The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Based on such sentiments as might arise from the discussions which we have actually pursued in our meeting on “General Principles of Teaching,”¹ I should like to mention, in connection with method, an extraordinarily important point, which, moreover, has reference to our discussions on method of yesterday.

You must look on the first school-lesson which you take with your pupils in every class as a lesson of outstanding significance. The influence of this first school-lesson will be far more important in one connection than that of all the other lessons. But the other lessons, too, will have to be employed to make the potential influence of the first lesson fruitful for the whole course of teaching. Let us imagine, without more delay, in concrete terms, how—as you will soon be in a position to become familiar with children coming from all quarters of education, and mis-education, too—we are going to arrange the first school-lesson. Of course here I can only give you general suggestions which you will be able to develop further. The point is that you will not have to act in accordance with certain principles of education which have arisen lately, but you will have to aim at things of real value for the child's development.

You have, then, a group in front of you, of various children. The first thing will be to draw the attention of the children to the reason why they are really there. It is extremely important to address the children somewhat in this way: “So now you have come to school, and I shall tell you why you have come to school.” And now this act of coming to school must be consciously appreciated. “You have come to school because you have to learn something in school. To-day you have no idea of all that you are to learn in school, but you will have to learn very many things here. Why will you have to learn very many things in school? Well, you have already met grown-ups, the big people, and you will have seen that they can do something which you cannot. And you are here so that one day you too will be able to do what the big people can do. Some day you will be able to do what you cannot do yet.” To give the children this complex of idea is extremely important. But this deep-seated idea has still another consequence.

No teaching proceeds in the right course unless it is accompanied by a certain reverence for the previous generation. However much this shade of feeling must remain a nuance of feeling and sentiment, it must nevertheless be cultivated in the children by all possible means: the child must look up with reverence, with respect, to what the older generations have already achieved and what he is to achieve, too, through the school. This looking with a certain respect to the surrounding culture must be inspired in the child from the very first, so that he really sees almost a kind of higher being in the people who have already grown older. Without awakening this sense in teaching and education one cannot get on. But neither can one get on without raising to the level of the soul's consciousness the ideals that are to be realized. Proceed to reflect with the child, then, in the following way, quite without hesitation at the fact that you are, in so doing, looking beyond the child's horizon. It does not matter, you see, if you say a great deal to the child which he will only understand later. The principle that you should only teach the child what he already understands, what he can already form an opinion on, is the principle which has ruined so much in our culture. A very famous educator of a still more famous personality of to-day once boasted that he had educated this person on this principle: he said: “I have educated this young man well, for I have made him form an immediate opinion on everything.” Now very many people to-day are in agreement with this principle of forming opinions about everything and it is not remarkable that you find a very well-known teacher of a still better-known personality wishing to emphasize this principle again in pedagogical books. I have even found it said in a modern pedagogical work referring to this principle: It only remains to desire that such a model education might be given to every German boy and every German girl. You see from this that examples are plentiful among present-day educationists, of how not to behave, for this kind of educating conceals a great tragedy, and this tragedy again is connected with the present world catastrophe.

The point, then, is not that the child should at once form an opinion on everything imaginable, but that between the seventh and fifteenth year he absorbs what he is to absorb, from love for his teacher, from a sense of his authority. Accordingly you must try to continue the already suggested conversation with the child, enlarging on it in the way which best suits you: “Look how grown-ups have books and can read. You cannot read yet, but you will learn to read, and when you have learnt to read you will be able, one day, too, to handle books and to learn from them what the grown-ups learn from these books. Grown-ups can write letters to each other, too; in fact, they can write about all the things in the world. You also will be able to write letters later, for besides learning to read you will learn to write. And besides being able to read and write, the grownups can calculate. You do not know at all yet what calculating is. But you have to be able to calculate in life, when, for instance, you want to buy something to eat, or when you want to buy clothes or make clothes.” We must talk like this to the child, and then tell him: “You will learn to calculate, too.” It is a good thing to draw the child's attention to this fact, and then perhaps, even the next day, to redirect his attention to it, so that we take it through with the child, like other things, by frequent repetition. It is important, then, to make the child fully conscious of what he is doing.

Altogether it is most important for teaching and for education to see that the consciousness—if I may put it like this—is consciously awakened to what otherwise goes on in life through force of habit. On the other hand, it is of no benefit to teaching or to education to introduce all kinds of tricks into teaching, merely for the sake of the “aim” or only the ostensible aim, of the lesson. You find it suggested to-day that the child should come to school equipped with a box of burnt matches, and with these burnt matches—preferably not round, but square, so as not to roll off the steep benches of the school-room—he should be encouraged to make shapes. He is to be encouraged, for instance, to imitate the shapes of a house, and so on, with these matches. “Playing with sticks” is, in fact, a favourite subject quite particularly recommended nowadays for young children. But such a practice, in the face of a real knowledge of life, is like playing at things; it is meaningless for the inner being of the individual to learn things by playing at matches. For whatever playing at matches can lead to, this can only appear to man in later life as child's play. It is unwise to introduce mere trifling into education. On the contrary it is our task to introduce real life-fullness into education; but mere playing about should have no place there. Do not, however, misunderstand me: I do not say that games should not be introduced into education, but only that a game artificially prepared for the purpose of teaching is a mistake in school. As to how games should be incorporated in teaching we shall have much to say later.

But how can we really educate the child from the first, particularly in the forming of his will?

Having thoroughly talked over what I have just explained, that is, what is suited on the one hand to awakening the child's consciousness to the reason for his coming to school, and on the other hand to his developing a certain reverence, a certain respect, for the grown-up, it is important to pass on to something else. It is well to say to him at this point, for instance, “Look at yourself, now. You have two hands, a left hand and a right hand. You have these hands to work with; you can do all kinds of things with these hands.” That is, let us try to awaken the child's consciousness to the nature of man. The child must not only know that he has hands, but he must be conscious that he has hands. Of course you will probably say here: “Obviously he is conscious of having hands.” But there is a difference if while knowing he has hands to work with this thought has never crossed his soul. When you have talked with the child for a time about hands and about working with hands, go on to let him make something or other requiring manual skill. This can sometimes be done in the first lesson. You can say to him: “Watch me do this.” (You draw a straight line, Fig. 1.) “Now do it with your own hand.” Now you can let the children do the same, as slowly as possible, for it will naturally be a slow process if you are going to call the children out one by one and let them do

it on the board and then go back to their places. The right assimilation of teaching in this case is of the greatest importance. After this you can say to the child: “Now I am making this (Fig. 2); now do the same with your hand.” Now each child does this too. When this is finished you say to them: “This line (Fig. 1) is a straight line, and the other (Fig. 2) is a curved line; so now with your hands you have made a straight and a curved line.” You help the children who are clumsy with their hands, but be careful to see that each child from the first performs his task with a certain perfection.

In this way, then, see that you let the children do something by themselves from the first, and see, further, that a performance of this kind is repeated as revision in the following lessons. In the next lesson, then, have a straight line made, then a curved line. Here a subtle distinction comes into play. The greatest value must not first of all be attached to whether the children can make a straight and a curved line from memory. But the second time, as before, you yourself show on the board how a straight line is drawn and let the children make it after you, and the curved line in the same way. But then you must ask: “Peter, what is that?” “A straight line.” “John, what is that?” “A curved line.” You ought to utilize the principle of repetition by letting the child imitate the drawing and, in refraining from telling him what he is doing, let the child say it himself. It is very important to make this fine distinction. You must attach importance to do habitually the proper thing in front of the children, taking your educational impulses right into your own personal habits.

Then you need not be in the least afraid of setting up fairly soon—it is even an especially good plan to do things like this very early with the children—a paint-box with a glass of water by the side. You take a brush and dip it in the water, take some colour and, on a white surface that you have previously pinned on the board with drawing-pins, you apply a small yellow patch. When you have made this small yellow patch, again let every child make his own yellow patch like it. Each child must leave a certain space between his and the other yellow patches so that you end by having so many distinct yellow patches. Then you yourself dip the brush in the blue paint and make, next to the little surface which you painted yellow, directly next to it, a blue patch. Now you let the children make each a blue patch just the same. When about half the children have done this you say: “Now we will do something else; I am going to dip the brush in the green and add a green patch to the other patches.” Now let the other children—avoiding as well as you can making the children jealous of each other—make a green patch in the same way. This will take some time; the children will take it in well, as, in fact, in teaching, all depends on going quite slowly, in quite little steps, from one thing to the next. At this point you should say: “Now I am going to tell you something that you cannot understand properly yet, but that you will understand perfectly some day: what we have done up there, where we put blue next to yellow, is more beautiful than what we did down here, where we have green next to yellow; blue near yellow is more beautiful than green near yellow.” That will linger long in the child's soul. It will often have to be referred to again, to be repeated, but the child himself will turn it over; he will not absorb it with complete indifference but he will learn by and by to understand very well from simple, primitive illustrations how to distinguish in his feeling a beautiful thing from a less beautiful thing.

A similar process can be applied to the teaching of music. Here, too, it is a good plan to start from some single note. There is no need even to tell the child the name of this note, but strike a note in some way or other. Then it is a good plan to let the children themselves strike this note immediately, that is, here, too, to combine it with the element of will. Afterwards you strike a second concordant note and again let a number of children take turns at striking this same concordant note. Then go on to strike a note dissonant with a given note and again let the children do it after you. And now you try, as previously with colour, to awaken in the children a feeling for concord and discord in tones, by talking to them not of “concord” and “discord,” but of “beautiful” and “less beautiful,” by appealing, that is, to feeling. It is with these things, not with letters, that the first lesson should start. This is how we should begin.

Now let us take first the teacher who takes the main morning lessons. He will conduct with the children the conversations I have just described. Perhaps the musical element will have to be separate from these; the children will then be introduced to it at another time. Now it will be well for the music-master to enter into a quite similar conversation with the children, but based more upon music, and also to refer to it frequently, so that the child realizes: This is not only repeated by one teacher, but the other teacher says the same, and we learn the same from both. This should help to give the school a more corporative character. These matters should always be discussed in the weekly staff meeting and so produce a certain unity in the teaching.

