The Rudolf Steiner Archive

What is most important for me in these lectures is to show to what extent spiritual science can make education more fruitful. Of course it is not possible to develop a complete system of pedagogy in fourteen lectures. In these first considerations, I have already indicated that I do not believe a renewal of education is necessary, since present educational principles contain many good things. I believe that primarily a refreshing of education is necessary. Spiritual science is certainly appropriate for bringing new life into educational practice based upon many of the wonderful educational theories thatalready exist, because spiritual science attempts to comprehend the living spirit. Such comprehension of the living spirit, which is a source of enlivening for both the will and the feeling, is particularly necessary in pedagogy. Furthermore, spiritual science is a source of a genuine understanding of the human being that is particularly appropriate for working with children.

I would like to remark that it is clear that alongside of any form of education, whether it is oriented more toward the intellect or toward the soul, the human being must also be educated in feelings, primarily in a moral and religious sense. Particularly in the development of ethical and moral attitudes and of a religious sense, we need to work with the entire human being. Whenever we wish to have an effect upon the attitudes or will of the entire person, we must take into account the transformation and changes that human beings undergo both as children and in later life. To such changes in later life it is necessary that we give the proper impulse, particularly during the time of education.

But it is impossible to teach anything in connection with morals, attitudes or religion if, during the course of education, we do not first create some way of accessing the human soul and spirit. It would be a major error to believe that we can simply set up rules that people should do this or that in regard to their attitudes or religion or morality. The situation is actually quite different, and we can describe it in the following way.

If in my teaching, particularly with children up to the age of nine, I can create a connection with the child’s soul, the child will allow me to guide her in a moral or religious connection. If I cannot create such a relationship, if I teach in such a way that the child closes her feelings off from me, the child will be unreachable by even the best moral or religious guidance. It is particularly unhelpful to give in to illusions, even if we are doing so on the grounds that we are overcoming some of the cultural damage of our times. We cannot, for example, allow ourselves to be influenced by doctrines that understand the immortality of the human soul only in one sense.

In this area we chiefly try to make sure that people have a good understanding and a healthy feeling in regard to going through the gates of death, in regard to the further life of the soul after death. Such knowledge might seem to be merely theoretical, but it is not. Every action that we undertake in life, everything we do or say, particularly how we do or say it, depends upon a person’s view of this major life question. Although the various confessions of the immortality of human soul are absolutely correct, they nevertheless arise out of egotism in a certain number of people. They have developed out of human egotism. While it is necessary to speak to people (and to children in particular) about life after death—a truth that is certainly well-anchored in spiritual science—when we speak about this by itself, we reflect only the egotism of human nature that wants to continue to live after the body has been given over to the earth. But in doing so, we shut people out from the tasks of their earthly life. In particular, we as teachers shut ourselves out from the task of developing human beings when we think and act under the influence of such one-sided perspectives.

We need to recognize that earthly life is the continuation of a supersensible life. We need to look at what lives in us as spirit-soul as something that has moved from a supersensible world and connected itself with our physical bodies. It is very important to look at growing children in that way. If you look without prejudice, every child is a riddle to be solved, particularly for educators. If you look in this way at a growing child and say to yourself that what is presented here in earthly life is a continuation of the spiritual life, and it is our responsibility to guide what that divine being wanted in being incarnated in a human being, then we will be overcome by a feeling of holiness without which it is not possible to educate. We will have a feeling of solving a riddle when we are confronted with a developing human being. To imbue life here in the physical world with the character of a continuation of a spiritual life is something very important when we recognize it.

This is an important example of how differently an educator will act depending on his attitude. In external life, what is of primary importance is how a person acts. However, in being confronted by developing human beings, by children, we are also confronted with the innermost aspect of human nature. Our attitudes will inevitably affect theirs, and what is important here is the influences which lie at the basis of our attitude. An attitude of reverence will encourage a sense of responsibility toward the task of education. And without that sense of responsibility, we can achieve nothing in teaching. Everything must be permeated by it. I particularly hope that you will be permeated by this feeling, even though it appears to be so distant from the topic we are here to discuss.

Human beings derive their activities from two sources, as I said yesterday. One source is an indication more of what a human being brings into physical life from superphysical life. The other source is more an indication of what the human being should create out of life here. When we realize this, we will also be able to see the difference between what a human being brings into life and what is to be developed through this life. When I said how the intellect is born with the change of teeth and how the will moves into a human being with puberty, I characterized these two sources from two standpoints, although there are many others. When we focus upon the intellect, we are looking more at what a person brings into physical existence through birth. When we turn our attention to the will, we should be aware that we are primarily dealing with what a person should take in from the physical world in order to embed it into his higher nature. Inevery disharmony and harmony with the world that occurs through physical life, the human will is developed; that, in a certain sense, becomeshuman will. What is present as the intellect in human nature we must attempt to coax out.

In simply stating that, we can see many misunderstandings that arise in stating educational truths. People always want to say things in one-sided ways when these things actually have two sides in life. They either say that we must draw everything out of the human being or that we must put everything into it. Both are incorrect, of course. It is true that to a certain extent we need to draw everything that is naturally imaginative out of human nature. On the other hand, for everything concerned with the will, the experiences that we present to a human being are what is formative. People draw upon life for their will. For this reason it is important how we are connected to the children’s developing will, so that they can imitate us, seeing that what we say we also do. At around the age of seven, these patterns become authority for them. We need to place the child in such an environment so that she herself can draw upon as many experiences as possible to develop the will.

Here you can see how much of what people call the question of education is actually a question about the qualities of the teacher. Before I continue in this consideration, which I began yesterday, I would like to characterize the element that should permeate all of instruction, at least from one perspective.

Once again, it is possible to be very one-sided. Because of your own nature, you could fill your instruction with seriousness, with a face that can never laugh, that can only reprimand. It is also possible, if you have the tendency, to bring very little seriousness into your teaching. Both of these lead to extraordinarily damaging results later in life. It is as if someone were to think about whether inhaling is better than exhaling. Of course what is important is that human beings must both inhale and exhale; when a person who should exhale wants to inhale, that goes against nature. Just as there is a strict rhythm in the human being according to which there are on the average eighteen breaths taken in a minute, the entirety of human life is based upon rhythm. One part of that rhythm is the interplay between humor and seriousness.

Humor is based upon people getting away from themselves in a certain way. With humor, we move onto the path toward dreaming. Although we remain completely conscious, moving toward humor is the beginning of the path to dreaming. This loss of self is expressed through smiling or laughing. In these acts, the spirit-soul—or what we in spiritual science call the I and the astral body—moves out in a certain way from the physical and the etheric, although people still remain in control. Through humor, people expand in their soul and spirit aspects.

Let us now look at extreme examples of seriousness, such as crying and becoming sad. In these cases people are more compressed. The spirit-soul is more closely connected with the physical body than it is when we are in a neutral mood. A humorous attitude is an expansion of the soul and spirit, whereas a serious mood brings the spirit-soul aspect of human nature into closer contact with the physical body. We could also say that through laughing, a human being becomes more altruistic, and through seriousness, more egotistic.

An objection could be made to this assertion. If I say that seriousness makes people egotistical, then we can certainly preach that human beings should fight egotism. But what would happen if people fought egotism out of their own egotism, so that they perceived themselves as being unegotistical, as being unselfish? So that when they thought about the situation, they realized that they had created within themselves a passion for unselfishness? When someone satisfies her egotism by taking pleasure in loving many people, that is a much better gift than being unselfish in order to earn selfpraise. We need to consider such things in a way that corresponds to human nature rather than interpreting them in a way that leads to an increase of passion within the soul. What is important here is that the rhythm in the human being between humor and seriousness supports the soul-spirit life in the same way that inhaling and exhaling support physical life. Just as exhaling is a kind of turning toward the external world and becoming more foreign to oneself, while inhaling gives physical pleasure to a person’s egotism, humor is something whereby the human being expands and seriousness is something whereby the human being collects himself egotistically. Children need to move between these two moods through a teacher’s guidance.

Now it is of course extraordinarily difficult if, when you enter the classroom with a kind of self-imposed responsibility, you say to yourself that you should alternate between being humorous and serious. To give yourself such a task is impossible. It’s silly. It is something that cannot be. No one could expect me to include humorous things in my instruction immediately after a difficult personal experience. However, such an abstract feeling of responsibility is not necessary if you determine the content of what you should be enthusiastic about in the instruction in spiritual science. If you prepare for the class in a spiritual-scientificway, you will live in the individual portions of what you are to teach in an objective and impersonal way. If I come into a classroom at three in the afternoon to present something to the children and if I have schooled myself in the material in the same way I have learned to school myself in spiritual science, the material will be something through which I no longer need to take the external world into account. My own attitudes will disappear. The material itself will provide me with humor and seriousness at the right times, and things will just go by themselves.

This is an example of how spiritual science can help in practical education, right down to affecting the attitude of the teacher. It is necessary to see a doctor if I cannot properly breathe in order to restore the breathing process if possible. So the health-giving influence of a spiritual-scientific education is necessary for those people who are to have a healthy influence upon children. It is quite possible, of course, that on the way to school you may be justified in hanging your head in thinking about some terrible things that have happened to you. However, when you enter the classroom, you will become aware of what the task is for today, and you yourself no longer speak. It is not joy and sorrow that speaks. The things we teach are what speak; they move our fingers when we draw with chalk or when we write or do something else.

This shows that what is important at present is not to create new principles of education. Instead what is needed is a new spiritual structure that enables us to carry out our tasks without subjective influences. The teachers at the Waldorf School attempt to train themselves in this or at least to draw it out of human nature. During the short time we have worked there, we have in fact achieved something I could describe in the following way. For the sake of discretion, I will describe it as abstractly as possible.

Some have disagreed with my selection of teachers. They have told me that one teacher or another may not be very good, he may be too pedantic. I have not allowed myself to be influenced by that. But if a person has correct spiritual moral and feeling capacities, it is not necessary to consider whether that person is pedantic or not. What is important is to show the person how his or her pedantic tendencies can be properly brought into the service of humanity. If we had to remove all pedantic tendencies in people, we would certainly see how little is left over. If you take up spiritual science in a living way, it makes it easier to explain a specific, concrete area of life in an objective way, because the subjective characteristics of pedantry cease to be effective. In fact those people who were described as pedantic have become very exciting teachers after they found their way into teaching through a spiritual-scientific attitude. It is not at all important to act according to one or another preconceived idea. Instead we should act according to life. That is something we need in the present. Socialism wants to reform the entire world according to a theory. With regard to the development of humanity, the task of the present is to act according to life.

Everything I have said today is, in a way, the flip side of what I said yesterday about teaching languages, eurythmy, gymnastics, and so forth. What I discussed yesterday can be properly achieved by the teacher only when the teacher behaves in the way I have described today.

This leads me into a particularly interesting question that I was asked and which is closely connected with what I have just now described. It was indicated to me that a twelve-and-a-half-year-old girl had a B in behavior. While discussing an essay, she mentioned that in a private school, she always had good grades, but always a B in behavior. She told me that she then had a teacher she liked very much and never had a B, but that later his son taught the class and these bad grades in behavior started up again and continued in our school until the present time.

Much of what we have said today could have an extraordinarily high impact upon this question. You see, there are two things that are necessary in teaching. One is that we understand how to draw as much as possible out of the child, something we do at first through imagination. The other is that we work with the children in such a way that the child can like us.

There are all kinds of things in which we can, with some effort, try to train ourselves so that they become instinct. This is a complicated psychological problem into which we really cannot enter today. It is, however, true that many things that may require much effort to learn will come to others so simply, almost instinctively. One such thing is that a group of children just loves the person. That is very beautiful when it happens. What is important in regard to the development of culture and civilization, though, is that we achieve something similar through a certain kind of selftraining. We can achieve that if we try to relate to the world in the way that we must if we are to take up spiritual science. As I mentioned before, we cannot take up spiritual science as though we were sitting in the theatre and watching a film. We can only take it up when we are inwardly active. As I said before, you should read my book An Outline of Esoteric Science, but if you read it without any inner experience and take what I say there simply as a guide for your own thoughts, then the entirety of spiritual science will be just like straw. For that reason, spiritual science is for many people simply straw. If, however, you read it so that it is like an orchestral score that you first only understand when you have drawn all the details out of yourself, then, through drawing that out of yourself, you will develop those forces that otherwise remain hidden in human nature.

