The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Christo Morimur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knowledge of the Whole Human Being

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Relationship between Teacher and Child

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Choleric Temperament

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Phlegmatic Temperament

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

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

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

The Melancholic Temperament

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

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

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

The Sanguine Temperament

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Teacher and the Three Stages of Childhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Nature of Proof in Spiritual Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Individual’s Entry into the World

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

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

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

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

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

The Religious Nature of Childhood

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

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

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

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

The Priestly Nature of Teaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Teacher as Artist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ability to Read the Human Being

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Implications of the Change of Teeth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding the Fourfold Human Being

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching Writing before Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding Cosmic Forces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Child’s Need for Imagery in the Tenth Year

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

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

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

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

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

The Human Being as a Symphony of the Tones in Animals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living Education

In these five lectures my task has been to describe briefly some guidelines for Waldorf education. Here I have not tried to get into details but describe the spirit of this method as a whole, which should flow from anthroposophy. Perhaps even more than details—though they may be important—contemporary humanity needs a complete renewal and strengthening of all spiritual life. Aside from the spiritual substance that is of course necessary, all spiritual callings require a renewed enthusiasm that springs from knowledge of the world—a worldview that has been taken hold of in spirit. Today it is becoming obvious to a wide range of people that teachers—who must be soul-artists—need such enthusiasm more than anyone else. Perhaps people seek along paths that cannot lead to the goal, because people everywhere continue to fear a thorough investigation of spiritual matters. We base our educational method on the discovery of a teaching method—conditions that will make education viable through reading human nature itself; such reading will gradually reveal the human being so that we can adjust our education to what is revealed to every step of the curriculum and schedule.

Let’s for a moment go into the spirit of how we read the human being. We have seen that children are naturally completely open—in a religious attitude, as it were—to their immediate human surroundings; they are imitative beings, and they elaborate in themselves through will-imbued perception all that they experience unconsciously and subconsciously from their environment. Children’s bodily nature has a religious disposition, from the moment of entering the world until the change of teeth—of course, not in terms of substance, but in its constitution as a whole. The soul is initially spirit, which reveals itself outwardly as a natural creation. Human beings do not enter the world without predispositions—they do not arrive only with the physical forces of heredity from their ancestors but with forces individually brought from a previous earthly life. Consequently, they may at first be equally open to beauty and ugliness, to good and evil, to wisdom and foolishness, to skillfulness and unskillfulness. Our task, therefore, is to work around children—to the degree that we control our very thoughts and feelings—so that children may become beings who imitate goodness, truth, beauty, and wisdom.

When we think in this way, life flows into our interactions with children; education very obviously becomes a part of that life through our interactions with them. Education, therefore, is not something we work at in isolated activities, but something lived. Children develop in the right way in their growth to adulthood only when education is lived with children and not forced on them.

Morality and the Child’s Natural Religious Feeling

What we have educated in children very naturally in a priestly way—what is really a religious devotion—we must now be able to reawaken at a higher soul level during the second stage of life, between the change of teeth and puberty. We do this by transforming pictorially everything we bring them, by transforming education into an artistic activity; nevertheless, it is a truly subjective and objective human activity. We educate children so that, through their relationship to the teacher, they are devoted aesthetically to beauty and internalize the images. Now it becomes essential that, in place of the religious element, a naturally artistic response to the world arises. This naturally artistic human attitude (which must not be confused with the treatment of “art as a luxury,” which is so much a part of our civilization) includes what now would be seen as a moral relationship to the world.

When understood correctly, we realize that we will not get anything from children between the change of teeth and puberty by giving them rules. Prior to the change of teeth, moralizing won’t get us anywhere with children; moralizing is inaccessible to a child’s soul during the first period of life. Only the morality of our actions have access at that age—that is, the moral element children see exprEssentialEd in the actions, gestures, thoughts, and feelings of those around them. Even during the second period of life—between the change of teeth and puberty—moralistic rules will not get us very close to a child. Children have no inner relationship to what is contained in moral commands. To them, they are only empty sounds.

We get close to children during this stage of life only by placing them in the context of natural authority. Children who cannot yet understand abstractly beauty, truth, goodness, and so on may develop this impulse through a sense that the teacher acts as the incarnation of goodness, truth, and beauty. When we understand children correctly, we understand that they have not gained any abstract, intellectual understanding for the revelations of wisdom, beauty, and goodness.

Nevertheless, children see what lives in the teacher’s gestures, and they hear something revealed in how the teacher’s words are spoken. It is the teacher whom the child calls—without saying it—truth, beauty, and goodness as revealed in the heart. And this is the way it must be.

When a teacher corresponds to what the child needs at this age, two things gradually grow in the child. The first is an inner aesthetic sense of pleasure and displeasure in the moral realm. Goodness pleases children when our whole personality exemplifies it. We must plan education so that the natural need to take pleasure in goodness can develop—and, likewise, displeasure in evil. How do children ask questions? Children do not ask intellectually with words, but deep in their hearts. “May I do this?” or, “May I do that?” They will be answered, “Yes, you may,” if the teacher does it. “Should I leave this undone?” “Yes, because my teacher shows that it may be left undone.”

This is how children experience the world through the teacher—the world as goodness or evil, as beauty or ugliness, and as truth or falsehood. This relationship to the teacher—the activity of the hidden forces between the child’s heart and that of the teacher—is the most important aspect of the teaching method; the conditions for life in education are contained in this.

This is how pleasure in morality and displeasure in immorality should develop between the change of teeth and puberty. Then, however, something appears in the background of that growing moral feeling. What first existed naturally during the first period of the child’s life—as a religious surrender to the environment—is resurrected, as it were, in a different form in this moral development; and, if the teacher’s soul forces are equal to it, it is easy to relate what arises as pleasure in good and displeasure in evil to what flows as soul through the manifestations of nature. First a child is surrendered naturally to nature itself; since the moral element in the environment is perceived as a part of nature, a moral gesture is felt, imitated and made part of the child’s being. But as we unfold the child’s sense of pleasure in the good, this religious and natural attitude is transformed into a soul quality.

Now consider what this means. Until the change of teeth, through the magic of completely unconscious processes, we allow the child’s religious attitude to develop naturally, through pure imitation; thus, we ground the religious element while we cannot yet touch the force of the inner, free individuality. We educate through nature and do not interfere with the soul and spirit. And when we approach the soul element between the change of teeth and puberty—since it is then that we must approach it—we do not force a religious feeling but awaken the child, and thus evoke the I in the human being.

In this way, we are already practical philosophers of freedom, since we do not say: You must believe this or that of the spirit; rather, we awaken innate human beliefs. We become awakeners, not stuffers of the souls of children. This constitutes the true reverence we must have for all creatures placed in the world by the Godhead, and we owe this especially to the human being. And thus we see how the I arises in the human being, and how moral pleasure and displeasure assume a religious quality.

Teachers who learn to observe what was initially a purely natural religious aspect as it strives toward transformation in the soul, embody through their words something that becomes a pleasing image of goodness, beauty, and truth. The child hangs on to something in the adult’s words. Teachers and educators are still active in this, but their methods no longer appeal only to imitation but to something that exists behind imitation. It no longer stimulates outer bodily nature but the soul element. A religious atmosphere permeates moral pleasure and displeasure.

The Intellect after Puberty

The intellect becomes active in its own way once children reach puberty. Because of this, I have suggested that it is actually a matter of bringing human beings to the point where they find within themselves what they must understand—draw from their own inner being what was initially given as spontaneous imitation, then as artistic, imaginative activity. Thus, even during the later period, we should not force things on the human being so that there is the least feeling of arbitrary, logical compulsion.

It was certainly a great moment in the development of spiritual life in Germany when—specifically in reference to moral experience—Schiller opposed Kant’s concept of morality. When Kant said, “Duty, you sublime and powerful name—you who bear no enticements but demand stern submission,” Schiller stood against it. He opposed this concept of duty, which does not allow morality to arise from goodwill but only from subjection. Schiller replied to Kant’s idea of duty with the remarkable words containing a true moral motto: “I willingly serve my friend, but unfortunately I serve him from inclination; alas, I therefore lack virtue!”

Indeed, moral life as a whole arises from human nature in purity only when duty becomes a deep human inclination, when it becomes, in the words of Goethe, “Duty—that is, where people love what they tell themselves to do.” It was a great moment when morality was purged of Kant’s influence and made human again through Schiller and Goethe.

