The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religion—two hours a week.

The mother tongue—eleven hours a week.

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

Then:

Local geography—two hours² a week.

Arithmetic—four hours a week.

Singing and gymnastics together—one hour a week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE EDITOR

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

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

A question about the treatment of melancholic children.

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

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

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

A question about school books.

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

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

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

A report was presented on the following questions: How is the sanguine temperament expressed in a child? How should it be treated?

RUDOLF STEINER: This is where our work of individuating begins. We have said that we can group children according to temperament. In the larger groups children can all take part in the general drawing lesson, but by dividing them into smaller groups we can personalize to some extent. How is this individuating to be done? Copying will play a very small part, but in drawing you will try to awaken an inner feeling for form so that you can individuate. You will be able to differentiate by your choice of forms by taking either forms with straight lines or those with more movement in them—by taking simpler, clearer forms, or those with more detail. The more complicated, detailed forms would be used with the child whose temperament is sanguine. From the various temperaments you can learn how to teach each individual child.

A report was given on the same theme.

RUDOLF STEINER: We must also be very clear that there is no need to make our methods rigidly uniform, because, of course, one teacher can do something that is very good in a particular case, and another teacher something else equally good. So we need not strive for pedantic uniformity, but on the other hand we must adhere to certain important principles, which must be thoroughly comprehended.

The question about whether a sanguine child is difficult or easy to handle is very important. You must form your own opinion about this and you must be very clear. For example, suppose you have to teach or explain something to a sanguine child. The child has taken it in, but after some time you notice that the child has lost interest—attention has turned to something else. In this way the child’s progress is hindered. What would you do if you noticed, when you were talking about a horse, for example, that after awhile the sanguine child was far away from the subject and was paying attention to something entirely different, so that everything you were saying passed unnoticed? What would you do with a child like this?

In such a case much depends on whether or not you can give individual treatment. In a large class many of your guiding principles will be difficult to carry out. But you will have the sanguine children together in a group, and then you must work on them by showing them the melancholic pattern. If there is something wrong in the sanguine group, turn to the melancholic group and then bring the melancholic temperament into play so that it acts as an antidote to the other. In teaching large numbers you must pay great attention to this. It’s important that you should not only be serious and restful in yourself, but that you should also allow the serious restfulness of the melancholic children to act on the sanguine children, and vice versa.

Let’s suppose you are talking about a horse, and you notice that a child in the sanguine group has not been paying attention for a long time. Now try to verify this by asking the child a question that will make the lack of attention apparent. Then try to verify that one of the children in the melancholic group is still thinking about some piece of furniture you were talking about quite awhile ago, even though you have been speaking about the horse during that time. Make this clear by saying to the sanguine child, “You see, you forgot the horse a long time ago, but your friend over there is still thinking about that piece of furniture!”

A real situation of this kind works very strongly. In this way children act correctively on each other. It is very effective when they come to see themselves through these means. The subconscious soul has a strong feeling that such lack of cooperation will prevent a continuation of social life. You must make good use of this unconscious element in the soul, because teaching large numbers of children can be an excellent way to progress if you let your pupils wear off each other’s corners. To bring out the contrast you must have a very light touch and humor, so that the children see you are never annoyed nor bear a grudge against them—that things are revealed simply through your method of handling them.

The phlegmatic child was spoken of.

RUDOLF STEINER: What would you do if a phlegmatic child simply did not come out of herself or himself at all and nearly drove you to despair?

Suggestions were presented for the treatment of temperaments from the musical perspective and by relating them to Bible history.