It is just those forces that develop relationships, particularly in children, that in a sense draw children’s attention to us. If we have gone through the process of drawing out those spiritual forces within us, then we can create a direct connection from one soul to another between ourselves and the child. That connection has tremendous significance in attitudinal and moral guidance as well as in training the child’s will. It would be hardly possible for you to keep a class that is made up of 40 percent uncontrollable children simply through moral reprimands that come out of you like abstract rules. Often, through the tone of your voice or the energy you put into your voice, you can achieve that for a short period. But you can achieve nothing lasting in that way.

Perhaps, however, you could attempt to have some experiences with the following. When preparing for your classes, in addition to your normal preparation, try to add a kind of meditative preparation. Add something that has not the least to do with the material you are to present, but has more to do with raising your own soul, that has something to do with imbuing some material or some feeling that opens the world to you. When in the evening you have gone through such a meditative inner view, and you enliven that view so that on the next morning you can recall it and in a sense reexperience it, then you will notice an effect when you go into the classroom. This may sound as though I am telling you some superstition, but these are things that cannot be comprehended through any theory. You need to see them. When you observe them you will find them confirmed. Most people today are not particularly interested in observing such things. But we will have to become accustomed to such observations if we are to come out of the misery of the present time. From them corresponding convictions will arise, particularly for a type of education that is meant to include all of humanity. With the student I described before, it is quite clear that when she said she loved the teacher, her training in will was under the direct influence of that personal relationship. Although we can philosophize about this as much as we want, all training in will is always under the sway of personal relationships until children are past the age of puberty.

Now I come to another extremely interesting question. In every elementary school, particularly in boys’ schools, you will find at least one boy who, although not in any way weak-minded, appears to be extraordinarily dumb in every subject, but who has a considerable talent for drawing. He has a certain instinct for observing and a genuine feeling for art. The remaining dumbness is nearly always connected to a kind of moral weakness and a brooding egotism. Such a boy does not seem to have the energy to come out of himself. What insight can a spiritual-scientific consideration of such a situation give? How should a teacher treat such a student in order to develop his intellectual capacities as well as the moral strength to carry out his own decisions?

When confronted with so concrete, so personal a question, I have the feeling of standing before unscalable walls. If you attempt to penetrate facts in the world through spiritual science, you can no longer consider such things superficially. At first you will have an uneasy feeling when working from the spiritual-scientific perspective in regard to such basic questions, even though you may have a great deal to say about them based upon all the many theories. You know, however, that regardless of how much you philosophize, you cannot find anything that will lead to an answer because life nearly always shows individual facts in individual situations and with special nuances, and you must first understand those nuances. With spiritual science you will almost always be led to the experience. Out of that experience you will work to find an answer.

I would now like to show you how you can attempt to find a way of overcoming to an extent the insurmountable hindrances that life may present. I knew a boy who I could also continue to observe as a young man who had a remarkable weakness in the will. It was so acute that he could stand in the street, for instance, and decide to take a given streetcar to go somewhere. But when the streetcar came, he was unable to sufficiently gather his will together and board it. He thought about going to his destination with the streetcar, but he was unable to board it, so he stood there after the streetcar had gone by. I knew just such a boy who as a young man was an extraordinarily intelligent and progressive person, and that was a real riddle for me at first. I solved the riddle in a rather remarkable way. I was aware that the boy’s father, whom I also knew, held the view that it was unnecessary to develop the will.1 His thoughts were thus concentrated upon, in a sense, talking away the will as a characteristic of the soul. Now I had a path. The father’s perspective was not actually a part of his nature; it had not actually affected his own organs. But what was a thought with the father had become habitual with the son. Possibly what the son had received from the father through heredity was strengthened by hearing similar thoughts expressed. Maybe the father did not always say explicitly that the will was not a part of the soul, but this was the perspective implied. People grow into life through very complicated situations.

It lies in human nature to develop the three capacities of the soul, namely, thinking, feeling, and willing. But some feeling also enters into our thoughts. We never actually have pure thinking unless we strictly train ourselves to do it, or when we devote ourselves to the ideals of morality or religion. In normal life, however, in thinking about the external world or when thinking together with other people, we are always using thoughts that contain some degree of feeling. We can therefore say that our thoughts are related to our feelings. Our feelings are reflected in our thoughts because they are stimulated by those thoughts, by the kind of thinking we do. On the other hand, our will also interacts with our feeling. There is quite a difference between will and will. The will can be what I would call a more neutral impulse or it can contain the warmth of feeling. Some people have a tendency to strengthen feeling at the cost of willing so that feeling is overemphasized and the will comes up short. With such people during childhood, what should actually enter the will is held in feeling. Thus they are satisfied with the picture of an action and never actually go on to act. That is the sort of person I am talking about here. We need to see how the feelings of such children react to one thing or another. Then we should not be satisfied only with what we see, but we should try to direct them toward the things that bring them into movement.

With children who exhibit this kind of moral weakness, an ensouled gymnastics of the sort I have described as eurythmy has a healthy effect. This is assuming that eurythmy, where human beings draw not only with their hands but with their entire bodies in space, is taught to them by the age of nine.

It is important to look at the interactions between human capacities. If you have learned to observe life, you will learn to guide the influences that act upon the child in such a way that the forces of the soul and those of the entire human being are brought into appropriate interaction. Spiritual-scientific training, when properly carried out, guides a person toward observing life. In general, people forget the most important facts of life, or they do not find the proper rhythm between humor and seriousness. You have not found the proper rhythm if you simply laugh at a young person who allows the streetcar to pass by. Such a person is certainly an object of humor, but you need to be able to move from humor into seriousness. We cannot remain merely with one or the other. This view of life is particularly necessary for teachers, and this is what is developed in us through a proper spiritual-scientific training.

I have attempted to indicate from various perspectives how we can base curriculum and teaching goals upon human development. I have particularly tried to show that we can characterize the period that begins around the age of six or seven with the change of teeth, and continues until puberty, about age fourteen or fifteen, as one stage of life. I also attempted to show that there is a shorter stage within the earlier stage that lasts until approximately the age of nine. There is another important change around the age of twelve. We should view these three times, that is, about the age of nine, then about twelve, and then again around fourteen or fifteen, which is approximately when the students leave school, as important when we create the whole curriculum and teaching goals. You can easily see the importance of comprehending the development of the human being when you realize that what is important in education is that we completely develop those forces that lie buried in human nature. If we look at things in the proper way, we have to admit that we need to use all our teaching material and education to reveal those forces. It is not nearly so important to use the forces within children to teach them one detail or another. What is important is that we use the material the children are to learn in such a way that the effects of what they learn develop the natural forces within them. That is something we fail to do if we do not take into account how different the child’s physical and soul nature is before the age of nine, and then again before the age of twelve, and so forth. We must be aware that the power to differentiate through reason, which enables human beings to reason independently, in essence occurs only at puberty and that we should slowly prepare for it beginning at the age of twelve. We can therefore say that until the age of nine children want to develop under authority, but their desire to imitate is still present as well. At nine, the desire to imitate disappears, but the desire for authority remains. At about the age of twelve, while still under the guidance of authority, another important desire, namely, to reason independently, begins to develop. If we use independent reasoning too much before the age of twelve, we will actually ruin the child’s soul and bodily forces. In a certain sense, we deaden human experiencing with reason.

To anyone not completely devoid of feeling, it is not insignificant that we say yes or no to something through making a judgment. Depending upon whether we need to say yes or no, we have feelings of liking or disliking, joy or sorrow. As much as modern people tend to have egotistical feelings of liking or disliking those things that they judge, they have hardly any feelings, whether of joy or sorrow, about the world and life as a whole. That is precisely why people miss so much today. Aside from that, their incapacity to experience the world influences social desires as a whole. That is why our teaching should not only emphasize the development of proper concepts, but it should also develop a proper feeling for the world, a proper feeling for a person’s place in the world.

Today people have one overriding judgment in regard to social issues. They say to themselves that we must make the world into an earthly paradise for all human beings. In the end, what do the extremists, the radical socialists of Eastern Europe, want other than to develop a kind of earthly paradise out of some theories, even though the paradise that results is a hell? But that is something else again. Where does this come from? We need only replace that judgment with another, and we will immediately see the problem in wanting to create an earthly paradise through enforced socialization.

I don’t really want to discuss Nietzsche here, but I do want to mention the following in order to explain something else.1 Nietzsche’s first work was entitled The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. Among the many thoughtful ideas contained in that work (even though you could argue against them), Nietzsche suggests that the Greek people were not the eternally happy, laughing folk many people say they were, but instead the life of the Greeks was rooted in tragedy, in a kind of sadness. The Greeks felt that our life here upon earth between birth and death could not always be one of great happiness, and that the task of human beings lay beyond this earthly life. Nietzsche thought the Greeks had a particularly strong feeling of this and needed a strong solace for the disharmonies of earthly life, which they found in art. Nietzsche’s view of the rise of art was that art, particularly Greek art, was a solace for earthly disharmonies. Nietzsche sees music in particular as something that leads people beyond earthly disharmonies. There is certainly a contrast between what we experience in our dry, calculating thinking and what we experience through music, but these contrasts relate to one another in a quite peculiar way. Consider that we can compute tones and the relationships of tones in terms of numbers; the result is musical physics, or acoustics. However, those who give themselves over to the musical world of tones leave what we can compute completely behind. They leave the intellectual aspects of music aside. What is intellectual sleeps in music. Nietzsche had a particular feeling for what he called the tragedy of music. The tragedy of music is that people can feel in music what they should otherwise feel throughout the world. Now Nietzsche was a man who could feel throughout his body what the materialism of the nineteenth century had brought to humanity. He was the kind of a teacher who dreamed of educational institutions based upon ideas such as I just described, which could have been the source of a genuine solace for life. Someone like Nietzsche revealed through his own life what was needed by the nineteenth century. The problem is, he collapsed under the experiences of those disharmonies. If we read between the lines, we will see that fate in a way determined that this man could deeply experience things that others of his century passed through in a more or less sleepy state of soul. We can also see that he always points to those things that were missing in his own education, specifically the education he had to go through in school. In Nietzsche youhave the feeling that the forces within him remained deeply buried, that they were never developed. Surely such an insightful person as he felt the tragedy of that much more strongly than others. You could easily say that here and there he had some awareness of the three main stages of childhood, particularly the stage between the ages of six or seven and fourteen or fifteen, but he never brought that understanding into the service of education. That is something that must happen now.

At the age of nine, the child experiences a truly complete transformation of her being that indicates an important transformation of her soul life as well as her physical experience. At that time, the human being begins to feel separated from her surroundings and learns to differentiate between the world and herself. If we can observe accurately, we have to admit that until that transformation, the world and the I are more or less conjoined in human consciousness. Beginning at the age of nine (of course I mean this only approximately), human beings can differentiate between themselves and the world. We must take that into consideration in what and how we teach children starting at the age of nine. Until then, it is best not to confuse them with descriptions and characterizations of things that are separate from the human being, or that we should consider separate from the human being. When we tell a child a story or a fairy tale, we describe the animals and perhaps the plants in the way we would speak about people. In a certain sense, we personify plants and animals. We can justifiably personify them because the child cannot yet differentiate between herself and the world. That is why we should show the child the world in a way similar to the way he or she experiences it. You should be clear that what I am suggesting does not diminish childhood before the age of nine, but enriches it.

My last statement may seem quite paradoxical to you. But much of what people say about the child’s life is said in such a way that the child’s life does not actually become richer but rather poorer. Think for a moment of what modern people often say when a child injures himself on the corner of a table and hits the table in rage. Today people say that children’s souls have something called animism. In a certain sense, the child makes the table alive by pushing his or her soul into the table. This is an impossible theory. Why? Because children do not directly perceive themselves as something living, something that can put itself into the table and personify it. Rather, children do not think of themselves as any more alive than the table. Children look at the table and experience no more of themselves than they do of the table. It is not that the child personifies the table but, if I can express it this way, the child “tables” his or her own personality. Children do not make their personality anything more than the table. When you tell a child a fairy tale or story, you speak only of what the child can comprehend of the external world. That is what must occur until the age of nine. After that, you can count upon children’s ability to differentiate themselves from the world. At that time, we can begin to speak about plants and animals from the perspective of nature. I have put a lot of effort into studying the effects upon children of teaching about nature too early. Teaching about nature too early really does make children dry; so dry, in fact, that a well-trained observer can see in the changes of someone’s skin that that person was taught about the concepts of nature at too early an age.