What came at that time from German spiritual life nevertheless became immersed in nineteenth-century materialism, as it still is today. Something appeared in civilization because we forgot this powerful action in the moral realm, and our task is now to raise humanity out of it. This rehabilitation of the human being as a fully human and moral being is the special task of those who have to teach and educate. In this consciousness, the impulse of living education will be able to arise. We may say that the sun of German spiritual life shining in Schiller and Goethe in the moral sphere should shine down especially in the actions of those teachers and educators of the present who understand the task of this their own age, and who seek to develop through education a really human relationship of human beings to their own being and to the real needs of the civilization of the age. The task of this educational conference was to speak of the position of education in regard to human individuality and the culture of the age. We shall only accomplish this task if we can think with gratitude of the impulses that flowed into the evolution of Central Europe through great and shining spirits like Goethe and Schiller. When we seek to comprehend our true situation in the world, it is not merely in order to develop a critical sense, but above all things a gratitude for what has already been accomplished by human beings before us.

One could say, of course, that self-education should refer only to the education people give themselves. However, all education is self-education, not just in this subjective sense, but in an objective sense as well—in other words, educating the self of another. To educate (erziehen) means to “draw out,” and it is related to “drawing” (ziehen). The essence of what we invoke is left untouched. We do not smash a stone in order to pull it out of the water. Education does not demand that we in any way injure or overpower those who have entered the world; on the contrary, we must guide them to experience particularly the stage of culture reached by humanity as a whole when it descended from the divine-spiritual worlds into the sensible world. All these ideas, felt and experienced, are a part of the teaching method. The people who least understand the situation of education in our time are those in whom such ideas do not live.

In the moral realm we allow pleasure in the good and displeasure in the evil to grow; we allow the religious element, which was originally natural in the child, to awaken in the soul. In the depths, however, between the change of teeth and puberty there develops the seed and foundation—something already was present—that becomes free understanding after the age of puberty. We prepare a free understanding of the world that includes the religious and moral spheres. It is great when a person can recognize how pleasure and displeasure were experienced as a permeation of the whole life of feeling as the moral qualities of good and evil during the second period of life.

Then the impulse arises: The good that pleased you—this is what you must do! And what displeased you, you must not do. This principle of morality arises from what is already present in the human I, and a religious devotion toward the world arises in the spirit, which had been a thing of nature during the first period, and a thing of the soul during the second. The religious sense—and will applied to the religious impulse—becomes something that allows human beings to act as though God were acting in them. This becomes the expression of the I, not something imposed externally. Following puberty, if the child has developed in accordance with a true understanding of the human being, everything seems to arise as though born from human nature itself.

As I have already suggested, in order that this can happen, we must consider the whole human being during the earthly pilgrimage from birth to death. It’s easy to say that one will begin education by employing the principle of simply observing the child. Today people observe the child externally and experimentally, and from what they perceive in the child they think they can discern the method of teaching. This is impossible, since, as we have seen, a teacher whose uncontrolled choleric temperament leads to angry behavior sows a seed that will remain hidden, and later develop as gout, rheumatism, and disease of the whole organism.

This is what happens in many other relationships; we must keep in mind the earthly life of the whole human being. We must remember this when we are concerned with an event in a particular life period. There are those who limit themselves to a triviality often known as “visual instruction.” They entrench themselves behind the rule—as obvious as it is foolish—that children should be shown only what they can comprehend, and they fall into absurdities that could drive a person crazy. This principle must be replaced by that deeper principle that helps us to understand what it means for the vitality of a person when, at the age of forty, a sudden realization occurs: For the first time I can understand what that respected authority thought and accomplished earlier. I absorbed it because, to me, that individual embodied truth, goodness, and beauty. Now I have the opportunity to draw from the depths what I heard in those days.

When things are reinvigorated in this way, there is an infinitely rejuvenating and vitalizing effect on later life. The human being is deprived of all this at a later age if the teacher fails to insure that there actually is something in the depths that will be understood only later on. The world becomes empty and barren, unless something can arise anew again and again from the essence of human nature—something that permeates outer perception with soul and spirit. Therefore, when we educate this way, we give the human being full freedom and vitality for the rest of life.

Materialism and Spirit in Education

At this point, let me mention something I have often spoken of. A true teacher must always keep in view all of human life. A teacher must, for example, be able to see the wonderful element that is present in many older people, whose very presence brings a kind of blessing without much in the way of words; a kind of blessing is contained in every gesture. This is a characteristic of many people who stand at the threshold of death. From where does this come? Such individuals have this quality because, during childhood, they developed devotion naturally. Such reverence and devotion during childhood later becomes the capacity to bless. We may say that at the end of earthly life, people cannot stretch out their hands in blessing if they have not learned to fold them in prayer during childhood. The capacity for blessing when one grows old and comes near the threshold of death originates with folding one’s hands in prayer with reverent, childhood devotion. Everything visible as a seed in the child will develop into good or evil fruit as the person progresses farther along in earthly life. And this is something else that must be continually within view in order to develop a genuine teaching method based on real life in education.

Thus—at least in rough outline—we have the foundation for an attempt to bring anthroposophy to fruit in education through Waldorf schools. This education conference should illuminate what has been attempted in this way and practiced for some years. It has been illuminated from various perspectives and we have shown what the students themselves have accomplished—though, in relation to this, much has yet to be demonstrated and discussed.

At the beginning of today’s lecture, I was addrEssentialEd with loving words from two sides, for which I am heartily grateful; after all, what could be done with impulses, however beautiful, if there were no one to realize them through devotion and selfsacrifice? Therefore, my gratitude goes to the Waldorf teachers who try to practice what needs to underlie this kind of renewal in education. My gratitude also goes out to today’s youth, young men and women who, through their own educational experiences, understand the true aims of Waldorf education. One would be happy indeed if the cordiality felt by young people for Waldorf education carried their message to our civilization and culture.

I believe I am speaking for the hearts of all of you when I respond with words of gratitude to those who have spoken so lovingly, because, more than anything else, education needs human beings who will accomplish these goals. A painter or sculptor can work in solitude and say that even if people do not see the work, the gods do. When a teacher performs spiritual actions for earthly existence, however, the fulfillment of such activities can be expected only in communion with those who help to realize them in the physical realm of the senses.

As teachers and educators, this impulse must live in our awareness, especially in our time. Therefore, as we conclude these lectures—this lecture must be the last, since I am wanted elsewhere and cannot remain in Stuttgart—allow me to point to something. Based on anthroposophy and not forcing it on people as a worldview—based on anthroposophy because it gives a true knowledge of the human being in body, soul, and spirit—let me conclude by saying that this education serves, in the most practical way possible, the deepest needs and conditions of our modern civilization. The people of Central Europe can hope for a future only if their actions and thoughts arise from such impulses.

What is our most intense suffering? By trying to characterize our education I repeatedly had to point out that we stand with reverent awe before the human I-being placed in the world by divine powers helping to develop that I. The human I is not truly understood unless it is understood in spirit; it is denied when understood only in matter. It is primarily the I that has suffered because of our contemporary materialistic life, because of ignorance, because of the wrong concept of the human I. This is primarily due to the fact that—while we have hammered away at perception of matter and at activity in matter—spirit has been shattered, and with it the I.

If we place limits on knowledge, as is common, saying that we cannot enter the realm of spirit, this implies only that we cannot enter the human realm. To limit knowledge means that we remove the human being from the world as far as knowing is concerned. How can a soul be educated if it has been eliminated by materialistic concepts? Elimination of the soul was characteristic of the kind of materialism we have just passed through, and it still prevails throughout human activity.

What has happened in the materialistic attitude of the more modern time? It is an attitude that, as I have said, was justified from a different perspective because it had to enter human evolution at some point, but now it must pass away. In expressing this attitude, we may say that the human being has surrendered the I to matter—connected it to matter. Consequently, however, the genuine, living method of teaching, the real life of education has been frozen; only external techniques can survive in a civilization bound by matter. But, matter oppresses people. Matter confines each person within the bodily nature, and each individual thus becomes more or less isolated in soul. Unless we find other human beings in spirit, we become isolated souls, since human beings cannot, in fact, be found in the body.