Only when you have taught the children manually and aurally like this is the time ripe for passing on to the first elements of reading, and, in fact, particularly to the reading of handwriting. It will have an extraordinarily good effect on the child from the point of view of method to have spoken to him as early as the first lesson about reading, writing, and arithmetic, and how he cannot do these things yet, it is true, but will learn them all in school. This awakens hope, desire, resolve in the child, and he enters through their spontaneous power into a world of feeling, which again incites to the world of will. You can refrain from introducing the child directly to what you intend to teach him later and leave him in a state of expectancy. This has an extremely favourable effect on the development of the will of the growing being.

I should now like, before going into this further, to dissipate a few of those ideas which might perhaps lead you astray. There has been so much sinning in the name of the methods hitherto employed in learning to read and to write, but especially in what is, after all, connected with learning to read and write: with language, with grammar, syntax, etc. There has been so much sinning that there are doubtless few people who do not remember with a kind of horror how they were made to learn grammar or even syntax. This horror is, of course, fully justified. Only it must not therefore be imagined that the learning of grammar as such is useless and that it should be entirely ousted. That would be an utterly false idea. Obviously, if people are going to try to come by the right method by going from one extreme to the other, we shall be hearing it said: “Well, then, let us do away with grammar altogether; let us teach the child to read practically, by putting reading passages before him: let us teach him to read and write without any grammar.” This idea might result from the very horror which many a person still remembers. Yet the learning of grammar is not a useless factor, particularly in our time, for the following reason.

What do we really do when we elevate unconscious speech into grammar, into the knowledge of grammar? We pass with our pupil from unconscious language to the higher plane of a fully conscious approach; we do not in the least wish to teach him grammar pedantically, but we want to elevate into consciousness processes otherwise performed unconsciously. Unconsciously, or half-consciously, in fact, man climbs in life up to the external world in a way corresponding to what he learns in grammar. In grammar, for instance, we learn that there are nouns. Nouns indicate objects, objects which in a sense are enclosed in space. That we encounter such objects in life is not without significance for our life. Through all that is expressed in nouns we become conscious of our independence as human beings. We disassociate ourselves from the outer world in learning to describe things by nouns. When we call a thing “table” or “chair,” we disassociate ourselves from the table or chair. We are here, the table or chair is there. It is quite another matter when we describe things by adjectives. When I say: “The chair is blue,” I define some quality which unites me with the chair. The quality which I perceive unites me with the chair. When I describe an object by a noun I disassociate myself from it; when I define its quality I approach and unite with it again, so that the development of our consciousness in relation to things is reflected in forms of address of which we must become conscious by all means. When I use a verb, “Someone writes,” I do not only associate myself with the individual of whom I use the verb, but I participate in the action of his physical body; I perform it with him, my ego does it with him. My ego joins in the gesture of a physical body when I use a verb. Our listening, particularly to verbs, is in reality always a participation. The most spiritual part of man, in fact, participates, but merely as “tendency.” But only in Eurhythmy is it fully expressed. Eurhythmy gives, besides all else, a form of listening. When someone tells a tale, the listener all the time participates with his ego in the physical life behind the sounds, but suppresses it. The ego performs a constant Eurhythmy, and the Eurhythmy expressed in the physical body is only listening made visible. So you are always engaged in Eurhythmy when you listen, and when you are actually performing Eurhythmy you are only making visible what you leave invisible when you listen. The manifestation of the activity of the listener is, in fact, Eurhythmy. It is nothing in the least arbitrary, but it is in reality the activity of the listening person revealed. People to-day, of course, are inwardly fearfully sluggish, and in listening they inwardly perform at first very bad Eurhythmy. You become better controlled when you really learn to listen. In making this activity normal you elevate it into a real Eurhythmy. People will learn from Eurhythmy to listen rightly, for to-day, of course, they cannot listen properly at all.

I have made curious discoveries while delivering my present lectures.² In the discussions speakers stand up, but you very soon notice from their speeches that they have really not heard the whole lecture at all, not even physically, but that they have only heard parts of it. Particularly in the present age of our human evolution this is of quite especial significance. Someone puts in his spoke, in the discussion, for instance, and says what he has been accustomed to think for decades. You may address a socialistically minded audience, but they really only hear you say what they have heard from their political propagandists for decades; they do not even physically hear the rest. They sometimes naively confess as much in these words: “Dr. Steiner says many beautiful things, but he says nothing new.” People have become so rigid in their listening that they confuse everything that has not been fossilized within them decades ago. People cannot listen, and will become increasingly less able to do so in these times, unless the power of listening is stirred to life afresh by Eurhythmy.

A kind of healing or restoration of the soul's being must take place again. Consequently, it will be particularly important to add the hygiene of the soul to all the materialistic hygienic tendencies of gymnastic training and to all that is exclusively concerned with the physiology and the functions of the body. This can be achieved by having alternate Gymnastics and Eurhythmy. Then, even if Eurhythmy, in the first place, is Art, the hygienic element in it will be of particular benefit, for people will not only learn something artistic in Eurhythmy, but they will learn for the soul what they learn for the body in Gymnastics, and, moreover, there will result a very beautiful interplay of these two forms of expression. The point is really to educate our children so that they take thought again for their surroundings, for their fellow-beings. That, of course, is the foundation of all social life. In these days everyone talks of social impulses, but sheer anti-social tendencies prevail. People will have to learn to respect one another before socialism can begin. They can only do this if they really listen to each other. It is extraordinarily important to direct people's feelings to these matters again, if we are to be educators and teachers.

Now simply this knowledge: by using a noun I dissociate myself from my surroundings, by using an adjective I unite myself with them, and by using a verb I actively merge in them, I participate—this knowledge alone will compel you to speak of “noun,” “adjective,” and “verb” with quite a different inner emphasis from what you would give to these words without this consciousness. All this, however, is only by way of preliminary; it must be developed further. For the moment I only wish to evoke certain ideas whose absence might confuse you.

It is, then, extraordinarily important to know how significant for man is the elevation to consciousness of the structure of our language. But besides this, we must acquire a feeling which has also to a great degree already died out in modern people—a feeling of how wise language really is. It is much cleverer, of course, than all of us. Language—as you will doubtless believe from the outset—has not been built up in its structure by man. For imagine what would have resulted if people had had to sit down together in parliaments to determine the structure of language according to their lights! Something about as clever as our laws! But language is truly cleverer than our State-laws. The structure of language contains the greatest wisdom. And you can learn an extraordinary amount from the way a nation or other group of people expresses itself. If you consciously penetrate into the framework of a language its genius teaches you very much. And to learn how to feel something concrete of the working and active influence of the spirit of language is extraordinarily important. To believe that the genius of a language works at its construction means a great deal. This feeling, too, can be further developed, can be developed into the consciousness: we human beings speak; animals cannot; they have at the most the beginnings of an articulate language. In these times, of course, when people like to confuse everything, we attribute language to ants and bees as well. But in the light of reality that is all nonsense. It is all based on a form of opinion to which I have frequently drawn attention. There are naturalist philosophers to-day who imagine themselves very wise and who say: “Why should not the plants, too, have a life of the will and a life of feeling?” There are, in fact, such things as plants—the so-called insectivorous plants—which, when small creatures fly in their proximity, attract them, and when they have crept inside, close up. Those, then, are beings which apparently use will towards what approaches them. But we cannot claim that such outward signs are really characteristic of will. If such a view is mentioned, I usually say, applying the same logic to my argument: “I know something which waits, too, till a living creature comes near it, then encloses and imprisons it. I refer to the mouse-trap. The very mousetrap could just as well be considered a living creature as the Venus fly-trap (the plant that catches flies).”

We must be profoundly conscious that the power of articulate speech is mere human property. Man must also become conscious of his relation in the world to the other three kingdoms of nature. If he is conscious of this he knows that his ego is essentially bound up with our power to speak, though to-day's speaking has become very abstract. But I should like to remind you of a fact which will inspire you anew with respect for language. When in very olden times, for instance in the Jewish civilization—but it was even more pronounced in still older civilizations—when priests and those who represented a cult or were in charge of it—in the course of their rites and ceremonies came to certain ideas, they interrupted their words and conveyed certain descriptions of higher beings, not through words, but through silence and through the corresponding Eurhythmic gesture—they were silent and then they went on speaking. In this way, for example, the name which already sounds so abstract to us to-day and which expressed in Hebrew, “I am that I am,” was never uttered, but speech was invariably used up to this point, then a sign was made, and only after that was the speaking resumed. Thus was expressed by gesture the “Unutterable and ineffable name of God in man.” Why was this done? Because if this name had been spoken and repeated, as a matter of course, without further ceremony, people would have been stunned by it, so great was their sensitiveness in those days. There were then certain sounds and combinations of sound in speech by which the people of more ancient civilizations could be stunned, so violent was their effect. Something like an actual swoon would have come over people at the utterance and hearing of such words. That is why they spoke of the “ineffable name of God.” It was profoundly significant. And this is seen when it is laid down: Only the priests, and they only on certain occasions may utter such names, because otherwise, at their utterance before those unprepared for them, heaven and earth would collapse. That is, people would have fainted and lost consciousness. That is why a name of this kind was expressed by a gesture. The real essence of language, then, was expressed by a feeling of this kind. But nowadays people chatter thoughtlessly about everything. We can no longer vary our feelings, and those people are very rare who, without sentimentality, feel tears in their eyes, for instance, at certain passages in novels. In fact, this is quite atavistic to-day. The living experience of what lies in the essence of language and the feeling in language has become very dulled.

This experience, among many other things, will have to be revived, and if we revive it we shall be able to feel profoundly how much we owe to the power of speech. We owe much of our ego-sense, of our sense of ourselves as personalities, to nothing less than our language. And it is possible for man to have a feeling as intense as prayer: “I hear language spoken around me; the power of language is flowing into me.” When you have felt the holiness in this call of the language to the ego you will also be able to awaken it in the children. And then, in fact, you will not awaken this ego-sense in children in an egoistic form, but quite differently. For this ego-sense in children can be awakened in two ways. If it is falsely excited it directly stimulates egoism; if it is rightly stirred, it stimulates the will, it is an impulse to selflessness itself, a direct impulse to life with the outer world.