When they are nine we may begin to teach children the concepts of nature, but only through living thoughts. Wherever possible, we should avoid teaching them about minerals, about dead things. What is living, what lives outside the human being, exists in two areas, that of animals and that of plants. However, if we attempt to present the popular descriptions of animals, their scientific characteristics and the scientific descriptions of plants, we will not really be able to teach children about them. You can see in nearly every natural history book that the content is nothing more than a somewhat simplified academic natural science—that is horrible. Of course, people have also attempted to create an illustrative teaching of nature. There are numerous books about that method too, but they suffer from the opposite mistake. They contain a great deal of triviality. In that case, the teacher attempts to discuss nothing with the children, nothing more than what they already know. As people say, the teacher tries to create a picture of nature solely out of the nature of the children themselves. We easily fall into triviality that way. We can only throw our hands up in frustration about so many of those method books because they are so terribly trivial. We may feel that if schools use such things, only triviality will be implanted in children. This triviality will come to expression later as many other things I have already mentioned, as a kind of aridness in later life, or at any rate it will make it impossible for people to look back upon their childhood with joy.

That is, however, precisely what human beings need. Throughout life, we need to be able to look back upon our childhood as something like a paradise. It is not just that we had only happy experiences then; it is really not so important that as children we had only happy experiences. Many people may have gone hungry during their childhood or have been beaten by their teachers out of a lack of understanding or were treated unkindly. Of course, nothing other than an intent to fight against all such things in the best possible way should ever form the basis of education. Nevertheless such things can occur, and even so thinking back upon childhood can still be a source of enlivening when, in one way or another, we gained a relationship to the world during childhood. As children, we need to develop that relationship by being taught about nature in the proper way. It is of no help whatsoever when we describe the various classes of animals or types of plants and so forth to children and then, in order not to be too dry, we go on a walk with the children to show them the plants outdoors. That is not at all useful. Of course, through certain instinctive tendencies, one teacher will be able to accomplish more and another less. A teacher can, through his or her own love of nature, enliven a great deal for children. However, what spiritual science can give to people’s feeling is something really quite different, something that gives people a feeling for the connections living between the human being and the remainder of the world.

In the first third of the nineteenth century, many people still felt that the entire animal world was an extended human being. In this model, we have different groups of animals. One group is one-sidedly developed in one direction, another in another direction. We can create an overview of the various groups and kinds of animals for ourselves. The human being contains all those forces, all the inner forms that are distributed among the animals. That was, for example, the view of nature that someone like Oken took. At that time people looked for the lower animals in nature. Today’s materialistic natural science says that these lower animals existed in very early times and that they slowly developed and become more complete. The result was today’s human being, a completely developed physical being. We do not need to go into all the details today, since our concern is not with conventional science, but with education. However, can’t we see that the human head, which is a bony structure outside with the softer parts inside, looks similar to that of certain lower animals? Look at a snail or a mussel and see how similar they are to the human head. If you look at our more or less developed birds, you would have to admit that they have adjusted to the air, they have adjusted their entire life to something that corresponds to the inner form of the lungs and such things in human beings. If you remove from your thoughts all those aspects of the human being contained in the limbs and imagine the entire human inner organization as adjusted to living in air, the result will be the form and function of a bird. You could also compare the organic form of a lion or a cat with that of a bovine.

Everywhere you will see that in one group of animals, one part of its form is more developed and in another group, a different part. Each group of animals is particularly well-developed in one direction or another. We can say a snail is almost entirely head. It has nothing other than the head aspect, only it is a simple and primitive head. The human head is more complicated. Of a bird we can say that it is, in a certain sense, entirely a lung developed in a particular way because all other aspects are rudimentary. Of a lion we can say that it is, in a certain sense, primarily the blood circulation and the heart. We could say cattle are entirely stomachs. Thus in external nature we can characterize the various groups of animals by looking toward individual human organs. What I have just said can be said very simply, in a primitive way. If we look at the world of animals and look at the great diversity there, then compare that with the human organism and see how in the human being everything is well-rounded—how no part of the human being is one-sidedly developed, but each part complements the other—then we can see that in animals the various organs are adapted to the external world, whereas in human beings the organs do not adapt to the external world, but rather one organ complements another.

The human being is a closed totality.

Now imagine that we used everything available to us, the nature exhibits in the school, each walk with the children, everything the children have experienced, to show in a living way how the human being is, in a certain sense, a summary of the animal world. Imagine showing children that everything in the human being is formed harmoniously, is well-rounded, and that the animals represent one-sided developments and, for that reason, are not fully blessed. We can also show that the human being represents an adaptation of one system of organs to the other and for that reason has a possibility of complete being. If we are completely convinced of this relationship of the human being to the world of animals, if it fully permeates us spiritually, we can describe that relationship in a lively way so that the description is quite objective, but at the same time children can feel their relationship to the world.

Think how valuable it is for modern people to be able to say, in our materialistic times, that they are the crown of earthly creation. People do not really understand it—they look at themselves, and they look at individual animals. However, they do not look at each individual animal and try to understand how one system of organs is one-sidedly developed in one animal and another in another animal. They also do not consider how that all comes together in the human being. If we do that, our knowledge will directly become a feeling, a perception of our position relative to the world. We will then stop experiencing ourselves only egotistically, and our feelings will go out into the universe.

You need only attempt to teach in that sense once, and you will see what value such teaching has for the feelings of the child. Such knowledge is transformed completely into feeling, and people slowly become more modest under the influence of such knowledge. In that way, the material to be taught becomes a genuine means of education. What is the use of saying we should not teach in a dry way, we should not teach the children only facts, if we have no possibility of transforming the material to be taught so that it becomes a direct means of education? Sometimes when people stress that teaching children too many facts hinders their proper development, we want to ask, “Why don’t you throw out all the material you teach if it is of no use?” We cannot do that, of course. We must make the material we teach into educational material. Teaching about nature, particularly in connection with the animal world, can become educational material when we shape it in the way I described, and when we do not teach it to children before the age of nine.

With the plant world, we cannot take the individual plants or kinds of plants, present them one-sidedly, summarize everything we find there, and expect to see it again in the human being. The approach that is so fruitful with animals and gives us such a good basis for an artistic and living presentation of the nature of animals fails with plants. We cannot consider them in the same way; it does not work. With plants, we need to use a very different approach. We need to consider the entire nature of plants in relationship to the earth as something that enlivens the entire earth.

Materialism has brought us to the point where we consider the earth only as a ball made of stones and minerals in which plants are simply placed. We cannot use the same principle with, for instance, the human head and hair. We need to consider the growth of hair as something connected with the human head. In the same way, we must consider plants as belonging to the organism of the earth. We create an abstract picture if we only think of the earth as a stone, which can at most call gravity its own. We speak of the real earth when we think of the earth as an organism with plants that belong to it just as the hair on our heads belongs to us. When we consider it that way, our picture of the earth grows together with our picture of plants, and we get the proper feeling for how to think of the earth in connection with the plant world. We can do that when we look at the earth in the course of the year. If we are to really teach children about plants, we should not compare one class or group of plants with another. Instead we need to use all the fresh plants we have, the nature exhibits in the school, walks, everything the children remember, and everything we can bring into the classroom as fresh plants. Then we can show the children how spring magically draws the plants out of the earth. We can show them how plants are magically drawn out, then go on to May, when the earth becomes somewhat different. We then continue on into summer, and the earth looks different again.

We try to consider flowers and plants in the same way children understand the development of the earth throughout the course of the year. We tell the children how, in the fall, the plant seeds return to the earth and the cycle begins anew. We consider the earth an organism and follow the sprouting and dying back of the plants. We call everything by its proper name (which of course is only convention) only after we have taught the child by saying, “Look, here is a plant (under a tree or perhaps somewhere else). We have this little plant because this kind of plant grows so well in May. It has five little petals. Remember, these plants with five little yellow petals are part of the life of the whole earth in May. It is a buttercup.” You can go on in that way and show them how the world of plants is connected with the yearly cycle of the earth. You can then go on further to more hidden things, how, for example, some plants bloom at Christmastime, and some plants can live through winter and others much longer. You go from the life of one plant that decorates the earth for one year and leaves, to others, such as the growth of a tree and so forth. You would never consider simply comparing one plant with another; you always relate the earth to its plant growth and how the growth of plants arises out of the living earth.

You now have two wonderful points in the life of nature. Everywhere in the animal realm you find things that point to the human being. People can feel how they are a synthesis of all the one-sided aspects of the animal realm. We do not take up any species of animals without indicating which aspect of the human being that animal species has developed one-sidedly. The animal kingdom becomes, therefore, a picture of the human being spread out before us—the human being unfolded like a fan. As I said, modern people laugh about such things, but during the first third of the nineteenth century that sometimes took on grotesque forms. People such as Oken have said such grotesque things as “the tongue is a squid,” and I certainly do not want to defend them. Oken had the right principle in mind. He looked at the human tongue and then sought something among the animals which he then compared with that human organ. He found the greatest similarity to the human tongue in the squid; thus the tongue is a squid. He went on to say that the stomach is a cow. All that is, as I said, an extreme presentation. We certainly do not need to go that far. At that time, people were really unable to find the proper things. Today, however, we can certainly present the entire animal world as a spread-out human being and the human being as a synthesis of the entire animal world. We thus connect everything the children observe in the animals with the human being. We therefore have a possibility of placing all the aspects of a human being in front of the child’s eyes by directing the child’s eyes outward.

In the plant world we have just the opposite. There we completely forget the human being and consider the world of plants as entirely growing out of the earth itself, out of the planet upon which we wander. In the one case we bring the animal world into a close relationship to the human being, and in the other case we bring the plant world into the same close relationship to something that exists outside the human being. In other words, on the one hand we bring forth a feeling understanding of the world of animals and the human being by observing the animal world itself. On the other hand, we teach children to objectively consider the earth as an organism upon which we run about and from which we live, and where we see in the growth of plants, in the life cycle of plants, particularly in how plants live from year to year, something that is separate from ourselves. Through these two ways of looking at things, we can bring a tremendous amount of balance between the intellect and feeling into the human soul. We will leave mere intellectualism, which is so boring and arid, behind.

Once people comprehend annual plants, green plants that grow out of the earth with their roots in the earth, leaves, and stems above it, and the green leaves that then go on to form the flower and seed; once people perceive a living connection with the earth and have enlivened that through their experiences of the yearly cycle; once they have experienced how the blossom comes forth when sunlight has connected itself in love with what pours forth out of the earth; once that is felt throughout people’s entire being as a felt knowledge; once people have felt the growth from the root through the leaf to the flower and finally to the seed from spring until fall; once people have felt all that, then they will realize something else. Here is the earth, here is a plant, an annual. This plant that lives only one year is rooted in the earth. Now let us look at a tree. Here it is wood. Here are the branches. What appears on the tree during the course of one year appears similar to an annual plant and sits on the tree in a way similar to an annual plant sitting in the earth. In a certain sense the earth and the part of the tree that is wood are the same. Through that we can create a picture that will have an enormously strong effect upon us. In the same way a tree grows into wood, the earth is built upon what lies under the surface. Where no trees, but only annual plants grow, the forces that are otherwise in the trunk of the tree is in the earth itself. We can achieve a living feeling about how to seek the flowing of the sap in the tree trunk under the surface of the earth. Just as the sap that flows within a tree brings forth the blossoming of the year, the sap flowing beneath us, which we can see is identical to the sap flowing in the tree, brings forth annual plants. What I want to say is that we can intimately connect what we see in trees with our view of the earth. We therefore gain an understanding of what is living.

Through such a living characterization of the earth, plants, animals, and human beings, you can directly enliven something in the children that they would otherwise feel as only dead, specifically, in the period from about the age of nine until twelve. During the time when children are particularly interested in gradually differentiating themselves from the world and unconsciously want to learn about the relationship between the human being and the world of animals, on the one hand and, on the other hand, the earth and earthly life separate from the human being, something will grow within children that gives them the proper relationship to the historical life of humanity on Earth. In this way the appropriate feelings develop that allow children to learn about history properly. Before the age of ten or eleven, we have told children about history only in the form of stories or biographies. At about the age of ten or eleven, we include history within the teaching of natural history, so that everywhere a feeling develops in the child through the teaching of natural history that is, in a certain sense, also held in all the concepts and ideas and feelings that can enliven the teaching of history. Only at the age of twelve can we begin to go on to actual reasoning. We will speak more of that tomorrow.

