The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have shown you how between the change of teeth and the ninth or tenth year you should teach with descriptive, imaginative pictures, for what the children then receive from you will live on in their minds and souls as a natural development, right through their whole lives.

This is of course only possible if the feelings and ideas one awakens are not dead but living. To do this you must first of all yourselves acquire a feeling for the inward life of the soul. A teacher or educator must be patient with his own self-education, with the awakening of something in the soul which may indeed sprout and grow. You may then be able to make the most wonderful discoveries, but if this is to be so you must not lose courage in your first endeavours.

For you see, whenever a man undertakes an activity of a spiritual nature, he must always be able to bear being clumsy and awkward. A man who cannot endure being clumsy and doing things stupidly and imperfectly at first, will never really be able to do them perfectly in the end out of his own inner self. And especially in education we must first of all kindle in our own souls what we then have to work out for ourselves; but first it must be enkindled in the soul. If once or twice we have succeeded in thinking out a pictorial presentation of a lesson which we see impresses the children, then we shall make a remarkable discovery about ourselves. We shall see that it becomes more and more easy for us to invent such pictures, that by degrees we become inventive people in a way we had never dreamt of. But for this you must have the courage to be very far from perfect to begin with.

Perhaps you will say you ought never to be a teacher if you have to appear before the children in this awkward manner. But here indeed the Anthroposophical outlook must help you along. You must say to yourself: Something is leading me karmically to the children so that I can be with them as a teacher though I am still awkward and clumsy. And those before whom it behoves me not to appear clumsy and awkward—these children I shall only meet in later years, again through the workings of Karma.¹ The teacher or educator must thus take up his life courageously, for in fact the whole question of education is not a question of the teachers at all but of the children.

Let me therefore give you an example of something which can sink into the child's soul so that it grows with his growth, something which one can come back to in later years and make use of to arouse certain feelings within him. Nothing is more useful and fruitful in teaching than to give the children something in picture form between the seventh and eighth years, and later, perhaps in the fourteenth and fifteenth years, to come back to it again in some way or other. Just for this reason we try to let the children in the Waldorf School remain as long as possible with one teacher. When they come to school at seven years of age the children are given over to a teacher who then takes his class up the school as far as he can, for it is good that things which at one time were given to the child in germ can again and again furnish the content of the methods employed in his education.

Now suppose for instance that we tell an imaginative story to a child of seven or eight. He does not need to understand all at once the pictures which the story contains; why that is I will describe later. All that matters is that the child takes delight in the story because it is presented with a certain grace and charm. Suppose I were to tell the following story: Once upon a time in a wood where the sun peeped through the branches there lived a violet, a very modest violet under a tree with big leaves. And the violet was able to look through an opening at the top of the tree. As she looked through this broad opening in the tree top the violet saw the blue sky. The little violet saw the blue sky for the first time on this morning, because she had only just blossomed. Now the violet was frightened when she saw the blue sky—indeed she was overcome with fear, but she did not yet know why she felt such great fear. Then a dog ran by, not a good dog, a rather bad snappy dog. And the violet said to the dog: “Tell me, what is that up there, that is blue like me?” For the sky also was blue just as the violet was. And the dog in his wickedness said: “Oh, that is a great giant violet like you and this great violet has grown so big that it can crush you.” Then the violet was more frightened than ever, because she believed that the violet up in the sky had got so big so that it could crush her. And the violet folded her little petals together and did not want to look up to the great big violet any more, but hid herself under a big leaf which a puff of wind had just blown down from the tree. There she stayed all day long, hiding in her fear from the great big sky-violet.

When morning came the violet had not slept all night, for she had spent the night wondering what to think of the great blue sky-violet who was said to be coming to crush her. And every moment she was expecting the first blow to come. But it did not come. In the morning the little violet crept out, as she was not in the least tired, for all night long she had only been thinking, and she was fresh and not tired (violets are tired when they sleep, they are not tired when they don't sleep!) and the first thing that the little violet saw was the rising sun and the rosy dawn. And when the violet saw the rosy dawn she had no fear. It made her glad at heart and happy to see the dawn. As the dawn faded the pale blue sky gradually appeared again and became bluer and bluer all the time, and the little violet thought again of what the dog had said, that that was a great big violet which would come and crush her.

At that moment a lamb came by and the little violet again felt she must ask what that thing above her could be. “What is that up there?” asked the violet, and the lamb said, “That is a great big violet, blue like yourself.” Then the violet began to be afraid again and thought she would only hear from the lamb what the wicked dog had told her. But the lamb was good and gentle, and because he had such good gentle eyes, the violet asked again: “Dear lamb, do tell me, will the great big violet up there come and crush me?” “Oh no,” answered the lamb, “it will not crush you, that is a great big violet, and his love is much greater than your own love, even as he is much more blue than you are in your little blue form.” And the violet understood at once that there was a great big violet who would not crush her, but who was so blue in order that he might have more love, and that the big violet would protect the little violet from everything in the world which might hurt her. Then the little violet felt so happy, because what she saw as blue in the great sky-violet appeared to her as Divine Love, which was streaming towards her from all sides. And the little violet looked up all the time as if she wished to pray to the God of the violets.

Now if you tell the children a story of this kind they will most certainly listen, for they always listen to such things; but you must tell it in the right mood, so that when the children have heard the story they somehow feel the need to live with it and turn it over inwardly in their souls. This is very important, and it all depends on whether the teacher is able to keep discipline in the class through his own feeling.

That is why when we speak of such things as I have just mentioned, we must also consider this question of keeping discipline. We once had a teacher in the Waldorf School, for instance, who could tell the most wonderful stories, but he did not make such an impression upon the children that they looked up to him with unquestioned love. What was the result? When the first thrilling story had been told the children immediately wanted a second. The teacher yielded to this wish and prepared a second. Then they immediately wanted a third, and the teacher gave in again and prepared a third story for them. And at last it came about that after a time this teacher simply could not prepare enough stories. But we must not be continually pumping into the children like a steam pump; there must be a variation, as we shall hear in a moment, for now we must go further and let the children ask questions; we should be able to see from the face and gestures of a child that he wants to ask a question. We let him ask it, and then talk it over with him in connection with the story that has just been related.

Thus a little child will probably ask: “But why did the dog give such a horrid answer?” and then in a simple childlike way you will be able to show him that a dog is a creature whose task is to watch, who has to bring fear to people, who is accustomed to make people afraid of him, and you will be able to explain why the dog gave that answer.

You can also explain to the children why the lamb gave the answer that he did. After telling the above story you can go on talking to the children like this for some time. Then you will find that one question leads to another and eventually the children will bring up every imaginable kind of question. Your task in all this is really to bring into the class the unquestioned authority about which we have still much to say. Otherwise it will happen that whilst you are speaking to one child the others begin to play pranks and to be up to all sorts of mischief. And if you are then forced to turn round and give a reprimand, you are lost! Especially with the little children one must have the gift of letting a great many things pass unnoticed.

Once for example I greatly admired the way one of our teachers handled a situation. A few years ago he had in his class a regular rascal (who has now improved very much). And lo and behold, while the teacher was doing something with one of the children in the front row, the boy leapt out of his seat and gave him a punch from behind. Now if the teacher had made a great fuss the boy would have gone on being naughty, but he simply took no notice at all. On certain occasions it is best to take no notice, but to go on working with the child in a positive way. As a general rule it is very bad indeed to take notice of something that is negative.

If you cannot keep order in your class, if you have not this unquestioned authority (how this is to be acquired I shall speak of later), then the result will be just as it was in the other case, when the teacher in question would tell one story after another and the children were always in a state of tension. But the trouble was that it was a state of tension which could not be relaxed, for whenever the teacher wanted to pass on to something else and to relax the tension (which must be done if the children are not eventually to become bundles of nerves), then one child left his seat and began to play, the next also got up and began to sing, a third did some Eurythmy, a fourth hit his neighbour and another rushed out of the room, and so there was such confusion that it was impossible to bring them together again to hear the next thrilling story.

Your ability to deal with all that happens in the classroom, the good as well as the bad, will depend on your own mood of soul. You can experience the strangest things in this connection, and it is mainly a question of whether the teacher has sufficient confidence in himself or not.

The teacher must come into his class in a mood of mind and soul that can really find its way into the children's hearts. This can only be attained by knowing your children. You will find that you can acquire the capacity to do this in a comparatively short time, even if you have fifty or more children in the class; you can get to know them all and come to have a picture of them in your mind. You will know the temperament of each one, his special gifts, his outward appearance and so on.

In our teachers' meetings, which are the heart of the whole school life, the single individualities of the children are carefully discussed, and what the teachers themselves learn from their meetings, week by week, is derived first and foremost from this consideration of the children's individualities. This is the way in which the teachers may perfect themselves. The child presents a whole series of riddles, and out of the solving of these riddles there will grow the feelings which one must carry with one into the class. That is how it comes about that when, as is sometimes the case, a teacher is not himself inwardly permeated by what lives in the children, then they immediately get up to mischief and begin to fight when the lesson has hardly begun. (I know things are better here but I am talking of conditions in Central Europe.) This can easily happen, but it is then impossible to go on with a teacher like this and you have to get another in his place. With the new teacher the whole class is a model of perfection from the first day!

These things may easily come within your experience; it simply depends on whether the teacher's character is such that he is minded to let the whole group of his children with all their peculiarities pass before him in meditation every morning. You will say that this would take a whole hour; this is not so, for if it were to take an hour one could not do it, but if it takes ten minutes or a quarter of an hour it can be done. But the teacher must gradually develop an inward perception of the child's mind and soul, for it is this which will enable him to see at once what is going on in the class.

To get the right atmosphere for this pictorial story-telling you must above all have a good understanding of the temperaments of the children. This is why the treatment of children according to temperament has such an important place in teaching. And you will find that the best way is to begin by seating the children of the same temperament together. In the first place the teacher has a more comprehensive view if he knows that over there he has the cholerics, there the melancholics, and here the sanguines. This will give him a point of vantage from which he may get to know the whole class.

The very fact that you do this, that you study the child and seat him according to his temperament, means that you have done something to yourself that will help you to keep the necessary unquestioned authority in the class. These things usually come from sources one least expects. Every teacher and educator must work upon himself inwardly.

If you put the phlegmatics together they will mutually correct each other, for they will be so bored by one another that they will develop a certain antipathy to their own phlegma, and it will get better and better all the time. The cholerics hit and smack each other and finally they get tired of the blows they get from the other cholerics; and so the children of each temperament rub each other's corners off extraordinarily well when they sit together. But the teacher himself when he speaks to the children, for instance when he is talking over with them the story which has just been given, must develop within himself as a matter of course the instinctive gift of treating the child according to his temperament. Let us say that I have a phlegmatic child; if I wish to talk over with such a child a story like the one I have told, I must treat him with an even greater phlegma than he has himself. With a sanguine child who is always flitting from one impression to another and cannot hold on to any of them, I must try to pass from one impression to the next even more quickly than the child himself does.

