelfth-grade curriculum upon our principles. We simply have to admit that we must take all the subjects in other high schools into account during the final year. I am looking with some horror at the last semester, when we will have to ignore everything except the subjects required for the final examination. It’s inconceivable that we can work any other way if the students are to pass the final examination. This is really a problem. After thinking about it a long time, I do not think there is much to say about the curriculum for that class except those things we already considered, such as chemical technology and such.

The students are about eighteen, and at that age it is best if they attain an overall understanding of history and art. We should give them an understanding of the spirit of literature, art, and history without, of course, teaching them about anthroposophy. We must try to bring them the spirit in those subjects, not only in the content but also in the way we present them. With the students, we should at least try to achieve what I have striven for with the workers in Dornach, pictures that make it clear that, for instance, an island like Great Britain swims in the sea and is held fast by the forces of the stars. In actuality, such islands do not sit directly upon a foundation; they swim and are held fast from outside. In general, the cosmos creates islands and continents, their forms and locations. That is certainly the case with firm land. Such things are the result of the cosmos, of the stars. The Earth is a reflection of the cosmos, not something caused from within. However, we need to avoid such things. We cannot tell them to the students because they would then need to tell them to their professors in the examinations, and we would acquire a terrible name. Nevertheless, that is actually what we should achieve in geography.

In physics and chemistry, we should try to cover every principle that reveals the whole system of chemistry and physics as an organism, a unity, and not simply an aggregate as most people assume. With the twelfth grade, we have a kind of conclusion, and we must draw conclusions everywhere. We must give answers to the questions that arise, for instance, in mineralogy, where the five Platonic solids manifest. We should do that when we study minerals and crystals.

In art, we can only continue what we previously did in music, sculpture, and painting. That can never be concluded.

Unfortunately, we can do none of that. The only new thing we can do is one hour of chemical technology. Elsewhere, we will need to make sure that we simply bring the students far enough along that they can answer the questions on the final examination. This is terrible, but there is nothing we can do to avoid it. However, we should follow our curriculum as exactly as possible until the students are fourteen. As far as possible, I would ask you to consider up to that year all the things that have fallen by the way. We need to strictly carry out the curriculum until the students are fourteen.

I am telling you all this so that you will know how you would need to think were it possible to apply the principles of the Waldorf School with eighteen-year-old students. Eighteen-year-olds need to understand the various historical periods in a living way, particularly regarding the “getting younger” of humanity. That would have an important influence upon people. In the oldest periods of humanity, people could feel the development of their souls until the age of sixty. Following the Mystery of Golgotha, they could feel it only until the age of thirty-three, and today that is possible only until twenty-seven. Students need to comprehend this ongoing decrease before they begin their studies at an institution of higher learning. It is something that belongs in the general education in a Waldorf school and would have a tremendously beneficial effect upon the students’ souls.

The situation is as follows. When we look at the learning goals of the twelfth grade, we need to imagine that the students will continue at a college, and we also need to imagine that they have completed their general education. We can find our teaching goals in the following circumstances. Today, you can represent anthroposophy to the world such that people with sound human feeling can understand it. (Sound human understanding does not exist today.) They can understand it through feeling. Today, however, if those who have gone through a modern high-school education do not have a particular predisposition, it is impossible for them to comprehend certain anthroposophical truths. Today, they have hardly any possibility of understanding such things.

If you consider Kolisko’s chemistry, it is clear that it is unimaginable for modern chemists. You can teach students that kind of imaginative capacity until the age of eighteen or nineteen, that is, until the completion of the moon cycle, which then begins again. If people are to comprehend certain concepts, they must achieve a particular development during that period.

Compared to other people today, you are all a little crazy. You all have something that sets you apart from the current general development, something that is present to a greater or lesser extent in each of you. You have a certain kind of eccentricity. You are, in a certain way, not quite normal. Those who are normal, that is, “normal people,” cannot understand some things. Chemists with a normal education cannot understand Kolisko’s chemistry. They simply have no concepts for it. Our goal should be to make that understanding possible for our students. However, we cannot achieve that when we are forced to work toward ruining brains in exactly the same way that modern schools work toward that goal. Souls cannot be ruined. They undergo a self-correction before the next earthly life, although if things remain as they are today and continue into the next earthly life, humanity will degenerate. We cannot do these things. It is simply impossible. Even people like Herman Grimm could maintain themselves upon their islands only by brusquely brushing away certain concepts. People like him simply went past others, but they were the last who had such concepts. Those people, who were quite old during the 1890s, were the last who had them, and that possibility died with them.

It is particularly difficult with today’s youth. Today’s young people, as we have seen quite clearly in our anthroposophical youth movement, have a tendency to reject all ideas. They are not interested in ideas and, therefore, to the extent that they do not accept anthroposophy, become disorganized. Today’s young people are forced into a terrible tragedy, particularly if they are academically inclined and have gone through our college preparatory schools. We can achieve more for those students who go into practical life at the age of fourteen.