For centuries, no one has been educated in a way appropriate to human nature, which makes it quite impossible to accurately look at human life and compare it with the life of the earth. People express themselves through their view of the world. Quite understandably, people say, for example, that spring is the morning of the year, summer the day, fall the evening, and winter the night. But in reality it is quite different. When we are sleeping, everything that differentiates us from plants slips out of our human form. When we are sleeping, we are not at all justified in looking as we do. Actually, we look the way we do only because we are shaped in accord with our soul and spirit. While sleeping, we are actually more at the level of plants. At that time, as individual human beings, we are no different from the earth with its plant growth. But to which season does our sleep correspond? When we are sleeping, that corresponds to summer, that is, to that period of the year in which the plants are here. To which season does our wakefulness correspond? That is like winter, when plant life ceases and, in a sense, recedes deep within the earth. In the same way, plant life recedes into the human being and is replaced by something else during the period of awakening until falling asleep again. If we do not follow some vague analogy but follow reality, we would have to say that we need to compare human sleep with summer, and the period of human wakefulness with the earth’s winter. Thus the reality of the situation is actually just the opposite of some vague analogy.

At this point I need to say something rather unusual. I have attempted to determine if anyone working in conventional science has even the slightest idea of what I have spoken of as a result of spiritual-scientific research, namely, that the earth is actually awake in winter and asleep in summer. The only small hint I have found which, if properly developed, would lead to what I have just described, I found in the Basel school program developed in the 1840s or ’50s. In that school program there is a discussion about human sleep that is treated in a manner contradictory to normal considerations. I think it is important to make mention of that school program in Basel. At the moment, I have forgotten the name of the person who created it, but I hope I will remember it by tomorrow.

The question I was posed after yesterday’s lecture is directly connected with what I explained in the previous days. It can also be considered today in connection with what we have been talking about. Yesterday I attempted to sketch out a description of how the content of the teaching material may actually not be the most important thing. I said we cannot make directly out of the material we obtain through science or from something else a popularized form adjusted for children, as often is done with biology or zoology, so that a simplified content is taught the children. I drew your attention to how the task of teaching can only become a task of education when we are in a position of being able to transform the material we have to present, regardless of what form it has, into an educational experience. Yesterday, I gave some indication of how to do that for biology and zoology. In education, we need to work more and more toward presenting everything, particularly with children from the ages of six or seven until puberty, in such a way that the forces that are trying to develop in a child can actually be brought to development.

If we are going to be able to do that, we must also be capable of properly using everything the child brings into school. I also mentioned that a large number of children bring into school something that we can well use in teaching, namely, their dialect. The children speak in dialect, and they speak in such a way that the dialects have developed in them under the influence of the instinct for imitation. If we have a talent for observing such things, we can recognize that those children who speak in dialect have a much more intimate relationship to language than those children who do not speak in dialect. The question I was asked yesterday was connected with how we can use the capacity of the children to speak in dialect in school, in teaching them to speak the so-called standard language.

We certainly cannot overlook the fact that the intimate relationship that children who speak in dialect have to their languages exists because the dialect as such, in its words and sentences, has been formed out of a much more intense feeling and willing than standard language, which is based more upon thinking or upon a thinking derived primarily from feeling. In any event, emotion is much less present in standard language when a child learns standard language originally than it is in dialect. The same is also true in regard to the will impulse.

Now this points us at the very beginning to something extremely important for teaching and education, namely, that human beings, more than we normally assume, develop themselves from two sources that are really related to one another like the North and South Poles. If we work in one direction or the other in education or in forming our teaching, if we work to primarily base everything upon visualization so that the child reasons visually and thus slowly develops through a comprehension of the pictures presented, we are going to one extreme. If, on the other hand, we educate the child through using the child’s capacity of memory or count upon the child’s acceptance due to obedience to our authority, we are going to the other extreme.

It is particularly clear in language that these two extremes always belong together in human nature. Language itself has a clearly perceptible musical element, an element which is closely connected with that innermost aspect of the human being. Language also has at the same time a sculptural or drawing element. As very small children, we attempt to imitate, though unconsciously, in our language what we perceive through the senses. It is especially clear in language how the musical and sculptural elements work in two diverging directions. If we educate children more according to the musical element, which in school is expressed primarily through a feeling for authority, we will destroy what exists in the child as a sculptural desire. The musical element of language develops under the influence of authority such that the child continuously has an instinct or a desire to speak, even in the details of the tones, in the same way that a person who is felt to be an authority speaks. A conformity to the authority’s musical element is, whether we want to believe that it is right or wrong, simply there because of the nature of the child. If you have a talent for observing such things, you will quickly notice how the musical element of the child’s language conforms to that of the person educating the child.

A one-sided development of the musical element in language destroys language’s sculptural element. When people only follow the musical element, they are forced more and more to make language an inner experience, to follow their feelings in a certain way by recreating the tone, the intonation, and particularly the nuances of the vowels to conform to those of the people whom they perceive as authorities. This is most certainly true when a child enters elementary school. It is less true for a child in that age between birth and elementary school, when he or she first learns language. During that time, the child is an imitator and develops language out of the entirety of human nature and with a continuous adjustment of the remainder of the human organism to the environment. At that point much enters into speaking which guides language into a more sculptural form. However, because human beings are imitators and imitate right into the innermost activities of their nature, the sculptural element also forms during this time in an inner way. Here we can see one major difference in language development. From birth until the change of teeth, children develop their language sculpturally. If a child has the good fortune to be able to adjust to a dialect during that period of life, one that is more inwardly connected to the human being than standard language, then the child is, in regard to willing and authority aspects of language development, more intimately connected to language than it is with standard language.

Upon entering elementary school, the musical element then replaces the sculptural element, as I mentioned before, and the inner feelings have an effect. However, since the musical element as such counteracts the sculptural element, it is necessary for us to appropriately use in teaching elementary school what the children bring with them, what they have developed in language through their own forces until the age of six or seven.

In language, broadly speaking, the unconscious has had a great effect on the child. We should also learn from the fact that primitive peoples have often developed a much richer grammar than those present in the languages of more civilized peoples. This is seldom taken into account outside of spiritual science, but it is something we should consider as a result of a genuine observation of human beings, namely, that the human being develops a logic from within so that language is actually logically formed. Thus we do not need to teach grammar in a way other than by bringing what already exists as a completely developed language structure into consciousness. When teaching and learning grammar, we need only to follow the general tendency of awakening the child and of bringing that into consciousness. We need only to develop those forces that can be developed until the age of nine, in the sense that I described before. We need to use the instruction in language in order to continue to awaken the child. We can best do that if we use every opportunity that occurs to work from dialect. If we have a child who before the age of seven has already learned a more educated informal language, the socalled standard language, it will be extremely difficult to reach the aspect of the child’s unconscious that has a natural relationship to the logical formation of language, since that has already withered. Thus if we have children who speak dialect and others who do not in the same class, we should always connect our instruction in grammar with what those children who do speak in dialect already provide us.

We first want to try to find the structure of a sentence and then a word from the perspective of dialect. We can do that if we proceed by having a child say a sentence, for example, one that is as simple as possible. The main thing the sentence will always contain is something that is an inner enlivening of an activity. The more often we begin with an inner enlivening of an activity, the more we will be able to achieve an awakening of consciousness in the child while teaching language.

There is a very extensive and clever literature about so-called subjectless sentences, for instance, “It is raining,” “It is lightning,” “It is thundering,” and so forth. The most important point about this is hardly mentioned in all of that research, however. What is most important is that these sentences correspond to the child’s actual understanding. The sentences correspond to that feeling in children that exists in people who are not educated, and where the soul feels itself to be at one with the external world. A differentiation between the I and the external world has not yet been developed. If I say, for example, “It is raining,” this is based upon an unconscious feeling that what is occurring as an activity outside of myself continues in that space within my skin, and that my I does not confront the external world. When saying something like “It is raining” or “It is lightning,” we do not feel ourselves separate from the world. In a certain sense, these subjectless sentences are the original sentences of human nature. They are simply the first step of language development which arrests an activity. Originally, we perceived all of the world as an activity, something we do not consider enough. In a certain sense, in our youngest childhood, we see everything substantial as a substantiated verb and accept it simply as it is. Later, what we become aware of, what is active, is what is active and then occupies our own activity. Now you might say that contradicts the fact that children first say “Papa” or something similar. That is not at all a contradiction, since in speaking the series of sounds, the child brings into life that activity which the corresponding person presents to the child.

Learning to speak is at first the enlivening of an activity whose substantiation occurs only afterwards. This is something that, when we look at dialect, we can certainly take into account. You can attempt to feel that by having a child say something and then trying to feel that within yourself. The words in dialect are such that they are extremely close to what lives in the gesture that accompanies the word in dialect. To a much greater extent dialect words require the person to participate, to live into the word. By feeling the word in dialect you can determine what is an abstraction, and what the subject and the predicate are. The predicate is derived from the activity, whereas the subject is actually more of an intellectual abstraction of the activity. When we have children speak sentences in dialect and we then consider the pictures they provide us with, and we can see those as representing what human beings actually feel when we go on to develop the rules of grammar, we are using instruction in grammar and sentence structure to help the child to awaken.

We can now allow these two things to interact in a wonderful way. We can translate what has been presented in dialect into standard language and then show, through a direct feeling and with a lively interaction with the children, how a certain “aroma” of language is given to the so-called educated informal language, to standard language. From there we can go on to the inner characteristics of standard language. This creates a certain development of thinking. In standard language we need to give much more attention to the development of the thoughts that are its basis than we do with dialect.

Dialect shows us directly that human beings did not develop speech from thinking. Instead they learned to think from language, so it was language that first developed out of the human unconscious. As human beings thought about language, thoughts first arose from language. If we can properly feel this, then we can connect a living feeling with what I would call the genius of language. In many regards language is much more clever than individual human beings. In earliest childhood we can in fact find our way through the complicated organism of language. Only later do we discover those remarkable connections that only a sharp logic can reveal and which exist in language out of our unconscious nature. The spirit has an effect upon language. However, we will not understand that spiritual aspect if we only consider how the spirit, in an abstract form, has an effect upon human beings, in the way that people in our materialistic age like to do.

Perhaps I can again touch something which is often said to be the basis of psychoanalysis but which needs to be understood in a quite different sense than psychoanalysts often do. Let us take something that often occurs in life. A lady is invited to a home where guests have been invited, but the lady of the house is absent that evening because of illness. This lady now attends the party. On the same evening, the lady of the house needs to leave. The party breaks up because the man of the house needs to take his wife to the train. The group of people now go along the street, and a coach comes around the corner. At first the carriage is going very quickly and the group of people move to the left and right of the street to make way. However, the one lady who had been invited that evening runs in front of the horses. She runs and runs, and in spite of all the coachman’s shouting, he is unable to get her to move to one side. She keeps on running in front of the coach, and as they come to a bridge, she recognizes the situation and jumps into the water. She needs to be rescued. The group of people who were at the party don’t know what to do with her except bring her back to the house where they had been invited that evening.

The psychoanalyst would say that this lady was mentally isolated, that she had been startled as a child by a horse that had chased her or something similar, and that this experience was carried in the depths of her mind. Now, on this evening, this experience surfaces again. This is a very clever theory. But those who have learned to observe reality and who have learned to place themselves into reality through spiritual science will not see this as valid.

The truth is quite different. The lady is infatuated with the man of the house, and is quite happy to have been invited to the party on just that day when the lady of the house has to leave. Of course, this lady would not admit this, since she is a very correct person. She could be, in fact, a very correct lady in her consciousness, but what she does not admit has an effect in her subconscious. For that reason, she arranges everything so that all of the guests invited that evening will bring her back to the house when the lady of the house has left. That is what she wanted from the very beginning, but was not at all conscious of it.

Here you can see how thinking, cleverness, and intelligence work without having an effect through the human consciousness. Those who can observe life know that there are people who can arrange things from a distance to achieve what they want without having any conscious idea that they are doing so. Nevertheless everything is all very systematically arranged toward a particular goal. We need to be aware that reason is not only something that we develop, it is also something that acts within us in our nature, something which is active within us long before we become aware of it.

What we want to teach children about language has an effect upon them long before they become aware of it. We should therefore avoid trying to teach them the rules for speaking or writing, but instead enable them to awaken and become aware of what subconsciously acts within. Whether we have one intention or another in our instruction is tremendously important. We should always pay attention to the intention behind teaching.

