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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 5541 through 5550 of 6552

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308. The Essentials of Education: Lecture Three 10 Apr 1924, Stuttgart
Translated by Jesse Darrell

How can we understand the etheric body? This requires a much better preparation than is usual for understanding the human being today. We understand the etheric body when we enter the shaping process, when we know how a curve or angle grows from inner forces.
When we rise from abstract principles to formative qualities and understand how every natural law molds itself sculpturally, we come to understand the human etheric body.
308. The Essentials of Education: Lecture Four 10 Apr 1924, Stuttgart
Translated by Jesse Darrell

The Human Being as a Symphony of the Tones in Animals If musical understanding—which I mentioned this morning—has truly taught the teacher about the reality of the human astral body, providing a concept of the human being itself as a wonderful, inwardly organized musical instrument, such an understanding of the astral body will open an even broader understanding of the whole relation between the human being and the world.
All that was understood through images now arises from the inner wellspring. Proceeding to intellectual activity involves the human being looking into the self.
And when there is this concordance between the two sides of an individual’s nature, after puberty the person truly experiences inner freedom as a result of understanding for the first time what was merely perceived earlier. The most important thing for which we can prepare a child is the experience of freedom, at the right moment in life, through the understanding of one’s own being.
308. The Essentials of Education: Lecture Five 11 Apr 1924, Stuttgart
Translated by Jesse Darrell

When we understand children correctly, we understand that they have not gained any abstract, intellectual understanding for the revelations of wisdom, beauty, and goodness.
From this, it follows that we cannot understand the world as a one-sided subject of the head alone. It is untrue to say that we can understand the world through ideas and concepts. And it is equally false to say that the world can be understood through feeling alone. It has to be understood through ideas and feeling, as well as through the will; human beings will understand the world only when divine spirit descends into will.
309. The Roots of Education: Lecture One 13 Apr 1924, Bern
Translated by Helen Fox

Although many people feel this to be the situation, they are unprepared to acknowledge that—regardless of all that the modern age has provided us in terms of information about the natural world—we are still no closer to understanding the human being. This impossibility is most likely to be felt when we attempt to understand the growing human being, the child.
In fact, what anthroposophy attempts in education is to apply the correct principles for bodily education, since we understand that precisely during the first stage of life, the entire physical nature of a child is influenced by soul impulses.
The way matter works in a child is contained in a unity of soul and spirit. No one can understand matter in a child unless soul and spirit are considered valid. Indeed, soul and spirit are revealed in the outer appearance of matter.
309. The Roots of Education: Lecture Two 14 Apr 1924, Bern
Translated by Helen Fox

Our task, instead, is to point to a way of teaching that springs from our anthroposophic knowledge of humankind. Understanding the Human Being As you know, we need to gain a more intimate observation of human beings than is customary today.
In earlier times, people had a better understanding of what thinking really was, and out of such knowledge, words and expressions flowed into the language that expressed the real thing much better than our modern abstractionists realize.
This is already happening today. Only by considering such matters can we understand what this materialistic time signifies. It is bad enough that people think materialistic, theoretical thoughts; but in itself this is not really that serious.
309. The Roots of Education: Lecture Three 15 Apr 1924, Bern
Translated by Helen Fox

However, the astral body itself, in its true inner being and function, cannot be understood by those laws. It can be understood only by understanding music—not just externally, but inwardly.
In this case, it is not something that arises from cosmic shaping, but from the musical impulse streaming into the human being through the astral body. Again, we must begin with an understanding of music, just as a sculptural understanding is necessary in understanding the etheric body’s activities.
You can do this when you attempt to understand the way a word is formed. There is untold wisdom in words, way beyond human understanding.
309. The Roots of Education: Lecture Four 16 Apr 1924, Bern
Translated by Helen Fox

Of course, there are obvious objections to such a statement; the idea of “object-lessons,” or teaching based on sense-perception, is so misunderstood these days that people believe they should give children only what they can understand, and since we live in an era of the intellect, such understanding is intellectual. It is not yet understood that it is possible to understand things with soul forces other than those of the intellect—and recommendations for so-called “object-lessons” can drive one nearly to despair. It is a terrible mindset that wants to pin the teacher down to the children’s level of understanding all the time. If you really set up the principle of giving children only “what they can understand,” one cannot gain a concept of what it means for a child of six or seven to have accepted something based on the unquestioned authority of a teacher.
Only on the basis of this knowledge can we correctly understand what expresses itself in the life and activities of children under seven. They simply continue in their earthly life a tendency of soul that was the most essential aspect of life before birth.
309. The Roots of Education: Lecture Five 17 Apr 1924, Bern
Translated by Helen Fox

In ancient times, those who possessed an instinctive spiritual knowledge still recognized the two sides of eternity—the undying and the unborn. We will understand eternity only when we are able to understand both of these concepts. Eternity will be experienced when children are properly educated.
The most harmful aspect of materialism is not that it fails to understand spirit. That will be corrected eventually. The worst thing about materialism is that it is completely ignorant of matter and its activity, because it fails to find spirit in matter.
It has retreated increasingly into the background, and in many respects, human beings meet and pass each other without any understanding of one another. It is indeed a grievous feature of present-day life that when one human being meets another, there is no mutual understanding.
310. Human Values in Education: Anthroposophical Education Based on a Knowledge of Man 17 Jul 1924, Arnheim
Translated by Vera Compton-Burnett

I should like to express myself still more clearly, so that we may understand one another. For example, a man who wishes to set up a business concern thinks out some sort of business project.
At the present time the only sphere where such things are understood, where it is recognised that such a procedure does not work, is in the application of mechanical natural science to life.
O, these plants contain many, many more secrets than the gardener understands; but he can tend them, and perhaps succeed best in caring for those which he does not yet know.
310. Human Values in Education: Descent into the Physical Body, Goethe and Schiller 18 Jul 1924, Arnheim
Translated by Vera Compton-Burnett

It works, only in a hidden way, in what is of a bodily nature, and one does not understand the body if one has no understanding of the spiritual forces active within it. Let us now proceed to study further what I have just indicated.
But let us now look at the matter as a whole. Can we not deepen our feeling and understanding for everything that is human simply by looking at a single human life in the way that we have done?
If someone really wishes to develop an understanding of the essential principles of education based on a knowledge of man—whether he has already acquired a knowledge of spiritual science or whether, as can also happen, he has an instinctive understanding of these things—he will observe the child in such a way that he is faced with this question: What is the main trend of a child's development up to the time of the change of teeth?

Results 5541 through 5550 of 6552

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