Thus, our civilization’s materialistic view has produced an age when human beings pass each other by, because their perceptions are all connected with bodily nature. People cry out for a social life out of the intellect, and at the same time develop in their feelings an asocial indifference toward one another as well as a lack of mutual understanding. Souls who are isolated in individual bodies pass one another by, whereas souls who awaken the spirit within to find spirit itself also find themselves, as human beings, in communion with other human beings. Real community will blossom from the present chaos only when people find the spirit—when, living together in spirit, they find each other.

The great longing of today’s youth is to discover the human being. The youth movement came from this cry. A few days ago when the young people here came together, it became evident that this cry has been transformed into a cry for spirit, through the realization that the human being can be found only when spirit is found; if spirit is lost, we lose one another.

Last evening, I tried to show how we can find knowledge of the world—how the human being living on earth in body, soul, and spirit can develop out of such knowledge. I tried to show how a worldview can develop into an experience of the cosmos, and the Sun and Moon may be seen in everything that grows and flourishes on Earth. When we educate young people with this kind of background, we will properly develop the experience of immortality, the divine, the eternally religious element in the growing child, and we implant in the child’s being an immortal aspect destined for further progress, which we must carry in spirit through the gate of death.

This particular aspect of education is not what we are discussing here. The relationship between education and the human I, as well as culture, is what we had to look at first. Nevertheless, we may be sure of one thing; if people are educated properly on Earth, the heavenly being will also be educated properly, since the heavenly being lives within the earthly being. When we educate the earthly being correctly, we also promote the true development of the heavenly being through the tiny amount of progress that we make possible between birth and death.

In this way we come to terms with a view that progresses, in the true sense, to a universal knowledge—a knowledge that understands the need for human cooperation in the great spiritual cosmos, which is also revealed in the realm of the senses. True education recognizes that human beings are coworkers in building humankind. This is what I meant yesterday when I described the view of life that I said must form the background of all teaching and education.

From this, it follows that we cannot understand the world as a one-sided subject of the head alone. It is untrue to say that we can understand the world through ideas and concepts. And it is equally false to say that the world can be understood through feeling alone. It has to be understood through ideas and feeling, as well as through the will; human beings will understand the world only when divine spirit descends into will. Humankind will also be understood then—not through one aspect, but through the whole being. We need a worldview not just for the intellect, but for the whole human being—for human thinking, feeling, and willing—a concept of the world that discovers the world in the human body, soul, and spirit.

Only those who rediscover the world in the human being, and who see the world in human beings, can have a true concept of the world; because, just as the visible world is reflected in the eye, the entire human being exists as an eye of spirit, soul, and body, reflecting the whole cosmos. Such a reflection cannot be perceived externally; it must be experienced from within. Then it is not just an appearance, like an ordinary mirrored image; it is an inner reality. Thus, in the process of education, the world becomes human, and the human being discovers the world in the self.

Working this way in education, we feel that the human race would be disrupted if all human experience were tied to matter, because, when they deny their own being, souls do not find one another but lose themselves. When we move to spirit, we find other human beings. Community, in the true sense of the word, must be established through spirit. Human beings must find themselves in spirit; then they can unite with others. If worlds are to be created out of human actions, then the world must be seen in human beings.

In conclusion, allow me to express what was in the back of my mind while I was speaking to you. What I said here was intended as a consideration of education in the personal and cultural life of the present time. Now, in conclusion, let me put this in other words that include all I have wanted to say.

To spend oneself in matter
is to grind down souls.
To find oneself in the spirit
is to unite human beings.
To see oneself in all humanity
is to construct worlds.

New Education and the Whole Human Being

Here in Bern, I have spoken to you often about anthroposophy in general. And it is a special pleasure to be able now to speak to you in the spirit of anthroposophy about education—the sphere of life that must lie closest to the human heart. We must develop an art of education that can lead us out of the social chaos into which we have fallen during the last few years and decades. Our chances of overcoming this chaos are very slight. In fact, one is tempted to say that there is no escaping this chaos unless we find a way to bring spirituality into human souls through education, so that human beings may find a way to progress and to further the evolution of civilization out of the spirit itself.

We feel confident that this is the right way to proceed, because in our hearts we know that the world is created in spirit and arises from spirit. Therefore, human creation will be fruitful only when it springs from the fountainhead of spirit itself. To achieve such fruitful creation from spirit, however, people must also be educated and taught in the spirit. I believe that anthroposophy in fact has much to say about the nature of education and teaching, therefore, it gives me great satisfaction that I can present these lectures here.

There are many all over the world who feel that a new impetus of some kind is needed in education and teaching. It is true that the nineteenth century was full of progressive ideas and much was done to further schooling and education. However, a recent tendency of our civilization has been that individuals are seldom brought into touch with their own humanity. For many centuries we have been able to record the most wonderful progress in the realm of natural science and in its resulting technology.

We have also seen that a certain worldview has gradually crystallized out of that scientific progress. The world as a whole—which includes the human being—seems to be viewed exclusively in terms of what the senses tell us about natural phenomena, and what the intellect, which is related to the brain, tells us about the realm of the senses. Nevertheless, all of our recently acquired knowledge about the natural world does not, in fact, lead us to the human being; this is not clearly recognized today. Although many people feel this to be the situation, they are unprepared to acknowledge that—regardless of all that the modern age has provided us in terms of information about the natural world—we are still no closer to understanding the human being.

This impossibility is most likely to be felt when we attempt to understand the growing human being, the child. We sense a barrier between the teacher and the child. Anthroposophy, which is based on a real and comprehensive understanding of the human being, would hear this heartfelt appeal coming from all sides—not by establishing theories on education, but by showing men and women as teachers how to enter the school’s practical life. Anthroposophic education is really the practical life of the school, and our lectures should provide practical details about how to deal with the various details of teaching.

Something else must come first, however; for if we were to begin by speaking of practical details in this way, then the spirit that gives birth to all this could not reveal itself. Therefore, you must kindly permit me to speak today of this spirit of anthroposophic education as a kind of introduction. What we have to say about it will be based on a comprehensive, truly penetrating knowledge of the human being—the active force of anthroposophy in education.

A penetrating knowledge of the human being—what does this mean to us? If a growing human being, a child, stands before us, it is not enough, as I have said, to make certain rules for teaching and educating this child, merely conforming to rules as one would when dealing with a technical problem. This will not lead to good teaching. We must bring an inner fire and enthusiasm to our work; we must have impulses that are not transmitted intellectually from teacher to child according to certain rules, but ones that pass intimately from teacher to child. An educator’s whole being must be at work, not just the thinking person; the person who feels and the person who wills must also play their roles.

Recently, the thinking and worldview of natural science have taken hold of people more deeply and closer to the marrow than they like to think. Even those not specifically trained as scientists think, feel, and act scientifically. This is not acceptable for teachers, since scientific thinking provides an understanding of only one member of the whole human being—the physical body, or body of the senses. But this is only one member of the entire human being, and anthroposophy shows us that when we have genuine knowledge of the human being, we see that the human being possesses three clearly distinguished members—physical body, soul, and spirit.

We see the whole human being only when we have enough wisdom and knowledge to recognize the soul’s true nature as clearly as we recognize the physical body. We must also be able to recognize the human spirit as an individual being. Nevertheless, the connections among the body, soul, and spirit in the child are not the same as in the adult; and it is precisely a loosening of the connection with the physical body that allows us to observe the soul and spirit of the child as the greatest wonder of knowledge and practical life in human existence.

The First Stage of Childhood

Let’s look for a moment at the tiny child and see how that child is born into the world. Here we see a genuinely magical process at work. We see how spirit, springing from the innermost being of the little child, flows into undefined features, chaotic movements, and every action, which seem still disjointed and disconnected. Order and form come into the child’s eyes, facial expressions and physical movements, and the child’s features become increasingly expressive. In the eyes and other features, the spirit manifests, working from within to the surface, and the soul—which permeates the entire body—manifests.

When we look at these things with a serious, unbiased attitude, we see how they come about by observing the growing child; in this way we may gaze reverently into the wonders and enigmas of cosmic and human existence. As we watch in this way while the child develops, we learn to distinguish three clearly differentiated stages. The only reason such stages are not generally distinguished is because such discernment depends on deep, intimate knowledge; and people today, with their crude scientific concepts, are not going to trouble themselves by acquiring this kind of intimate knowledge.