Speaking a dialect has an intimate connection with the subconscious, so we can develop real grammar and rules for sentence structure from the dialect language by basing our work upon the reason that lives within human nature. If, however, we need to work with children who already speak the standard language, we should whenever possible not work in such a way to develop a kind of grammar through the intellect, and not direct our work by teaching about the dative and accusative and how we write, how periods and commas are placed at particular locations and so forth. We instead need to work in a different way. When we need to teach children who do not speak in dialect, then we must create our instruction and grammar in an artistic way and appeal to a feeling for style.

Children bring an instinct for language with them into elementary school, and we need to develop this feeling wherever possible until the child reaches the age of nine. We can only do this by developing a feeling for style in an artistic way. That is something we can achieve—although in this age where authority is being undermined everywhere this may be laughed at—by using the natural desires of children to follow authority, and thus to form those sentences that we present to the children in the most artistic way. We need to artistically form the sentences so that we draw from the child a feeling for their artistic form. That is something we can do when we make the children aware of the difference between an assertion or a question, or perhaps a statement of feeling, and have the child speak it in such a way that a statement with feeling is spoken with the intonation of an assertion. We can then make the children aware of how an assertion is spoken in a neutral, objective way; whereas a statement of feeling is spoken with certain nuances of feeling. We can work with this artistic element of language, then out of that element develop grammar and syntax.

If we use dialect in order to develop the natural human instinct for language while using standard language in order to awaken an inner feeling for style, we can achieve what is necessary in teaching language. I will speak about this in more detail later, however; for now I simply want to indicate the principles.

This principle shows that we must keep the developing child in mind at all times. We need to ask what is developing at this particular age. If we do not have the feeling that with the change of teeth children are, in a certain sense, born a second time, then we will not have the proper enthusiasm for our teaching. Of course, the physical birth is much more obvious than what occurs at around the age of seven. At birth the physical body of a human being is separated from that body of the mother. With the change of teeth, the human etheric body becomes separate from the physical body, with which the etheric body was intimately connected. The etheric body worked within the physical body to develop the second set of teeth, but now it becomes free. What children bring to school in terms of capacities are actually the free and newborn capacities of the etheric body. This is the first spiritual aspect that a child presents.

When we have a child younger than seven before us, we have it before us only as a physical body. All the child’s spiritual and soul aspects are active within that physical body, and we can reach the child only through the fact that the child itself has a desire to imitate. At the age of seven, the etheric body, that is, all those aspects of human nature which have an etheric component in their substance, now become free and have a life for themselves. I have already mentioned that the human being is more than 75 percent composed of water. Why do people in physiology and anatomy always speak as though the human being consisted of a solid body? What occurs within a human being works in just the same way in fluids. It also occurs in the gaseous state. What develops in a child in regard to spiritual and soul capacities after the change of teeth occurs neither in a solid nor in liquid nor in gaseous state. It occurs instead in what we carry within our body as the etheric, what we carry within us in the form of heat, light, chemical, and life ethers.

It is nonsense to say that thoughts are only processes within the nervous system, imagining the nerves as semi-solid or at least soft forms. No, thoughts occur through direct development, by not being transformed into memories. Thoughts occur in such a way that they do not even have contact with the physical body after the age of seven.

When people think, they think only in their etheric element, which fills their physical bodies. You might, however, object by saying that thoughts become memories and thus remain within the human being. The etheric element is very volatile; all thoughts would dissolve if they were to live only in it. Memory is a much more complicated process than people normally think. Often they have the idea—which is based upon materialism—that when people think, the thoughts they have seek out a place to live somewhere in the human soul, and that we bring them forth again when we recall them. But that is not how it is. If you can observe the process of thinking, you will find that when you see something through your senses in the outer world, you connect thoughts with it. But when you recall something and form a thought, then what you have is something that otherwise comes from the external world but now arises within your own inner world. Just as you comprehend thoughts connected with the external world, you also comprehend thoughts which arise within you. Memory does not occur because thoughts sink down into the soul, but because what physically acts upon the eye and the ear is continued within the physical body. Thinking is a parallel process. This process leaves behind a rhythmical element which can be brought forth inwardly at a later time, so it can be perceived in the same way that external perceptions are.

Probably all of you have observed how young children help themselves so that they can better bring up their memories. They do everything possible in order to strengthen thinking through the senses if they are to remember something. Recall how many children study, how they seek to include within their physical body what they are to learn as a thought, how a physical inclusion occurs in parallel with thinking. When children simply think, they often do not remember. They only remember when they again hear what they have memorized, or are in some other way physically reminded of what they have memorized.

In order for us to remember, there must be some process that works in parallel to thinking. For thinking, it is totally unimportant whether it is developed through the external world or through a memory that arises within. Thinking is something that is fleeting. Thoughts are not retained. It is something else which is retained that then each time gives rise to a new thought. There is no difference between whether I remember something and then create a thought and when I see something in the external world that gives rise to a thought. In the one case, there is a process connected with the external world and in the other case there is a process connected with an inner experience. In any event, when I recall something, my organs go into a rhythmic movement and repeat what they carried out under the impression of the experience. When I have the experience for the first time, that is, while I observe it in the external world, my thoughts develop only in connection with the external world. When I remember something, my thoughts are ignited from within by my organs, which begin to vibrate in the same way as when I first had the experience.

Such things cannot be directly proven in the same way that external processes can be proven. These things must be slowly comprehended so that they become a certainty through a genuine observation of life. When we look at this particular kind of thinking that actually occurs within the volatile element of the etheric and when we determine how the physical organs must be capable of vibrating in the same sense as the etheric vibrates, we will properly comprehend the enormous transformation that human life undergoes through the change of teeth. Up to this point the entire etheric body is active. The heat, chemical, light, and life ethers are active in the organs, forming them in such a way that they can vibrate in material along with the etheric. The etheric body is the architect and sculptor of the physical body. Once the physical body is developed to this degree, under the influence of the etheric body—which actually thinks—the intellect is emancipated from the physical body so that the physical body can vibrate like a violin string when another string is struck. Thus when the physical body has developed to the point that the change of teeth has begun, we can then count upon developing the etheric body as such. We form the physical body at the same time as we form the etheric body. But we need to have a feeling for this birth of the etheric body at the time of the change of teeth.

Going on, we again need to sense that something still higher in human nature is born at puberty, something that previously had been working on a further formation of the human organism. Whether we call what is born at the age of fourteen or fifteen in a human being the astral body and whether we are pleased with that description or not is unimportant. What is important is to realize that just as the intellectual element is born through the etheric body around the age of seven, the entire non-physical soul aspect is born around the age of fourteen or fifteen. Prior to that, feeling and willing are closely connected with the physical organism. Just as thinking is connected with the physical organism until the age of seven, feeling and willing are closely connected with the physical organism, that is, until puberty.

We must therefore be aware that before the age of puberty, which is also when the students graduate from elementary school, we do not under any circumstances bring into thinking—which is slowly developing with the etheric body—anything that could lead to an independence of the will or feeling too early. When the child is educated with love under the guidance of authority—when the child learns feeling and willing under the guidance of others, under the guidance of adult instructors—then at the proper moment, namely at puberty, the child’s own independent feeling and willing will be born. We can only properly develop our feeling and willing in that we allow them to develop under the authority of other people. If we achieve an independent development of will too early, if we achieve what I might call certain secret functions of the will too early, that will damage us for the remainder of our lives. We achieve a subtle functioning of the will too early if we are tempted to subject our moral and religious impulses to our own judgment at too early a time.

Until puberty, children should learn morality and religion through the influence of moral and religious authorities. Only at puberty does the spiritual and soul nature of the human being begin to become free of the body so that we can allow it to make its own judgments. When you say such things today, you have the prejudices of our times against you. As I mentioned this question of a natural feeling for authority in a more or less public lecture in Germany at a time when everything seemed to be under the influence of a revolution (though it did not turn out to be), everyone objected to this because they all wanted to keep the authorities away from children. What they really wanted was that teachers cease to exist and that the children would teach and raise themselves in a democratic way.

I had to answer that this is something that children do not want at all. Children want to be guided, they want to love and learn from authority. What develops within children as a love of authority is connected with their own nature.

When human beings reach sexual maturity, there, of course, develops a love for the other sex. This then becomes individualized into the love of a man for a woman. However, what is thus individualized is at the same time an individual expression for a general love for humanity, for a love for humanity in general. The general love of humanity as well as a love for particular persons develops in the same way as love for the other sex does at sexual maturity. This love that one person has for others develops as an independent force only with sexual maturity, since love must be freed of authority. This kind of love is genuine devotion. Until sexual maturity, love is a need. It is something that the child’s own being demands egotistically. We must recognize that children in elementary school egotistically demand to be able to love. They need to have that person of authority near them on whom they hang, to whom they are devoted because they find pleasure in devotion, into which they are forced by their own nature. That is the primary element in love, whether it be love of humanity or love of nature, love of the stars, or love of supersensible beings and God. It is what lives in the human beings as love, and it is essentially the content of the astral body.

Only when you have thoroughly accepted these things will you be able to develop a proper understanding of how language, at least to the extent that the child brings language to school in the form of a dialect, has developed under the influence of the physical body itself. In contrast, from the age of seven onward, we no longer have a possibility of bringing style into the imaginative element of language if we do not develop a feeling for style itself through our own individual personal relationship, our love for the child. Out of this loving relationship, a feeling for style in more educated, standard language, can grow.

A child that learned a dialect just as it learned to walk already has a feeling for the dialect. It is something we can develop out of the child itself. But it is also useful to make children aware of dialect even if they have not had the good fortune of learning it. Compared to standard language, a dialect is more artistic. Standard language is more related to reason and adheres more to convention. In doing this, we are using something we need to use in education—the artistic element. In a certain sense, we use something existing in the child’s blood that forms the dialect.

I still need to speak about the actual teaching of grammar, about what is, in my opinion, the proper method of teaching arithmetic and so forth. In teaching arithmetic it is important to be able to look closely at what occurs in a young person between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen. If we develop a person contrary to what occurs naturally, we will damage that person for his or her entire life.

It is very easy to teach a person in a way that is against human nature because human nature is split. We thus need to be aware that we damage people when we do something that is correct but take it to an extreme: one side always needs to be rounded off by the other. In language, we need to round off the sculptural element with the musical element. We will see what the situation is with arithmetic. What damages people so much is often the result of their instruction in arithmetic. The way that we learn to do arithmetic generally goes against human nature. Everything that occurs in many people today as a tendency toward materialism is essentially the result of improper instruction in arithmetic around the age of nine. Another thing that is so destructive for the later development of the soul in many people is that they begin to reason too early, and we present the material there to learn in a way for which they are not yet mature enough. They take in a large number of predetermined judgments that then continue to affect them. People often speak about the fact that in human beings one concept or idea associates itself with others. There is nothing more unfortunate than this talk about the association of ideas. When ideas associate with one another in us, when they clump and we run after them, then in our thinking, we are under their control and no longer have power over ourselves. Through education, we must protect people from allowing these associations to gain the upper hand over the will. I will speak more of that tomorrow.

You have seen how spiritual science works toward using educational material as a means for raising children. The scientific forms of the instructional material are presented to the child in such a way that those forces within the child that prepare him or her for development are drawn out. If we are to work fruitfully with the instructional material we have, we need to pay attention to the course of activity of the child’s soul.

If we look at the activity of a human soul, we see two things. The first is a tendency toward analysis and the second is a tendency toward synthesis. Everyone knows from logic or psychology what the essential nature of analysis and synthesis is. But it is important to comprehend these things not simply in their abstract form, as they are normally understood, but in a living way.

We can recall what analysis is if we say to ourselves the following: if we have ten numbers or ten things, then we can imagine these ten things by imagining three, five, and two, and adding to it the idea that ten can be divided, or analyzed as three, five, and two.

When working with synthesis, our concern is just the opposite: we simply add three, five, and two. As I said, in an objective, abstract, and isolated sense, everyone knows what analysis and synthesis are. But when we want to comprehend the life of the human soul, we find that the soul is continuously impelled to form syntheses. For example, we look at an individual animal out of a group of animals and we form a general concept, that of the species. In that case, we summarize, that is, we synthesize. Analysis is something that lies much deeper, almost in the unconscious. This is a desire to make multiplicity out of unity. Since this has been little taken into account, people have understood little of what human freedom represents in the soul. If the activity of the human soul were solely synthetic—that is, if human beings were connected with the external world in such a way that they could onlysynthesize, they could only form concepts of species and so forth—we could hardly speak of human freedom. Everything would be determined by external nature.