Phlegmatics: Harmonium and piano; Harmony; Choral singing; The Gospel of Matthew; (variety)
Sanguines: Wind instruments; Melody; Whole orchestra; The Gospel of Luke; (Inwardness of soul)
Cholerics: Percussion and drum; Rhythm; Solo instruments; The Gospel of St. Mark; (Force, strength) Melancholics: Stringed Instruments; Counterpoint; Solo singing; The Gospel of St. John; (Deepening of the spirit)

RUDOLF STEINER: Much of this is very correct, especially the choice of instruments and musical instruction. Equally good is the contrast of solo singing for the melancholic, the whole orchestra for the sanguine, and choral singing for the phlegmatic. All this is very good, and also the way you have related the temperaments to the four Evangelists. But it wouldn’t be as good to delegate the four arts according to temperaments; it is precisely because art is multifaceted that any single art can bring harmony to each temperament.¹ Within each art the principle is correct, but I would not distribute the arts themselves in this way. For example, you could in some circumstances help a phlegmatic child very much through something that appeals to the child in dancing or painting. Thus the child would not be deprived of whatever might be useful in any of the various arts. In any single art it is possible to allocate the various branches and expressions of the art according to temperament. Whereas it is certainly necessary to prepare everything in the best way for individual children, it would not be good here to give too much consideration to the temperaments.

An account was given about the phlegmatic temperament and it was stated that the phlegmatic child sits with an open mouth.

RUDOLF STEINER: That is incorrect; the phlegmatic child will not sit with the mouth open but with a closed mouth and drooping lips. Through this kind of hint we can sometimes hit the nail on the head. It was very good that you touched on this, but as a rule it is not true that a phlegmatic child will sit with an open mouth, but just the opposite. This leads us back to the question of what to do with the phlegmatic child who is nearly driving us to despair. The ideal remedy would be to ask the mother to wake the child every day at least an hour earlier than the child prefers, and during this time (which you really take from the child’s sleep) keep the child busy with all kinds of things. This will not hurt the child, who usually sleeps much longer than necessary anyway. Provide things to do from the time of waking up until the usual waking hour. That would be an ideal cure. In this way, you can overcome much of the child’s phlegmatic qualities. It will not be possible very often to get parents to cooperate in this way, but much could be accomplished by carrying out such a plan.

You can however do the following, which is only a substitute but can help greatly. When your group of phlegmatics sit there (not with open mouths), and you go past their desks as you often do, you could do something like this: [Dr. Steiner jangled a bunch of keys]. This will jar them and wake them up. Their closed mouths would then open, and exactly at this moment when you have surprised them, you must try to occupy them for five minutes! You must rouse them, shake them out of their lethargy by some external means. By working on the unconscious you must combat this irregular connection between the etheric and physical bodies. You must continually find fresh ways to jolt the phlegmatics, thus changing their drooping lips to open mouths, and that means that you will be making them do just what they do not like doing. This is the answer when the phlegmatics drive you to despair, and if you keep trying patiently to shake up the phlegmatic group in this way, again and again, you will accomplish much.

Question: Wouldn’t it be possible to have the phlegmatic children come to school an hour earlier?

RUDOLF STEINER: Yes, if you could do that, and also see that the children are wakened with some kind of noise, that would naturally be very good; it would be good to include the phlegmatic children among those who come earliest to school.² The important thing with the phlegmatic children is to engage their attention as soon as you have changed their soul mood.

The subject of food in relation to the different temperaments was introduced.

RUDOLF STEINER: On the whole, the main time for digestion should not be during school hours, but smaller meals would be insignificant; on the contrary, if the children have had their breakfast they can be more attentive than when they come to school on empty stomachs. If they eat too much—and this applies especially to phlegmatic children—you cannot teach them anything. Sanguine children should not be given too much meat, nor phlegmatic too many eggs. The melancholic children, on the other hand, can have a good mixed diet, but not too many roots or too much cabbage. For melancholic children diet is very individual, and you have to watch that. With sanguine and phlegmatic children it is possible to generalize.

The melancholic temperament was spoken of.

RUDOLF STEINER: That was very good. When you teach you will also have to realize that melancholic children get left behind easily; they do not keep up easily with others. I ask you to remember this also.

The same theme was continued.

RUDOLF STEINER: It was excellent that you stressed the importance of the teacher’s attitude toward the melancholic children. Moreover, they are slow in the birth of the etheric body, which otherwise becomes free during the change of teeth. Therefore, these children have a greater aptitude for imitation; if they have become fond of you, everything you do in front of them will make a lasting impression on them. You must use the fact that they retain the principle of imitation longer than others.

A further report on the melancholic temperament.