It is impossible, for example, to develop a spatial concept as I described it in the recent teachers’ course in Dornach, that is, the three dimensions, up-down, left-right, front-back. That is why it is so difficult to give people an understanding of anthroposophical truths. No one today is interested in things for which there should be broad public interest. I have said that everything connected with the will works three-dimensionally in the earthly realm. Everything connected with feeling is not three-dimensional, but two-dimensional, so that when you move from willing to feeling in your soul, you have to project the third dimension onto the plane in a direction that corresponds with front to back. We need to remember that we cannot simply—we can reduce it to the symmetry of the human being, but we cannot limit it to only that. This plane is two-dimensional everywhere—thinking then leads to one dimension and the I to zero dimensions. When we do that, the situation becomes quite clear. Now I ask you, how can such elementary things be presented in a lecture? There is simply no possibility of making that plausible to the modern public. No one is interested in it.

It would certainly be wonderful if, for example, in addition to the normal perspective of orthogonals, planes, and centers, people understood perspectives of three dimensions to two, from two dimensions to one, and then from one to the zero dimension. It would be wonderful if people could do that so that we could differentiate a point in many ways.

I am telling you all these things so that you can see how things need to be in the future and how we should form a school that would really educate people. Today, so-called educated people are really very undeveloped because today’s students are required to know many things in a certain way, but they really need to know them in a quite different way. I think we should try to do as much of that as possible in the lower grades, but in the upper grades, we must be untrue to our own principles, at least for the most part. We can only include one thing or another here and there. Even someone like J.W. can say to me that she would take the final examination if she thought she would pass. I told her that would be sensible only if she is certain she will pass. If she failed, it would not be good for the school.

The worst thing is that if we could convince the state to accept our reports, our students could very well follow a course of study at the university with what they would learn from our curriculum. Everything connected with the final examination, which causes such misery in modern school life, is absolutely unnecessary for studying at the university. Students could take up Kolisko’s chemistry as a subject. They would at first be surprised by chemical formulas, of course, but they could learn that later. It is much more important that they understand the inner processes of materials and the relationships between them. These are the things I wanted to say. I would like to discuss this whole question further. I would have completed the curriculum, but it has no meaning for the twelfth grade. We already know what we must do.

The students need to complete all the practical subjects insofar as possible. That is something you will feel after a time. So that the children have some sense of security, I would like to ask them about these subjects. I had the impression a while ago that the children thought the questions were unusual when you stated them poorly.

A teacher: Could we split the classes?

Dr. Steiner: We would need to have parallel classes from the age of fourteen, but we do not have enough teachers. The problem is financial. I would like to know how the finances are now. We should always keep that in mind.

There is some discussion about the financial situation.

Dr. Steiner: Well, the important thing is not that we have a financial report, but that we always have what we need in the bank. We can certainly continue, but we will have to do something. Otherwise, it will be impossible to do what needs to be done. For now, we cannot consider such a split.

At the college level, we cannot reach our goals for a very long time. The Cultural Committee might have done that, but they fell asleep after a few weeks. We might be able to achieve the things we want so much if we had the situation that existed in Austria for many private high schools. There many parochial high schools had the right to give and grade the final examinations, and technical schools could provide an accepted final report. I believe there are no such institutions in Germany. We would need a state official to be present, but the teachers would actually do the testing. A state official, while certainly causing many difficulties in our souls, in the end would have little effect on the grades if the final examination was held by our teachers.

A teacher: I believe we should speak to the students who will not be able to pass the final examination.

Dr. Steiner: That depends. People will say the faculty is at fault if more than a third of the class do not achieve the learning goals. If it is less than a third, the fault is thought to be the students’, but when a third or more do not achieve what they should, then it is seen as the faculty’s problem. You know that, don’t you?

In general, no one who has had good grades fails. The problem is, that is not taken into account. A further point is whether we could avoid using those really unpedagogical textbooks. The teacher could, of course, use them for preparation. Most of those texts are simply extracts from various scientific books. I have noticed that the questions come from such books and that there are readings from them, also. That can, however, cause many problems. We need to get away from using such references. We can use Lübsen’s books since they are quite educational, although the last editions have been somewhat ruined. His books are very pedagogical through all the editions before those made by his successor. Imagine for a moment the wonderful value of calculus in pedagogy. His analytical geometry is also pedagogically wonderful, at least the older edition, as well as his volumes on algebra and analysis. He has, for example, a collection of problems that are extraordinarily good because the methods required to solve them are very instructive.

A teacher: Should we throw out all the textbooks?

Dr. Steiner: For translation, they are not so bad. However, for German readings, you should not use normal textbooks. They are quite tasteless. Perhaps we should write down our lesson plans for the following teachers, so they could at least have some material for reading. There are so many people here who can type. Why can’t we prepare documents that people can read? The offices are filled with people, but I have no idea what they do.