In contrast, the soul aspect of all of our deeds is based upon analysis, which enables us to develop freedom in the life of pure thinking. If I am to find the sum of two and five and three, I have no freedom. There is a rule that dictates how much two and five and three are. On the other hand, if I have ten, then I can represent this number ten as nine plus one, or five plus five or three plus five plus two, and so forth. When analyzing, I carry out a completely free inner activity. When synthesizing, I am required by the external world to unfold the life in my soul in a particular way.

In practical life, we analyze when, for example, we take a particular position and say we want to consider one thing or another from this perspective. In this case, we dissect everything we know about the thing into two parts. We analyze and separate everything and then put ourselves in a certain position. For instance, I could consider getting up early purely from the standpoint of, say, a greater inclination to do my work in the early morning. I could also consider getting up early from other perspectives. I might even go so far in my analysis that I have two or three perspectives. In this analytical activity in my soul, I am in a certain way free. Since we develop this analytical soul activity continuously and more or less unconsciously, we are free human beings. No one can overcome the difficulties in the question of human freedom who does not understand this analytical tendency in human beings.

And yet it is just this analytical activity that is normally taken too little into account in teaching and education. We are more likely to take the view that the external world demands synthesis. Consequently synthesizing is what is primarily taken into account rather than analyzing. This is very significant. If, for example, you want to pursue the idea of beginning with dialect when teaching language, it is clear how necessary it is to analyze. The child already has a dialect language. When we have the child speak some sentences, we then need to analyze what already exists in those sentences in order to derive the rules of speech formation from them. We can also develop the analytical activity in instruction much further.

Now I go on to the analysis. I would try to draw the child’s attention to how the word begins with f. Thus, I analyze the f in the context of the word. I then do the same with the i and so forth. Thus we work with human nature as it is when, instead of beginning with letters and synthesizing them into words, we begin with whole words and analyze them into letters.

This is something we also need to take into account, particularly from the perspective of the development of the human soul in preparation for later life. As you all know, we suffer today under the materialistic view of the world. This perspective demands not only that we only accept material things as being valid. It also insists that we trace everything in the world back to the activities of atoms. It is unimportant whether we think of those atoms in the way people thought of them in the 1880s, that is, as small elastic particles made up of some unknown material, or whether we think of them as people do today—as electrical forces or electrical centers of force. What is important in materialism is material itself, and when the tools of materialism are transferred to our view of the spirit and soul, we think of them as being composed of tiny particles and depending upon the activities of those particles. Today we have come so far that we are no longer aware that we are working with hypotheses. Most people believe it is a proven scientific fact that atoms form the basis of phenomena in the external world.

Why have people in our age developed such an inclination for atomism? Because they have developed insufficient analytical activities in children. If we were to develop in children those analytical activities that begin with unified word pictures and then analyze them into letters, the child would be able to activate its capacity to analyze at the age when it first wants to do so; it would not have to do so later by inventing atomic structures and so forth. Materialism is encouraged by a failure to satisfy our desire for analysis. If we satisfied the impulse to analyze in the way that I have described here, we would certainly keep people from sympathizing with the materialistic worldview.

For this reason in the Waldorf School we always teach beginning not with letters, but with complete sentences. We analyze the sentence into words and the words into letters and then the letters into vowels. In this way we come to a proper inner understanding as the child grasps the meaning of what a sentence or word is. We awaken the child’s consciousness by analyzing sentences and words.

When you accept a child as he is and see how he speaks a dialect, then it is not at all necessary to begin with the opposite method. Children understand the unity of sentences much more than we think. Children whose tendency to analyze is accepted develop a greater awareness than is generally the case in today’s population. We have sinned a great deal in education in regard to the awareness in people’s souls. We could actually say that we sleep not only in the time between falling asleep and awakening, nor are we simply awake during the period from awakening until falling asleep. To some extent during daily life we alternate continually between being awake and being asleep. The activity of inhaling and exhaling is at the same time an illumination and a darkening, though we may not notice it. We do not notice it because it occurs quite quickly and because the darkening and illumination are very weak. The rapidity of the process and the subtlety of the changes make this imperceptible. Nevertheless it is true that with every inhalation we go to sleep in a certain sense, and when we exhale, in a certain sense we awaken. In this sense wakefulness and sleeping continually alternate within us.

This is also true of the mind. As a rule, with every analytical activity we awaken, and with every synthesizing activity we fall asleep. Of course this does not mean the ordinary states we are in during the night or day. Even so there is a relationship between analyzing and awakening and synthesizing and falling asleep. We therefore develop a tendency in the child to confront the world with a wakeful soul when we use the child’s desire to analyze, when we develop the individual details from unified things.

This is something we must particularly take into account in teaching arithmetic. We often do not sufficiently consider the relationship of arithmetic to the child’s soul life. First of all we must differentiate between arithmetic and simple counting. Many people think counting represents a kind of addition, but that is not so. Counting is simply naming differing quantities. Of course, counting needs to precede arithmetic, at least counting up to a certain number. We certainly need to teach children how to count. But we must also use arithmetic to properly value those analytical forces that want to be developed in the child’s soul. In the beginning, we need to attempt, for instance, to begin with the number ten and then divide it in various ways. We need to show the children how ten can be separated into five and five, or into three and three and three and one. We can achieve an enormous amount in supporting what human nature actually strives for out of its inner forces when we do not teach addition by saying that the addends are on the left and the sum is on the right, but by saying that we have the sum on the left and the addends on the right. We should begin with analyzing the sum and then work backwards toward addition.

If you wish, you can take this presentation as a daring statement. Nevertheless those who have achieved an unprejudiced view of the forces within human nature will recognize that when we place the sum on the left and the addends on the right, and then teach the child how to separate the sum in any number of ways, we support the child’s desire to analyze. Only afterward do we work with those desires that actually do not play a role within the soul, but instead are important with interactions of people within the external world. What a child analyzes out of a unity exists essentially only for herself. What is synthesized exists always for external human nature.

Now you might say that what I had said previously regarding the concept of species, for example, is the result ofsyntheses. And that is true. However, we cannot understand the process of synthesizing as simply the creation of abstract concepts. Certainly people believe that when we form general concepts such as wolfor lamb, these are general concepts that develop only in our reasoning.This, however, is not the case. The things that exist outside of all substance, and which we comprehend in the idea of a wolf or lamb, are also real. If they were not real, if only material substance were real, then if we were to cage a wolf and feed it only lamb, after a period of time it would have to become like a lamb. Clearly this is something that will not happen because a wolf is something more than simply the matter out of which it is made. The additional aspect of which a wolf consists becomes clear to us through the concept that we form through synthesis. It is certainly also something that corresponds to an external reality. On the other hand, what we in the end separate out of something into various parts corresponds to something subjective in many cases, but particularly in those cases where our concern is to find a point of view. It is certainly a subjective activity when I separate the sum on the left into the addends so that I have the addends on the right. In that case, I have what needs to be on the right. If I have the sum on the left and then separate it into parts, then I can do the separation from various points of view and thus the addends can take on numerous forms. It is very important to develop this freedom of will in children.

Similarly, in multiplication we should not attempt to begin with the factors and proceed to the product. Instead we should begin with the product and form the factors in many various ways. Only afterwards should we turn to the synthesizing activity. This way through arithmetic people may be able to develop the rhythmic activity within the life of the soul that consists of analyzing and synthesizing. In the way we teach arithmetic today, we often emphasize one side too strongly. For the soul, such overemphasis has the same effect as if we wereto heap breath upon breath upon the body and not allow it to exhale in the proper way. It is important to take the individuality of the human being into account in the proper way. This is what I mean when I speak of the fructification that education can experience through spiritual science.

e need to become aware of what actually wants to develop out of the child’s individuality. First we need to know what can be drawn out of the child. At the outset children have a desire to be satisfied analytically; then they want to bring that analysis together through synthesis. We must take these things into account by looking at human nature. Otherwise even the best pedagogical principles—although they may be satisfying to use and we believe they are fulfilling all that is required—will never be genuinely useful because we do not actually try to look at the results of education in life.

People are curiously short-sighted in their judgment. If you had lived during the 1870s, as I did, you would have heard in Prussia (and also from some people in Austria) that Prussia won the war with Austria in 1866 because the Austrian schools at an earlier time were worse than those in Prussia. It was actually the Prussian teachers who won. Since October 1918 I have not heard similar talk in Germany, although there would perhaps be reason to speak that way. But of course the talk in Germany would have to be the other way around.

We can learn from such things. They show how people have too strong a tendency to form judgments not according to the facts, but according to their sympathies and antipathies, according to what they feel. This is because there are many things in human nature that are not developed, but actually demand to be developed as human forces. We will, however, always find our way if we take the rhythmic needs within the whole human being into account. We do that when we do not simply teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. When teaching addition, we should not simply expect answers to the question of what is the sum of so and so much. Instead we should expect answers to the question of how a sum can be separated in various ways. In contrast, the question with regard to subtraction is, from what number do we need to remove five in order to have the result be eight? In general, we need to pose all these kinds of questions in the opposite way to which they are posed in synthetic thinking when interacting with external world.

Here we can place the teaching of arithmetic in parallel with teaching language, where we begin with the whole and then go on to the individual letters. In our Waldorf School it is very pleasing to see the efforts the children make when they take a complete word and try to find out how it sounds, how we pronounce it, what is in the middle, and so forth, and in that way go on to the individual letters. When we atomize or analyze in this way, children will certainly not have any inclination toward materialism or atomism such as everyone does today, because modern people have been taught only synthetic thinking in school and thus their need to be analytical, their need to separate, can only develop in their worldviews.

We must, however, take something else into account. Human nature, as I mentioned yesterday, basically begins with activity and only then goes on to rest. Just as a baby begins by kicking and waving its arms and then becomes quiet, the entirety of human nature begins with activity and must learn how to come to rest. This process actually needs to be developed quite systematically. Thus what is important is that we, in a sense, educate people based upon their own movement.

It is very easy to make an error in that regard today. I have already tried to show how important it is at the beginning of elementary school to work with the musical and singing elements. We need to work with the child’s musical needs as much as possible. Today, however, it would be very easy for an erroneous prejudice against these ideasto arise. If we look at the modern world—and most of you will have already noticed this—there are nearly as many methods of teaching singing as there are singing teachers. Of course each one always believes his or her own method is the best. If we simply apply these methods of teaching singing and music to adults, who are already beyond the age of development, we can allow them to pick and choose the method they want. Essentially all such methods begin with an erroneous position. They assume that we need to quiet the human organs in order to develop the activity that is desired. Thus, in a sense, the activity of the lungs, for example, must be quieted in order to develop that activity in the lungs which in this case, in singing, should predominate. However, just the opposite occurs within human nature. Nearly all methods of teaching singing that I have every seen actually begin with our modern materialism. They begin with the assumption that the human being is somehow mechanical and needs to be quieted in order to be able to develop the necessary activity. This assumption is something that can never be important when we genuinely see the nature of the human being.

The proper method of teaching singing or developing a musical ear assumes that children normally hear properly,and then a desire develops within the child to imitate so that the imitation adjusts to that hearing. Thus the best method is for the teacher to sing to the children with a certain kind of love and to adjust to what is missing in them musically. In that way, the natural need of the students to imitate and have their mistakes corrected is awakened though what they hear from the teacher. However, in singing, children need to learn what instinctively results from quieting the organs. In the same way, speaking serves to regulate the human breathing rhythm. In school we need to work so that the children learn how to bring their speech into a peaceful regularity. We need to require that the children speak syllable for syllable, that they speak slowly and that they properly form the syllables so that nothing of the word is left out. The children need to grow accustomed to proper speech and verse, to well-formed speech, and develop a feeling rather than a conscious understanding of the rise and fall of the tones in verses. We need to speak to the children in the proper way so that they learn to hear.

During childhood the larynx and neighboring organs adjust to the hearing. As I said, the methods common today may be appropriate for adults, as what results from those methods will be included or not included in one way or another by life itself. In school, however, we need to eliminate all such artificial methods. Here what is most needed is the natural relationship of the teacher to the student. The loving devotion of the child to the teacher should replace artificial methods. I would, in fact, say that intangible effects should be the basis of our work. Nothing would be more detrimental than if all the old aunts and uncles with their teaparty ideas of music and methods were to find their way into school. In school what should prevail is the spirit of the subject. But that can only occur when you, the teacher, are enveloped by the subject, not when you want to teach the subject to the children through external methods.