Soul and Spirit Build the “Second” Human Being

The first significant change in a child’s life occurs around the seventh year when the second teeth appear. The outer physical process of the change of teeth is itself very interesting. First we have the baby teeth, then the others force their way through as the first are pushed out. A superficial look at this process will see no farther than the actual change of teeth. But when we look into it more deeply (through means I will describe later in these lectures) we discover that this transformation can be observed throughout the child’s body, though more delicately than the actual change of teeth. The change of teeth is the most physical and basic expression of a subtle process that in fact occurs throughout the body.

What really happens? Anyone can see how the human organism develops. We cut our nails, our hair, and we find that our skin flakes off. This demonstrates how physical substance is cast off from the surface as it is constantly pushed out from within. This pushing from within—which we observe in the change of teeth—is present throughout the whole human body. More exacting knowledge shows us that indeed the child gradually forced out the body received through inheritance; it was cast out. The first teeth are forced out, and likewise the child’s whole initial body is forced out.

At the change of teeth, a child stands before us with a body that—in contrast to the body at birth—is entirely formed anew. The body from birth has been cast out as are the first teeth, and a new body is formed. What is the nature of this more intimate process? The child’s first body was inherited. It is the result of a collaboration between the father and mother, so to speak, and it is formed from the earthly physical conditions. But, just what is this physical body? It is the model that the Earth provides to the person as a model for true development as a human being. The soul and spirit aspect of a human being descends from a realm of soul and spirit where it lived prior to conception and birth. Before we became earthly beings in a physical body, we were all beings of soul and spirit in a soul and spirit realm. What we are given by our parents through inherited physical substance unites in embryonic life with what descends from a higher realm as pure spirit and soul. Spirit and soul take hold of the physical body, whose origin is in the stream of inheritance. This physical body becomes its model, and on this model an entirely new human organism is formed, while the inherited organism is forced out.

Thus, when we consider a child between birth and the change of teeth we can say that the physical body’s existence is due to physical inheritance alone. But, two other forces then combine to work on this physical body. First is the force of those elements the human being brought with it to Earth; the second is assimilated from the matter and substance of the Earth itself. By the time the teeth change, the human being has fashioned a second body modeled after the inherited body, and that second body is the product of the human soul and spirit.

Having arrived at such conclusions by observing the human being more intimately, one will naturally be aware of objections that may be raised; such objections are obvious. One is bound to ask: Can’t you see that a likeness to the parents often appears after the change of teeth—that, therefore, a person is still subject to the laws of inheritance, even after the change of teeth? One could raise a number of similar objections.

Let’s consider just this one: We have a model that comes from the stream of inheritance. On this model the spirit and soul develop the second human being. But when something is built from a model we don’t expect to find a complete dissimilarity to the model; thus, it should be clear that the human spirit and soul use the model’s existence to build up the second human organism in its likeness.

Nevertheless, when you can perceive and recognize what really occurs, you discover something. Certain children come into their second organism between nine and eleven, and this second body is almost identical to the initial, inherited organism. With other children, one may notice a dissimilarity between the second organism and the first, and it is clear that something very different is working its way from the center of their being. In truth, we see every variation between these two extremes. While the human spirit and soul aspect is developing the second organism, it tries most of all to conform to the being it brings with it from the realm of spirit and soul.

A conflict thus arises between what is intended to built as the second organism and what the first organism received through inheritance. Depending on whether thy have had a stronger or weaker spiritual and soul existence (in the following lectures we shall see why this is), human beings can either give their second organism an individual form that is strongly impregnated with soul forces, or, if they descend from the spiritual world with weaker forces, stay as closely as possible to the model.

Consider what we must deal with to educate children during the first period of life between birth and the change of teeth. We are inspired with great reverence when we see how divine spiritual forces work down from supersensible realms! We witness them working daily and weekly, from month to month and year to year, during the first phases of children’s lives, and we see how such work carries them through to forming a second individual body. In education we participate in this work of spirit and soul; for human physical existence, we continue what divine spiritual forces began. We participate in divine labor.

The Child as a Sense Organ

These matters require more than strictly intellectual understanding; one’s whole being must comprehend them. Indeed, when we are brought face to face with the creative forces of the world, we may sense the magnitude of our task in education, especially during the early years. But I would like to point out to you that the way spirit and soul enter the work of creating a second human organism shows us that, in the child, the formation of the body, the activity of the soul, and the creation of the spirit are a unity. Whatever happens while forming a new organism and pushing out the old involves a unity of spirit, soul, and body.

Consequently, children reveal themselves very differently than do adults. We may observe this clearly in individual instances. As adults, when we eat something sweet, it is the tongue and palate that perceive its sweetness; a little later, the experience of sweetness ceases when the sweet substance has gone into another part of the body. As adults, we do not follow it farther with our taste. This is very different for a child, in whom taste permeates the whole organism; children do not taste only with the tongue and palate but with the whole organism. The sweetness is drawn throughout the organism. In fact, the whole child is a sensory organ.

In essence, what is a sensory organ? Let’s consider the human eye. Colors make an impression on the eye. If we properly consider what is involved in human seeing, one has to say that will and perception are one in the human eye. The surface is involved—the periphery of the human being. During the first years of life, however, between birth and the change of teeth, such activity permeates the whole organism, though in a delicate way. The child’s whole organism views itself as one all-inclusive sense organ. This is why all impressions from the environment affect children very differently than they would an adult. An expression of the soul element in the human being—the element of human morality—is occurring in the environment, and this can be seen with the eye.

The Effects of the Teacher’s Temperament on Children

Subconsciously—even unconsciously—children have a delicate and intimate capacity for perceiving what is expressed in every movement and act of those around them. If a choleric person expresses fury in the presence of a child and allows the child to see this in the unconscious way I described, then, believe me, we are very mistaken to believe that the child sees only the outer activity. Children have a clear impression of what is contained within these moral acts, even when it is an unconscious impression. Sense impressions of the eye are also unconscious. Impressions that are not strictly sensory impressions, but expressions of the moral and soul life, flow into a child exactly the way colors flow into the eye, because the child’s organism is a sense organ.

This organism, however, has such a delicate structure that every impression permeates all of it. The first impression a child receives from any moral manifestation is a soul impression. For a child, however, the soul always works down into the bodily nature. Whether it be fear or joy and delight that a child experiences in the environment, all this passes—not crudely but in a subtle and delicate way—into the processes of growth, circulation, and digestion. Children who live in constant terror of what may come their way as expressions of fury and anger from a choleric person, experience something in the soul that immediately penetrates the breathing, the circulation of the blood, and even the digestive activities. This is tremendously significant. In childhood we cannot speak only of physical education, because soul education also means educating the body; everything in the soul element is metamorphosed into the body—it becomes body.

We will realize the significance of this only when, through genuine knowledge of the human being, we do more than merely look at children and imprint certain educational maxims on them, and instead consider all of human earthly life. This is more difficult than merely observing children. We may record observations regarding memory, thinking powers, sensory functions of the eye, ear, and so on, but such records are made for the moment or, at most, for a short while. But this has not helped us in any way toward true knowledge of the human being as such.

When we look at a plant, something is already contained there in the seed that takes root and, after a long time, will appear as blossom and fruit. Similarly, in children before the change of teeth, when the bodily nature is susceptible to the soul’s influences, there are seeds of happiness and unhappiness, health and sickness, which will affect all of life until death. As teachers and educators, whatever we allow to flow into children during their first phase of life will work down into the blood, breathing, and digestion; it is like a seed that may come to fruition only in the form of health or sickness when they are forty or fifty years old. It is in fact true that the way educators act toward the little child creates the predispositions for happiness or unhappiness, sickness or health.

This is particularly noticeable when we observe in detail the effects of teachers on the children, based on actual life events. These phenomena may be observed just as well as the phenomena of botany or physics in laboratories, but we seldom see this. Let us consider individual examples. Let us consider, for instance, the teacher’s relationship to a child in school. Consider the teacher’s temperament. We may know that, due to temperament, a choleric teacher may be energetic, but also quick-tempered and easily angered. A melancholic teacher may be the kind of person who withdraws into the self—an introvert who is self-occupied and avoids the world. A sanguine teacher may be quick to receive outer impressions, flitting from one impression to the next. Or, we may find a phlegmatic person who allows things to slide, someone indifferent to everything, who remains unaffected by outer impressions, generally gliding over things.