With a choleric child you must try to teach him things in a quick emphatic way so that you yourself become choleric, and you will see how in face of the teacher's choler his own choleric propensities become repugnant to him. Like must be treated with like, so long as you do not make yourself ridiculous. Thus you will gradually be able to create an atmosphere in which a story like this is not merely related but can be spoken about afterwards.

But you must speak about it before you let the children retell the story. The very worst method is to tell a story and then to say: “Now Edith Miller, you come out and retell it.” There is no sense in this; it only has meaning if you talk about it first for a time, either cleverly or foolishly; (you need not always be clever in your classes; you can sometimes be quite foolish, and at first you will mostly be foolish). In this way the child makes the thing his own, and then if you like you can get him to tell the story again, but this is of less importance for it is not indeed so essential that the child should hold such a story in his memory; in fact, for the age of which I am speaking, namely between the change of teeth and the ninth or tenth year, this hardly comes in question at all. Let the child by all means remember what he can, but what he has forgotten is of no consequence. The training of memory can be accomplished in subjects other than story-telling, as I shall have to show.

But now let us consider the following question: Why did I choose a story with this particular content? It was because the thought-pictures which are given in this story can grow with the child. You have all kinds of things in the story which you can come back to later. The violet is afraid because she sees the great big violet above her in the sky. You need not yet explain this to the little child, but later when you are dealing with more complicated teaching matter, and the question of fear comes up, you can recall this story. Things small and great are contained in this story, for indeed things small and great are repeatedly coming up again and again in life and working upon each other. Later on then you can come back to this. The chief feature of the early part of the story is the snappish advice given by the dog, and later on the kind loving words of advice uttered by the lamb. And when the child has come to treasure these things in his heart and has grown older, how easily then you can lead on from the story you told him before to thoughts about good and evil, and about such contrasting feelings which are rooted in the human soul. And even with a much older pupil you can go back to this simple child's story; you can make it clear to him that we are often afraid of things simply because we misunderstand them and because they have been presented to us wrongly. This cleavage in the feeling life, which may be spoken of later in connection with this or that lesson, can be demonstrated in the most wonderful way if you come back to this story in the later school years.

In the Religion lessons too, which will only come later on, how well this story can be used to show how the child develops religious feelings through what is great, for the great is the protector of the small, and one must develop true religious feeling by finding in oneself those elements of greatness which have a protective impulse. The little violet is a little blue being. The sky is a great blue being, and therefore the sky is the great blue God of the violet.

This can be made use of at various different stages in the Religion lessons. What a beautiful analogy one can draw later on by showing how the human heart itself is of God. One can then say to the child: “Look, this great sky-violet, the god of the violets, is all blue and stretches out in all directions. Now think of a little bit cut out of it—that is the little violet. So God is as great as the world-ocean. Your soul is a drop in this ocean of God. But as the water of the sea, when it forms a drop, is the same water as the great sea, so your soul is the same as the great God is, only it is one little drop of it.”

If you find the right pictures you can work with the child in this way all through his early years, for you can come back to these pictures again when the child is more mature. But the teacher himself must find pleasure in this picture-making. And you will see that when, by your own powers of invention, you have worked out a dozen of these stories, then you simply cannot escape them; they come rushing in upon you wherever you may be. For the human soul is like an inexhaustible spring that can pour out its treasures unceasingly as soon as the first impulse has been called forth. But people are so indolent that they will not make the initial effort to bring forth what is there in their souls.

We will now consider another branch of this pictorial method of education. What we must bear in mind is that with the very little child the intellect, that in the adult has its own independent life, must not yet really be cultivated, but all thinking should be developed in a pictorial and imaginative way.

Now even with children of about eight years of age you can quite well do exercises of the following kind. It does not matter if they are clumsy at first. For instance you draw this figure for the child (see drawing a.) and you must try in all kinds of ways to get him to feel in himself that this is not complete, that something is lacking. How you do this will of course depend on the individuality of the child. You will for instance say to hi: “Look, this goes down to here (left half) but this only comes down to here (right half, incomplete). But this doesn't look nice, coming right down to here and the

other side only so far.” Thus you will gradually get the child to complete this figure; he will really get the feeling that the figure is not finished, and must be completed; he will finally add this line to the figure. I will draw it in red; the child could of course do it equally well in white, but I am simply indicating in another colour what has to be added. At first he will be extremely clumsy, but gradually through balancing out the forms he will develop in himself observation which is permeated with thought, and thinking which is permeated with imaginative observation. His thinking will all be imagery.

And when I have succeeded in getting a few children in the class to complete things in this simple way, I can then go further with them. I shall draw some such figure as the following (see drawing b. left), and after making the child feel that this complicated figure is unfinished I shall induce him to put in what will make it complete (right hand part of drawing). In this way I shall arouse in him a feeling for form which will help him to experience symmetry and harmony.

This can be continued still further. I can for instance awaken in the child a feeling for the inner laws governing this

figure (see drawing c.). He will see that in one place the lines come together, and in another they separate. This closing together and separating again is something that I can easily bring to a child's experience.

Then I pass over to the next figure (see drawing d.). I make the curved lines straight, with angles, and the child then has to make the inner line correspond. It will be a difficult task with children of eight, but, especially at this age, it is a wonderful achievement if one can get them to do this with all sorts of figures, even if one has shown it to them beforehand. You should get the children to work out the inner lines for themselves; they must bear the same character as the ones in the previous figure but consist only of straight lines and angles.

This is the way to inculcate in the child a real feeling for form, harmony, symmetry, correspondence of lines and so on. And from this you can pass over to a conception of how an object is reflected; if this, let us say, is the surface of the water (see drawing e.), and here is some object, you must arouse in the child's mind a picture of how it will be in the reflection. In this manner you can lead the children to perceive other examples of harmony to be found in the world.

You can also help the child himself to become skilful and mobile in this pictorial imaginative thinking by saying to him: “Touch your right eye with your left hand! Touch your right eye with your right hand! Touch your left eye with your right hand! Touch your left shoulder with your right hand

from behind! Touch your right shoulder with your left hand! Touch your left ear with your right hand! Touch your left ear with your left hand! Touch the big toe of your right foot with your right hand!” and so on. You can thus make the child do all kinds of curious exercises, for example, “Describe a circle with your right hand round the left! Describe a circle with your left hand round the right! Describe two circles cutting each other with both hands! Describe two circles with one hand in one direction and with the other hand in the other direction. Do it faster and faster. Now move the middle finger of your right hand very quickly. Now the thumb, now the little finger.”

So the child can learn to do all kinds of exercises in a quick alert manner. What is the result? If he does these exercises when he is about eight years old, they will teach him how to think—to think for his whole life. Learning to think directly through the head is not the kind of thinking that will last him his life. He will become “thought-tired” later on. But if, on the other hand, he has to do actions with his own body which need great alertness in carrying out, and which need to be thought over first, then later on he will be wise and prudent in the affairs of his life, and there will be a noticeable connection between the wisdom of such a man in his thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year and the exercises he did as a child of six or seven. Thus it is that the different epochs of life are connected with each other.

It is out of such a knowledge of man that one must try to work out what one has to bring into one's teaching.

Similarly one can achieve certain harmonies in colour. Suppose we do an exercise with the child by first of all painting something in red •;see drawing a.). Now we show him, by

arousing his feeling for it, that next to this red surface a green surface would be very harmonious. This of course must be carried out with paints, then it is easier to see. Now you can try to explain to the child that you are going to reverse the process. “I am going to put the green in here inside (see drawing b.); what will you put round it?” Then he will put red round it. By doing such things you will gradually lead to a feeling for the harmony of colours. The child comes to see that first I have a red surface here in the middle and green round it (see former drawing), but if the red becomes green, then the green must become red. It is of enormous importance just at this age, towards the eighth year, to let this correspondence of colour and form work upon the children.

Thus our lessons must all be given a certain inner form, and if such a method of teaching is to thrive, the one thing necessary is—to express it negatively—to dispense with the usual timetable. In the Waldorf School we have so-called “period teaching” and not a fixed timetable. We take one subject for from four to six weeks; the same subject is continued during that time. We do not have from 8–9 Arithmetic; 9–10 Reading, 10–11 Writing, but we take one subject which we pursue continuously in the Main Lesson morning by morning for four weeks, and when the children have gone sufficiently far with that subject we pass on to another. So that we never alternate by having Arithmetic from 8–9 and Reading 9–10, but we have Arithmetic alone for several weeks, then another subject similarly, according to what it may happen to be. There are, however, certain subjects which I shall deal with later that require a regular weekly timetable. But, as a rule, in the so-called “Main Lessons” we keep very strictly to the method of teaching in periods. During each period we take only one subject but these lessons can include other topics related to it.

We thereby save the children from what can work such harm in their soul life, namely that in one lesson they have to absorb what is then blotted out in the lesson immediately following. The only way to save them from this is to introduce period teaching.

Many will no doubt object that in this kind of teaching the children will forget what they have learnt. This only applies to certain special subjects, e.g. Arithmetic, and can be corrected by frequent little recapitulations. This question of forgetting is of very little account in most of the subjects, at any rate in comparison to the enormous gain to the child if the concentration on one subject for a certain period of time is adhered to.

• 1. Dr. Steiner retained the ancient oriental word “Karma” in speaking of the working of human destiny in repeated lives on earth. See Rudolf Steiner:Theosophy,chap. II.

I. Proof for the Theorem of Pythagoras.

(As it has been impossible to reproduce the diagrams in colour, the forms which Dr. Steiner referred to by their colours have been indicated by letters or numbers.) It is quite easy to do this proof if the triangle is isosceles. If you have here a right-angled isosceles triangle (see diagram a.), then this is one side, this is the other and this the hypotenuse. This square (1, 2, 3, 4) is the square on the hypotenuse. The squares (2, 5) and (4, 6) are the squares on the other two sides.

Now if I plant potatoes evenly in these two fields (2, 5) and (4, 6), I shall get just as many as if I plant potatoes in

this field (1, 2, 3, 4). (1, 2, 3, 4) is the square on the hypotenuse, and the two fields (2, 5) and (4, 6) are the squares on the other two sides.

You can make the proof quite obvious by saying: the parts (2) and (4) of the two smaller squares fall into this space here (1, 2, 3, 4, the square on the hypotenuse); they are already within it. The part (5) exactly fits in to the space (3), and if you cut out the whole thing you can take the triangle (6) and apply it to (1), and you will see at once that it is the same. So that the proof is quite clear if you have a so-called right-angled isosceles triangle.

If however you have a triangle that is not isosceles, but has unequal sides (see diagram b.), you can do it as follows:

draw the triangle again ABC; then draw the square on the hypotenuse ABDE. Proceed as follows: draw the triangle ABC again over here, DBF. Then this triangle ABC or DBF (which is the same), can be put up there, AGE. Since you now have this triangle repeated over there, you can draw the square over one of the other sides, CAGH.