What I have just said is meant to permeate you as educators and teachers. It is left to you to apply it in the teaching of languages. Of how it can be imbued in practice with consciousness, to awaken in the child the conscious feeling of his personality, we shall speak in our next lecture.

• 1. See Lecture IV of the accompanying course referred to in the Preface.
• 2. These were the lectures on the Threefold State.

In the last lecture we spoke of how the first school-lesson should be conducted. Naturally I cannot go on to describe every step separately, but I should like to indicate the essential course of the teaching, so that you are able to make something of it in practice.

You have seen that we have considered as most important: first, the child's consciousness of why he has actually come to school; then the transition by which he becomes conscious that he has hands; and then, after making him conscious of this, that a kind of drawing should be embarked on, and even a kind of transition to painting, from which the sense of the beautiful and the less beautiful can be developed. We have seen that this emerging sense can be observed in hearing, too, and that the first elements of the musical experience of beauty and the less beautiful will be linked up with it.

Let us now suppose that you have pursued such exercises with pencil and with colour for some time. It is absolutely a condition of well-founded teaching that a certain intimacy with drawing should precede the learning to write, so that, in a sense, writing is derived from drawing. And a further condition is that the reading of printed characters should only be developed from the reading of handwriting. We shall then try to find the transition from drawing to handwriting, from writing to the reading of handwriting, and from the reading of handwriting to the reading of print. I assume for this purpose that you have succeeded, through the element of drawing, in giving the child a certain mastery of the round and straight-lined forms which he will need for writing. Then from this point we would again seek the transition to what we have already mentioned as the foundation of teaching in reading and writing. To-day I will first try to show you by a few examples how this can be done.

We assume, then, that the child has already come to the point at which he can master straight-lined and round forms with his little hand. We began with the fish and the F. You do not need to proceed alphabetically; I am only doing it now so that you have it in encyclopaedic form. Let us see what success we have in beginning to evolve writing and reading on the lines of your own free imagination. I should first say to the child at this point: “You know what a bath is”—and here I will say in parenthesis that much depends in teaching on being able to make use of any situation in a rational way, that is, on always having between the lines of the lesson anything that may help your purpose. It is well to use the word “bath” for what I now intend to do, so that the child remembers, in connection with being at school, baths, washing, and cleanliness. It is well to have something like this in the background, without having to moralize or give orders. It is well to select your examples so that the child is compelled to think of something which contributes at the same time to a moral-aesthetic attitude. Then go on to say: “Look; when the grown-ups want to write down what a bath is, they write it like this: BATH. So this is the picture of what you mean when you say Bath and when you give a name to it.” Then, again, I simply let a number of children write this after me, so that whenever they come to something of this kind they get it into their little hand; they do not merely look at it, but they grasp it with their whole being. Now I shall say: “Watch yourself beginning to say ‘bath.’ We will just get the beginning clear: ‘B.’” The child must be guided from saying the whole word “bath” to breathing the first sound, as I illustrated with “fish.” And now it must be made clear to the child that just as Bath is the sign for the whole bath, “B” is the sign for the beginning of the word “bath.”

Then I draw the child's attention to the presence in other words of a similar beginning. I say: “When you say ‘band’ you begin just the same way; when you say ‘bow,’ which many women wear on their heads, a bow of ribbon, you begin just the same way; and perhaps, too, you have seen a bear at the zoo; for that, too, you begin to breathe the same way; each of these words begins with the same breathing out.” In this way I try to pass with the child from the whole of the word to the initial letter, to lead him to nothing but the single sound, to the letter, always to develop the initial letter from the word.

Now the problem for you is to try, let us say, first to evolve the initial letter yourself in the same visualizing way from drawing. You will be able to do this easily if you simply call your imagination to your aid and say to yourselves:

“The people who first saw animals which begin with B, like beaver, bear, etc., portrayed the back of the animal, the feet on which it sits and the lifted fore-feet; they drew an animal in the act of rising, standing on its hind legs, and the drawing became the B. You will find in every word—” and here you can give full rein to your imagination; there is no need to go into histories of civilizations, which are incomplete in any case—you will find that the initial letter is pictorial, representing the form of an animal or plant or even an external object. This is historically the fact: if you go back to the most ancient forms of the Egyptian writing, which was still hieroglyphic, you find that everywhere the letters are imitations of such things. And not until the transition from the Egyptian civilization to the Phoenician was the process completed which we can call a development from the “picture” to the “sign” to represent a sound. Let the child follow the same line. It leads to the following:

In the earliest periods of the evolution of writing in Egypt, literally every detail which had to be written down was written down in picture-writing, was drawn—indeed, was so drawn that it became necessary to learn the easiest possible way of making the drawings. Anyone who made a mistake, when he was appointed to copy these hieroglyphics, if, for instance, the error occurred in a sacred word, was condemned to death. In ancient Egypt, then, matters of writing were taken very, very seriously. But all writing which existed was picture-writing of the kind I have described. Then civilization passed over to the Phoenicians, who lived more in the world outside them. Here the initial

image was always retained and transferred to the sound. As an example I will show you from a word where the process is most easily paralleled in our language (though we cannot here study Egyptian) and is also true of the Egyptian language. The Egyptians saw that the sound M could be best shown by watching chiefly the upper lip. So they took the sign for M from the picture of the upper lip. From this sign there then evolved the letter which we have for the beginning of the word Mouth and which then remained for every similar beginning, for everything beginning with M. The picture of the word was taken over. Thus transferring the picture of the word to the initial letter one came to the sign for the sound.

This principle, which is contained in the history of the evolution of writing, can also be very well applied to teaching, and now is the moment to apply it. That is: we shall try to arrive at the letter from the drawing: just as we get from the “fish” with his two fins to F, we get from the bear, dancing, standing up, to B. We get from the upper lip to the mouth, to the M, and we try with our imagination to trace for the child a path like this from drawing to writing. I said that you have no need to study the history of writing in civilized life and refer to it for what you need. For what you look up in this research is of far less value to you in teaching than are the discoveries of your own soul's making, of your own imagination. The activity which you apply to the study of the history of writing deadens you so that your influence on your pupil is far less living than when you think out for yourself something like the Ð’ from the picture of the bear. This thinking out for yourself refreshes you so that what you want to convey to your pupil is much more living than when you embark on excursions into the history of civilizations to discover something for your lesson. And from these two points of view both life and teaching must be considered. For you must ask yourself: “What is more important, to have learnt an historical, most elaborately ascertained fact and incorporated it painfully into your teaching—or to feel yourself so astir in your soul that you transmit to the child with your own enthusiasm the discovery you make?” You will always feel joy, even if it is a quite calm joy, in transferring to letters the form of some animal or some plant which you have found yourself. And this joy which you yourself feel will live in what you make of your pupil.

Then you go on to draw the child's attention to the fact that the letter which he has seen at the beginning of a word occurs in the middle of words too. You go on to say to him: “Let us see; you know what grows outside in the fields or on the hills, what is gathered in autumn and what wine is made from: the vine? (Rebe). The grown-ups write Rebe like this: REBE. Now just think, when you say Rebe quite slowly there is the same sound in the middle as there was at the beginning of Bear.” Then always write it up first in big letters so that the child sees the resemblance with the picture. Like this we teach him that what he has learnt for the beginning of a word is found, too, in the middle of words. We go on to split the whole into its atoms.

You see the important thing for us who wish to achieve living teaching as opposed to dead: all depends on starting from the whole. As in arithmetic we start with the sum, not with the addenda, and analyse the sum, here, too, we go from the whole to the part. This has the great advantage for education and teaching that we succeed in leading the child into the world in a fully living way; for the world is a whole, and the child lives in enduring intimacy with the living whole when we proceed as I have suggested. When you let the child learn the separate letters from their pictures he enters into a relation with living reality. But you must never omit to write up the letter forms so that they are seen to emerge from an image, and you must always be careful to explain the accompanying sounds, the consonants, as

drawings of external things—but never the vowels. The vowels must always be made to render the human inner being and its relation to the outside world. When, for instance, you try to teach the child a, you will say to him: “Now just think of the sun which you see in the morning. Can any of you remember what you did when the sun rose in the morning?” Then perhaps one child or another will remember what he did. If he does not, if nobody remembers, you must refresh the child's memory a little to bring back to him what he did: how he must have stood, what he must have said if the sunrise was very beautiful: “Ah!” You must let this echo of emotion resound; you must try to derive the resonance, which we hear in the vowel, from emotion. And then you must try to say: “When you stood like that and said ‘Ah!’ it was as if a sunbeam had streamed out of your mouth in the shape of an opening angle. When you see the sunrise you let the life inside you stream out like this (Fig. 1) and you reveal it when you say ‘Ah!’ But you do not let it all stream out; you hold some of it back and that becomes this sign (Fig. 2).” You can try some time to clothe in picture-form the essence of the breath in a vowel. In this way you get drawings which can represent to you in images the process by which the vowel-signs arose. Vowels, you remember, are also rare in the primitive civilizations known to-day. The languages of primitive races are very rich in consonants; much more is expressed in the accompanying sounds, in the consonants, than we know. They sometimes literally click their tongues, they have all kinds of refined resources for pronouncing complicated consonants, and the vowel only vibrates in an undertone between them. Among the African races you find sounds which are like the cracking of a whip, etc.; on the other hand, the vowels are only faintly heard, and the European travellers who meet with such races usually sound the vowels much more than the natives do.

We can always derive the vowels from drawing. If, for instance, you succeed in making the child imagine—by appealing to his feeling—that he is in a situation like this: “Your brother or your sister is coming to you. They tell you something, but you don't understand them. Then there comes a moment when it begins to dawn on you. What sound do you make, then, to show that it is dawning?” Then, again, a child will discover, or the other children will be drawn on until one of them says: “i, i, i” (English ee, ee, ee). The pictorial form of the sound ee then expresses the pointing to something that has been understood. In Eurhythmy it is more clearly expressed. The simple stroke, then, which ought to be thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top, is turned into “i;” the stroke alone is made, and the vanishing at the top is expressed by the smaller sign above it. In this way all the vowels can be extracted from the shape assumed by the breath, from the shape of the breath.