If in the school education becomes more of an art such as we have been discussing, then I believe people will be less inclined to learn things according to some specific method than they are today. If children at the age of six or seven are taught music and singing in a natural way, later on they will hardly take any interest in the outrageous methods that play such a large role in modern society.

In my opinion, modern education should also require the teacher to look objectively at everything in the artificiality of our age, and eliminate it through instruction during elementary school. There are many things—such as the methods I just mentioned—that are very difficult to overcome. The people who use such methods are fanatical and can see only how their methods may reform the world. In general, it is useless to try to discuss such things reasonably and objectively with these people. Such things can only be brought into their proper context by the next generation. Here is where we can make an impact. In regard to society it is always the next generation that accomplishes a great deal. The art of teaching and education consists not only of the methods used, but also of the perspective that results from the teacher’s interest in the general development of humanity. Teachers need to have a comprehensive interest in the development of humanity, and they need to have an interest in everything that occurs during the present time. The last thing a teacher should do is to limit his or her interests. The interests we develop for the cultural impulses of our age have an enlivening effect upon our entire attitude and bearing as teachers. You will excuse me when I say that much of what is properly felt to be pedantic in schools would certainly go away if the faculty were interested in the major events of life and if they would participate in public activities. Of course, people don’t like to see this, particularly in reactionary areas, but it is important for education not to simply have a superficial interest.

A question was asked of me today that is connected with what I have just said. I was asked what the direction of language is, what we should do so that all of the words that have lost their meaning no longer form a hindrance to the development of thinking, so that a new spiritual life can arise. An English mathematician who attempted to form a mathematical description of all the ways of thinking recently said, in a lecture he gave on education, that style is the intellectual ethical aspect. I think this could be a genuine literary ideal. In order to speak or write ethically each person would need a particular vocabulary for himself, just as each people does now. In language as it is now, the art of drama only develops the words, but seldom develops general human concepts. How can we transform language so that in the future the individual thought or feeling, as well as the generality of the individual concept, becomes audible or visible? Or should language simply disappear and be replaced by something else in the future?

Now that is certainly quite a collection of questions! Nevertheless I want to go into them a little today; tomorrow and the next day I will speak about them in more detail. It is necessary to look into how more external relationships to language exist in our civilized languages, since they are in a certain way more advanced than external relationships that exist in other languages. There is, for example, something very external in translation by taking some text in one language and looking up the words in a dictionary. When working this way you will in general not achieve what exists in the language beyond anything purely external. Language is not simply permeated by reason; it is directly experienced, directly felt. For that reason, people would become terribly externalized if everyone were to speak some general language like Esperanto. I am not prejudiced; I have heard wonderful-sounding poems in Esperanto. But much of what lives in a language in regard to the feelings, the life of the language, would be lost through such a universal language. This is also something that is always lost when we simply translate one language word for word into another using a dictionary. We therefore need to say that in one sense the man who spoke about that here was quite correct, although it is not good to make such things into formulas. It is not good to try to formulate thoughts mathematically or to do other things that are only of interest in the moment. What we can say, though, is that it is important for us to try to imbue our language with spirit. Our language, like all civilized languages, has moved strongly into clichés. For that reason, it is particularly good to work with dialect.

Dialects, where they are spoken, are more alive than so-called standard language. A dialect contains much more personal qualities: it contains secret, intimate qualities. People who speak in dialect speak more accurately than those who speak standard language. In dialect, it is more difficult to lie than it is in standard language. That assertion may appear paradoxical to you, but it is nevertheless true in a certain sense. Of course I am not saying there are no bald-faced liars who speak dialect. But it is true that such people must be much worse than they would need to be if they were to lie only in educated, standard language. There you do not need to be as bad in order to lie, because the language itself enables lying more than when you speak in dialect. You need to be a really bad person if you are to lie in dialect because people love the words in dialect more than they do those of standard language. People are ashamed to use words in dialect as clichés, whereas the words in standard language can easily be used as clichés. This is something that we need to teach people in general—that there are genuine experiences in the words. Then we need to bring life into the language as well.

Today hardly anyone is interested in trying to bring life into language. I have tried to do that in my books in homeopathic doses. In order to make certain things understandable, I have used in my books a concept that has the same relationship to force as water flowing in a stream does to the ice on top of the stream. I used the word kraften (to work actively, forcefully). Usually we only have the word Kraft, meaning “power” or “force.” We do not speak of kraften. We can also use similar words. If we are to bring life into language, then we also need a syntax that is alive, not dead. Today people correct you immediately if you put the subject somewhere in the sentence other than where people are accustomed to having it. Such things are still just possible in German, and you still have a certain amount of freedom. In the Western European languages—well, that is just terrible, everything is wrong there. You hear all the time that you can’t say that, that is not English, or that is not French. But, to say “that is not German” is not possible. In German you can put the subject anywhere in the sentence. You can also give an inner life to the sentence in some way. I do not want to speak in popular terms, but I do want to emphasize the process of dying in the language. A language begins to die when you are always hearing that you cannot say something in one way or another, that you are speaking incorrectly. It may not seem as strange but it is just the same as if a hundred people were to go to a door and I were to look at them and decide purely according to my own views who was a good person and who was a bad person. Life does not allow us to stereotype things. When we do that, it appears grotesque. Life requires that everything remain in movement. For that reason, syntax and grammar must arise out of the life of feeling, not out of dead reasoning. That perspective will enable us to continue with a living development of language.

Goethe introduced much dialect into language. It is always good to enliven written language with dialect because it enables words to be felt in a warmer, more lively way. We should also consider that a kind of ethical life is brought into language. (This, of course, does not mean that we should be humorless in our speech. Friedrich Theodore Vischer2 wrote a wonderful book about the difference between frivolity and cynicism. It also contains a number of remarks about language usage and about how to live into language.) When teaching language, we have a certain responsibility to use it also as a training for ethics in life. Nevertheless there needs to be some feeling; it should not be done simply according to convention. We move further and further away from what is alive in language if we say, as is done in the Western European languages, that one or another turn of phrase is incorrect and that only one particular way of saying things is allowed.

If we look again at the three most important phases of elementary school, then we see that they are: first, from entering elementary school at about the age of six or seven until the age of nine; then second, from the age of nine until about the age of twelve; and finally from twelve until puberty. The capacity to reason independently only begins to occur when people have reached sexual maturity, even though a kind of preparation for this capacity begins around the age of twelve. For this reason, the third phase of elementary school begins about the age of twelve.

Every time a new phase occurs in the course of human life, something is born out of human nature. I have previously noted how the same forces—which become apparent as the capacity to remember, the capacity to have memories, and so forth—that appear at about the age of seven have previously worked upon the human organism up until that age. The most obvious expression of that working is the appearance of the second set of teeth. In a certain sense, forces are active in the organism that later become important during elementary school as the capacity to form thoughts. They are active but hidden. Later they are freed and become independent. The forces that become independent we call the forces of the etheric body.

Once again at puberty other forces become independent which guide us into the external world in numerous ways. Hidden within that system of forces is also the capacity for independent reasoning. We can therefore say that the actual medium of the human capacity for reason, the forces within the human being that give rise to reasoning, are basically born only at the time of puberty, and have slowly been prepared for that birth beginning at the age of twelve.

When we know this and can properly honor it, then we also become aware of the responsibility we take upon ourselves if we accustom people to forming independent judgments too soon. The most damaging prejudices in this regard prevail at the present time. People want to accustom children to forming independent judgments as early as possible.

I previously said that we should relate to children until puberty in such a way that they recognize us as an authority, that they accept something because someone standing next to them who is visibly an authority requests it and wants it. If we accustom children to accepting the truth simply because we as authorities present it to them, we will prepare them properly for having free and independent reasoning later in life. If we do not want to serve as an authority figure for the child and instead try to disappear so that everything has to develop out of the child’s own nature, we are demanding a capacity for reason too early, before what we call the astral body becomes free and independent at puberty. We would be working with the astral body by allowing it to act upon the physical nature of the child. In that way we will impress upon the child’s physical body what we should actually only provide for his soul. We are preparing something that will continue to have a damaging effect throughout the child’s life.

There is quite a difference between maturing to free judgment at the age of fourteen or fifteen—when the astral body, which is the carrier of reasoning, has become free after a solid preparation—than if we have been trained in so-called independent judgment at too early an age. In the latter case, it is not our astral aspect, that is, our soul, which is brought into independent reasoning, but our physical body instead. The physical body is drawn in with all its natural characteristics, with its temperament, its blood characteristics, and everything that gives rise to sympathy and antipathy within it, with everything that provides it with no objectivity. In other words, if a child between the ages of seven and fourteen is supposed to reason independently, the child reasons out of that part of human nature which we later can no longer rid ourselves of if we are not careful to see that it is cared for in a natural way, namely, through authority, during the elementary school period. If we allow children to reason too early, it will be the physical body that reasons throughout life. We then remain unsteady in our reasoning, as it depends upon our temperament and all kinds of other things in the physical body. If we are prepared in a way appropriate to the physical body and in a way that the nature of the physical body requires—that is, if we are brought up during the proper time under the influence of authority—then the part of us that should reason becomes free in the proper way and later in life we will be able to achieve objective judgment. Therefore the best way to prepare someone to become a free and independent human being is to avoid guiding the child toward freedom at too early an age.

This can cause a great deal of harm if it is not used properly in education. In our time it is very difficult to become sufficiently aware of this. If you talk about this subject with people today who are totally unprepared and who have no good will in this regard, you will find yourself simply preaching to deaf ears. Today we live much more than we believe in a period of materialism, and it is this age of materialism that needs to be precisely recognized by teachers. They need to be very aware of how much materialism is boiling up within modern culture and modern attitudes.

I would now like to describe this matter from a very different perspective. Something remarkable happened in European civilization around 1850, although it was barely noticed: a direct and basic feeling for rhythm was to a very large extent lost. Hence we now have people a few generations later who have entirely lost this feeling for rhythm. Such people are completely unaware of what this lack of rhythm means in raising children. In order to understand this, we need to consider the following.

In life people alternate between sleeping and being awake. People think they understand the state called wakefulness because they are aware of themselves. During this time, through sense impressions they gain an awareness of the external world. But they do not know the state between falling asleep and awakening. In modern life, people have no awareness of themselves then. They have few, if any, direct conscious perceptions of the external world. This is therefore a state in which life moves into something like a state of unconsciousness.

We can easily gain a picture of the inner connections between these two states only when we recognize two polar opposites in human life that have great significance for education. I am referring here to drawing and music, two opposites I have already mentioned and which I would like to consider from a special point of view again today.

Let us first look at drawing, in which I also include painting and sculpting. While doing so, let us recall everything in regard to drawing that we consider to be important to the child from the beginning of elementary school. Drawing shows us that, out of his or her own nature, the human being creates a form we find reflected in the external world. I have already mentioned that it is not so important to hold ourselves strictly to the model. Instead we need to find a feeling for form within our own nature. In the end, we will recognize that we exist in an element that surrounds us during our state of wakefulness in the external world, in everything that we do forming spatially. We draw lines. We paint colors. We sculpt shapes. Lines present themselves to us, although they do not exist in nature as such. Nevertheless they present themselves to us through nature, and the same is true of colors and forms.

Let us look at the other element, which we can call musical, that also permeates speech. Here we must admit that in what is musical we have an expression of the human soul. Like sculpting and drawing, everything that is expressed through music has a very rudimentary analogy to external nature. It is not possible to simply imitate with music that which occurs naturally in the external world, just as it is not possible, in a time where a feeling for sculpting or drawing is so weak, to simply imitate the external world. We must ask ourselves then if music has no content. Music does have its own content. The content of music is primarily its melodic element. Melodies need to come to us. When many people today place little value upon the melodic element, it is nothing more than a characteristic of our materialistic age. Melodies simply do not come to people often enough. We can well compare the melodic element with the sculptural element. It is certainly true that the sculptural element is related to space. In the same way the melodic element is related to time. Those who have a lively feeling for this relationship will realize that the melodic element contains a kind of sculpting. In a certain way, the melodic element corresponds to what sculpting is in the external world.

Let us now look at something else. You are all acquainted with that flighty element in the life of our souls that becomes apparent in dreams. If we concern ourselves objectively with that element of dreaming, we slowly achieve a different view of dreams than the ordinary one. The common view of dreams focuses upon the content of the dream, which is what commonly interests most people. But as soon as we concern ourselves objectively with this wonderful and mysterious world of dreams, the situation becomes different. Someone might talk about the following dream.