As you see, I can now also draw this triangle DEI congruent to BCA. Then the square DIHF is the square on the other side. Here I have both the square on the one side and the square on the other side. In the one case I use the side AG and in the other case the side DI. The two triangles AEG and DEI are congruent. Where is then the square on the hypotenuse? It is the square ABDE. Now I have to show from the figure itself that (1, 2) and (3, 4, 5) together make up (2, 4, 6, 7). Now I first take the square (1, 2); this has the triangle (2) in common with the square on the hypotenuse ABDE and section (4) of the square on the other side HIDF is also contained in ABDE. Thus I get this figure (2, 4) which you see drawn here and which is actually a piece of the square ABDE. This only leaves parts (1, 3 and 5) of the squares AGHC and DIHF to be fitted into the square on the hypotenuse ABDE. Now you can take part (5) and lay it over part (6), but you will still have this corner (1, 3) left over. If you cut this out you will discover that these two areas (1, 3) fit into this area (7). Of course it can be drawn more clearly but I think you will understand the process.

We will now continue our discussions by speaking of certain matters of method, and here I should like to say that in these few lectures our purpose cannot be to give detailed indications but only general principles. You can also study the Waldorf School Seminar Courses, and with the indications you have received here you will be able to understand them thoroughly. We must get a clear picture of the child between the change of teeth and puberty; we must know that in the years before the change of teeth the inherited characteristics are the determining factors, and that the child receives from his father and mother a “model” body which is completely thrown aside by the time he changes his teeth, for during the first seven-year period it is being replaced by a new body. The change of teeth, indeed, is only the external expression of this replacing of the old body by a new one, upon which the soul and spirit are now at work.

I have already told you that if the spirit-soul is strong, then during the school period from the change of teeth to puberty the child may go through great changes as regards the qualities he formerly possessed. If the individuality is weak, the result will be a body that very closely resembles the inherited characteristics, and with the children of school age we shall still have to take into account deeply-rooted resemblances to the parents or grandparents.

We must be clear in our minds that the independent activity of the etheric body of man only really begins at the change of teeth. The etheric body in the first seven years has to put forward all the independent activity of which it is capable in order to build up the second physical body. So that this etheric body is pre-eminently an inward artist in the child in the first seven years; it is a modeller, a sculptor. And this modelling force, which is applied to the physical body by the etheric body, becomes free, emancipates itself with the change of teeth at the seventh year. Then it can work as an activity of soul.

This is why the child has an impulse to model forms or to paint them. For the first seven years of life the etheric body has been carrying out modelling and painting within the physical body. Now that it has nothing further to do as regards the physical body, or at least not as much as before, it wants to carry its activity outside. If therefore you as teachers have a wide knowledge of the forms that occur in the human organism, and consequently know what kind of forms the child likes to mould out of plastic material or to paint in colour, then you will be able to give him the right guidance. But you yourselves must have a kind of artistic conception of the human organism. It is therefore of real importance for the teacher to try and do some modelling himself, for the teachers' training of today includes nothing of this sort. You will see that however much you have learnt about the lung or the liver, or let us say the complicated ramifications of the vascular system, you will not know as much as if you were to copy the whole thing in wax or plasticine. For then you suddenly begin to have quite a different kind of knowledge of the organs, of the lung for instance. For as you know you must form one half of the lung differently from the other half; the lung is not symmetrical. One half is clearly divided into two segments, the other into three. Before you learn this you are constantly forgetting which is left and which is right. But when you work out these curious asymmetrical forms in wax or plasticine, then you get the feeling that you could not change round left and right any more than you could put the heart on the right hand side of the body. You also get the feeling that the lung has its right place in the organism with its own particular form, and if you mould it rightly you will feel that it is inevitable for the human lung to come gradually into an upright position in standing and walking. If you model the lung forms of animals you will see or you will feel from the touch that the lung of an animal lies horizontally. And so it is with other organs.

You yourselves therefore should really try to learn anatomy by modelling the organs, so that you can then get the children to model or to paint something that is in no way an imitation of the human body but only expresses certain forms. For you will find that the child has an impulse to make forms that are related to the inner human organism. You may get some quite extraordinary experiences in this respect in the course of your lessons.

We have introduced lessons on simple Physiology in the school, and especially in the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh classes, as this is obviously an integral part of the Waldorf School method. Our children paint from the very beginning, and from a certain age they also do carving. Now if you simply let the children work freely it is very interesting to see that when you have explained anything about the human being to them, the lung for instance, then out of themselves they begin to model such forms as the lung or something similar. It is really interesting to see how the child forms things out of his own being. That is why it is essential for you to take up this plastic method, and to find ways and means of making faithful reproductions of the forms of the human organs exactly in wax or plasticine—even, if you like, as our children often do, in mud, for if you have nothing else that is very good material to work with.

This is an inner urge, an inner longing of the etheric body, to be at work in modelling or painting. So you can very easily turn this impulse and longing to account by deriving the letters of the alphabet out of the forms which the child paints or models, for then you will be really moulding your teaching out of a knowledge of man. This is what must be done at this stage.

Now to proceed. Man consists not only of his physical body and etheric body, which latter is emancipated and free at the seventh year, but also of the astral body and ego. What happens to the astral body of the child between the seventh and fourteenth year? It does not really come to its full activity till puberty. Only then is it working completely within the human organism. But whilst the etheric body between birth and the change of teeth is in a certain sense being drawn out of the physical body and becoming independent, the astral body is gradually being drawn inwards between the seventh and fourteenth year, and when it has been drawn right in and is no longer merely loosely connected with the physical and etheric bodies but permeates them completely, then the human being has arrived at the moment of puberty, of sex maturity.

With the boy one can see by the change of voice that the astral body is now quite within the larynx, with the girl one can see by the development of other organs, breast organs and so on, that the astral body has now been completely drawn in. The astral body finds its way slowly into the human body from all sides.

The lines and directions it follows are the nerve fibres. The astral body comes in along the nerve fibres from without inwards. Here it begins to fill out the whole body from the outer environment, from the skin, and gradually draws itself together inside. Before this time it is a kind of loose cloud, in which the child lives. Then it draws itself together, lays firm

hold upon all the organs, and if we may put it somewhat crudely, it unites itself chemically with the organism, with all the tissues of the physical and etheric body.

But something very strange happens here. When the astral body presses inwards from the periphery of the body it makes its way along the nerves which then unite in the spine (see

drawing). Above is the head. It also forces its way slowly through the head nerves, crawls along the nerves towards the central organs, towards the spinal cord, bit by bit, into the head, gradually coming in and filling it all out.

What we must chiefly consider in this connection is how the breathing works in with the whole nervous system. Indeed this working together of the breathing with the whole nervous system is something very special in the human organism. As teacher and educator one should have the very finest feeling for it; only then will one be able to teach rightly. Here then the air enters the body, distributes itself, goes up through the spinal column (see drawing), spreads out in the brain, touches the nerve fibres everywhere, goes down again and pursues paths by which it can then be ejected as carbon dioxide. So we find the nervous system being constantly worked upon by the in-breathed air which distributes itself, goes up through the spinal column, spreads out again, becomes permeated with carbon, goes back again and is breathed out.

It is only in the course of the first school period, between the change of teeth and puberty, that the astral body carries this whole process of breathing, passing along the nerve fibres, right into the physical body. So that during this time when the astral body is gradually finding its way into the physical body with the help of the air breathed in, it is playing upon something that is stretched across like strings of an instrument in the centre of the body, that is, upon the spinal column. Our nerves are really a kind of lyre, a musical instrument, an inner musical instrument that resounds up into the head.

This process begins of course before the change of teeth, but at that time the astral body is only loosely connected with the physical body. It is between the change of teeth and puberty that the astral body really begins to play upon the single nerve fibres with the in-breathed air, like a violin bow on the strings.

You will be fostering all this if you give the child plenty of singing. You must have a feeling that the child is a musical instrument while he is singing, you must stand before your class to whom you are teaching singing or music with the clear feeling: every child is a musical instrument and inwardly feels a kind of well-being in the sound.

For you see, sound is brought about by the particular way the breath is circulated. That is inner music. To begin with, in the first seven years of life, the child learns everything by imitation, but now he should learn to sing out of the inward joy he experiences in building up melodies and rhythms. To show you the kind of inner picture you should have in your mind when you stand before your class in a Singing lesson, I should like to use a comparison which may seem a little crude, but which will make clear to you what I mean. I do not know how many of you, but I hope most, have at some time been able to watch a herd of cows who have fed and are now lying in the meadow digesting their food.

This digestive process of a herd of cows is indeed a marvellous thing. In the cow a kind of image of the whole world is present. The cow digests her food, the digested foodstuffs pass over into the blood vessels and lymphatic vessels, and during this whole process of digestion and nourishment the cow has a sensation of well-being which is at the same time knowledge. During the process of digestion every cow has a wonderful aura in which the whole world is mirrored. It is the most beautiful thing one can see, a herd of cows lying in the meadow digesting their food, and in this process of digestion comprehending the whole world. With us human beings all this has sunk into the subconscious, so that the head can reflect what the body works out and sees revealed as knowledge.

We are really in a bad way, we human beings, because the head does not allow us to experience the lovely things that the cows, for example, experience. We should know much more of the world if we could experience the digestive process, for instance. We should then of course have to experience it with the feeling of knowledge, not with the feeling that man has when he remains in the subconscious in his digestive process. This is simply to make clear what I want to say. I do not wish to imply that we now have to raise the process of digestion into consciousness in our teaching, but I want to show that there is something that should really be present in the child at a higher stage, this feeling of wellbeing at the inward flow of sound. Imagine what would happen if the violin could feel what is going on within it! We only listen to the violin, it is outside us, we are ignorant of the whole origin of the sound and only hear the outward sense picture of it. But if the violin could feel how each string vibrates with the next one it would have the most blissful experiences, provided of course that the music is good. So you must let the child have these little experiences of ecstasy, so that you really call forth a feeling for music in his whole organism, and you must yourself find joy in it.

Of course one must understand something of music. But an essential part of teaching is this artistic element of which I have just spoken.

On this account it is essential, for the inner processes of life between the change of teeth and puberty demand it, to give the children lessons in music right from the very beginning, and at first, as far as possible to accustom them to sing little songs quite empirically without any kind of theory: nothing more than simply singing little songs, but they must be well sung! Then you can use simpler songs from which the children can gradually learn what melody, rhythm and beat are, and so on; but first you must accustom the children to sing little songs as a whole, and to play a little too as far as that is possible. Unless there is clearly no bent at all in this direction every Waldorf child begins to learn some instrument on entering school; as I say, as far as circumstances allow, each child should learn to play an instrument. As early as possible the children should come to feel what it means for their own musical being to flow over into the objective instrument, for which purpose the piano, which should really only be a kind of memorising instrument, is of course the worst possible thing for the child. Another kind of instrument should be chosen, and if possible one that can be blown upon. Here one must of course have a great deal of artistic tact and, I was going to say, a great deal of authority too. If you can, you should choose a wind instrument, as the children will learn most from this and will thereby gradually come to understand music. Admittedly, it can be a hair-raising experience when the children begin to blow. But on the other hand it is a wonderful thing in the child's life when this whole configuration of the air, which otherwise he encloses and holds within him along the nerve-fibres, can now be extended and guided. The human being feels how his whole organism is being enlarged. Processes which are otherwise only within the organism are carried over into the outside world. A similar thing happens when the child learns the violin, when the actual processes, the music that is within him, is directly carried over and he feels how the music in him passes over into the strings through his bow.