Let’s imagine for the moment that a teachers’ training college did nothing to moderate these temperaments and prepare teachers to function well in the school life—that these temperaments were allowed full and total expression with no restraint. The choleric temperament—let us imagine that, before the change of teeth, a child is exposed to a choleric temperament. If a teacher or educator lets loose with a temperament of this kind, it permanently affects the child’s soul, leaving its mark on the circulatory system and all that constitutes the inner rhythmic life. Such effects do not initially penetrate very deeply; really, they are only there in seed, but this seed grows and grows, as all seeds do. It sometimes happens that, at forty or fifty years of age, circulatory disorders of the rhythmic system appear as a direct result of a teacher’s unrestrained choleric temperament. Indeed, we do not educate children only for childhood, but for their whole earthly existence and even, as we shall see later, for the time beyond.

Or, let’s imagine a melancholic giving rein to that particular temperament—someone who was not motivated during teacher training to harmonize it and find an appropriate way to channel it into working with children. Such teachers succumb to their own melancholy in their interactions with children. But by living, feeling, and thinking such inner melancholy, such a person continually withholds from children exactly what should flow from teacher to child—that is, warmth. This warmth, which is so often missing in education, acts first as a warmth of soul, and then passes into the body, primarily into the digestive system. This quickens the seed of certain tendencies that appear later in life as all kinds of disorders and blood diseases.

Or consider the phlegmatic, a person who is indifferent to interactions with the child. A very peculiar relationship arises between them—not exactly a coldness, but an extremely watery element is active in the soul realm between the child and such a teacher. The foundation is not strong enough for the proper interplay of soul between teacher and child. The child is insufficiently aroused to inner activity. If you observe someone who developed under the influence of a phlegmatic person, and if you follow the course of that person’s life into later years, you will often notice a tendency to brain weakness, poor circulation in the brain, or a dulling of brain activity.

And now let us look at the effects of sanguine people on the child—those who allow their sanguine nature to get out of hand. Such an individual responds strongly to every impression, but impressions pass quickly. There is a kind of inner life, but the person’s own nature is taken right out into the surroundings. Children cannot keep up with such a teacher, who rushes from one impression to the next, and fails to stimulate the child properly. In order to arouse sufficient inner activity in a child, the teacher must lovingly hold that child to one impression for a certain period of time. If we observe a child who has grown up under the influence of an uncontrolled sanguine nature, we see in later life that there is a certain lack of vital force—an adult life that lacks strength and content.

Thus, if we have the ability to see it (and education depends on a capacity for subtle perception), we recognize various types of people in their fortieth or fiftieth year of life, and we are able to say whether a person has been influenced by the temperament of an educator who was melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric, or sanguine.

The Lasting Effects of a Teacher’s Actions

I mention these things in introducing my lectures, not to give instructions on how to work out these things for training teachers, but to show you how actions meant to affect the child’s soul life do not just remain in the soul, but go all the way into the physical nature. To educate the soul life of children means to educate them for their whole earthly life, even in their bodily nature.

Anthroposophy is often criticized for wanting to speak of spirit as well as soul. There are many today who become very critical and antagonistic whenever they even hear the word spirit, and anthroposophy is easily assumed to be a kind of fantasy. Anthroposophists are accused of reducing the reality of the sense world to a kind of vague abstraction, and those who speak rationally of spiritual things should naturally be unconcerned with such abstraction.

In fact, what anthroposophy attempts in education is to apply the correct principles for bodily education, since we understand that precisely during the first stage of life, the entire physical nature of a child is influenced by soul impulses. Anyone who consciously tries to discover how all physical activity is based fundamentally on soul and spirit can still choose to be a materialist when working on child development between birth and the change of teeth. The way matter works in a child is contained in a unity of soul and spirit. No one can understand matter in a child unless soul and spirit are considered valid. Indeed, soul and spirit are revealed in the outer appearance of matter.

The ability to educate necessitates a sense of responsibility. The considerations I have presented to you strongly arouse one’s sense of responsibility as a matter of heartfelt concern. If you take up educational work knowing what affects the young child and that it will continue through all of life as happiness or unhappiness, sickness or health, such knowledge may initially seem like a burden on the soul; but it will also spur you on to develop forces and capacities and above all, as a teacher, a mental attitude that is strong enough to sow “seeds” of soul in the young child that will blossom only later in life, even in old age.

This knowledge of the human being is what anthroposophy presents as the basis for an art of education. It is not merely knowledge of what we find in a human being in a single stage of life—for example, in childhood; it springs from contemplating all of human earthly life. What, in fact, is a human life on Earth? When we view a person before us at any given moment, we may speak of seeing an organism, since each detail is in harmony with the formation of the whole.

To gain insight into the inner connections of size or form in the individual members of the human organism—how they fit together, how they harmonize to form both a unity and a multiplicity—let us look, for example, at the little finger. Although I am only looking at the little finger, I also get some idea of the shape of the earlobe, since the earlobe’s form has a certain connection with the form of the little finger, and so on. Both the smallest and the largest members of the human organism receive their shape from the whole, and they are also related in form to every other member. Consequently, we cannot understand, for example, an organ in the head unless we see it in relation and in harmony with an organ in the leg or foot. This also applies to the spatial organism—the organism spread out in space.

Besides having a spatial organism, however, the human being has also a time organism. We have seen that within the space organism, the earlobe receives its form from the body as a whole, as well as from the form of, say, the little finger or knee; but the time organism must also be considered. The configuration of a person’s soul in the fiftieth year—the person’s physical health or sickness, cheerfulness or depression, clarity or dullness of mind—is most intimately connected with what was present there in the tenth, seventh, or fourth year of life. Just as the members of a spatial organism have a certain relationship to one another, so do the members of a time organism separated from one another by time.

From one perspective, it may be asserted that when we are five years old, everything within us is already in harmony with what we will be at forty. Of course, a trivial objection may be raised that one might die young, but it doesn’t apply, since other considerations enter in. Additionally, as a spatial organism, a human being is also organized in time. And if you ever find a finger lying around somewhere, it would have to have been very recently dislodged to look like a finger at all—very soon, it would no longer be a finger. A limb separated from the organism soon shrivels and ceases to be a human limb. A finger separated from the human organism is not a finger at all—it could never live apart from the body, but becomes nothing, and since it cannot exist on its own, it is not real. A finger is real only while united with the whole physical body between birth and death.

Such considerations make it clear that in all our teaching, we must consider the time organism. Imagine what would happen to the space organism if it were treated the way people often treat their time-organism. Let say, for example, that we put some substance into a man’s stomach, and it destroys his head. Imagine, however, that we examined only the stomach and never looked at what happened to this substance once it dispersed into the organism, where it eventually reached the head. To understand the human organism, we must be able to examine the process that the substance goes through in the human stomach and also see what it means for the head. In passing from the stomach to the head the substance must continually alter and change; it must be flexible.

In the time organism, we continually sin against children. We teach them to have clear, sharp ideas and become dissatisfied if their ideas are flexible and not sharply defined. Our goal is to teach children in such a way that they retain in their mind what we teach them, so they can tell us just what we told them. We are often especially gratified when a child can reproduce exactly what we taught several years later. But that’s like having a pair of shoes made for a child of three and expecting them to fit when the child is ten years old. In reality, our task is to give children living, flexible ideas that can grow in the soul just as the outer physical limbs grow with the body. It is much less trouble to give a child definitions of various things to memorize and retain, but that is like expecting the shoes of a three-year- old to fit a child of ten.

We ourselves must take part in the inner activities of children’s souls, and we must consider it a joy to give them something inwardly flexible and elastic. Just as their physical limbs grow, so can their ideas, feelings, impulses, and soon they themselves are able to make something new out of what we gave them. This cannot happen unless we cultivate inner joy in ourselves toward growth and change. We have no use for pedantry or sharply defined ideas of life. We can use only active, life forming forces—forces of growth and increase. Teachers who have a feeling for this growing, creative life have already found their relationship to the children because they contain life within themselves, and such life can then pass on to the children who demand it of them. This is what we need most of all. Much that is dead in our pedagogy and educational systems must be transformed into life. What we need, therefore, is a knowledge of the human being that doesn’t say only that a human being is like this or like that. We need knowledge of the human being that affects the whole human being, just as physical nourishment affects the blood. Blood circulates in human beings, and we need human knowledge that gives blood to our souls also; it would not only make us sensible, clever, and intelligent, but also enthusiastic and inwardly flexible, able to enkindle love in us. This would be an art of education that springs from true knowledge of the human being, borne by love.