RUDOLF STEINER: You will find it very difficult to treat the melancholic temperament if you fail to consider one thing that is almost always present: the melancholic lives in a strange condition of self-deception. Melancholics have the opinion that their experiences are peculiar to themselves. The moment you can bring home to them that others also have these or similar experiences, they will to some degree be cured, because they then perceive they are not the singularly interesting people they thought themselves to be. They are prepossessed by the illusion that they are very exceptional as they are.

When you can impress a melancholic child by saying, “Come on now, you’re not so extraordinary after all; there are plenty of people like you, who have had similar experiences,” then this will act as a very strong corrective to the impulses that lead to melancholy. Because of this it is good to make a point of presenting them with the biographies of great persons; they will be more interested in these individuals than in external nature. Such biographies should be used especially to help these children over their melancholy.

Two teachers spoke about the choleric temperament. Rudolf Steiner then drew the following figures on the board:

What do we see in these figures? They depict another characterization of the four temperaments. The melancholic children are as a rule tall and slender; the sanguine are the most normal; those with more protruding shoulders are the phlegmatic children; and those with a short stout build so that the head almost sinks down into the body are choleric.

Both Michelangelo and Beethoven have a combination of melancholic and choleric temperaments. Please remember particularly that when we are dealing with the temperament of a child, as teachers we should not assume that a certain temperament is a fault to be overcome. We must recognize the temperament and ask ourselves the following question: How should we treat it so that the child may reach the desired goal in life—so that the very best may be drawn out of the temperament and with the help of their own temperaments, children can reach their goals.

Particularly in the case of the choleric temperament, we would help very little by trying to drive it out and replacing it with something else. Indeed, much arises from the life and passion of choleric people—especially when we look at history and find that many things would have happened differently had there been no cholerics. So we must make it our task to bring the child, regardless of the temperament, to the goal in life belonging to that child’s nature.

For the choleric you should use as much as possible fictional situations, describing situations you have made up for the occasion, and that you bring to the child’s attention. If, for example, you have a child with a temper, describe such situations to the child and deal with them yourself, treating them in a choleric way. For example, I would tell a choleric child about a wild fellow whom I had met, whom I would then graphically describe to the child. I would get roused and excited about him, describing how I treated him, and what I thought of him, so that the child sees temper in someone else, in a fictitious way the child sees it in action. In this way you will bring together the inner forces of such a child, whose general power of understanding is thus increased.

The teachers asked Rudolf Steiner to relate the scene between Napoleon and his secretary.

Rudolf Steiner: For this you would first have to get permission from the Ministry of Housing! Through describing such a scene the choleric element would have to be brought out. But a scene such as I just mentioned must be described by the teacher so that the choleric element is apparent. This will always arouse the forces of a choleric child, with whom you can then continue to work. It would be ideal to describe such a situation to the choleric group in order to arouse their forces, the effect of which would then last a few days. During that few days the children will have no difficulty taking in what you want to teach them. Otherwise they fume inwardly against things that they should be getting through their understanding.

Now I would like you to try something: we should have a record of what we have been saying about the treatment of temperaments, and so I should like to ask Miss B. to write a comprehensive survey (approximately six pages) of the characteristics of the different temperaments and how to treat them, based on everything I have spoken about here. Also, I will ask Mrs. E. to imagine she has two groups of children in front of her, sanguine and melancholic and then, in a kind of drawing lesson, to use simple designs, varied according to sanguine and melancholic children. I will ask Mr. T. to do the same thing with drawings for phlegmatic and choleric children; and please bring these tomorrow when you have prepared them.

Then I will ask, let us say, Miss A., Miss D., and Mr. R. to deal with a problem: Imagine that you have to tell the same fairy tale twice—not twice in the same way, but clothed in different sentences, and so on. The first time pay more attention to the sanguine and the second time to the melancholic children, so that both get something from it.

Then I ask that perhaps Mr. M. and Mr. L. work at the difficult task of giving two separate descriptions of an animal or animal species, first for the cholerics and then for the phlegmatics. And I will ask Mr. O., Mr. N., and perhaps with the help of Mr. U. to solve the problem of how to consider the four temperaments in arithmetic.