In this way you teach the child first of all a kind of picture-writing. Then you need not be at all shy of calling to your aid ideas which evoke real experiences of past history. You can teach the child this: you can say to him: “Just look at the top of the house; what do you say for that? ‘Dach!’ (roof). But then you ought to make a D like this, (Diagram 5); that is awkward. So people changed it round: D.” Such ideas lie concealed in writing and you can utilize them by all means. But then people did not want to write so complicatedly; instead, they wanted to make writing simpler. So from the sign D, which should really be (Diagram 6) (and here you pass on to small letters) there grew this sign, the little d. You can derive the existing letter-forms like this without exception from figures which you have taught to the child pictorially. (Diagram 7)

These facts, of course, have already been observed by individual people; very few in number, it is true. There are educationists who have already drawn attention to the fact that writing should spring from drawing. But they proceed on different lines from those laid down here. They more or less anticipate letters in their final forms; they take a letter in its present form and do not come to the Ð’ from the drawing of the sitting or dancing bear, but they take the b as it is now, divide it up into its separate strokes and lines: | ), and try to lead the child in this way from drawing to writing. They do abstractly what we are attempting to do concretely. That is, several educationists have already rightly observed the practicability of deriving writing from drawing, but people are too firmly rooted in the dead husks of civilized life to be able to conceive of the living process clearly.

Here, too, I should not like to forget to warn you of being led astray by many modern attempts. Don't say: here, this has already been attempted: and there, something else. For you will see that the attempt has not been very profoundly and firmly willed. Humanity continually feels the urge to realize such aims, but it will not be able to carry them out until it has taken spiritual science into its culture.

Thus we can always link up with man and his relation to the world around him by writing organically and teaching reading from the reading of what is written.

Now it is natural to teaching—and we should not leave this out of account—that there should be a certain yearning to be completely free. And notice how freedom inspires this discussion of the preparation of lessons. Our discussion has an inner relation to freedom. For I draw your attention to the fact that you are not to enslave yourself by cramming yourself with the knowledge of how writing evolved from Egyptians to Phoenicians, but you are to look to developing yourself the capacities of your own soul. Positively the same results can be achieved by one teacher in this way, by another teacher in that. Not everyone can make use of a dancing bear; perhaps someone else will make use of something much better for the same point. The ultimate aim can be secured just as well by one teacher as by another. But every teacher puts himself into his teaching, and thus it is that his freedom is perfectly preserved. The more the staff wish to preserve their freedom in this respect, the more they will be able to put into their teaching, to devote themselves to it. This fact has been almost completely lost sight of in recent times. You can see this in a certain phenomenon.

A few years ago there was some agitation—the younger among you have perhaps not had the experience, but it caused the older ones, who had an understanding of such things, a good deal of annoyance—in favour of imposing in spiritual things something similar to the famous “Imperial German State-Gravy” in the material sphere. As you know, it was frequently insisted that a uniform sauce or gravy should be made for all the inns which did not depend entirely on foreign visitors, but rather on Germans. It was called “Imperial German State-Gravy;” people wanted to organize things uniformly. In the same way the attempt was made to make spelling, orthography, uniform. Now people have a quite extraordinary attitude to this question. You can study it in concrete examples. German spiritual life contains a very beautiful, tender relationship between Novalis and a woman. This relationship is so beautiful because Novalis, after her death, still continued to live with her consciously. He speaks of this, following her, in his meditation, into the spiritual world. It is one of the most beautiful, most intimate things which you can read in the history of German literature—this relationship of Novalis to a woman. Now there is a very intelligent, even very interesting (from the point of view I have mentioned), severely philological treatise by a German scholar on the relation between Novalis and his beloved. The delicate, lovely relationship is “put in its proper light,” for it can be proved that the beloved died before she could spell properly. She made spelling mistakes in her letters! In short, the portrait of this personality in its relation to Novalis is shown up in a thoroughly trivial light—in accordance with quite strict scholarship. The method of this scholarship is so good that everyone who writes an essay in which he follows this method deserves to get full marks for it. I only want to remind you that people have already forgotten that Goethe could never spell properly, that in reality he made mistakes all his life, especially in his youth. In spite of this, however, he could rise to Goethean greatness! Not to mention the people who knew him, whom he valued very much—whose letters, in the facsimiles now made, would leave a schoolmaster's hand literally scored with red ink! They would get a thoroughly bad mark!

This absurdity is connected with an utter lack of freedom in our common life, which should play no part in teaching and in education. But a few decades ago it was so pronounced that the enlightened minds among the teachers were seriously annoyed by it. A uniform German orthography was to be set up—the famous “Puttkammer” orthography. That is, in the very school itself the State did not merely exercise a right of supervision, it did not merely control administration, but it laid down even the spelling by law. It looks like it, too! For through this Puttkammer orthography we have really lost much that might still awaken us to-day to some of the intimacies of the German language. Because nowadays they are given an abstract kind of writing, people lose much of the quality which used to live in the German language; the so-called standard language (Schriftsprache) suffers loss.

Now the thing that matters in such a case is, above all, to have the right attitude. Obviously we cannot let any sort of orthography run riot, but we can at least know the extreme ways of dealing with this question. If, after learning to write, people could write what they hear from others, or from themselves, just as they hear it, they would write very variously; they would have very varied fashions of orthography; they would be very individualistic. It would be extraordinarily interesting, but it would obstruct intercourse. On the other hand, our task is to develop not only our individuality in human intercourse, but also our social impulses and social feelings. Many things which we would develop as individuals must be sacrificed where we have to meet others. But we should feel that this is the position, and the feeling should be educated with us, that we do such and such a thing only for social reasons. When you come with your writing-lessons to orthography you will have to start with a certain definite feeling-complex. You will have to draw the child's attention again and again—I have already mentioned this fact from another point of view—to the necessity for reverence, respect for grown-up people, to the fact that he is growing up to an already finished life, which is to receive him, that therefore he must respect what is already there. From this point of view, too, we must try to introduce the child to a thing like orthography. Along with the spelling we must cultivate in him the feeling of respect, of reverence, for what our forefathers have settled. And we must not try to teach spelling from some abstraction, for instance as if orthography had been created by a “divine”—for some, а “Puttkammer” law, as though it came from the Absolute—but you must develop in the child the feeling that the grown-ups, whom one must respect, write like this, therefore their example should be followed. There will result, indeed, a certain variety in spelling, but it will not run riot; instead, it will represent the adjustment of the growing child to the grown-up people about him. And we should reckon with this kind of adaptability: we ought not to want to produce the belief: that is right, and that is wrong; but we ought only to encourage the belief: that is how the grown-ups write; that is, you build here, too, on a living authority.

That is what I meant when I said: “The transition must be found from the child's first period up to the change of teeth, to his second period up to puberty, that is from the principle of imitation to that of authority.” What I meant by this must everywhere be realized in concrete detail, not by inculcating authority in the child, but by proceeding so that the sensitiveness to authority arises of itself, that is by basing the teaching of spelling and the whole orthographic form of writing on so-called authority in the way I have just described.

You will not only have to be teachers and educators at the Waldorf School, but if things go well you will also have to be protagonists of the whole Waldorf School system. For, of course, you will know far more exactly what the Waldorf School really means than can be conveyed to the neighbouring or more distant outside world. But to be the true protagonists of the aims of the Waldorf School and of its aims for civilization in general you will have to be in a position to conduct your defence against prevailing opinion wherever this shows itself antagonistic or even merely demurring. Consequently, I must introduce into these pedagogical-didactic reflections a chapter which will quite naturally connect with what we have already so far analysed in our discussions on method.

You know that in the sphere of educational theory, as well as other spheres, much is expected at the present time from the so-called experimental psychology. Experiments are carried out on people to determine an individual's gift for forming ideas, for memorizing, even for willing, although this can naturally only be ascertained by a detour. The will fulfils itself in sleep, and the electrical apparatus in the psychological laboratory can only indirectly discover an individual's experiences during sleep, just as these cannot be observed directly by way of experiment. Such experiments, indeed, are carried out. Do not imagine that I object to such experiments as a whole. They can be valuable as tendrils of science, as offshoots of science. All kinds of interesting things can be learnt from such experiments and I have decidedly no desire to condemn them, lock, stock, and barrel. I should like everyone who is attracted to work of this kind to have the means of acquiring such psychological laboratories and of carrying out their experiments there. But we must consider for a moment the rise of this experimental psychology in the form in which it is especially recommended by the educationist, Meumann,¹ who is really one of the Herbartian school.

Why is experimental psychology practised to-day? Because people have lost the gift of studying man directly. They can no longer rely on the forces which inwardly bind one man to another—or, to the child. So they try to discover by external devices, by external experiments, what should be done with the growing child. Clearly our principles and methods of teaching take a much more inward course. This is, moreover, urgent and vital for the present day and the immediate future of mankind. Granted, then, on the one hand, the urge to experimental psychology, on the other hand, as a result of this experimental psychology, we get the misconstruction of certain simple facts of life. Let me illustrate this by an example.