But remember, you should begin giving these Music and Singing lessons as early as possible. For it is of very great importance that you not only make all your teaching artistic, but that you also begin teaching the more specifically artistic subjects, Painting, Modelling and Music, as soon as the child comes to school, and that you see to it that he really comes to possess all these things as an inward treasure.

The point of time in the life of the child which falls between the ninth and tenth year must be very specially borne in mind in the teaching of languages. I have characterised for you this turning point between the ninth and tenth year as the time when the child first learns to differentiate between himself and his environment. Up to this time they have been as one. I have already indicated the right method of teaching for the child entering school, but he ought not really to come to school before he begins to change his teeth; one might say that fundamentally any kind of school teaching before this time is wrong; if we are forced to it by law we must do it, but it is not the right thing from the point of view of artistic education. In a true art of education the child should not enter school until the change of teeth. Our first task, as I have shown you, is to begin with something artistic and work out the forms of the letters through art; you should begin with some independent form of art as I have explained to you, and treat everything that has to do with nature in the mood and fashion of fairy tales, legends and myths, in the way I have described. But for the teaching of languages it is specially important to consider this epoch between the ninth and tenth year.

Before this point of time is reached language teaching must under no circumstances be of an intellectual nature; that is to say it must not include any grammar or syntax. Up to the ninth or tenth year the child must learn to speak the foreign language just as he acquires any other habit; he must learn to speak as a matter of habit. It is only when he learns to differentiate himself from his environment that he may begin to examine what he himself is bringing forth in his speech. It is only now that one can begin to speak of noun, adjective, verb and so on, not before. Before this time the child should simply speak and be kept to this speaking.

We have a good opportunity for carrying this out in the Waldorf School, because as soon as the child comes to us at the beginning of his school life he learns two foreign languages besides his mother tongue.

The child comes to school and begins with Main Lessons in periods, as I have already described; he has the Main Lesson for the early part of the morning, and then directly after that the little ones have a lesson which for German children is either English or French. In these language lessons we try not to consider the relationship of one language to the other. Up till the point of time I have described to you between the ninth and tenth year, we disregard the fact that a table for instance is called “ Tisch” in German and “table” in English, that to eat is “ essen” in German and “eat” in English; we connect each language not with the words of another language, but directly with the objects. The child learns to call the ceiling, the lamp, the chair, by their names, whether it is in French or in English. Thus from the seventh to the ninth year we should not attach importance to translation, that is to say rendering a word in one language by a word in another, but the children simply learn to speak in the language, connecting their words with the external objects. So that the child does not need to know or rather does not need to think of the fact that when he says “table” in English it is called “ Tisch” in German, and so on; he does not concern himself with this at all. This does not occur to the children, for they have not been taught to compare the language in any way.

In this manner the child learns every language out of the element from which it stems, namely, the element of feeling. Now a language consists, of course, of sounds, and is either the expression of the soul from within, in which case there is a vowel, or else it is the expression of something external and then there is a consonant. But one must feel this first of all. You will not of course pass on to the children exactly what I am saying here, but in the course of your lesson the child should actually experience the vowel as something connected with feeling, and the consonant as a copy of something in the outside world. He will do this of himself because it lies in human nature, and we must not drive out this impulse but rather lead on from it.

For let us think, what is the vowel A [In these references to A and E the sounds of Ah and Eh should be considered, not the names of the letters.] (ah)? (This does not belong to the lesson, but is only something you ought to know!) What is A? When the sun rises I stand in admiration before it: Ah! A is always the expression of astonishment, wonder. Or again, a fly settles on my forehead; I say: E (Eh). That is the expression of warding off, doing away with: E. The English sounds are somewhat differently connected with our feelings, but in every language, English included, we find that the vowel A expresses astonishment and wonder.

Now let us take a characteristic word: roll—the rolling of a ball, for instance. Here you have the R. Who could help feeling that with the R and the L together, the ball rolls on (see drawing a.). R alone would be like this (see drawing b.):

R. L. goes on. L always implies a flowing on. Here you have an external process imitated in the consonant (see drawing c.).

So the whole language is built up in the vowels out of a feeling of inner astonishment, wonder, self-defence, self-assertion, etc., or out of a feeling of imitation in the case of the consonants. We must not drive these feelings out of the child. He should learn to develop the sound from the external objects and from the way in which his own feelings are related to them. Everything should be derived from the feeling for language. In the word “roll” the child should really fed: r, o, l, l. It is the same thing for every word.

This has been completely lost for modern civilised man. He thinks of the word simply as something written down or something abstract. Man can no longer really feel his way into language. Look how all primitive languages still have feeling within them; the most civilised languages make speech an abstract thing. Look at your own English language, how the second half of the word is simply cast aside, and one skips over the real feeling of the sounds. But the child must dwell in this feeling for language.

This must be cultivated by examining characteristic words in which such a feeling plays. Now in German we call what one has up here “Kopf.” In English it is called “head,” in Italian “testa.” With the abstract kind of relationship to language that people usually have today, what do they say about this? They say, in German the word is “Kopf,” in Italian “testa,” in English “head.” But all this is absolutely untrue. The whole thing is nonsense.

For let us think: “Kopf,” what is that? “Kopf” is what is formed, something that has a rounded form. Theform is expressed when you say “Kopf.” When you say “testa”—you have it in the word “testament” and “testify”—then you are expressing the fact that the head establishes or confirms something. Here you are expressing something quite different. You say of that organ that sits up there: that is the establisher, the testator— testa. Now in English one holds the opinion that the head is the most important part of man, (although you know of course that this opinion is not quite correct). So that in English you say “head,” that is, the most important thing, the goal of all things, the aim and meeting-place of all.

Thus different things are expressed in the different languages. If people wanted to designate the same thing, then the Englishman and the Italian too would say “Kopf.” But they do not designate the same thing. In the primeval human language the same thing was expressed everywhere, so that this primeval language was the same for all. Then people began to separate and to express things differently; that is how the different words came about. When you designate such different things as though they were the same you no longer feel what is contained in them, and it is very important not to drive out this feeling for language. It must be kept alive and for this reason you must not analyse language before the ninth or tenth year.

Only then can you pass on to what a noun, a verb or an adjective is and so on: this should not be done before the ninth or tenth year, otherwise you will be speaking of things which are connected with the child's own being, and this he cannot yet understand because he cannot yet distinguish himself from his environment. It is most important to bear in mind that we must not allow any Grammar or comparison of languages before the ninth or tenth year. Then what the child gets from speaking will be similar to what he gets in his singing.

I have tried to illustrate this inner joy in singing by picturing to you the inner feeling of pleasure that rises up out of the digestive organs of the cows in the meadow when they are digesting their food. There must be present an inner feeling of joy of this kind, or at least some feeling for the thing itself, so that the children feel what is really contained in a word, that they feel the inward “rolling.” Language must be inwardly experienced and not only thought out with the head. Today you mostly find that people only “think” language with their head. Therefore when they want to find the right word in translating from one language into another they take a dictionary. Here the words are so put together that you find “testa” or “Kopf” and people imagine that that is all the same. But it is not all the same. A different conception is expressed in each word, something that can only be expressed out of feeling. We must take this into account in language teaching. And another element comes in here, something which belongs to the spirit. When the human being dies, or before he comes down to earth, he has no possibility of understanding the so-called substantives, for example. Those whom we call the dead know nothing about substantives; they know nothing of the naming of objects, but they still have some knowledge of qualities, and it is therefore possible to communicate with the dead as regards qualities. But in the further course of the life after death that soon ceases also. What lasts longest is an understanding of verbs, words of action, active and passive expressions, and longest of all the expression of sensations: Oh! Ah! I (ee), E (eh); these interjectional expressions are preserved longest of all by the dead.

From this you can see how vital it is that if the human soul is not to become entirely un-spiritual it should have a living experience of interjections. All interjections are actually vowels. And the consonants, which as such are in any case very soon lost after death, and were not present before the descent to earth, are copies of the external world. This we should really experience in our feeling, be aware of it in the child, and see that we do not drive it out by giving lessons on nouns, adjectives and so on too early, but wait with these until the ninth or tenth year is reached.

From the first class of the Waldorf School upwards we have introduced Eurythmy, this visible speech in which, by carrying out certain movements either alone or in groups, man actually reveals himself just as he reveals himself through speech. Now if there is the right treatment in the language lessons, that is to say if the teacher does not ruin the child's feeling for language but rather cherishes it, then the child will feel the transition to Eurythmy to be a perfectly natural one, just as the very little child feels that learning to speak is also a perfectly natural process. You will not have the slightest difficulty in bringing Eurythmy to the children. If they are healthily developed children they will want it. You will always discover something that is pathologically wrong with children who do not wish to do Eurythmy. They want it as a matter of course, just as when they were quite little children they wanted to learn to speak, if all their organs were sound. That is because the child feels a very strong impulse to express his inward experiences as activities of will in his own body. This can be seen in the very early years when he begins to laugh and cry, and in the various ways in which feelings are expressed in the face.

It would have to be a very metaphorical way of speaking if you were to say that a dog or any other animal laughs. In any case it does not laugh in the same way as the human being does, neither does it cry in the same way. Indeed in the animal all gestures and movements which carry over inward experience into the element of will are quite different. There is a great difference between animal and man in this respect.

What is expressed in Eurythmy rests upon laws just as language does. Speaking is not an arbitrary thing. With a word like “water” for instance, you cannot put another vowel in place of the “a,” you cannot say “wuter,” or anything like that. Speech has laws, and so has Eurythmy. In the ordinary movements of the body man is in a sense free, although he also does many things out of a certain instinct. When he is cogitating about something, he puts his finger to his forehead; when he wants to show that something is not true, he shakes his head and his hand, extinguishing it, as it were. But Eurythmy leads inward and outward experiences over into ordered movements, just as speech leads an inward experience over into the sound: this is what Eurythmy is, and the child wants to learn it. For this reason the fact that Eurythmy is not yet taught in modern education proves that there is no thought of drawing forth the human faculties out of the very nature of man himself, for if you do that then you must come to Eurythmy in the natural course of things.