A teacher: The students in the twelfth grade would like an additional hour of French.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to make everything possible. It is terrible that the twelfth-grade students will not receive an introduction to architecture. If everyone teaching languages helped, it might be possible.

An English teacher asks about prose readings for the twelfth grade, about Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, and about the English art and literature magazine The Athenaeum.

Dr. Steiner: The Athenaeum is edited very practically. You should not give it to the students, but instead use some individual essays. You could also use it in the eleventh grade. We do not have such well-edited magazines in Germany anymore. This is an old magazine, a humanistic magazine par excellence. There was a terrible German imitation called Literary News. Zarnck’s Literarisches Zentralblatt (Literary journal) was also a terrible imitation. It was a magazine for people who do not exist even in England.

A teacher: We have done enough of Tacitus and Horace. Should we take up Sallustius?

Dr. Steiner: Sallustius and Tacitus. I think the Germania would be enough. You could have them read a larger piece from that and then give them a test.

A teacher asks about music for the twelfth grade.

Dr. Steiner: A feeling for style, as such, an awareness of how Bach differs from others, is the main thing for the twelfth grade. At worst, you will have a problem at Christmastime if we see that we cannot continue all of the art instruction. Do not consider it an impossibility that we have to stop all art instruction at Christmas. Other people make fun of our things.

A teacher asks about religious instruction for the twelfth grade.

Dr. Steiner: You should go through religious history and give an overview of religious development. Begin with the ethnographic religions and then go on to folk religions and finally universal religions.

Begin with the ethnographic religions such as the Egyptian regional gods, where the religions are still quite dependent upon the various tribes. There are also regional gods throughout Greece. You need to do this in stages. At first, we have the religions that are fixed at a given location, the holy places. Then, during the period of wandering, the tent replaces the holy places, the religion becomes more mobile, and folk religions arise. Finally, we have universal religions, Buddhism and Christianity. We cannot call any other religions universal.

In the ninth grade, read the Gospel of Luke, which is a pouring out of the Holy Spirit.

A teacher asks about the Apocrypha.

Dr. Steiner: The children are not yet mature enough to go through the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha contains many things that are more correct than what is written in the Gospels. I have always extended the Gospels by what we can verify from the Apocrypha. Sometimes there are strong conflicts. When they take up the Gospels, the children must grasp them. It is difficult to explain the contradictions, so if they took up the Apocrypha nothing would make sense anymore. I would simply study the Gospels. A teacher asks about religion in the tenth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Following St. John’s Gospel, a number of paths are possible. You could do either the Gospel of St. Mark or Augustine, selecting some sections from the Confessions where he speaks more about religion.

A teacher asks if they should teach zoology and botany in the twelfth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Those subjects need to be included if our reports are to be officially recognized. We study zoology in the fifth grade, then the human being, then zoology again. If we did not have this problem of final examinations, I think it would be wonderful to present zoology to the children in the course of three weeks. That would be eighteen mornings to handle the twelve groups of animals. In the twelfth grade, we should limit zoology to categorization; the same is true of plants.

The students already know about skeletal structure, since you have already done anthropology. The most important thing is that they gain an overview about how we classify animals. You should begin with single-celled animals, then go through the worms. You will have twelve if you consider the vertebrates as one class. A teacher asks about how continents swim.

Dr. Steiner: Usually people do not think about how it looks if you move toward the center of the Earth. You would soon come to regions where it is very fluid, whether it is water or something else. Thus, according to our normal understanding, the continents swim. The question is, of course, why they don’t bump into one another, why they don’t move back and forth, and why they are always the same distance from one another, since the Earth is under all kinds of influences. Why don’t they bump into one another? For instance, why is a channel always the same width? We can find no explanation for that from within the Earth. That is something that comes from outside. All fixed land swims and the stars hold it in position. Otherwise, everything would break apart. The seas tend to be spherical.

A teacher asks for more details. Dr. Steiner takes a teacher’s notebook and draws the following sketch in it while giving an explanation.

Dr. Steiner: The contrast is interesting. The continents swim and do not sit upon anything. They are held in position upon the Earth by the constellations. When the constellations change, the continents change, also. The old tellurians and atlases properly included the constellations of the zodiac in relationship to the configuration of the Earth’s surface. The continents are held from the periphery; the higher realms hold the parts of the Earth. In contrast, the Earth holds the Moon dynamically, as if on a leash. The Moon goes along as if on a tether.

A teacher asks about drawing exercises for fourteen- and fifteenyear- olds.

Dr. Steiner: You should have the children paint the moods of nature. The continuation students in Dornach have done wonderful work in painting. I had them paint the difference between sunrise and sunset, and some of them have done that wonderfully. They should learn those differences and be able to paint them. Those are the kinds of things you could work with, for example, the mood of rain in the forest. In addition, they should learn the differences between painting and sculpting.

In the lower grades, take care, when things get out of hand and you cannot get through the material, that you do not rashly reach for a substitute and simply tell the children a story to keep them quiet.

I hope to be here again tomorrow morning.