These experimental psychologists and educationists have lately been particularly interested in what they call the process of comprehension; for instance, the process of comprehension in reading, in the reading of a given passage. In order to ascertain this process of comprehension they have tried to work with “subjects,” as they are called. If we summarize the steps taken in great detail, this is the procedure. A “subject,” a child or an adult, is given a reading passage, and the investigation is now directed as to which is the most effective method for the child, for instance, to adopt, in order to arrive at the most rapid comprehension. It is discovered that the most effective method is first to “dispose” the reader to the reading passage, that is, first to introduce the person concerned to the meaning of such a reading passage. Then, after numerous tests, the “subject” carries out what is called “passive comprehension.” After having dealt with the meaning, by making “scheme” or plan, it is supposed to be passively comprehended. For through this passive assimilation of a reading passage there should occur what is called “learning to anticipate”: repeating once more in free spiritual activity what has just been worked out in scheme or plan and then passively assimilated. And then follows, as fourth act to this drama, the filling in of all that until now has remained uncertain, that is, of all that has not penetrated completely into the life of the human spirit and soul. If you let the subject carry out, in correct succession, first the process of familiarizing himself with the meaning of a reading passage, then of passive assimilation, then of learning to anticipate, then of returning to the as yet incompletely assimilated parts, you then see that a given reading passage is most effectively grasped, read, and remembered. Do not misunderstand me: I mention this procedure because it must be mentioned in view of the fact that people talk to-day so much at cross-purposes, for they may want to imply the same thing with diametrically opposed words. Accordingly, the experimental psychologists will say: “A scrupulously faithful method like this reveals exactly what should be done in education.” But those who have a profounder understanding of the life of the whole being know that this is not the way to true education—any more than you can put together again a living beetle from its separate parts after it has been dissected. It cannot be done. Nor can it be done by trying anatomy on the human soul-activity. It is interesting, of course, and in another connection it can be extremely valuable for science, to practise anatomy on the activity of the human soul—but it does not make educators. For this reason there can proceed from this experimental psychology no new true building up of education; this can only proceed from an inner understanding of man.

I had to say this for fear lest you should misunderstand me when I make a statement which will naturally cause annoyance to a supporter of modern opinion. The statement is one-sided in its way, and its one-sidedness must, of course, be counterbalanced. What do the experimental psychologists get, when they have split up into atoms like this the soul of their subject and have made a martyr of him—this process is not pleasant if it is inflicted on you—what good do they get out of it? According to them they have obtained an extraordinarily valuable result, which is constantly being impressed by italics in educational textbooks as a conclusion arrived at. This statement, translated into decent German, runs roughly like this: You can remember a reading passage better when you have understood the meaning than when you have not understood the meaning. It has been “determined by research”—to use scientific jargon—that it is useful firstly to understand the meaning of a reading passage if you want to learn it easily. And here I must make the heretical declaration that, in as far as this theory is correct, I could have known it before, for I should like to know what person with a normal human intelligence does not know for himself that a reading passage can be remembered better when its meaning has been understood than when this has not been understood. Every single one of the conclusions of experimental psychology is an appalling platitude. The platitudes printed in the textbooks of experimental psychology are sometimes of such a kind that only those people can have anything to do with them who have already trained themselves in the pursuit of science to submit to intense boredom for an occasional striking point. You are easily trained to do this by the drill of the school-system—for even the elementary school has this defect, although it is less conspicuous here than at the universities.

This heretical statement is meant particularly for the educationist: It is to some extent self-evident that one must first understand the meaning of a thing which is to be remembered. But there is this to consider: that what has been assimilated by understanding the meaning, only affects the observation, only affects thought-perception, and that this elevation of the human being to the level of sense-comprehension educates him one-sidedly to a mere observation of the world, to a thought-perception. And if we teach simply and solely in accordance with this theory we shall get nothing but weak-willed people. The statement, then, is in a sense correct—and yet not conclusively correct. It ought, as a matter of fact, to be further expressed in these terms: If you want to do the best possible thing for the thinking perception of the individual you can do it by analysing the meaning of everything that he absorbs. And, in fact, if we were to analyse merely the meaning of things, we could go very far in educating human observation of the world. But we should never educate a man's will—volitional man—for the will cannot be forced by simply throwing the light on the meaning of a thing. The will likes to sleep, and it does not wish to be fully awakened by what I should like to call the perpetual unchaste laying bare of the meaning. And the point is, that the very inevitability of life breaks in upon this simple truth of the value of revealing meanings, so that with the child, too, we must study subjects which do not lay bare the meaning. Then we shall educate his will.

The mischievous effects of the one-sided application of the principles of explaining the meanings have been particularly active in movements like the Theosophical Movement. You know how much I have protested for years against a certain mischievous influence in Theosophical circles. I have even had to see Hamlet, for instance, a pure work of art, explained in terms of theosophical cant like this: “This is Manas, this is the Ego—that is the astral body. This character represents one thing—that one another.” Such explanations were particularly in favour. I protested against them because it is a sin against human life to interpret symbolically what is meant to be taken directly, in its elements, as art. It leads to a mischievous reading of a meaning into things, and this is dragged to the level of mere observation to which it should not be dragged. This all arises from the fact that the actual Theosophical Movement is a decadent movement. It is the furthest-flung offshoot of a declining culture; in its entire attitude it has nothing to do with Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy aims at being the opposite: at being an ascending movement, the beginning of an ascent. That is a radical difference. That is why so much is written in the field of Theosophy which is really an extreme symptom of decadence. But that there exist people at all who contrive to interpret Hamlet symbolically, character by character, is the result of the appalling way in which we have been educated only to look for meanings.

Human life makes it indispensable that we should not only be educated in terms of the meaning, but from what the will experiences in the sleeping life: by rhythm, measure, melody, harmony of colours, repetition, in fact all spontaneous activity which does not seek to comprehend. When you let the child repeat sentences which he is far from understanding because of his tender age, when you encourage the child to take in these sentences just by memory itself, you certainly do not influence his comprehension—because you are unable to enter into their meaning, for that must only dawn later—but you influence his will, and that is what you should do; that is what you must do. You must try first of all to acquaint the child with things which are first and foremost artistic: music, drawing, plastic art, etc.; but on the other hand you must also give the child things which can have some abstract form of meaning in such a way that he does not, it is true, understand this at once, but only later in life. Then he will understand it because he has assimilated it by repetition, and can remember, and later understand, with his greater maturity, what he could not understand before. There you have worked upon his will. And quite especially you have worked upon his feeling—and you should not forget this. Just as feeling—this can be observed of the soul as well as of the spirit—lies between willing and thinking, so does the education of feeling lie midway between the methods of educating the thinking and those of willing. For the thinking knowledge or thinking perception we must definitely practise subjects concerned with revealing meanings: reading, writing, etc.; for action inspired by will we must cultivate everything which does not aim at a mere interpretation of meanings but at a direct impression through the whole being, for instance, of artistic subjects. What lies midway between the two (i.e. thought and will) will chiefly influence the development of feeling, the formation of its disposition. You can produce a strong effect on the education of the feeling nature when the child is made to assimilate something first of all only by rote, uncomprehended, without tampering with its meaning. For only after some time, when he has matured through other processes, and remembers it, can he understand what he absorbed earlier. This is a subtlety of education which must absolutely be respected, if we are to educate people with inner feelings. For feeling plays a peculiar role in life. In this sphere, too, people should make observations. But they do not observe rightly. I will indicate an observation which you can easily, with a little industry, make for yourselves.

Suppose you are trying to get a clear idea of the state of Goethe's soul in 1790. You can do this by studying a selection of the works composed by Goethe in the year 1790. You find, of course, at the end of every edition of Goethe a chronological index of his poems, in their order of composition; so you take out the poems written in 1790 and the plays written in 1790 and study them. You remember that in precisely this year he finished the beautiful essay, Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (“The Metamorphosis of Plants”); you recall that just at that time he conceived the first idea of the Farbenlehre (“Theory of Colour”); you imagine from all this the state of his soul in 1790 and ask yourselves: “What were the influences active on Goethe's psychic life in 1790?” You will only be able to answer this question if you cast a critical glance on all Goethe's previous experiences from 1749 to 1790 and on what followed after this year—of which Goethe at the time was still unaware, but which you now know—during the period from 1790 to 1832, that is, to his death. Then there emerges the remarkable realization that the actual state of his soul in the year 1790 was a combination of what was to come later, the conquests remaining for the individual to make, and those he had already experienced. This is an extraordinarily significant discovery. People only avoid it because it leads into provinces which they quite naturally do not like to enter for observations of this kind. Try to extend your observations in this way to the soul-life of an individual who died recently and whom you have known for some time. If you train yourself to a more careful study of the soul you will then find this: A man, a friend of yours, died, let us say, in 1918. You have known him for some time, so that you can ask yourselves: “What was the state of his soul in 1912?” If you consider everything that you know of him you will find that the state of his soul in 1912 was such that the preparation for his approaching death was unconsciously reflected in his psychic disposition at that time; it was unconsciously reflected in his feelings. Taken as a whole I call the life of the feelings the psychic disposition, “Mood of Soul” (Seelenstimmung). A man who is soon to die has a quite different inner disposition from one who has still long to live.

You will now understand that people do not like to study these things, for it would create a very unpleasant impression—to put it mildly—if we were to observe the signs of approaching death in people's psychic disposition. These, however, can be observed. But in everyday life it is not wise for people to notice these things. That is why they are usually hidden from this life just as the will is withdrawn, as a sleeping power, even when we are awake, from the waking consciousness. But the educator must, after all, take up a position outside ordinary life to some extent. He must not be afraid to take up his stand detached from his usual life and to absorb truths for his teaching which are rather disturbing, rather tragic, for everyday life. In this connection there is lost ground to cover in the educational system of Central Europe. You know that especially the teachers in the universities in the early decades of this Central European system of education and teaching were people on whom the actual man of the world rather turned up his nose in scorn. Unworldly, pedantic fellows, who could not adapt themselves properly to the world, who always wore long, black frock-coats and never evening dress; these were the former educators of youth, especially the teachers of more mature youth. In these days things have changed. The university professors have begun to wear correct evening dress and to adapt themselves to worldly custom, and it is considered a great mark of progress that their former state is at last a thing of the past. It is a good thing. But it must be a thing of the past in other senses, too; it must in future be a thing of the past to the extent that the detachment from life does not merely consist, as it did formerly, in the teacher's wearing the invariable long pedantic frock-coat when other people did not. The detachment from life can remain to some extent, but it must be bound up with a profounder conception of life than that of people who wear evening dress for dinner. I am only speaking figuratively, of course, for I have nothing against “evening dress.”