This will not mean any interference with Gymnastics, the teaching of physical exercises. This is something quite different, and the teacher and educator must recognise the difference. Gymnastics as taught today and all kinds of sport are something quite different from Eurythmy. You can quite well have both together. For the conception of space is very often considered in quite an abstract way, and people do not take into account that space is something concrete. For people have become so accustomed to think of the earth as round that when someone who lives in this part of the world makes a jump he says he jumps “up.” But when someone in the Antipodes, who has his legs down here and his head up there, jumps, he jumps “down”—or so we imagine. But this is not anything we can experience. I once read a book on Natural Philosophy where the author tried to ridicule the idea that the sky is above us by saying: Down there in the Antipodes the sky must be below! But the truth is far richer than that. We do not make judgments about the world and about space in such a way that we leave ourselves out of it altogether and simply consider space by itself as something abstract. There are certain philosophers who do this—Hume and Mill and Kant. But this is all untrue. It is really all nonsense. Space is something concrete of which man is sensible. He feels himself within space and he feels the necessity of finding his place in it; when he thus finds his way into the balance of space, into the different conditions of space, then Sport and Gymnastics arise. In these man is trying to find his own relationship to space.

If you do this gymnastic movement (arms outstretched), you have the feeling that you are bringing your two arms into a horizontal direction. If you jump you have the feeling that you are moving your body upwards by its own force. These are gymnastic exercises. But if you feel you are holding within you something which you are experiencing inwardly—the sound EE—and you reflect upon it, then you may make perhaps a similar movement, but in this case, the inner soul quality is expressed in the movement. Man reveals his inward self. That is what he does in Eurythmy, which is thus the revelation of the inner self. In Eurythmy there is expressed what man can experience in breathing and in the circulation of the blood, when they come into the realm of soul. In Gymnastics and in Sport man feels as though space were a framework filled with all sorts of lines and directions into which he springs and which he follows, and he makes his apparatus accordingly. He climbs a ladder or pulls himself up on a rope. Here man is acting in accordance with external space.

That is the difference between Gymnastics and Eurythmy. Eurythmy lets the soul life flow outwards and thereby becomes a real expression of the human being, like language; Eurythmy is visible speech.

By means of Gymnastics and Sport man fits himself into external space, adapts himself to the world, experiments to see whether he fits in with the world in this way or in that. That is not language, that is not a revelation of man, but rather a demand the world makes upon him that he should be fit for the world and be able to find his way into it. This difference must be noticed. It expresses itself in the fact that the Gymnastics teacher makes the children do movements whereby they may adapt themselves to the outside world. The Eurythmy teacher expresses what is in the inner being of man. We must feel this, we must be sensible of it. Then Eurythmy, Gymnastics, and Games too, if you like, will all take their right place in our teaching.

We will speak further of this tomorrow.

We will now speak of some further details of method, though of course in this short time I can only pick out a few examples to give you.

When we consider the whole period between the change of teeth and puberty we can see that it divides itself again into three sections, and it is these three sections that we must bear in mind when we have to guide the children through these early years of school life.

First we have the age up to the point of time which I have described to you here, when the child begins to differentiate himself from his environment and makes a distinction between “subject”—his own self, and “object”—the things which surround him in the outside world; up to this point of time it is essential for us to teach in such a way that everything within the child or without him bears the character of a unity. I have shown you how that can be done artistically. Then, in the second period, we saw how the transition to descriptions of the outside world can be made through our teaching of plant and animal life. You can treat these things in quite an elementary way up till the twelfth year. The third section extends from the twelfth year up to puberty, and it is really only at this time that we can pass on to lifeless nature, for it is only now that the child really begins to understand the inanimate world.

We might indeed say that from the seventh year to about nine-and-a-half or nine-and-one-third the child takes in everything with his soul. There is nothing that the child would not take in with his soul. The trees, the stars, the clouds, the stones, everything is absorbed by the child's soul life. From about nine-and-a-third to about eleven-and-two-thirds the child already perceives the difference between the soul quality which he sees in himself and what is merely “living.” We can now speak of the whole earth as living. Thus we have the soul quality and the living quality. Then from eleven-and-two-thirds to about fourteen the child discriminates between what is of the soul, what is living, and what is dead, that is to say, what is based on the laws of cause and effect.

We should not speak to the child of Inanimate things at all before he approaches his twelfth year. Only then should we begin to speak about minerals, physical phenomena, chemical phenomena and so on. We must make it clear to ourselves that this is really how things are: in the child between the change of teeth and puberty it is not the intellect but the fantasy that is predominantly active; we must constantly be thinking of the child's fantasy, and therefore, as I have often said, we must especially develop fantasy in ourselves. If we do not do this, but pass over to all kinds of intellectual things when the child is still quite young, then he cannot go through his development rightly even in his physical body. And much that is pathological at the present day arises from the fact that in this materialistic age too much attention has been paid to the intellect in children between the change of teeth and puberty.

We should only very gradually introduce the lifeless world when the child is approaching his twelfth year, for this lifeless world must be grasped by the intellect. At this time we can introduce minerals, physical and chemical phenomena and so on. But even here we should connect it up with life as far as possible, not simply start, for instance, with a collection of minerals, but start from the earth, the soil, and first describe the mountain ranges, how they bring about the configuration of the earth; then we can speak of how the mountains are surrounded with soil at their foot, and the higher we go the more bare they become and the fewer plants there are. So we come to speak of the bareness of the mountains and point out that here there are minerals. Thus we start with the mountains and lead on to the minerals.

Then when we have given a clear description of the mountains we can show the children a mineral and say: this is what you would find if you were to take this path up the mountain. This is where it is found. When you have done this with a few different minerals you can pass on to speak of the minerals themselves. But you must do the other first, here again proceeding from the whole and not from the part. This is of very great importance.

For physical phenomena also it is just as important to start from life itself. You should not begin your teaching of Physics as set forth in the text books of today, but simply by lighting a match for instance and letting the children observe how it begins to burn; you must draw their attention to all the details, what the flame looks like, what it is like outside, what it is like further in, and how a black spot, a little black cap is left when you blow out the flame; and only when you have done this, begin to explain how the fire in the match came about. The fire came about through the generation of warmth, and so on. Thus you must connect everything with life itself.

Or take the example of a lever: do not begin by saying that a lever consists of a supported beam at the one end of which there is a force, and at the other end another force, as one so often finds in the Physics books. You should start from a pair of scales; let the child imagine that you are going to some shop where things are being weighed out, and from this pass on to equilibrium and balance, and to the conception of weight and gravity. Always develop your Physics from life itself, and your chemical phenomena also.

That is the essential thing, to begin with real life in considering the different phenomena of the physical and mineral world. If you do it the other way, beginning with an abstraction, then something very curious happens to the child; the lesson itself soon makes him tired. He does not get tired if you start from real life. He gets tired if you start from abstractions.

The golden rule for the whole of teaching is that the child should not tire. Now there is something very strange about the so-called experimental education of the present day. Experimental psychologists register when a child becomes tired in any kind of mental activity, and from this they decide how long to occupy a child with any one subject, in order to avoid fatigue.

This whole conception is wrong from beginning to end. The truth of the matter is as follows: you can read about it in my books, especially in the book Riddles of the Soul and in various lecture courses; all I shall do now is to remind you that man consists of three members—the nerve-senses man, that is, all that sustains man in the activity of his mind and spirit; the rhythmic man, which contains the whole rhythm of breathing, the circulation of the blood and so on; and the metabolic-limb man, in which is to be found everything that is metamorphosed by means of the different substances.

Now if you take the physical development of the child from birth to the change of teeth you will find it is specially the head-organisation, the nerve-senses organisation that is at work.¹ The child develops from the head downwards in the early years of his life. You must examine this closely. Look first of all at a human embryo, an unborn child. The head is enormous and the rest of the body is still stunted. Then the child is born and his head is still outwardly the largest, strongest part, and out of the head proceeds the whole growth of the child.

This is no longer the case with the child between the seventh and fourteenth year. Rhythm of breathing, rhythm of the blood, the whole rhythmic system is what holds sway between the change of teeth and puberty. Only rhythm!

But what is the real nature of rhythm? Now if I think a great deal, particularly if I have to study, I get tired, I get tired in my head. If I have to walk far, which is an exertion for my limb organism, I also tire. The head, or the nerve-senses organism, and the metabolic-limb organism can get tired. But the rhythmic organism can never tire.

For just think; you breathe all day long. Your heart beats at night as well as in the day. It must never stop, from birth to death. The rhythm of it has to go on all the time, and cannot ever tire. It never gets tired at all.

Now in education and teaching you must address yourself to whichever system is predominant in man; thus between the change of teeth and puberty you must address yourself to rhythm in the child by using pictures. Everything that you describe or do must be done in such a way that the head has as little to do with it as possible, but the heart, the rhythm, everything that is artistic or rhythmic, must be engaged. What is the result? The result is that with teaching of this kind the child never gets tired, because you are engaging his rhythmic system and not his head.

People are so terribly clever, and in this materialistic age they have thought out a scheme whereby the children should always be allowed to romp about between lessons. Now it is certainly good to let them romp about, but it is good because of the soul qualities in it, because of the delight they have in it. For experiments have been made and it has been found that when the children are properly taught in lesson time they are less tired than when they play about outside. The movement of their limbs tires them more, whereas what you give them in their lessons in the right way should never tire them at all. And the more you develop the pictorial element with the children and the less you exert the intellect, by presenting everything in a living way, the more you will be making demands on the rhythmic system only, and the less will the child become tired. Therefore when the experimental psychologists come and make observations to see how much the child tires, what is it they really observe? They observe how badly you have taught. If you had taught well you would find no fatigue on the part of the children.

In our work with children of Elementary School age we must see to it that we engage the rhythmic system only. The rhythmic system never tires, and is not over-exerted when we employ it in the right way, and for this rhythmic system we need not an intellectual but rather a pictorial method of presentation, something that comes out of the fantasy. Therefore it is imperative that fantasy should hold sway in the school. This must still be so even in the last period of which we have spoken, from eleven-and-two-thirds to fourteen years; we must still make the lifeless things live through fantasy and always connect them with real life. It is possible to connect all the phenomena of Physics with real life, but we ourselves must have fantasy in order to do it. This is absolutely necessary.

Now this fantasy should above all be the guiding principle in what are called compositions, when the children have to write about something and work it out for themselves. Here what must be strictly avoided is to let the children write a composition about anything that you have not first talked over with them in great detail, so that the subject is familiar to them. You yourself, with the authority of the teacher and educator, should have first spoken about the subject with the children; then the child should produce his composition under the influence of what you yourself have said. Even when the children are approaching puberty you must still not depart from this principle. Even then the child should not just write whatever occurs to him; he should always feel that a certain mood has been aroused in him through having discussed the subject with his teacher, and all that he then himself writes in his essay must preserve this mood.

Here again it is “aliveness” that must be the guiding principle. “Aliveness” in the teacher must pass over to “aliveness” in the children.