When you consider something like the temperaments in working out your lessons, you must remember above all that the human being is constantly becoming, always changing and developing. This is something that we as teachers must have always in our consciousness—that the human being is constantly becoming, that in the course of life human beings are subject to metamorphosis. And just as we should give serious consideration to the temperamental dispositions of individual children, so we must also reflect on the element of growth, this becoming, so that we come to see that all children are primarily sanguine, even if they are also phlegmatic or choleric in certain things. All adolescents, boys and girls, are really cholerics, and if this is not so at this time of life it shows an unhealthy development. In mature life a person is melancholic and in old age phlegmatic.

This again sheds some light on the question of temperaments, because here you have something particularly necessary to remember at the present time. In our day we love to make fixed, sharply defined concepts. In reality, however, everything is interwoven so that, even while you are saying that a person is made up of head, breast, and limb organizations, you must be clear that these three really interpenetrate one another. Thus a choleric child is only mostly choleric, a sanguine mostly sanguine, and so on. Only at the age of adolescence can one become completely choleric. Some people remain adolescents till they die, because they preserve this age of adolescence within themselves throughout life. Nero and Napoleon never outgrew the age of youth. This shows us how qualities that follow each other during growth can still—through further change—permeate each other again.

What is the poet’s productivity actually based on—or indeed any spiritually creative power? How does it happen that a man, for example, can become a poet? It is because he has preserved throughout his whole life certain qualities that belonged to early manhood and childhood. The more such a man remains “young,” the more aptitude he has for the art of poetry. In a certain sense it is a misfortune for such a man if he cannot keep some of the qualities of youth, something of a sanguine nature, his whole life through. It is very important that teachers can become sanguine out of their own resolve. And it is moreover tremendously important for teachers to remember this so they may cherish this happy disposition of the child as something of particular value.

All creative qualities in life—everything that fosters the spiritual and cultural side of the social organism—all of this depends on the youthful qualities in a human being. These things will be accomplished by those who have preserved the temperament of youth. All economic life, on the other hand, depends on the qualities of old age finding their way into people, even when they are young. This is because all economic judgment depends on experience. Experience is best gained when certain qualities of old age enter into people, and the old person is indeed a phlegmatic. Those business people prosper most whose other attributes and qualities have an added touch of the phlegmatic, which really already bears the stamp of old age. That is the secret of very many business people—that in addition to their other good qualities as business people, they also have something of old age about them, especially in the way they manage their businesses. In the business world, a person who only developed the sanguine temperament would only get as far as the projects of youth, which are never finished. A choleric who remains at the stage of youth might spoil what was done earlier in life through policies adopted later. The melancholic cannot be a business person anyway, because a harmonious development in business life is connected with a quality of old age. A harmonious temperament, along with some of the phlegmatic’s unexcitability is the best combination for business life.

You see, if you are thinking of the future of humankind you must really notice such things and consider them. A person of thirty who is a poet or painter is also something more than “a person of thirty,” because that individual at the same time has the qualities of childhood and youth within, which have found their way into the person’s being. When people are creative you can see how another being lives in them, in which they have remained more or less childlike, in which the essence of childhood still dwells. Everything I have exemplified must become the subject of a new kind of psychology.

• 1. The teacher who presented the above suggestions had also allocated particular arts to the various temperaments.
• 2. This refers to the need for having school in shifts.

RUDOLF STEINER: We will now continue the work we have set out to do, and we will pass on to what will be said about how to deal with arithmetic from the perspective of the temperaments. We must primarily consider what procedure we should follow in teaching arithmetic.

Someone showed how to explain a fraction by breaking a piece of chalk.

RUDOLF STEINER: First, I have just one thing to say: I would not use chalk, because it is a great pity to break chalk. I would choose something less valuable. A bit of wood or something like that would do, wouldn’t it? It is not good to accustom young children to destroy useful things.

Question: Does a child who slouches and lacks a proper vertical position find it more difficult to understand spatial and geometrical forms because of such a problem?