An educator must be able to study life more profoundly, otherwise he will never give appropriate and fruitful attention to the growing child. Consequently, he will have to accept, among others, such truths as I have just mentioned. Life itself, to a certain extent, demands the presence of mysteries. We need no diplomatic secrets in the near future. But for education we need the knowledge of certain mysteries of life. The old Mystery teachers withheld such secrets of life esoterically because these could not be revealed directly to life. But in a certain degree every teacher must know truths which he cannot impart directly to the world, because the world would be confused in normal progress, if it had access to such truths all the time. But you do not fully understand how to treat the growing child if you cannot estimate the influence on him of something imparted in such a way that he does not fully understand it at the time. He will understand when it is returned to later, and when he is told, not only what he then realizes, but what he had assimilated earlier. This makes a profound impression on the feelings and disposition.

For this reason the custom should be followed in every school as faithfully as possible—wherever possible—of the teacher retaining his same pupils; of taking them over for the first form, of keeping them the next year in the second form, of going up with them again in the third year, etc., as far as this is possible in conjunction with outside regulations. The teacher, after finishing with the eighth class, should then begin anew with the first class. For one must sometimes be able to come back years later in a positive way to what was instilled into the children's souls years before. In any case, the formation of the disposition or feeling life suffers greatly when the children are passed every year to a fresh teacher who cannot himself develop what he instilled into children in earlier years. It is part of the teaching method itself that the teacher should go up with his own pupils through the different school-stages. Only in this way can we enter into the rhythm of life. And in the most comprehensive sense life has a rhythm. This manifests itself even in everyday decisions, in the rhythm of day to day itself. If you have accustomed yourself, for instance, only for a week, to eat a buttered roll every day at half-past ten in the morning, you will probably feel hungry for the buttered roll at the same time in the second week. The human organism conforms as closely as this to a rhythm. But not only the external organism, but the whole being, is rhythmically organized. For this reason, too, it is a good thing throughout life as a whole—and that is what we are concerned with when we educate and teach children—to be able to attend to rhythmical repetition. For this reason we do well to think that even every year is not too often to return to quite definite educational themes. Therefore select subjects for the children, make a note of them, and come back to something similar every year. Even in more abstract things this method can be followed. You teach, let us say, in a way suited to the child's disposition, addition in the first school year; you come back to addition in the second, and teach more about it, and in the third year you return to it in the same way, so that the same act takes place repeatedly, but in progressive repetition.

To enter like this into the rhythm of life is of quite particular importance for all education and teaching—far more important than continuously repeating: Do build up your lessons according to the principle of meaning—thus inartistically pulling to bits whatever you deal with. You can only divine what is demanded here by gradually developing a feeling for life itself. But you will then part company very markedly, precisely as educationists, from the external experimental aims so frequent to-day even in education. Again, not to condemn, but to correct, certain tendencies which have proved detrimental to our spiritual culture, do I emphasize these things. You can embark on modern textbooks of education where the results are worked out which have been obtained through experiments on memory. The “subjects”—people experimented upon—are treated in a strange way. Tests are made on them to show how they can remember something of which they have understood the meaning; then they are given words written one after the other with no connecting sense, and they have to learn these, etc. These experiments for ascertaining the laws of the memory are practised very extensively to-day. Again a result has been obtained which is committed to formulae in scientific form. Just as, for instance, in physics, the Law of Gay-Lussac, among others, is formulated, people are anxious to formulate such laws in experimental education or psychology. You find, for example, very learnedly expounded, the gist of conclusions about a certain scientific yearning which is quite justified, namely, to prove the existence of types of memory. Firstly, the quickly or slowly assimilating memory; secondly, the quickly or slowly reproducing memory. So a “subject” is tormented to furnish evidence for the fact that there are people who memorize easily and people who memorize with difficulty; then other “subjects” are tormented to prove that there are people who can call back to mind easily, and people who can call back to mind only with difficulty, what they have once learnt. Now it has been determined by research that there are such types of memory; those showing a rapid or a slow assimilation, and those showing an easy or painful recollection or reproduction of what was assimilated. Thirdly, there are also types of memory which can be called “true and exact;” fourthly, there is a comprehensive memory; fifthly, a retentive and reliable memory, in opposition to the type which easily forgets. This answers very satisfactorily to the craving of modern science to systematize. The scientific result has now been obtained. We can ask: “What has been discovered scientifically in exact psychology about the types of memory?” And we learn: firstly, there is a type of memory which assimilates easily or laboriously; secondly, a type which reproduces easily or laboriously; thirdly, there is a true or exact memory; fourthly, a comprehensive memory, that is, there are people who can remember great passages of prose in contrast to those who can only remember short ones; fifthly, a retentive memory, which has perhaps remembered things from years ago, in contrast to the kind which forgets quickly.

This scientific method of observation scrupulously and very conscientiously maltreats innumerable victims, and sets to work most ingeniously to obtain results, in order that education, too, after having tested the children in experimental psychology, may know what various types of memory are to be differentiated. But with all due respect for such a science, I should like to make the following objection. Anyone endowed with a little sound common sense must know that there are people who commit things to memory easily or with difficulty; there are also those who easily or laboriously recall things once known, and again there are people who can recount things truly and accurately, in contrast to those who muddle everything they try to tell. There are people with an extensive memory, who can remember a long story, in contrast to those who can only remember a short one; and there are also people who can remember a thing for a long time, even years, and people who have forgotten everything in a week! It is part, in fact, of the fairly ancient wisdom of sound common sense, but it is discovered again in a science which inspires us with respect, because the methods which it applies are so ingenious.

There are two conclusions to be drawn from this: firstly, let us, above all, prefer to cultivate sound common sense in education and teaching, rather than expend it on such experimenting, which will, it is true, develop ingenuity very considerably, but which will not bring the teacher in touch with the quality of individuality in the child. But we can also draw a second conclusion: our age is actually in a sorry plight if we have to assume that the people who are going to become our teachers and educators have so little healthy human intelligence that they can only learn in this roundabout way that there are the different kinds of memory which we have just mentioned. Moreover, these things must undoubtedly be considered symptoms of the state of our present spiritual standard.

I had to draw your attention to these things. For people will say to you: “Well, you have let yourself be appointed at this Waldorf School. It is only a dilettante institution; the people there don't even want to know anything about the greatest conquest of our time: about the methods of experimental psychology. The study of this experimental psychological method is for experts, but the methods of the Waldorf School are quackery in comparison!” You will have to realize that you will sometimes have to acknowledge the connection of science—which must not be respected any the less for that—with what remains to be built up by us on an inner educational theory and method, but which, compared with the external relations which are set up by experiment, inspires an inner loving attentiveness towards the child. Certainly this quality has not completely disappeared; it prevails even more than is realized. But it definitely prevails in opposition to the ever-encroaching aims of scientific educational theory. To a certain extent it is true that the pursuit of science can destroy a good deal in modern life, but it has not the power to drive out all healthy human intelligence. This healthy human intelligence or sound common sense should be our starting-point, and when this is properly cultivated it will produce an inner connection with the ideals of teaching. We must realize, of course, that we live at the beginning of a new age, and we must completely master this fact. Down to the middle of the fifteenth century the surviving traditions of the Greek and Latin-Roman times were preserved. After the middle of the fifteenth century these are only the clattering after traditional repetition. But the people whose life is in this “clattering” still feel, in certain sub-regions of their consciousness, the craving to return to the Graeco-Latin age, which we can admire profoundly in its place, of course, but whose persistence into our age is no longer a living thing. Just think for a moment how self-satisfied the person is in these days, who has learnt something and can descant on it in the following terms: “A good teacher must not merely bring out the rhythm, and the rhyme in a poem; he must comment technically on the text; he must introduce the meaning, and only when he has unravelled the meaning will the pupils absorb it as an inner activity.” After such a person has long held forth on the importance of starting with the meaning, he concludes with: “As the old Latin said: rem tene, verba sequuntur, if you have understood the question, words will follow of themselves.” These are tactics which you will frequently find in people who imagine that they have learnt a great deal, that they have gone far beyond dilettantism in enunciating something first as a piece of sublime contemporary wisdom, and then following it up with, “as the old Latin said. ...” And, of course, he has only to say it in Greek for people to believe implicitly that it is something quite extraordinary. For the fourth post-Atlantean period of civilization, this attitude was desirable; it is unbecoming in our age. The Greek did not introduce his children, first of all, to old grammar schools where they could learn, let us say, ancient Egyptian; he made them learn Greek. But to-day we begin by introducing people to ancient tongues before their own. That is a fact which must be realized.

• 1. See Dr. C. v. Heydebrand, Gegen Experimentalpsychologie und Pädagogik.

(Dr. Steiner in the original first paragraph confined his remarks to the educational system in Germany in 1919 and before. They may be summarized as follows: In Germany you will be sharing the many difficulties inevitable in country schools where the equipment is defective in comparison with the town schools. On the other hand, the country schools have often better methods and have preserved many simple, good old principles, which die out as soon as modern intellectualism is introduced.—

In these circumstances you will often have to rely on your gift for invention. You will have to fall back on many a simple device where the average town schools have abundant resources. That may, indeed, animate your teaching, but it will also make the teaching of some subjects thoroughly distasteful. You will feel this particularly when you have brought the children to the end of their ninth year and can really only continue your teaching provided you have adequate materials for it. You will then have to use drawing, and simple elementary painting, as a substitute for many a thing which, in ideal conditions, you would not convey by drawing or by painting, but by a study of the thing itself.

I have made this preliminary observation because I should like to speak to you to-day about the transition in method which must be attended to just when the children have passed their ninth year. We shall only understand the curriculum at this point if we have trained ourselves in method so far that we have realized the nature of each individual child between seven and fifteen years. I should like to explain to you, as teachers, what you will have to make clear to children (in a rather different, more elementary way), just when they are between their ninth and tenth year. In some children this stage is reached even before the ninth year, with some it only occurs later, but on an average what I have to tell you to-day begins with the ninth year.

When we approach this period in their lives we shall have to feel the need to introduce natural history into the timetable in addition to the other things. Before this the children have grown familiar with natural history in narrative form, in the same way as I took in our training class¹ the relations of the animal world and the vegetable world to man. The method so far used to familiarize the child with natural history has been chiefly narrative, descriptive. But with actual natural history, before the Rubicon of the ninth year has been crossed you will hardly have started.