As you will see from all this, the whole of your teaching and education must be taken from real life. This is something which you can often hear said nowadays. People say that lessons must be given in a living way and in accordance with reality. But first of all we must acquire a feeling for what is actually in accordance with reality. I will give you an example from my own experience of what sometimes happens in practice even when in theory people hold the most excellent educational principles.

I once went into a classroom—I will not say where it was—where an Arithmetic example was being given which was supposed to connect addition with real life. 14 2/3, 16 5/6 and 25 3/5 for example, were not simply to be added together, but were to be related to life. This was done in the following way: The children were told that one man was born on 25th March, 1895, another on 27th August, 1888, and a third on 3rd December, 1899. How old are these three men together? That was the question. And the sum was quite seriously carried through in the following way: from the given date in 1895 to 1924 [The date of this Lecture Course.] is 29 3/4; this is the age of the first man. The second one up to 1924 is about 26 1/2 years old, and the third, from 1899, as he was born on 3rd December, we may say 25. The children were then told that when they add up these ages they will find out how old they all are together.

But my dear friends, I should just like to ask how it is possible that they can make up a certain sum together with their ages? How do you set about it? Of course the numbers can quite well be made up into a sum, but where can you find such a sum in reality? The men are all living at the same time, so that they cannot possibly experience such a thing together in any way. A sum like this is not in the very least taken from life.

It was pointed out to me that this sum was actually taken from a book of examples. I then looked at this book and I found several other ingenious examples of the same kind. In many places I have found that this kind of thing has repercussions in ordinary life, and that is the important thing about it. For what we do at school affects ordinary life, and if the school teaching is wrong, that is if we bring such an unreality into an arithmetical example, then this way of thinking will be adopted by the young people and will be taken into ordinary life. I do not know if it is the same in England, but all over Central Europe when, let us say, several criminals are accused and condemned together, then you sometimes read in the papers: all five together have received sentences of imprisonment totalling 75 1/2 years. One has ten years, another twenty and so on, but it is all added up together. This you can find repeatedly in the newspapers. I should like to know what meaning a sum like that can have in reality. For each single prisoner who is sentenced, the 75 years together certainly have no meaning; they will all of them be free long before the 75 years are over, so that it has no reality at all.

You see, that is the important thing, to make straight for the reality in everything: you simply poison a child to whom you give a sum like this which is absolutely impossible in real life.

You must guide the child to think only about things that are to be found in life. Then through your teaching reality will be carried back into life again. In our time we suffer terribly from the unreality of men's thinking, and the teacher has need to consider this very carefully.

There is a theory in this age which, though postulated by men who are considered to be extraordinarily clever, is really only a product of education. It is the so-called Theory of Relativity. I hope you have already heard something of this theory which is connected with the name of Einstein; there is much in it that is correct. I do not want to combat what is right in it, but it has been distorted in the following way. Let us imagine that a cannon is fired off somewhere. It is said that if you are so many miles away, after a certain length of time you hear the report of the cannon. If you do not stand still but walk away from the sound, then you hear it later. The quicker you walk away the later you get the impression of the sound. If you do the opposite and walk towards the sound you will be hearing it sooner and sooner all the time.

But now if you continue this thought you come to the possible conception, which is however an impossibility in reality, that you approach the sound more quickly than it travels itself, and then if you think this out to its conclusion you come to the point of saying to yourself: then there is also a possibility of hearing the sound before the cannon is fired off!

That is what it can lead to, if theories arise out of a kind of thinking which is not in accordance with reality. A man who can think in accordance with reality must sometimes have very painful experiences. For in Einstein's books you even find, for instance, how you could take a watch and send it out into the universe at the speed of light, and then let it come back again; we are then told what happens to this watch if it goes out at the speed of light and comes back again. I should like to get an actual sight of this watch which, having whizzed away at this speed, then comes back again; I should like to know what it looks like then! The essential thing is that we never lose sight of reality in our thinking.

Herein lies the root of all evil in much of the education of today, and you find, for instance, in the “exemplary” Kindergartens that different kinds of work are thought out for the child to do. In reality we should make the children do nothing, even in play, that is not an imitation of life itself. All Froebel occupations and the like, which have been thought out for the children, are really bad. We must make it a rule only to let the children do what is an imitation of life, even in play. This is extremely important.

For this reason, as I have already told you, we should not think out what are called “ingenious” toys, but as far as possible with dolls or other toys we should leave as much as we can to the child's own fantasy. This is of great significance, and I would earnestly beg you to make it a rule not to let anything come into your teaching and education that is not in some way connected with life.

The same rule applies when you ask the children to describe something themselves. You should always call their attention to it if they stray from reality. The intellect never penetrates as deeply into reality as fantasy does. Fantasy can go astray, it is true, but it is rooted in reality, whereas the intellect remains always on the surface. That is why it is so infinitely important for the teacher himself to be in touch with reality as he stands in his class.

In order that this may be so we have our Teachers' Meetings in the Waldorf School which are the heart and soul of the whole teaching. In these meetings, each teacher speaks of what he himself has learnt in his class and from all the children in it, so that each one learns from the other. No school is really alive where this is not the most important thing, this regular meeting of the teachers.

And indeed there is an enormous amount one can learn there. In the Waldorf School we have mixed classes, girls and boys together. Now quite apart from what the boys and girls say to each other, or what they consciously exchange with each other, there is a marked difference to be seen in the classes according to whether there are more girls than boys or more boys than girls or an equal number of each. For years I have been watching this, and it has always proved to be the case that there is something different in a class where there are more girls than boys.

In the latter case you will very soon find that you yourself as the teacher become less tired, because the girls grasp things more easily than boys and with greater eagerness too. You will find many other differences also. Above all, you will very soon discover that the boys themselves gain in quickness of comprehension when they are in a minority, whereas the girls lose by it if they are in the minority. And so there are numerous differences which do not arise through the way they talk together or treat each other but which remain in the sphere of the imponderable and are themselves imponderable things.

All these things must be very carefully watched, and everything that concerns either the whole class or individual children is spoken of in our meetings, so that every teacher really has the opportunity to gain an insight into characteristic individualities among the pupils.

There is one thing that is of course difficult in the Waldorf School method. We have to think much more carefully than is usually the case in class teaching, how one can really bring the children on. For we are striving to teach by “reading” from the particular age of a child what should be given him at this age. All I have said to you is directed towards this goal.

Now suppose a teacher has a child of between nine and ten years in the class that is right for his age, but with quite an easy mind he lets this child stay down and not go up with the rest of the class; the consequence will be that in the following year this child will be receiving teaching which is meant for an age of life different from his own. Therefore under all circumstances we avoid letting the children stay down in the same class even if they have not reached the required standard. This is not so convenient as letting the children stay in the class where they are and repeat the work, but we avoid this at all costs. The only corrective we have is to put the very weak ones into a special class for the more backward children.²

Children who are in any way below standard come into this class from all the other classes.

Otherwise, as I have said, we do not let the children stay down but we try to bring them along with us under all circumstances, so that in this way each child really receives what is right for his particular age.

We must also consider those children who have to leave school at puberty, at the end of the Elementary School period, and who cannot therefore participate in the upper classes. We must make it our aim that by this time, through the whole tenor of our teaching, they will have come to a perception of the world which is in accordance with life itself. This can be done in a two-fold way. On the one hand we can develop all our lessons on Science and History in such a manner that the children, at the end of their schooling, have some knowledge of the being of man and some idea of the place of man in the world. Everything must lead up to a knowledge of man, reaching a measure of wholeness when the children come to the seventh and eighth classes, that is when they have reached their thirteenth and fourteenth year. Then all that they have already learnt will enable them to understand what laws, forces and substances are at work in man himself, and how man is connected with all physical matter in the world, with all that is of soul in the world, with all spirit in the world. So that the child, of course in his own way, knows what a human being is within the whole cosmos. This then is what we strive to achieve on the one hand.

On the other hand we try to give the children an understanding of life. It is actually the case today that most people, especially those who grow up in the town, have no idea how a substance, paper for instance, is made. There are a great many people who do not know how the paper on which they write or the material they are wearing is manufactured, nor, if they wear leather shoes, how the leather is prepared.

Think how many people there are who drink beer and have no idea how the beer is made. This is really a monstrous state of affairs. Now we cannot of course achieve everything in this direction, but we try to make it our aim as far as possible to give the children some knowledge of the work done in the most varied trades, and to see to it that they themselves also learn how to do certain kinds of work which are done in real life.

It is, however, extraordinarily difficult, in view of what is demanded of children today by the authorities, to succeed with an education that is really in accordance with life itself. One has to go through some very painful experiences. Once for instance, owing to family circumstances, a child had to leave when he had just completed the second class and begun a new year in the third. He had to continue his education in another school. We were then most bitterly reproached because he had not got so far in Arithmetic as was expected of him there, nor in Reading or Writing. Moreover they wrote and told us that the Eurythmy and Painting and all the other things he could do were of no use to him at all.

If therefore, we educate the children not only out of the knowledge of man, but in accordance with the demands of life, they will also have to know how to read and write properly at the age at which this is expected of them today. And so we shall be obliged to include in the curriculum many things which are simply demanded by the customs of the time. Nevertheless we try to bring the children into touch with life as far as possible.

I should have dearly liked to have a shoemaker as a teacher in the Waldorf School, if this had been possible. It could not be done because such a thing does not fit into a curriculum based on present-day requirements, but in order that the children might really learn to make shoes, and to know, not theoretically but through their own work, what this entails, I should have dearly liked from the very beginning to have a shoemaker on the staff of the school. But it simply could not be done because it would not have been in accordance with the authorities, although it is just the very thing that would have been in accordance with real life. Nevertheless we do try to make the children into practical workers.

When you come to the Waldorf School you will see that the children are quite good at binding books and making boxes; you will see too how they are led into a really artistic approach to handwork; the girls will not be taught to produce the kind of thing you see nowadays when you look at the clothes that women wear, for instance. It does not occur to people that the pattern for a collar should be different from that of a belt or the hem of a dress. People do not consider that here for example (see drawing a.) the pattern must have a special character because it is worn at the neck. The pattern for a belt (see drawing b.) must lead both upwards and downwards, and so on.

Or again, we never let our children make a cushion with an enclosed pattern, but the pattern itself should show where to lay your head. You can also see that there is a difference between right and left, and so forth. Thus here too life itself is woven and worked into everything that the children make, and they learn a great deal from it. This then is another method by which the children may learn to stand rightly in life.

We endeavour to carry this out in every detail, for example in the giving of reports. I could never in my life imagine what it means to mark the capacities of the children with a 2, or 3, or 21-. I do not know if that is done in England too, giving the children numbers or letters in their reports which are supposed to show what a child can do. In Central Europe it is customary to give a 3, or a 4. At the Waldorf School we do not give reports like this, but every teacher knows every child and describes him in the report; he describes in his own words what the child's capacities are and what progress he has made.