These have been the introductory remarks I wanted to present about the essential ideas that an art of education must get from anthroposophy. In future lectures we will see how the spirit of anthroposophic education can be realized in the practical details of school.

The Goal of Waldorf Education

You have seen that education must be based on a more intimate knowledge of the human being than is found in natural science, although it is generally assumed that all knowledge must be grounded in natural science. As we have seen, however, natural science cannot come even close to the reality of the human being, and it doesn’t help to base our knowledge on it.

The world is permeated by spirit, and true knowledge of the world must be permeated by spirit as well. Anthroposophy can give us spiritual knowledge of the world, and, with it, spiritual knowledge of the human being, and this alone leads to a true art of education. But don’t make the mistake (which is easy to do) that those who consider themselves anthroposophists want to establish “anthroposophic” schools that teach anthroposophy as a worldview in the place of other contemporary worldviews, regardless of whether such views are inspired more by intellect or feeling. It is important to understand and reiterate that this is not at all our intention. What we are examining is mainly concerned with matters of method and the practice of teaching. Men and women who adhere to anthroposophy feel—and rightly so—that the knowledge of the human being it provides can establish some truly practical principles for the way we treat children.

At the Waldorf school in Stuttgart we have been able to pursue an art of education based on anthroposophy for many years; and we have always made it clear to the rest of the world that anthroposophy as such was never taught there. Roman Catholic children receive religious instruction from a priest and Protestant children from a Protestant pastor. Only those children whose parents specifically request it receive religion lessons involving a freer religious instruction based on anthroposophy. Thus, our own anthroposophic worldview as such really has no place in the school work itself.

Moreover, I would like to point out that the true aim and object of anthroposophic education is not to establish as many anthroposophic schools as possible. Naturally, some model schools are needed, where the methods are practiced in detail. There is a need crying out in our time for such schools. Our goal, however, is to enable every teacher to bring the fruits of anthroposophy to their work, no matter where they may be teaching or the nature of the subject matter. There is no intention of using anthroposophic pedagogy to start revolutions, even silent ones, in established institutions. Our task, instead, is to point to a way of teaching that springs from our anthroposophic knowledge of humankind.

Understanding the Human Being

As you know, we need to gain a more intimate observation of human beings than is customary today. In fact, there are some areas where people are learning a very exact kind of observation, especially in regard to visual observation—for example, using a telescope to observe the stars, for surveying, and in many other realms of knowledge. It arises from a sense for exact, mathematical observation. Because of the scientific mindset that has ruled for the past three centuries, nowhere in contemporary civilization do we find the kind of intimate observation that sees the fine and delicate changes in the human soul or body organization. Consequently, people have little to say about the important changes that have occurred in the child’s whole physical organization, such as those that happen at the change of the teeth, at puberty, and again after the twentieth year. And so, transitions that have great significance in terms of education—such as the period between the change of teeth and puberty—are simply ignored.

These changes are mentioned, it is true, but only as they affect the actual physical body of the child or are expressed in the soul’s more superficial dependence on the physical body. This would require much more delicate observations. Anthroposophy begins by viewing the world as an expression of spiritual forces, which is seldom acknowledged today; it provides exercises that train a person’s soul to acquire direct insight into the spirit world. There are some whose destiny has not yet brought them to the point of seeing the spiritual facts for themselves, but anthroposophy has such power that merely beginning such exercises in itself helps people to learn a much more delicate and intimate observation of the human being. After all, you must remember that our soul and spirit is the part of us that, as we have seen, descends from a pre-earthly existence and unites with the inherited physical body. And spiritual research depends on this higher, supersensible part of us; we have supersensible eyes and ears—soul organs such as the eyes and ears of our physical body—so that we can arrive at certain perceptions independently of the body.

Cosmic and Human Cycles

Each night while asleep, a person is unconsciously in a condition that is similar to what is needed for spiritual investigation. When falling asleep, the human soul and spirit leave the physical body, and re-enter it when the person awakes. While awake, people use their eyes and ears and move their limbs, and the forces for this come from the spirit and soul aspects of the human being. Genuine knowledge of nature—which doesn’t exist yet—would also show that while awake, people’s physical actions are controlled by soul and spirit, and that sleep is only an interruption of this activity. Here again, the difference is too subtle to be perceived by modern scientific methods—upon which today’s education is based, even when directed toward the earliest years of childhood. A sleeping person is completely surrendered to the activities of the organism to which plant and mineral are also subject.

Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science, on the other hand, strive for precision and accuracy, and it would not be true, of course, to say that while asleep a person is a plant. In a human being, mineral and plant substances have been raised to the level of animal and human. The human organization is not like that of a plant, since a plant has no muscles and nerves, and the human of course has both muscles and nerves, even while asleep. The important thing, however, is very simple; the vegetative function of the plant has nothing to do with nerves and muscles, but it is different for a human being. Activity in a person is related to muscles and nerves, and thus transcends the physical; even human sleep activity is not merely vegetative. (In a certain sense this applies also to animals, but we cannot address this matter now.) Although we find the same impulses in the plant as in the sleeping human being, nevertheless something different happens in a sleeping person.

It may help us to form an idea of this process if we think of it this way: when we are awake, the soul and spirit are integrated with the human organism. The soul and spirit, in turn, have a certain similarity to the cosmos, the whole universe—but keep in mind that it is only a similarity. And careful observation of plant development will show us that in spring, when the snow has melted, we see plants spring out of the earth and unfold their being. Until now, plant growth was controlled by the Sun forces within the Earth, or the stored sunshine of the previous year.

In spring the plants are released, so to speak, by these earthly Sun forces and, as they shoot out of the soil, they are received by the outer sunlight and guided through the summer until the seeds become ripe. Plant growth is again given over to the Earth. Throughout the summer, the Sun’s forces gradually descend into the Earth to be stored there; thus, the Earth is always permeated by these accumulated sun forces. We need only remember that millions of years ago Sun forces shone on the plants, which then became coal within the Earth; thus, sunlight is in reality now being burned in our stoves. Likewise—though for a much shorter time—the Sun’s forces are preserved in the Earth from summer to summer. Throughout the winter, plants absorb the Sun’s forces found in the earth, and during summer, the Sun pours its rays upon them right from the cosmos. So there really is a rhythm in the life of plants—earthly sun-forces, cosmic sun-forces, earthly sun-forces, cosmic sun forces, and so on. Plant life swings from one to the other as a pendulum on a clock.

Now let us turn to the human being. When I fall asleep I leave behind in my body everything of a mineral and plant nature, though, as we have seen, the plant nature in the human being—in contrast to an actual plant—is organized so that spirit and soul can dwell within it. What is left behind in sleep is thus wholly surrendered to its own plant-like activity. It begins to blossom and sprout, and when we go to sleep it is really springtime within us. When we awaken, the plant forces are driven back, and it becomes autumn within us. As soul and spirit arise on awakening, autumn enters us.

Viewing things externally, it is often said that waking is like spring and sleeping like autumn. This is not true, however. Genuine spiritual insight into human nature shows us that during the first moments of sleep, spring life sprouts and blossoms in us, and when we awaken autumn sinks into us like the setting Sun. While awake, when we are using all our faculties of soul, it is winter within us. Again we see a rhythm, as in plantlife. In plant growth we distinguish between earthly activity and the Sun’s activity. In the human being, we find essentially the same activity imitating the plant; falling asleep—summer activity, awakening—winter activity, and around again to summer activity, winter activity; but here it takes place in only twenty-four hours. Human beings have condensed a yearly rhythm into a day and a night.

These rhythms are similar but not identical, because for a human being the life of the soul and spirit does not have the same duration as the life of spirit in the realm of nature. A year is only a day in the life of the spirits who pervade the cosmos and permeate the whole course of the year, just as the soul and spirit of human beings direct the course of their day.

As we consider this, we arrive at this hypothesis. (I must warn you, by the way, that what I am about to say may seem very strange to you, but I present it as a hypothesis to demonstrate more clearly what I mean. Let us suppose that a woman falls asleep, and within her is what I have described as summer activity. Let us suppose that she continues to sleep without waking up. What will happen then? The plant element within her—the element not of soul and spirit—would eventually become the rhythm of the plant realm. It would go from a daily rhythm to an annual rhythm. Of course, such a rhythm does not exist in the human being. Thus, if the physical body were to go on sleeping as described, the person would be unable to tolerate the resulting yearly rhythm and would die; if the human body were all plant activity, it would be organized differently. The physical body would separate from the soul and spirit, assume a yearly cycle, and take on purely vegetative qualities. When we view physical death, which leads to the body’s destruction, we see that by being born out of the cosmos, the human being passed from a grand cycle to a small cycle. If a human body is on its own and cannot animate the spirit and soul in itself, it is destroyed, since it cannot immediately find its place in the cosmic rhythm.