RUDOLF STEINER: Not to any perceptible degree. Things of this kind depend more on the tendencies found in the construction of the human organism rather than on the build of an individual. This was once brought very forcibly to my attention after a lecture in Munich. I had explained in the lecture that it has a certain significance for the whole structure of the human being that the backbone is in line with the diameter of the Earth, while the line of the animal’s back is at a right angle to it. Afterward a learned doctor from Karlsruhe came and asserted that when a person is asleep the spine is in a horizontal position! I replied, “It’s not a question of whether a person can move the backbone into various positions, but that the whole human structure is arranged architecturally so that the backbone is ordinarily vertical, although it can be placed at a slant or any other position.”

If you did not consider this you could never understand how certain potentials found in the intellect appear, even when the senses themselves are not active—for example, in someone born blind. The human being is constructed so that the intellect has certain tendencies in the direction of the eyes, and thus, even in the case of those born blind, it is still possible to evoke mental images that are connected with the eyes, such as in the case of someone like the blind Helen Keller. What is important is the tendency, the general dispositions of the human organism, rather than what may be the result of a chance situation here or there. I would now like to add the following to what was said. It is not so much a question of criticizing these things, because that can always be done. What matters is that things of this kind are brought up and that we try to understand them.

Let’s start with addition, and first see what our view of addition should be. Let’s suppose I have some beans or a heap of elderberries. For our present task I will assume that the children can count, which indeed they must learn to do first. A child counts them and finds there are 27. “Yes,” I say. “27—that is the sum.” We proceed from the sum, not from the addenda. You can follow the psychological significance of this in my theory of knowledge.¹ We must now divide the whole into the addenda, into parts or into little heaps. We will have one heap of, let’s say, 12 elderberries, another heap of 7, still another of say 3, and one more, let’s say 5; this will represent the whole number of our elderberries: 27 = 12 + 7 + 3 + 5.

We work out our arithmetical process from the sum total 27. I would allow this process to be done by several children with a pronounced phlegmatic temperament. You will gradually come to realize that this kind of addition is particularly suited to the phlegmatics. Then, since the process can be reversed, I would call on some choleric children, and gather the elderberries together again, this time arranging them so that 5 + 3 + 7 + 12 = 27. In this way the choleric children do the reverse process. But addition in itself is the arithmetical rule particularly suited to phlegmatic children.

Now I choose one of the melancholic children and say, “Here is a little pile of elderberries. Count them for me.” The child discovers that there are, let’s say, 8. Now, I say, “I don’t want 8, I only want 3. How many elderberries must you take away to leave me only 3?” The child will discover that 5 must be removed. Subtraction in this form is the one of the four rules especially suited to melancholic children.

Then I call on a sanguine child to do the reverse process. I ask what has been taken away, and I have this child tell me that if I take 5 from 8, I’ll have 3 left. Thus, the sanguine child does the reverse arithmetical process. I would only like to add that the melancholic children generally have a special connection with subtraction when done as I have described.

Now I take a child from the sanguine group. Again I put down a pile of elderberries, but I must be sure the numbers fit. I must arrange it beforehand, otherwise we find ourselves involved in fractions. I have the child count out 56 elderberries. “Now look; here I have 8 elderberries, so now tell me how many times you find 8 elderberries contained in 56.” So you see that multiplication leads to a dividing up. The child finds that the answer is 7. Now I let the sum be done in reverse by a melancholic child and say, “This time I do not want to know how often 8 is contained in 56, but what number is contained 7 times in 56." I always allow the reverse process to be done by the opposite temperament.

Next I introduce the choleric to division, from the smaller number to the greater, by saying, “Look, here you have a little pile of 8; I want you to tell me what number contains 8 seven times.” Now the child must find the answer: 56, in a pile of 56. Then I have the phlegmatic children work out the opposite process: ordinary division. The former is the way I use division for the choleric child, because the rule of arithmetic for the choleric children is mainly in this form division.

By continuing in this way I find it possible to use the four rules of arithmetic to arouse interest among the four temperaments. Adding is related to the phlegmatic temperament, subtracting to the melancholic, multiplying to the sanguine, and dividing—working back to the dividend—to the choleric. I ask you to consider this, following what N. has been telling us.