And then every year each child receives in his report a motto or verse for his own life, which can be a word of guidance for him in the year to come. The report is like this: first there is the child's name and then his verse, and then the teacher without any stereotyped letters or numbers, simply characterises what the child is like, and what progress he has made in the different subjects. The report is thus a description. The children always love their reports, and their parents also get a true picture of what the child is like at school.

We lay great stress upon keeping in touch with all the parents so that from the school we may see into the home through the child. Only in this way can we come to understand each child, and to know how to treat every peculiarity. It is not the same thing when we notice the same peculiarity in two children, for it has quite a different significance in the two cases.

Suppose for instance that two children each show a certain excitability. It is not merely a question of knowing that the child is excitable and giving him something to help him to become quiet, but it is a question of finding out that in the one case the child has an excitable father whom he has imitated, and in the other case the child is excitable because he has a weak heart. In every case we must be able to discover what lies at the root of these peculiarities.

This is the real purpose of the Teachers' Meetings, to study man himself, so that a real knowledge of man is continually flowing through the school. The whole school is the concern of the teachers in their meetings, and all else that is needed will follow of itself. The essential thing is that in the Teachers' Meetings there is study, steady, continual study.

These are the indications I wanted to give you for the practical organisation of your school.

There are of course many things that could still be said if we could continue this course for several weeks. But that we cannot do, and therefore I want to ask you tomorrow, when we come together, to put in the form of questions anything which you may have upon your minds, so that we may use the time for you to put your questions which I will then answer for you.

• 1. Dr. Steiner is here speaking of the process of organic development, not of the child's mental growth. There is no question of approaching the child's intellect during this first period of childhood when the head and nerves system is performing a function entirely different from later years. See Rudolf Steiner: The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy.
• 2. Dr. Steiner then added that these children were at that time being taught by Dr. Karl Schubert who had a very special task in this domain and was particularly gifted for it.

The first question is as follows:

What is the real difference between multiplication and division in this method of teaching? Or should there be no difference at all in the first school year

The question probably arises from my statement that in multiplication the so-called multiplicand (one factor) and the product are given, and the other factor has to be found. Of course this really gives what is usually regarded as division. If we do not keep too strictly to words, then on the same basis we can consider division, as follows:

We can say: if a whole is divided in a certain way, what is the amount of the part? And you have only another conception of the same thing as in the question: By what must a number be multiplied in order to get a certain other number?

Thus, if our question refers to dividing into parts, we have to do with a division: but if we regard it from the standpoint of “how many times ...” then we are dealing with a multiplication. And it is precisely the inner relationship in thought which exists between multiplication and division which here appears most clearly.

But quite early on it should be pointed out to the child that it is possible to think of division in two ways. One is that which I have just indicated; here we examine how large each part is if we separate a whole into a definite number of parts. Here I proceed from the whole to find the part: that is one kind of division. In the other kind of division I start from the part, and find out how often the part is contained in the whole: then the division is not a separation into parts, but a measurement. The child should be taught this difference between separation into parts and measurement as soon as possible, but without using pedantic terminology. Then division and multiplication will soon cease to be something in the nature of merely formal calculation, as it very often is, and will become connected with life.

So in the first school years it is really only in the method of expression that you can make a difference between multiplication and division; but you must be sure to point out that this difference is fundamentally much smaller than the difference between subtraction and addition. It is very important that the child should learn such things.

Thus we cannot say that no difference at all should be made between multiplication and division in the first school years, but it should be done in the way I have just indicated.

At what age and in what manner should we make the transition from the concrete to the abstract in Arithmetic?

At first one should endeavour to keep entirely to the concrete in Arithmetic, and above all avoid abstractions before the child comes to the turning point of the ninth and tenth years. Up to this time keep to the concrete as far as ever possible, by connecting everything directly with life.

When we have done that for two or two-and-a-half years and have really seen to it that calculations are not made with abstract numbers, but with concrete facts presented in the form of sums, then we shall see that the transition from the concrete to the abstract in Arithmetic is extraordinarily easy. For in this method of dealing with numbers they become so alive in the child that one can easily pass on to the abstract treatment of addition, subtraction, and so on.

It will be a question, then, of postponing the transition from the concrete to the abstract, as far as possible, until the time between the ninth and tenth years of which I have spoken.

One thing that can help you in this transition from the abstract to the concrete is just that kind of Arithmetic which one uses most in real life, namely the spending of money; and here you are more favourably placed than we are on the Continent, for there we have the decimal system for everything. Here, with your money, you still have a more pleasing system than this. I hope you find it so, because then you have a right and healthy feeling for it. The soundest, most healthy basis for a money system is that it should be as concrete as possible. Here you still count according to the twelve and twenty system which we have already “outgrown,” as they say, on the Continent. I expect you already have the decimal system for measurements? (The answer was given that we do not use it for everyday purposes, but only in science.) Well, here too, you have the pleasanter system of measures! These are things which really keep everything to the concrete. Only in notation do you have the decimal system.

What is the basis of this decimal system? It is based on the fact that originally we really had a natural measurement. I have told you that number is not formed by the head, but by the whole body. The head only reflects number, and it is natural that we should actually have ten, or twenty at the highest, as numbers. Now we have the number ten in particular, because we have ten fingers. The only numbers we write are from one to ten: after that we begin once more to treat the numbers themselves as concrete things.

Let us just write, for example: 2 donkeys. Here the donkey is the concrete thing, and 2 is the number. I might just as well say: 2 dogs. But if you write 20, that is nothing more than 2 times 10. Here the 10 is treated as a concrete thing. And so our system of numeration rests upon the fact that when the thing becomes too involved, and we no longer see it clearly, then we begin to treat the number itself as something concrete, and then make it abstract again. We should make no progress in calculation unless we treated the number I itself, no matter what it is, as a concrete thing, and afterwards made it abstract. 100 is really only 10 times 10. Now, whether I have 10 times 10, and treat it as 100, or whether I have 10 times 10 dogs, it is really the same. In the one case the dogs, and in the other the 10 is the concrete thing. The real secret of calculation is that the number itself is treated as something concrete. And if you think this out you will find that a transition also takes place in life itself. We speak of 2 twelves—2 dozen—in exactly the same way as we speak of 2 tens, only we have no alternative like “dozen” for the ten because the decimal system has been conceived under the influence of abstraction. All other systems still have much more concrete conceptions of a quantity: a dozen: a shilling. How much is a shilling? Here, in England, a shilling is 12 pennies. But in my childhood we had a “shilling” which was divided into 30 units, but not monetary units. In the village in I which I lived for a long time, there were houses along the village street on both sides of the way. There were walnut trees everywhere in front of the houses, and in the autumn the boys knocked down the nuts and stored them for the winter. And when they came to school they would boast about it. One would say: “I've got five shillings already,” and another: “I have ten shillings of nuts.” They were speaking of concrete things. A shilling always meant 30 nuts. The farmers' only concern was to gather the nuts early, before all the trees were already stripped! “A nut-shilling” we used to say: that was a unit. To sell these nuts was a right: it was done quite openly.

And so, by using these numbers with concrete things—one dozen, two dozen, one pair, two pair, etc., the transition from the concrete to the abstract can be made. We do not say: “four gloves,” but: “Two pairs of gloves;” not: “Four shoes,” but “two pairs of shoes.” Using this method we can make the transition from concrete to abstract as a gradual preparation for the time between the ninth and tenth years when abstract number as such can be presented.¹

When and how should drawing be taught?

With regard to the teaching of drawing, it is really a question of viewing the matter artistically. You must remember that drawing is a sort of untruth. What does drawing mean? It means representing something by lines, but in the real world there is no such thing as a line. In the real world there is, for example, the sea. It is represented by colour (green); above it is the sky, also represented by colour (blue). If these colours are brought together you have the sea below and

the sky above (see sketch). The line forms itself at the boundary between the two colours. To say that here (horizontal line) the sky is bounded by the sea, is really a very abstract statement. So from the artistic point of view one feels that the reality should be represented in colour, or else, if you like, in light and shade. What is actually there when I draw a face? Does such a thing as this really exist? (The outline of a face

is drawn.) Is there anything of that sort? Nothing of the kind exists at all. What does exist is this: (see shaded drawing). There are certain surfaces in light and shade, and out of these a face appears. To bring lines into it, and form a face from them, is really an untruth: there is no such thing as this.

An artistic feeling will prompt you to work out what is really there out of black and white or colour. Lines will then appear of themselves. Only when one traces the boundaries which arise in the light and shade or in the colour do the “drawing lines” appear.

Therefore instruction in drawing must, in any case, not start from drawing itself but from painting, working in colour or in light and shade. And the teaching of drawing, as such, is only of real value when it is carried out in full awareness that it gives us nothing real. A terrible amount of mischief has been wrought in our whole method of thinking by the importance attached to drawing. From this has arisen all that we find in optics, for example, where people are eternally drawing lines which are supposed to be rays of light. Where can we really find these rays of light? They are nowhere to be found. What you have in reality is pictures. You make a hole in a wall; the sun shines through it and on a screen an image is formed. The rays can perhaps be seen, if at all, in the particles of dust in the room—and the dustier the room, the more you can see of them. But what is usually drawn as lines in this connection is only imagined. Everything, really, that is drawn, has been thought out. And it is only when you begin to teach the child something like perspective, in which you already have to do with the abstract method of explanation that you can begin to represent aligning and sighting by lines.

But the worst thing you can do is to teach the child to draw a horse or a dog with lines. He should take a paint brush and make a painting of the dog, but never a drawing. The outline of the dog does not exist at all: where is it? It is, of course, produced of itself if we put on paper what is really there.

We are now finding that there are not only children but also teachers who would like to join our school. There may well be many teachers in the outer world who would be glad to teach in the Waldorf School, because they would like it better there. I have had really quite a number of people coming to me recently and describing the manner in which they have been prepared for the teaching profession in the training colleges. One gets a slight shock in the case of the teachers of History, Languages, etc., but worst of all are the Drawing teachers, for they are carrying on a craft which has no connection whatever with artistic feeling: such feeling simply does not exist.

And the result is (I am mentioning no names, so I can speak freely) that one can scarcely converse with the Drawing teachers: they are such dried-up, such terribly “un-human” people. They have no idea at all of reality. By taking up drawing as a profession they have lost touch with all reality. It is terrible to try to talk to them, quite apart from the fact that they want to teach drawing in the Waldorf School, where we have not introduced drawing at all. But the mentality of these people who carry on the unreal craft of drawing is also quite remarkable. And they have no moisture on the tongue—their tongues are quite dry. It is tragic to see what these drawing teachers gradually turn into, simply because of having to do something which is completely unreal.

I will therefore answer this question by saying that where-ever possible you should start from painting and not from drawing. That is the important thing.