Therefore, we see that if we can develop a more delicate faculty for observation, we can gain true insight into the essence of human existence. This is why I said that those who have entered the path of spiritual knowledge, though they may not yet have attained spiritual vision for themselves, will nevertheless feel forces stirring within that lead to spiritual insight. And these are the very forces that act as messengers and mediators of all the spirits at work in the cosmos. Spirit is active in the cosmos where we find the beings who guide the life cycle of the year. This is a new realm to us, but when we observe a human being we can see the presence of soul and spirit in all human life, and here we are on familiar ground. For this reason, it is always easier to exercise a fine faculty of perception in regard to the human soul and spiritual qualities than it is to perceive spirit activity itself in the world.

When we think in ordinary life it is as if thinking, or forming mental images, continually escaped us. When we bump into something or feel something with our fingers—a piece of silk or velvet, for example—we immediately perceive that we have encountered that object, and we can feel its shape by touching its surface. Then we know that as human beings, we have connected with our environment. When we think, however, we do not seem to touch objects around us in this way. Once we have thought about something and made it our own, we can say that we have “apprehended,” or “grasped” it (begreifen). What do we mean by this? If external objects are alien to us—which is generally true for our thinking—then we do not say we have grasped them. If, for example, a piece of chalk is lying there, and I am standing here moving my hand as one does when speaking, one does not say, “I have grasped the chalk.” But if I actually take hold of the chalk with my hand, then I can say, “I have grasped it.”

In earlier times, people had a better understanding of what thinking really was, and out of such knowledge, words and expressions flowed into the language that expressed the real thing much better than our modern abstractionists realize. If we have had a mental picture of something, we say we have grasped it. This means we have come into contact with the object—we have “seized” it. Today we no longer realize that we can have intimate contact with objects in our environment through the very expressions in our thinking life. For example, there is a word in our language today that conceals its own meaning in a very hypocritical way. We say “concept” [Begriff in German, from begreifen]. I have a concept. The word conceive (to hold or gather) is contained within it [greifen, to grasp, or seize]. I have something that I have grasped, or gathered into myself. We have only the word now; the life has gone out of its meaning.

Examples such as these from everyday life demonstrate the aim and purpose of the exercises described as anthroposophic methods of research in my book How to Know Higher Worlds, and in the latter half of An Outline of Esoteric Science, and in other works. Consider the exercises in mental imagery. Certain thoughts are held in the mind so that concentration on these thoughts may strengthen the soul life. These exercises are based neither on superstition nor merely on fantasy, but on clear thinking and deliberation as exact as that used for mathematics. They lead human beings to develop a capacity for thought in a much more vital and active way than that found in the abstract thinking of people today.

Thinking and the Etheric Body

People today are truly dominated by abstraction. When they work all day with their arms and legs, they feel the need to sleep off their fatigue, because they recognize that their real being has been actively moving arms and legs. What they fail to understand, however, is that when we think, our being is just as active. People cannot see that when they think their being actively flows out and takes hold of the objects of their thinking; this is because they do not perceive the lowest supersensible member of the human being, the etheric body, living within the physical body, just as the physical body lives within the external world.

The etheric body can in fact be perceived at the moment when—by practicing the exercises I referred to—a person develops the eye of the soul and the ear of the spirit. One can then see how thinking, which is primarily an activity of the etheric body, is really a spiritual “grasping,” or spiritual touching, of the objects around us. Once we have condensed and concentrated our thoughts by means of the exercises mentioned, we experience spirit in such a way that we no longer have the abstract feeling, which is so prevalent today, that objects are far from us. We get a true sense of them that arises from practiced, concentrated thinking. Thinking too will then bring fatigue, and especially after using our powers of thought we will want to have our sleep.

The presence of materialistic ideas is not the worst product of this age of materialism in which we live; educators must also consider another aspect. As educators, we may feel somewhat indifferent to the amount of fatigue caused by people’s activities; eventually, people return to their senses, and things even out. But the worst thing for an educator is to watch a child go through years of schooling and receive for the soul only nourishment that bears the stamp of natural science—that is, of material things. Of course, this does not apply only to school science classes; all education today, even in the lowest grades, is based on scientific thinking. This is absorbed by children, it grows up with them, and it penetrates the whole physical organization so that in later years it appears as insomnia.

What is the cause of the sleeplessness of our materialistic time? It is due to the fact that if we think only in a materialistic way, the activity of thought—this “grasping” or “handling” of our environment through thought—does not allow the corresponding organs of the etheric body to become tired since it has become too abstract. Here, only the physical body becomes tired; we fall asleep—the physical body falls asleep—but the etheric becomes nervous and restless and cannot sleep. It draws the soul and spirit back into it, and this condition will necessarily develop gradually into an epidemic of insomnia. This is already happening today. Only by considering such matters can we understand what this materialistic time signifies. It is bad enough that people think materialistic, theoretical thoughts; but in itself this is not really that serious. It is even worse that we experience the effects of materialism in our moral life and in our economic life. And the worst thing is that through materialism, all of childhood is ruined to the point that people can no longer come to terms with moral or spiritual impulses at all.

These things must be known by everyone who recognizes the need to transform our teaching and education. The transitions we have mentioned, such as those that occur at the change of teeth and at puberty, can be understood only through intimate observation of the human being. We must learn to see how a person is inwardly active, so that people experience their etheric just as they feel their physical body; they must recognize that when they think about any object, they are really doing in the etheric what is otherwise done in the physical human body. If I want to know what an object is like, I feel it, I contact it, and thus gain a knowledge of its surface. This also applies to my etheric body. I “feel” etherically and supersensibly the object I want to “grasp,” what I wish to conceptualize. The etheric body is just as active as the physical body, and correct knowledge of human development can come only from this knowledge and consciousness of the etheric body’s activity.

The Child’s Imitative Nature

If we can activate our thinking in this way and, with this inwardly active thinking, watch a very young child, we see how every action performed in that child’s environment and every look that expresses some moral impulse (for the moral quality of a look contains something that passes into the child as an imponderable force) flows right into the child and continues to work in the breathing and the circulation of the blood. The clearest and most concrete statement we can come to regarding a child is this: “A child is an imitative being through and through.” The way a child breathes or digests in the more delicate and intimate processes of breathing or digesting reflects the actions of those around the child.

Children are completely surrendered to their environment. In adults the only parallel to such devotion is found in religion as expressed through the human soul and spirit. Religion is expressed in spiritual surrender to the universe. The religious life unfolds properly when, with our own spirit, we go beyond ourselves and surrender to a spiritual worldview—we should flow out into a divine worldview. Adult religious life depends on emancipating soul and spirit from the physical body, when a person’s soul and spirit are given up to the divine spirit of the world. Children give up their whole being to the environment. In adults, the activities of breathing, digestion, and circulation are within them, cut off from the external world. In children, however, all such activities are still surrendered to their environment, and they are therefore religious by nature. This is the essential feature of a child’s life between birth and the change of teeth; the whole being is permeated with a natural religious element, so to speak, and even the physical body maintains a religious mood.

But children are not surrounded only by beneficial forces that inspire religious devotion in later life. There are also spiritual forces that are harmful, which come from people around children and from other spiritual forces in the world. In this way, this natural religious element in a child’s physical body may also be exposed to evil in the environment—children can encounter evil forces. And when I say that even a small child’s physical body has a religious quality, I do not mean that children cannot be little demons! Many children are little demons, because they have been open to evil spiritual forces around them.

Our task is to overcome and drive out such forces by applying methods appropriate to our time. As long as a child is an imitative religious being, admonitions do no good. Words can be listened to only when the soul is emancipated to some extent, when its attention can be self-directed. Disapproving words cannot help us deal with a small child. But what we ourselves do in the presence of the child does help, because when a child sees this it flows right in and becomes sense perception. Our actions, however, must contain a moral quality.