It is very important not to continue working in a singular way, doing nothing but addition for six months, then subtraction, and so on; but whenever possible, take all four arithmetical rules fairly quickly, one after another, and then practice them all—but at first only up to around the number 40. So we shall not teach arithmetic as it is done in an ordinary curriculum. By practicing these four rules, however, they can be assimilated almost simultaneously. You will find that this saves a great deal of time, and in this way the children can work one rule in with another. Division is connected with subtraction, and multiplication is really only a repetition of addition, so you can even change things around and give subtraction, for example, to the choleric child.

It was suggested that one begin with solid geometry.

RUDOLF STEINER: With adults it is possible to begin with solids, but why should you want to go from solids to plane surfaces with a child? You see, three-dimensional space is never easy to picture, least of all for a child. You cannot impart anything to a child but a vague idea of space. Indeed, the child’s imagination will suffer if expected to imagine solid bodies.

You are assuming that the solid is the actual thing and the line abstract; but this is not so. A triangle is in itself something very concrete; it exists in space. Children see things mainly in surfaces. It is an act of violence to force a child into the third dimension, the idea of depth. If children are to apply their imagination to a solid, then they must first have the necessary elements within to build up this imaginative picture. For example, children must really have a clear picture of a line and a triangle before a tetrahedron can be understood. It is better for them to first have a real mental picture of a triangle; the triangle is an actuality, not merely an abstraction taken from the solid.

I would recommend that you teach geometry, not as solid geometry first, but as plane geometry, giving figures with plane surfaces between them; this is preferable, because children like to use their powers of understanding for such things; beginning with plane geometry will support them. You can add further to the effect by connecting it with drawing lessons. Children can draw a triangle relatively early, and you should not wait too long before having them copy what they see.

The figure shown yesterday was repeated, this time for a choleric child and for a phlegmatic child.

RUDOLF STEINER: That is a very good design for the choleric child. For the phlegmatic child I would prefer to make it speckled, I would rather have it checkered. It would be possible to use your design, but it would not arouse the phlegmatic child’s attention enough.

The drawings for the melancholic and the sanguine child were presented.

RUDOLF STEINER: In using this method you will find that the needs of the sanguine and melancholic child can be met in the following ways. For the sanguine you should constantly make use of varied repetition. You might have the child draw a design like this:

And then three more like it:

and then one more, so that the emphasis is on repetition:

For the melancholic child it would be good to give a design in which careful thought plays some part.

Suppose you have a melancholic child first draw a form like this (figure a), and then the counter-form (figure b), so that they complement one another. This will arouse the child’s imagination. I will shade the original form like this (a) and the opposite form like this (b) and you will see that what is shaded in one form would be left blank in the other. If you think of the blank part as filled in, you would get the first form again. In this way the outer forms in the second drawing are the opposite of the inner, and this design is the opposite of those based on repetition. Choose something requiring thought and connected with observation for the melancholic children, and something in which repetition plays a part (creepers, tendrils, and so on) for the sanguine children.

The story of “Mary’s Child” was told in the style for phlegmatic children.

RUDOLF STEINER: It is important to cultivate well-articulated speech and then help the children to get out of their dialect.² Frau Dr. Steiner will demonstrate.

Someone told the story of “The Long-Tailed Monkey” for phlegmatic children.

RUDOLF STEINER: For a story of this kind there are certain aids to storytelling that I would suggest you use. Just for the phlegmatics it would be good to pause occasionally mid-sentence, look at the children, and use the pause to let the imagination work. You can arouse their curiosity at critical points so that they can think on in advance a little and complete the picture for themselves. “The king’s daughter ... was ... very beautiful ... but ... she was not equally ... good.” This use of pauses in narration works strongest with phlegmatic children.

A fairy story was told for phlegmatic children.

RUDOLF STEINER: You must make use of a moment of surprise and curiosity.

Someone told an animal story for sanguine children about a horse, a donkey, and a camel. “Which do you like best, the horse or the donkey?”

RUDOLF STEINER: Some melancholics will prefer the donkey. With these descriptions of animals I would ask you to remember that, as far as possible, they should lead the child to observe animals, for descriptions of this kind can contain true natural history.

Someone else told the story of a monkey who escaped into the rafters—first for sanguines and then for melancholics.