Now here it is of great importance to know that the development to be aimed at in the child by means of natural history teaching is radically defeated unless the teaching of natural history starts with an exposition of man. You may say with justice: “The child at nine years of age can be told little natural history about man.” But be it never so little, the little that a child can be taught about man should be taught as a preparation for all other teaching in natural history. You must know, in the meantime, that in man we have, as it were, a synthesis, a compendium, of all three natural kingdoms, that the other three natural kingdoms merge in man on a higher plane. You will not need to tell the child this, but by the course of your teaching you will have to awaken in him the feeling that man is this consummation of all other kingdoms of nature. You will succeed in this if, in speaking of man, you lay sufficient emphasis on him; if, from your manner of referring to man, you produce in the child an impression of the importance of man within the entire world-order. You will perhaps start, when the child is nine, to describe the human form in its external aspect. You will draw his attention to the principal division of man into head, trunk, and limbs, but in so doing you will be more concerned with the outer appearance, with the outward form. You will be wise to use the drawing already practised to produce in the child, even at this early age, an idea of the most outstanding features of the human form: that the head is spherical, that it is slightly flattened underneath and rests on the trunk at the flattened spot, that is, that it is a sphere poised on the trunk. It is well to give the child this idea. It awakens simultaneously the elements of feeling and will, for the child starts by seeing the head artistically, as spherical. This is important. In this way you compass the whole human being, not merely the intellect. Then you try to arouse in the child the idea that the trunk is in a sense a fragment of the head. And then, for the limbs, you awaken the idea that they are appended to the trunk and affixed to it. There is much that the child will not be able to understand, but at least call up a vivid picture that the limbs are “fixed into” the human organism. At this point you must not go any further, for the limbs are continued internally in the morphological constitution of the human being, and are there connected with the digestive and sexual organs, which are simply a continuation, in an inward direction, of the limbs. But you evoke the clear idea in the children that the limbs are affixed to the organism from outside. This gives the child a first conception of the human form.

Try further to excite in the child a first, if still elementary, primitive conception, that our gazing on the world is bound up with the spherical head. You can say to him: “You have your eyes, your ears, your nose, your mouth, in your head. You see with your eyes, you hear with your ears, you smell with your nose, you taste with your mouth. Most of what you know about the outside world you know through your head.” If you develop this thought further the child derives from it a conception of the formation and function of the head. Then you try to produce in him a conception of the trunk by saying: “What you taste with your tongue enters your trunk as food; what you hear with your ears goes into your trunk as sound.” It is well with children to evoke an idea of the organic system of the whole being. If you then suggest to the child that he has the respiratory organs in the chest and breathes through these, that in the lower part of the body he has the stomach with which he digests food, it is an excellent plan. And it is moreover a good thing to let the child reflect on how the human limbs serve, as feet for walking on, and as hands for free movement and work. It is well at the same time to awaken in the child an understanding for the different services rendered to the human body by the feet, which carry it and make it possible for the human being to work in the different places where he has to live—and, in contrast to this, by the arms and hands, with which the human being does not need to carry his own body but can work freely. While his feet stand on the ground, his hands can be extended in the air to work. In short, the child's attention must be clearly directed to the essential difference between human legs and feet, and human arms and hands. The difference between the service performed by the feet and legs, in carrying the human body, and that performed by the hands and arms in working, not for the human body but for the world—this difference between the egoistical service of the feet and the selfless service of the hands in labouring for the human world outside, ought to be impressed on the child early and through the feelings.

Thus we ought to teach the child, by evolving ideas from form, as much as possible about man from natural history. Only then should you go on to the rest of natural history, and first of all to the animal kingdom. Here it would be a good plan to bring to the lesson—you will have to contrive this in some way or other—a cuttle-fish, a mouse, a lamb, or even a horse, something or other from the mammals, and then, in addition, perhaps, an example of a human being—now you ought to have enough specimens of human beings: you need only present one of the pupils to the others as a human object! You must be clear as to how to proceed. You will try to familiarize the class first of all with the cuttle-fish. You will tell them how it lives in the sea; you will describe, by studying or drawing it, its appearance; in a word, you will make the children acquainted with the cuttle-fish. They will feel, while you describe the cuttle-fish to them, that you are describing it in a particular way. Perhaps only later, when, for instance, you describe the mouse, the children will notice how differently you treat the subject of the mouse from that of the cuttle-fish. You must try to develop this artistic feeling in the children, which, from your different procedure in describing the cuttle-fish and the mouse, will be at the same time a feeling of the difference between these two creatures. With the cuttle-fish you must suggest how it feels its immediate surroundings: if it scents danger in its surroundings it at once emits its dark juice and envelops itself in an aura, to divert the attention of the approaching enemy. You can tell the child many things which help him to understand that the cuttle-fish, when protecting itself from its enemies, or, too, when feeding, always acts like the human being when he eats or looks at something. When the human being eats, he has a taste—a feeling which is conveyed to him through his tongue, through his taste-organ. Again, the human eye feels the constant need to look into light, and, when it does so, can adjust itself to light. Because the taste-organs of the human being desire to taste, they absorb what serves to nourish him. So describe the cuttle-fish in such a way that the child feels from your description the sensitiveness of the cuttle-fish, its fine perception of things surrounding it. You will have to work out for yourself an artistic description of the cuttle-fish so that the children really grasp it in this artistic description.

Then describe the mouse. Describe how it has a pointed snout, how on this pointed snout there can be seen very strong whiskers, how, besides, you can see the gnawing-teeth protruding from the lower and upper jaws; describe the disproportionately large ears of the mouse, then come to its cylindrical body and to the fine velvety growth of hair. Then go on to describe the limbs, the smaller forefeet, the slightly larger hind-feet, which enable the mouse to leap. Then notice its tail, covered with scales, scurf, and less hairy. At the same time show the child that when the mouse is climbing or grasping something by its fore-feet, it supports itself on its tail, which it can use very skilfully because it is not hairy but scurfy, and therefore inwardly more sensitive. In a word, you again try to describe the mouse to the child by building up its physical form artistically. And you will succeed in this artistic construction if you evoke in the child a notion of how, for all the functions for which the cuttle-fish does not need limbs grown on to the body, the mouse needs limbs grown on. The cuttle-fish is sensitive in itself, in its own body; consequently, it does not need such big ears as the mouse. Its relation to its surroundings allows it to imbibe nourishment without the help of the pointed snout which the mouse has. Nor does it need such large grown-on limbs as the mouse, because it can use its own body to propel itself forward in the water. Sum up in artistic form what you are trying to show the child: that the cuttle-fish expresses itself less through its limb-organs than through its body.

I have to describe all this to you first so that you can translate it into teaching, for you must first be conscious of what you must later introduce less consciously into artistically prepared lessons. In short, describe the mouse so that you gradually produce in the child the feeling that the mouse is completely adapted to serve the life of its trunk through its limbs. Then, too, make clear to the child that, after all, the lamb is so organized that its limbs serve its body, and the horse, when it lives wild, is organized so that with its limbs it can serve its body. For instance, show clearly why the mouse has such very pointed teeth; these teeth have to be sharp and pointed, or else the mouse would not be able to gnaw at objects, as it must, to nourish itself, and even to bore holes, in which it then lives. But in this way it is constantly wearing away its teeth. But the teeth of the mouse are arranged—like our nails—always to grow new again from inside, and the tooth-substance is constantly being renewed. Here you see, particularly with the teeth, which are, of course, also organs appended to the rest of the organism, that they are designed to enable the body of the mouse to live.

In this way you have given the child a profound, if only rudimentary impression, through the feelings, of the cuttlefish, and you have also evoked in him a clear idea of the structure of the mouse. And now you return to the structure of the human being. You make clear to the child that if we now look for the ways in which man most resembles a cuttlefish, curiously enough we are brought to the human head. The part of man which most resembles the cuttle-fish is the head. It is prejudice which causes people to imagine that the head is their most perfect organ. The head is indeed very complex in formation, but it is really only a transformed cuttle-fish—I mean, a transformed lower animal, for the relation of the human head to its surroundings is that of the lower animals to theirs. It is in his trunk that man most resembles the higher animals: the mouse, lamb, horse. But, whilst the cuttle-fish can maintain its entire existence by means of its head, man cannot do this. The head must be poised on the trunk and rest upon it; it cannot move freely. But the cuttle-fish, which is really all head and nothing else, can move freely in the water. You must at least succeed in giving the children a feeling of how the lower animals are heads which can move freely, though they are not so perfect as the human head. And you must awaken in the children a feeling for the fact that the higher animals are chiefly trunk, and are endowed by nature with refined organs chiefly for the satisfaction of the needs of the trunk, which is much less true of man; as far as his trunk goes he is more imperfectly formed than the higher animals.

You must then awaken in the child a feeling of the external feature in which man is the most perfect of all creatures. That is, his limbs. If you trace the higher animals up to the ape, you will find that the front limbs are not so very different from the hind limbs, and that the four limbs as a whole serve essentially to bear the trunk, to propel it forwards, etc. The wonderful differentiation of the limbs into feet and hands, into legs and arms, occurs for the first time in man, and is marked by the tendency to stand upright in his carriage and even in his structure. No animal species is so perfectly formed as man, from the point of view of the inter-organization of the limbs.

Then introduce a quite graphic description of the human arms and hands: how they have been relieved of the weight of carrying the body, how the hands do not come in contact with the earth for the purposes of the body, but how they are transformed so as to be able to grasp objects, so as to perform labour. And then go on to the will-aspect, to the moral aspect. Produce in the child, through the feelings, not theoretically, this vivid idea: for instance, you take up chalk to write with; you can only take up the chalk because your hand is designed to perform labour, because it no longer has to carry the body. The animal cannot be lazy with its arms because it cannot really be said to have any. When people talk of apes as being four-handed it is only an incorrect way of talking, for the ape actually has four legs and feet shaped like arms, and not four “hands.” For when, after all, animals are formed to climb, their climbing is a function which serves the body, and their feet are shaped like hands so that they can support the body in climbing. For the human body, hands and arms are freed from the task of supporting it, expressing thus the most beautiful symbol of human freedom. In fact, no more beautiful symbol could exist for it than our hands and arms. Man can both work with his hands and arms for others and for the support of his own body.