If, for example, a man who is color-blind looks at a colored surface, he may see only gray. An adult looks at another person’s actions also in this way, seeing only the speed and flow of the gestures. We see the physical qualities but no longer see the moral qualities of the person’s actions. A child, on the other hand, sees the moral element, even if only unconsciously, and we must make sure that while in the presence of children, we not only never act in a way that should not be imitated, but never think thoughts that should not enter their souls. Such education of the thoughts is most important for the first seven years of life, and we must not allow ourselves to think any impure, ugly, or angry thoughts when in the company of little children. You may say, “But I can think what I like without altering my outer actions in the least; so the child sees nothing and cannot be influenced by what cannot be seen.” Here it is interesting to consider those very peculiar and rather stupid shows given at one time, with so-called thinking horses—horses that could count, and other animals performing tricks demonstrating “intelligence.” These things were interesting, though not in the way that most people believed.

I once saw the Elberfeld horses. (I want to speak only of my own observation). I saw the horse belonging to Mr. von Osten, and I could see how he gave answers to his master. Von Osten gave him arithmatic problems to do—not very complicated, it is true, but difficult enough for a horse. The horse had to add and subtract and would give the correct answers by stamping his hoof. Now you can look at this either from the perspective of a modern scientist—for example, the professor who wrote a whole fat book on the horse—or you can view it from an anthroposophic standpoint. The professor began by repudiating all non-professional opinions on the matter. (Please do not think that I intend to say anything against natural science, because I am well aware of its value.) In the end, the professor concluded that the horse was able to perceive very delicate movements made by the man—a slight twitch of an eyelid, the most delicate vibrations of certain muscles, and so on. From this, the horse eventually learned what answers corresponded to certain vibrations, and could give the required number of stamps with his hoof. This hypothesis is very clever and intelligent. He then arrives at the inevitable question of whether these things have actually been observed. He asks this question himself, since people are indeed learning to be very conscientious in their research. He answers it, however, by saying that the human senses are not organized in such a way that they perceive such fine delicate movements and vibrations, but a horse can see them. In fact, all he proves is that a horse can see more in a person than a professor can.

But for me, there was something else important—the horse could give the correct answers only when Mr. von Osten stood beside him and spoke. While he talked he kept taking lumps of sugar and placing them in the horse’s mouth. The horse was permeated by a taste of sweetness all the time. This is the important thing; the horse felt suffused with sweetness. In such a condition, even a horse can experience things that would otherwise not be possible. In fact, I would put it this way: Mr. von Osten himself constantly lived in the “sweetened horse,” the etheric horse that had permeated the physical horse. His thoughts were alive and diffused there, just as they were in his own body; his thoughts lived on in the horse. It was not because a horse has a finer perception than a professor, but because it is not yet as highly organized and thus more susceptible to external influences while its physical body continually absorbs the sweetness.

Indeed, there are such influences that pass from person to person, aroused by things almost—if not wholly—imperceptible to contemporary human beings. Such things occur in the interactions between humankind and animals, and they also occur very much when the soul and spirit are not yet free of the body—that is, during early childhood. Small children can actually perceive the morality behind every look and gesture of those around them, even though this may be no longer possible for those who are older. It is therefore of the greatest importance that we never allow ourselves to think ugly thoughts around children; not only does this live on in their souls, but works right down into the physical body.

There is no question that much is being accomplished these days in many medical or other dissertations, and they reflect the current state of scientific knowledge. But a time will come when there will be something very new in this area. Let me give you a specific example to demonstrate what I mean. A time will come when a person may write a doctoral thesis showing that a disease, perhaps during the forty-eighth year of a person’s life, can be traced back to certain evil thoughts in the environment of that person as a child of four or five. This way of thinking can bring us to a genuine understanding of human beings and the capacity for seeing the totality of human life.

We thus have to learn gradually that it is not so much a question of inventing from our own abstract thoughts all kinds of things for little children to do, such as using rods and so on. Children do not spontaneously do things like that. Their own soul forces must be aroused, and then they will imitate what the adults do. A little girl plays with a doll because she sees her mother nursing the baby. Whatever we see in adults is present in children as their tendency to imitate. This tendency must be considered in educating children up to the seventh year.

We must bear in mind, however, that what we educate is subject to change in the child’s organism; in children everything is done in a more living and animated way than in adults, because children are still a unity of body, soul, and spirit. In adults, the body has been freed from the soul and spirit, and the soul and spirit from the body. Body, soul, and spirit exist side by side as individual entities; in the child they are still firmly united. This unity even penetrates the thinking.

We can see these things very clearly through an example. A small child is often given a so-called “beautiful” doll—a painted creature with glass eyes, made to look exactly like a human being. These little horrors are made to open and shut their eyes and do all sorts of other things. These are then presented to children as “beautiful” dolls. Even from an artistic perspective they are hideous; but I will not enlarge on that now. But consider what really happens to a child who is presented with a doll of this kind, a doll that can open its eyes and so on. At first the child will love it because it is a novelty, but that does not last.

Now, compare that with what happens to a child if I just take a piece of rag and make a doll out of that. Tie it together for a head, make two dots for eyes, and perhaps a big nose, and there you have it. Give that to a child and the rest of that doll will be filled out by the child through imagination in soul and spirit, which are so closely connected with the body. Then, every time that child plays with the doll, there is an inner awakening that remains inwardly active and alive. By making such experiments yourself, you will see what a difference there is between giving a child playthings that leave as much as possible to the power of imagination and giving finished toys that leave nothing for the child’s own inner activity. Handwork for small children should only indicate, leaving much for the child’s own imagination to do. Working in set forms that can easily be left as they are does not awaken any inner activity in the child, because the imagination cannot get past what is open to the senses.

Physical and Psychical Effects

This shows us what kind of teachers and educators we should be if we really want to approach children in the right way. We need an art of teaching based on a knowledge of human beings—knowledge of the child. This art of education will arise when we find a doctor’s thesis that works with a case of diabetes at the age of forty by tracing it back to the harmful effects of the wrong kind of play in the third or fourth year. People will see then what we mean by saying that the human being consists of body, soul, and spirit, and that in the child, body, soul, and spirit are still a unity. The spirit and soul later become freed of the body, and a trinity is formed. In the adult, body, soul, and spirit are pushed apart, as it were, and only the body retains what was absorbed by the individual during early development as the seed of later life.

Now this is the strange thing: when an experience affects the soul, its consequences are soon visible, even when the experience was unconscious; physical consequences, however, take seven or eight times longer to manifest. If you educate a child of three or four so that you present what will influence the soul’s life, then the effect of this will appear in the eighth year; and people are usually careful to avoid doing anything with a child of four or five that may affect the soul life in an unhealthy way during the eighth or ninth year. Effects on the physical body take much longer to manifest, because the physical body must free itself of the soul and spirit. Therefore, something that influences the soul life at four or five may come to fruition in the physical body when that person is seven or eight times as old—for example, in the thirty-fifth year. Thus, a person may develop an illness during the late thirties or early forties caused by ill influences that affected that soul while at play as a child of three or four.

If you wish to understand the whole human being, you must also realize that the freeing of the body from soul and spirit in the adult, as opposed to a child’s unity of body, soul, and spirit, is not merely abstract theory, but a matter of very specific knowledge, for we are speaking of very different calendars. The time that the body requires to work something out is increasingly lengthened compared to the time needed by the soul. The physical body works more slowly, and harmful influences manifest much later there than in the soul.

Thus, we often see that when we transgress against a little child in the very early years, many things turn out wrong in the teenager’s soul-life. This can be corrected, however. It is not very difficult to find ways of helping even seemingly unmanageable children during their teens. They may even become very good and respectable, if somewhat boring, citizens later on. This is not very serious. But the body develops more and more slowly as life goes on, and in the end, long after all the soul difficulties of early youth have been overcome, the physical effects will gradually emerge, and in later life the person will have to contend with arthritis or some other illness.

Real, experiential knowledge of the human being is of the greatest importance. Truly concrete knowledge of the human being, with the power of seeing right into the person, is the only possible basis for a true art of education—an art of education whereby persons may find their place in life and, subject to the laws of their own destinies, fully develop all their powers. Education should never work against a person’s destiny, but should help people achieve the fullest possible development of their own predispositions. Often today, people’s education lags far behind the talents and tendencies that destiny implanted in them. We must keep pace with these forces to the extent that the human beings in our care can attain all that their destinies will allow—the fullest clarity of thought, the most loving deepening of feeling, and the greatest possible energy and capacity of will.

This can be done only through an art of education and teaching based on a real knowledge of the human being. We will speak more of this in the next lectures.