RUDOLF STEINER: Yes, in certain cases that would make a very good impression on the melancholic children, but here also it is my opinion that you could develop it a little further in order to encourage animal observation as such.

I would like to remind you that consideration of the child’s temperament should not be neglected, but you can safely use the first three to five weeks to observe the temperaments of your pupils and then divide them into groups as spoken of here.

It would also be good to consider the extremes of the various temperaments. Goethe’s world view led him to express the beautiful idea that one can understand the normal by studying the abnormal. Goethe views an abnormal plant—a misshapen plant—and from the nature of the malformation he learns to understand the normal plant. In the same way you can find the connections between the absolutely normal and the malformations of the body-soul nature, and you yourselves can find the way from the temperaments to what is abnormal in the soul life.

If the melancholic temperament becomes abnormal and does not remain within the boundaries of the soul, but rather encroaches on the body, then insanity arises. Insanity is the abnormal development of a predominantly melancholic temperament. The abnormal development of the phlegmatic temperament is mental deficiency. The abnormal development of the sanguine is foolishness, or stupidity. The abnormal development of the choleric is rage. When a person is in an emotional state you will sometimes see these attacks of insanity, mental deficiency, foolishness, or rage arising from otherwise normal soul conditions. It is indeed necessary that you focus your attention and observation on the entire soul life.

Now we will move on to the solution of our other problem. I said: Suppose that you, my friends, had children of eight or nine years old in your class. What would you do if, three or four weeks after the beginning of term, you noticed that a phlegmatic, a choleric, and a melancholic child were, to some extent, becoming the three “Cinderellas” of the class, so that all the others pushed them around and no one wanted to play with them and so on? If this had happened, what would you as teachers do about it?

Various teachers expressed opinions.

RUDOLF STEINER: You should never allow the children to inform against each other; you must find other ways of discovering what has caused them to be “Cinderellas.” As teachers, you see, you will often find that you have to help raise the children. If they get into all sorts of naughty ways, their fathers and mothers will come and say, for example, “My child tells lies.” You would seldom go wrong to give this advice: say to the parents, “Imagine a case, a story, in which an untruthful child is placed in a ridiculous position—where the child, because of lying, is led into a situation that appears absurd even to the child. If you tell the child a story of this kind, and then another, and still another like it, you will as a rule cure your child of the tendency to lie.”

Similarly, you will find it helpful to insert into a story everything that has been said about the three “Cinderellas,” everything you can hear and discover about these children, and then you can tell this story to the whole class. The effect of this will be that the three “Cinderellas” will be somewhat comforted and the others somewhat ashamed. If you do this you will certainly find that, even at the first attempt, and even more after the second, you will succeed in restoring a friendly, social atmosphere, a mutual sympathy among the children. You should continue with a similar story throughout the term.

Tomorrow we will take another case that also happens sometimes, which certainly cannot be treated by telling a story that comforts some of the children and shames the others. Suppose you had children of eight or nine years old in your class, and one of these small fries had discovered a particularly mischievous trick. These things do happen. It had been learned outside the school and succeeded in infecting all the others so that the whole class was at it during recess.

An ordinary schoolmaster would go to the extreme of punishing the whole class, but I hope that by tomorrow you will think of a more rational—that is a more effective—method, because this old way of punishing places the teacher in the wrong relationship with the children, and this will not fail to have an effect. The aftereffect is not good.

I have a special case in mind that really happened, where a certain teacher did not act very wisely. One little rascal had conceived the idea of spitting on the ceiling and had actually succeeded. It was a long time before the teacher discovered the culprit. He could not pick out any one child, because they had all done it; the whole classroom was damaged.

Please think over this case of moral delinquency by tomorrow. All you really know is that the whole class had been infected. You cannot begin with the assumption that you know who the ringleader was. You will have to consider whether it wouldn’t be better to give up all thought of discovering the culprit by getting the children to tell on each other. How would you act in this case?

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, Goethe’s World View, and The Science of Knowing: Outline of an Epistemology Implicit in the Goethean World View, both Mercury Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1992 and 1988.
• 2. This does not imply that Rudolf Steiner was unaware of the importance of dialect in its right place.