By this description of the cuttle-fish, the mouse, the lamb, the horse, and the human being himself, you gradually awaken in the child, by way of the feelings, a clear conception that the lower animals have the character of head, the higher animals of trunk, and the human being of the limbs. It only inculcates man with conceit to teach him perpetually that he is the most perfect creature in the world by virtue of his head. On hearing this he instinctively derives the notion that man is perfect through idleness, through laziness. For the human being knows instinctively that his head is a lazy-bones, that it rests on his shoulders, that it does not want to move itself through the world, that it lets itself be carried by the limbs. It is not true that man is the most perfect creature because of his head, because of his lazy-bones of a head, but because of his limbs, which are a part of the structure and work of the world. You make man in his inmost heart more moral if you do not teach him that he is perfect through his lazy head, but through his active limbs. For the creatures which are only head, like the lower animals, have to propel their own heads, and the creatures which only use their limbs in the service of the trunk are, compared with man, the less perfect creatures because their limbs are less fashioned for free use than are those of the human being. They are burdened from the start by a certain purpose; they invariably serve the body. In man, one pair of limbs, his hands, is completely liberated into the sphere of human freedom. You will only give man a sound experience of the world if you awaken in him the idea that he is perfect on account of his limbs, not on account of his head. You can do this very well by the comparative description of the cuttle-fish, the mouse or the lamb or the horse, and the human being. At the same time you will notice that you should never really omit the human being in describing anything in the natural kingdom, for in man you see all the activities of nature combined. We should always have man in the background when we are describing anything in nature. That is why, after reaching the child's ninth year, and going on to teach natural history, we should take man as our starting-point.

In the study of childhood it is found that something happens just between the ninth and tenth year, though it is not so evident as at an earlier stage. When the child begins to move his limbs a little more consciously than before and to walk about, even if it is unsteadily, when he begins to move his arms and hands with a purpose, he is just beginning to be partially aware of his Ego, and will later be able to remember as far back as this moment, but no further. If you notice how normally (there are individual exceptions) the human being begins at this age to say “I,”—or perhaps a little later, because the activity of speech, that is, the will-element, must first have developed—you can see that the emergence in man of self-consciousness is distinctly perceptible at this stage, whereas the change is not so evident which takes place in the human consciousness round about the ninth year. At this point self-consciousness increases; you notice that the child understands much more intelligently what is said to him about the difference between man and the world. Before the Rubicon of the ninth year the child is far more merged in his surroundings than after this age. He then finds himself more separated from his surroundings. For this reason you can now begin to talk to the child a little about things of the soul, for which he would have shown little understanding before he reached the age of nine. When he is nine his self-consciousness both deepens and increases.

Anyone with a feeling for such things will observe that at this age the child begins to use words much more inwardly than before, to become much more aware that words arise from his inner nature. Nowadays, when people are much more concerned with outer than inner nature, far too little attention is shown to this sudden change in the ninth or tenth year. But the teacher must pay attention to it. For his reason you will be able to address the child from a quite different background of feeling when you introduce him—not before this stage has been reached—to natural history, which must always compare man with the other kingdoms of nature. Whereas before, when the individual was more merged in nature, you could only speak to the child of the things of natural history in the form of stories, now that he is past nine years of age you can show him the cuttle-fish, the mouse, the lamb, or the horse, and the human being, and talk with him of their relationship to each other and to man. Before this stage you would stumble on something quite unintelligible to the child if you were to connect the functions of the head with the cuttle-fish, or the functions of the trunk with the mouse, or if you were to seek the distinguishing perfection of man in the human limbs. And now you are to use the very material offered to you by the child's age, for when you teach natural history in the way I have described, you plant in the child's soul moral concepts which are firm and strong. Moral concepts are not instilled into the child's soul by appealing to the reason, but by appealing to the feelings and the will. But you will be appealing to the feeling and the will in directing the child's thoughts and feelings to the way in which he himself is only fully human if he employs his hands in work for the world, and how this makes him the most perfect creature; further, how the human head is related to the cuttle-fish, and the human trunk to the mouse, sheep, or horse. Through feeling himself duly placed like this in the natural order the child absorbs feelings by which he will later know himself to be fully man.

You can implant in the child's soul this quite particularly important moral element if you take pains to arrange your teaching of natural history so that the child has no suspicion that you intend to teach him anything moral. But you will never implant so much as a trace of morality in the children if your teaching of natural history is independent of man and describes the cuttle-fish for itself, the mouse or the lamb or the horse for itself, and even man for himself; these descriptions would simply be verbal-definitions. You can only describe man if you build him up from all other organisms and activities of nature. Schiller admired in Goethe his naive conception of nature, in the light of which he considered the human being composed of all the single entities of nature, as Schiller states in the beautiful letter which he wrote to Goethe at the beginning of the nineties in the eighteenth century. I have again and again brought this to your notice because it contains something which should permeate our civilization and our culture: the consciousness of the synthesis of all nature in man. Goethe is repeatedly expressing it like this: “Man is placed at the summit of nature and feels there that he is a whole nature;” or again: “The whole world reaches within man its own consciousness.” If you go through my writings you will find such utterances of Goethe's quoted again and again. I have not quoted them because they struck me as pleasing, but because such ideas should become part of the consciousness of our age. That is why I am always so grieved that one of the most important of educational writings has really remained quite unknown, or at least unfruitful in the actual sphere of education. Schiller, as a matter of fact, learnt good educational theory from Goethe's naive self-education, and introduced this educational theory into his work Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (“Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”). These letters contain a tremendous wealth of educational theory; one only has to think out its implications to their logical conclusion. Schiller arrived at his discoveries, remember, through Goethe's vision. Just recall how Goethe, a product of civilization and yet rooted in nature, from his very earliest childhood opposed the educational principles in force around him. Goethe could never isolate the human being from his surroundings. He always took man in his setting of nature and felt himself, as a human being, one with nature. That is why, for instance, he took no pleasure in piano lessons as long as they were given to him in no kind of connection with the human being. He only began to take an interest in piano lessons when he was shown the function of the different fingers, when he heard: “That is the thumb; that is the index-finger, etc.,” and when he knew how the thumb and the index-finger are applied in playing the piano. He always wanted to see the whole being rooted in the whole of nature. And again—I have mentioned this before, too—at the age of seven he built his own altar to nature, taking for the purpose his father's music desk, laying minerals upon it, and plants from his father's rock-garden, and on top putting a little fumigating candle; then he caught up the beams of the morning sun in a burning-glass and offered a sacrifice to the great God of nature—a rebellion against what people wanted him to learn. Goethe was always a person who wanted to be educated as people ought to be educated now. And because Goethe was like this, after first struggling hard with himself towards that end, he won Schiller's great admiration and inspired in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters on education what you know to be the contents of these letters.

My old friend and teacher, Schröer, once told me that he had to sit on a school commission to examine prospective teachers, but he had not been able to prepare the work demanded of the future teachers in the examination. So he questioned them on Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. They had learnt from A to Z everything about Plato and all else that was to be known, but when Schröer began to question them on Schiller's Aesthetic Letters they revolted! And all over Vienna the tale spread: Schröer had tried to examine the teachers on Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, while obviously no one on earth can make anything of them.

But if we wish to turn to many a healthy and sound, if rudimentary suggestion, we have to go back to Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education, and also to Jean Paul's educational doctrines in Levana. This, too, contains very many practical hints for teaching. In recent times there have been many improvements, but it cannot be said that the potential influence of Schiller's Aesthetic Letters and Jean Paul's educational doctrines have really entered the educational system of our days. Things are often turned according to personal points of view.

I have now tried to give you an idea of how it is possible to learn from a certain age in childhood, roughly the ninth year, the educational methods which ought to be adopted at this age. In the next lecture we shall see how the child's fourteenth and fifteenth years should be employed to give the child what satisfies the needs of his nature at that age. In this way we shall come near to winning insight into how the whole world appears to children between seven and fifteen years of age and into the obligations of the educator and teacher. From this insight will arise our curriculum. In these days people ask abstractly: “How are we to develop the child's latent possibilities?” But we must first know them, if all the oft-repeated phrases about teaching according to the “development of the child's possibilities” are to have any concrete meaning.

• 1. See No. 3 of the sixth year of the periodical, The Art of Education.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You will have seen from these lectures, which lay down methods of teaching, that we are gradually nearing the mental insight from which should spring the actual timetable. Now I have told you on different occasions already that we must agree, with regard to what we accept in our school and how we accept it, to compromise with conditions already existing. For we cannot, for the time being, create for the Waldorf School the entire social world to which it really belongs. Consequently, from this surrounding social world there will radiate influences which will continually frustrate the ultimate ideal time-table of the Waldorf School. But we shall only be good teachers of the Waldorf School if we know in what relation the ideal time-table stands to the time-table which we will have to use at first because of the ascendancy of the social world outside. This will result for us in the most vital difficulties which we must therefore mention before going on, and these will arise in connection with the pupils, with the children, immediately at the beginning of the elementary school period and then again at the end. At the very beginning of the elementary school course there will, of course, be difficulties, because there exist the time-tables of the outside world. In these time-tables all kinds of educational aim are required, and we cannot risk letting our children, after the first or second year at school, fall short of the learning shown by the children educated and taught outside our school. After nine years of age, of course, by our methods our children should have far surpassed them, but in the intermediate stage it might happen that our children were required to show in some way, let us say, at the end of the first year in school, before a board of external commissioners, what they can do. Now it is not a good thing for the children that they should be able to do just what is demanded to-day by an external commission. And our ideal time-table would really have to have other aims than those set by a commission of this kind. In this way the dictates of the outside world partially frustrate the ideal time-table. This is the case with the beginning of our course in the Waldorf School. In the upper classes¹ of the Waldorf School, of course, we are concerned with children, with pupils who have come in from other educational institutions, and who have not been taught on the methods on which they should have been taught.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religion—two hours a week.

The mother tongue—eleven hours a week.

Writing—there is no figure given for the number of hours, for it is included in the mother tongue.

Then:

Local geography—two hours² a week.

Arithmetic—four hours a week.

Singing and gymnastics together—one hour a week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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