I will explain this matter more clearly, so that there shall be no misunderstanding. You might otherwise think I had something personal against drawing teachers. I would like to put it thus: here is a group of children. I show them that the sun is shining in from this side. The sun falls upon something and makes all kinds of light, (see sketch). Light is shed upon everything. I can see bright patches. It is because the sun is shining in that I can see the bright patches everywhere. But above them I see no bright patches, only darkness (blue). But I also see darkness here, below the bright patches: there will perhaps be just a little light here. Then I look at something which, when the light falls on it in this way, looks greenish in colour. Here, where the light falls, it is whitish, but then, before the really black shadow occurs, I see a greenish colour; and here, under the black shadow, it is also greenish, and there are other curious things to be seen in between the two. Here the light does not go right in.

You see, I have spoken of light and shadow, and of how there is something here on which the light does not impinge: and lo, I have made a tree! I have only spoken about light and colour, and I have made a tree. We cannot really paint the tree: we can only bring in light and shade, and green, or,

a little yellow, if you like, if the fruit happens to be lovely apples. But we must speak of colour and light and shade; and so indeed we shall be speaking only of what is really there—colour, light and shade. Drawing should only be done in Geometry and all that is connected with that. There we have to do with lines, something which is worked out in thought. But realities, concrete realities must not be drawn with a pen; a tree, for example, must be evolved out of light and shade and out of the colours, for this is the reality of life itself.²

It would be barbarous if an orthodox drawing teacher came and had this tree, which we have drawn here in shaded colours, copied in lines. In reality there are just light patches and dark patches. Nature does that. If lines were drawn here, it would be an untruth.

Should the direct method, without translation, be used, even for Latin and Greek?

In this respect a special exception must be made with regard to Latin and Greek. It is not necessary to connect these directly with practical life, for they are no longer alive, and we have them with us only as dead languages. Now Greek and Latin (for Greek should actually precede Latin in teaching) can only be taught when the children are somewhat older, and therefore the translation method for these languages is, in a certain way, fully justified.

There is no question of our having to converse in Latin and Greek, but our aim is to understand the ancient authors. We use these languages first and foremost for the purposes of translation. And thus it is that we do not use the same methods for the teaching of Latin and Greek as those which we employ with all living languages.

Now once more comes the question that is put to me whenever I am anywhere in England where education is being discussed:

How should instruction in Gymnastics be carried out, and should Sports be taught in an English school, hockey and cricket, for example, and if so in what way?

It is emphatically not the aim of the Waldorf School Method to suppress these things. They have their place simply because they play a great part in English life, and the child should grow up into life. Only please do not fall a prey to the illusion that there is any other meaning in it than this, namely, that we ought not to make the child a stranger to his world. To believe that sport is of tremendous value in development is an error. It is not of great value in development. Its only value is that it is a fashion dear to the English people, and we must not make the child a stranger to the world by excluding him from all popular usages. You like sport in England, so the child should be introduced to sport. One should not meet with philistine opposition what may possibly be philistine itself.

With regard to “how it should really be taught,” there is very little indeed to be said. For in these things it is really more or less so that someone does them first, and then the child imitates him. And to devise special artificial methods here would be something scarcely appropriate to the subject.

In Drill or Gymnastics one simply learns from anatomy and physiology in what position any limb of the organism must be placed in order that it may serve the agility of the body. It is a question of really having a sense for what renders the organism skilled, light and supple; and when one has this sense, one has then simply to demonstrate. Suppose you have a horizontal bar: it is customary to perform all kinds of exercises on the bar except the most valuable one of all, which consists in hanging on to the bar, hooked on, like this ... then swinging sideways, and then grasping the bar further up, then swinging back, then grasping the bar again. There is no jumping but you hang from the bar, fly through the air, make the various movements, grasp the bar thus, and thus, and so an alternation in the shape and position of the muscles of the arms is produced which actually has a healthy effect upon the whole body.

You must study which inner movements of the muscles have a healthy effect on the organism, so that you will know what movements to teach. Then you have only to do the exercises in front of the children, for the method consists simply in this preliminary demonstration.³

How should religious instruction be given at the different ages?

As I always speak from the standpoint of practical life, I have to say that the Waldorf School Method is a method of education and is not meant to bring into the school a philosophy of life or anything sectarian. Therefore I can only speak of what lives within the Waldorf School principle itself.

It was comparatively easy for us in Württemberg, where the laws of education were still quite liberal: when the Waldorf School was established we were really shown great consideration by the authorities. It was even possible for me to insist that I myself should appoint the teachers without regard to their having passed any State examination or not. I do not mean that everyone who has passed a State examination is unsuitable as a teacher! I would not say that. But still, I could see nothing in a State examination that would necessarily qualify a person to become a teacher in the Waldorf School.

And in this respect things have really always gone quite well. But one thing was necessary when we were establishing the school, and that was for us definitely to take this standpoint: We have a “Method-School”; we do not interfere with social life as it is at present, but through Anthroposophy we find the best method of teaching, and the School is purely a “Method-School.”

Therefore I arranged, from the outset, that religious instruction should not be included in our school syllabus, but that Catholic religious teaching should be delegated to the Catholic priest, and the Protestant teaching to the pastor and so on.

In the first few years most of our scholars came from a factory (the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Factory), and amongst them we had many “dissenting” children, children whose parents were of no religion. But our educational conscience of course demanded that a certain kind of religious instruction should be given them also. We therefore arranged a “free religious teaching” for these children, and for this we have a special method.

In these “free Religion lessons” we first of all teach gratitude in the contemplation of everything in Nature. Whereas in the telling of legends and myths we simply relate what things do—stones, plants and so on—here in the Religion lessons we lead the child to perceive the Divine in all things. So we begin with a kind of “religious naturalism,” shall I say, in a form suited to the children.

Again, the child cannot be brought to anunderstanding of the Gospels before the time between the ninth and tenth years of which I have spoken. Only then can we proceed to a consideration of the Gospels in the Religion lessons, going on later to the Old Testament. Up to this time we can only introduce to the children a kind of Nature-religion in its general aspect, and for this we have our own method. Then we should go on to the Gospels but not before the ninth or tenth year, and only much later, between the twelfth and thirteenth years, we should proceed to the Old Testament.⁴

This then is how you should think of the free Religion lessons. We are not concerned with the Catholic and Protestant instruction: we must leave that to the Catholic and Protestant pastors. Also every Sunday we have a special form of service for those who attend the free Religion lessons. A service is performed and forms of worship are provided for children of different ages. What is done at these services has shown its results in practical life during the course of the years; it contributes in a very special way to the deepening of religious feeling, and awakens a mood of great devotion in the hearts of the children.

We allow the parents to attend these services, and it has become evident that this free religious teaching truly brings new life to Christianity And there is real Christianity in the Waldorf School, because through this naturalistic religion during the early years the children are gradually led to an understanding of the Christ Mystery, when they reach the higher classes.

Our free Religion classes have, indeed, gradually become full to overflowing. We have all kinds of children coming into them from the Protestant pastor or the Catholic priest, but we make no propaganda for it. It is difficult enough for us to find sufficient Religion teachers, and therefore we are not particularly pleased when too many children come; neither do we wish the school to acquire the reputation of being an Anthroposophical School of a sectarian kind. We do not want that at all. Only our educational conscience has constrained us to introduce this free Religion teaching. But children turn away from the Catholic and Protestant teaching and more and more come over to us and want to have the free Religion teaching: they like it better. It is not our fault that they run away from their other teachers: but as I have said, the principle of the whole thing was that religious instruction should be given, to begin with, by the various pastors. When you ask, then, what kind of religious teaching we have, I can only speak of what our own free Religion teaching is, as I have just described it.

Should French and German be taught from the beginning, in an English School? If the children come to a Kindergarten Class at five or six years old, ought they, too, to have language lessons?

As to whether French and German should be taught from the beginning in an English School, I should first like to say that I think this must be settled entirely on grounds of expediency. If you simply find that life is making it necessary to teach these languages, you must teach them. We have introduced French and English into the Waldorf School, because with French there is much to be learnt from the inner quality of the language, not found elsewhere, namely, a certain feeling for rhetoric which it is very good to acquire: and English is taught because it is a universal world language, and will become so more and more.

Now, I should not wish to decide categorically whether French and German should be taught in an English School, but you must be guided by the circumstances of life. It is not at all so important which language is chosen as that foreign languages are actually taught in the school.

And if children of four or five years do already come to school (which should not really be the case) it would then be good to do languages with them also. It would be right for this age. Some kind of language teaching can be given even before the age of the change of teeth, but it should only be taught as a proper lesson after this change. If you have a Kindergarten Class for the little children, it would be quite right to include the teaching of languages but all other school subjects should as far as possible be postponed until after the change of teeth.

I should like to express, in conclusion, what you will readily appreciate, namely, that I am deeply gratified that you are taking such an active interest in making the Waldorf School Method fruitful here in England, and that you are working with such energy for the establishment of a school here, on our Anthroposophical lines. And I should like to express the hope that you may succeed in making use of what you were able to learn from our Training Courses in Stuttgart, from what you have heard at various other Courses which have been held in England, and, finally, from what I have been able to give you here in a more aphoristic way, in order to establish a really good school here on Anthroposophical lines. You must remember how much depends upon the success of the very first attempt. If it does not succeed, very much is lost, for all else will be judged by the first attempt. And indeed, very much depends on how your first project is launched: from it the world must take notice that the matter is neither something which is steeped in abstract, dilettante plans of school reform, nor anything amateur but something which arises out of a conception of the real being of man, and which is now to be brought to bear on the art of education. And it is indeed the very civilisation of today, which is now moving through such critical times, that calls us to undertake this task, along with many other things.

In conclusion I should like to give you my right good thoughts on your path—the path which is to lead to the founding of a school here on Anthroposophical lines.

• 1. It should be noted that before this transition from the concrete to the abstract dealt with above, a rhythmic approach is used in the teaching of the rudiments of number, e.g. the tables, in the lower classes.
• 2. The sketch was made on the blackboard with coloured chalks but it has only been possible to reproduce it in black and white.
• 3. A method of Gymnastic teaching on the lines indicated above was subsequently worked out by Fritz Graf Bothmer, teacher of Gymnastic s at the Waldorf School, Stuttgart.
• 4. This paragraph can easily be misunderstood unless two other aspects of the education are borne in mind. Firstly: Here Dr. Steiner is only speaking of the content of the actual Religion lessons. In the class teaching all children are introduced to the stories of the Old Testament. Secondly, quite apart from the Religion lessons the Festivals of the year are celebrated with all children in a Rudolf Steiner School, in forms adapted to their ages. Christmas takes a very special place, and is prepared for all through Advent by carol singing, the daily opening of a star-window in the “Advent Calendar,” and the lighting of candles on the Advent wreath hung in the classroom. At the end of the Christmas term the teachers perform traditional Nativity Plays as their gift to the children. All this is in the nature of an experience for the children, inspired by feeling and the Christmas mood. Later, in the Religion lessons, on the basis of this experience, they can be brought to a more conscious knowledge and understanding of the Gospels.