I climbed up a mountain, but just before I came to the peak there was an obstacle that I was unable to overcome. I was therefore unable to reach the peak. As I attempted to overcome that obstacle, I was met by evil, unfriendly animals, beings with demonic forms.

Another person might describe the following:

I was walking along a path and came to a cave. I went into the cave and it grew suddenly dark so I could go no further. I then encountered all kinds of obstacles, but I could go no further and could not reach my goal.

A third or a fourth person could tell still other stories. The pictures are quite different. One person dreams about climbing a mountain, another about going into a cave, and a third about still something else. It is not the pictures that are important. The pictures are simply woven into the dream. What is important is that the person experiences a kind of tension into which they fall when they are unable to solve something that can first be solved upon awakening. It is this moving into a state of tension, the occurrence of the tension, of becoming tense that is expressed in the various pictures.

What is important is that human beings in dreams experience increasing and decreasing tension, resolution, expectations, and disappointments, in short, that they experience inner states of the soul that are then expressed in widely differing pictures. The pictures are similar in their qualities of increase and decrease. It is the state of the soul that is important, since these experiences are connected to the general state of the soul. It is totally irrelevant whether a person experiences one picture or another during the night. It is not unimportant, however, whether one experiences a tension and then its resolution or first an expectation and then a disappointment, since the person’s state of mind on the next day depends upon it. It is also possible to experience a dream that reflects the person’s state of soul that has resulted from a stroke of fate or from many other things. In my opinion, it is the ups and downs that are important. That which appears, that forms the picture at the edge of awakening, is only a cloak into which the dream weaves itself.

When we look more closely at the world of dreams, and when we ask ourselves what a human being experiences until awakening, we will admit that until we awaken, these ups and downs of feeling clothe themselves in pictures just at the moment of awakening. Of course, we can perceive this in characteristic dreams such as this one:

A student stands at the door of a lecture room. He dreams about how another student comes up to him and says such nasty things that it is obvious that this is a challenge to duel. The student dreams that the seconds are chosen, that they go out into the forest, and that everything is prepared. First shot. The student hears this sound and awakens to find that he has knocked over a chair standing next to his bed: that was the shot. That was the only external event.

Thus the entire picture of the dream flashed through his head at that moment. However, what was clothed in those pictures is a lasting state of his soul.

Now you need to seriously compare what lies at the basis of these dreams—the welling up and subsiding of feelings, the tension and its resolution or perhaps the tendency toward something which then leads to some calamity and so forth. Compare that seriously with what lies at the basis of the musical element and you will find in those dream pictures only something that is irregular (not rhythmic). In music, you find something that is very similar to this welling up and subsiding and so forth. If you then continue to follow this path, you will find that sculpture and drawing imitate the form in which we find ourselves during ordinary life from awakening until falling asleep. Melodies, which are connected to music, give us the experiences of an apparently unconscious state, and they occur as reminiscences of such in our daily lives. People know so little about the actual origins of musical themes because they experience what lives in musical themes only during the period from falling asleep till awakening. This exists for human beings today as a still-unconscious element, though revealed through forming pictures in dreams. However, we need to take up this unconscious element that prevails in dreams and which also prevails as melody in music in our teaching, so that we rise above materialism.

If you understand the spirit of what I have just presented, you will recognize how everywhere there has been an attempt to work with this unconscious element. I have done that first by showing how the artistic element is necessary right from the very beginning of elementary school. I have insisted that we should use the dialect that the children speak to reveal the content of grammar, that is, we should take the children’s language as such and accept it as something complete and then use it as the basis for presenting grammar. Think for a moment about what you do in such a case. In what period of life is speech actually formed? Attempt to think back as far as you can in the course of your life, and you will see that you can remember nothing from the period in which you could not speak. Human beings learn language in a period when they are still sleeping through life. If you then compare the dreamy world of the child’s soul with dreams and with how melodies are interwoven in music, you will see that they are similar. Like dreaming, learning to speak occurs through the unconscious, and is something like an awakening at dawn. Melodies simply exist and we do not know where they come from. In reality, they arise out of this sleep element of the human being. We experience a sculpting with time from the time we fall asleep until we awaken. At their present stage of development human beings are not capable of experiencing this sculpting with time. You can read about how we experience that in my book How to Know Higher Worlds. That is something that does not belong to education as such. From that description, you will see how necessary it is to take into account that unconscious element which has its effect during the time the child sleeps. It is certainly taken into account in our teaching of music, particularly in teaching musical themes, so that we must attempt to exactly analyze the musical element to the extent that it is present in children in just the same way as we analyze language as presented in sentences. In other words, we attempt to guide children at an early age to recognize themes in music, to actually feel the melodic element like a sentence. Here it begins and here it stops; here there is a connection and here begins something new. In this regard, we can have a wonderful effect upon the child’s development by bringing an understanding of the not-yet-real content of music. In this way, the child is guided back to something that exists in human nature but is almost never seen.

Nearly everyone knows what a melody is and what a sentence is. But a sentence that consists of a subject, a predicate, and an object and which is in reality unconsciously a melody is something that only a few people know. Just as we experience the rising and subsiding of feelings as a rhythm in sleeping, which we then become conscious of and surround with a picture, we also, in the depths of our nature, experience a sentence as music. By conforming to the outer world, we surround what we perceive as music with something that is a picture. The child writes the essay—subject, predicate, object. A triplet is felt at the deepest core of the human being. That triplet is used through projecting the first tone in a certain way upon the child, the second upon writing, and the third upon the essay. Just as these three are felt and then surrounded with pictures (which, however, correspond to reality and are not felt as they are in dreams), the sentence lives in our higher consciousness; whereas in our deepest unconsciousness, something musical, a melody, lives. When we are aware that, at the moment we move from the sense-perceptible to the supersensible, we must rid ourselves of the sense-perceptible content, and in its place experience what eludes us in music—the theme whose real form we can experience in sleep—only then can we consider the human being as a whole. Only then do we become genuinely aware of what it means to teach language to children in such a living way that the child perceives a trace of melody in a sentence. This means we do not simply speak in a dry way, but instead in a way that gives the full tone, that presents the inner melody and subsides through the rhythmic element.

Around 1850 European people lost that deeper feeling for rhythm. Before that, there was still a certain relationship to what I just described. If you look at some treatises that appeared around that time about music or about the musical themes from Beethoven and others, then you will see how at about that time those who were referred to as authorities in music often cut up and destroyed in the most unimaginable ways what lived in music. You will see how that period represents the low point of experiencing rhythm.

As educators, we need to be aware of that, because we need to guide sentences themselves back to rhythm in the school. If we keep that in mind, over a longer period of time we will begin to recognize the artistic element of teaching. We would not allow the artistic element to disappear so quickly if we were required to bring it more into the content.

All this is connected with a question that was presented to me yesterday and which I can more thoroughly discuss in this connection. The question was, “Why is it not possible to teach proper handwriting to those children who have such a difficult time writing properly?” Those who might study Goethe’s handwriting or that of other famous people will get the odd impression that famous people often have very strange handwriting. In education, we certainly cannot allow a child to have sloppy handwriting on the grounds that the child will probably someday be a famous person and we should not disturb him. We must not allow that to influence us. But what is actually present when a child writes in such a sloppy manner? If you make some comparisons, you will notice that sloppy handwriting generally arises from the fact that such children have a rather unmusical ear, or if not that, then a reason that is closely related to it. Children write in a sloppy way because they have not learned to hear precisely: they have not learned to hear a word in its full form.

There may be different reasons why children do not hear words correctly. The child may be growing up in a family or environment where people speak unclearly. In such a case, the child does not learn to hear properly and will thus not be able to write properly, or at least not very easily. In another case, a child may tend to have little perception for what he or she hears. In that case, we need to draw the child’s attention to listening properly. In other situations it is the teacher who is responsible for the child’s poor handwriting. Teachers should pay attention to speaking clearly and also to using very descriptive language. They do not have to speak like actors, making sure to enunciate the ending syllable. But they must accustom themselves to living into each syllable, so that the syllables are clearly spoken and children will be more likely to repeat the syllables in a clear way. When you speak in a clear and complete way, you will be able to achieve a great deal with regard to proper handwriting for some children. All this is connected with the unconscious, with the dream and sleep element, since the sleep element is simply the unconscious element. It is not something we should teach to children in an artificial way.

What is the basis of listening? That is normally not discussed in psychology. In the evening we fall asleep and in the morning we awake; that is all we know. We can think about it afterward by saying to ourselves that we are not conscious during that period. Conventional, nonspiritual science is unaware of what occurs to us from the time we fall asleep until we awaken. However, the inner state of our soul is no different when we are listening than when we are sleeping. The only difference is that there is a continual movement from being within ourselves to being outside ourselves. It is extremely important that we become aware of this undulation in the life of our souls. When I listen, my attention is turned toward the outer world. However, while listening, there are moments where I actually awaken within myself. If I did not have those moments, listening would be of absolutely no use. While we are listening or looking at something, there is a continual awakening and falling asleep, even though we are awake. It is a continual undulation—waking, falling asleep, waking, falling asleep. In the final analysis, our entire relationship to the external world is based upon this capacity to move into the other world, which could be expressed paradoxically as “being able to fall asleep.” What else could it mean to listen to a conversation than to fall asleep into the content of the conversation? Understanding is awakening out of the conversation, nothing more. What that means, however, is that we should not attempt to reach what should actually be developed out of the unconsciousness, out of the sleeping or dreaming of the human being in a conscious way.

For that reason, we should not attempt to teach children proper handwriting in an artificial way. Instead we should teach them by properly speaking our words and then having the child repeat the words. Thus we will slowly develop the child’s hearing and therefore writing. We need to assume that if a child writes in a sloppy way, she does not hear properly. Our task is to support proper hearing in the child and not to do something that is directed more toward full consciousness than hearing is.

As I mentioned yesterday, we should also take such things into account when teaching music. We must not allow artificial methods to enter into the school where, for instance, the consciousness is mistreated by such means as artificial breathing. The children should learn to breathe through grasping the melody. The children should learn to follow the melody through hearing and then adjust themselves to it. That should be an unconscious process. It must occur as a matter of course. As I mentioned, we should have the music teachers hold off on such things until the children are older, when they will be less influenced by them. Children should be taught about the melodic element in an unconscious way through a discussion of the themes. The artificial methods I mentioned have just as bad an effect as it would have to teach children drawing by showing them how to hold their arms instead of giving them a feeling for line. It would be like saying to a child, “You will be able to draw an acanthus leaf if you only learn to hold your arm in such and such a way and to move it in such and such a way.” Through this and similar methods, we do nothing more than to simply consider the human organism from a materialistic standpoint, as a machine that needs to be adjusted so it does one thing properly. If we begin from a spiritual standpoint, we will always make the detour through the soul and allow the organism to adjust itself to what is properly felt in the soul.

We can therefore say that if we support the child in the drawing element, we give the child a relationship to its environment, and if we support the child in the musical element, then we give the child a relationship to something that is not in our normal environment, but in the environment we exist in from the time of falling asleep until awakening. These two polarities are then combined when we teach grammar, for instance. Here we need to interweave a feeling for the structure of a sentence with an understanding of how to form sentences.

We need to know such things if we are to properly understand how beginning at approximately the age of twelve, we slowly prepare the intellectual aspect of understanding, namely, free will. Before the age of twelve, we need to protect the child from independent judgments. We attempt to base judgment upon authority so that authority has a certain unconscious effect upon the child. Through such methods we can have an effect unbeknownst to the child. Through this kind of relationship to the child, we already have an element that is very similar to the musical dreamlike element.

Around the age of twelve, we can begin to move from the botanical or zoological perspective toward the mineral or physical perspective. We can also move from the historical to the geographical perspective. It is not that such things should only begin at the age of twelve, but rather before then they should be handled in such a way that we use judgment less and feeling more. In a certain sense, before the age of twelve we should teach children history by presenting complete and rounded pictures and by creating a feeling of tension that is then resolved. Thus, before the age of twelve, we will primarily take into account how we can reach the child’s feeling and imagination through what we teach about history. Only at about the age of twelve is the child mature enough to hear about causality in history and to learn about geography.

If you now look at what we should teach children, you will feel the question of how we are to bring the religious element into all this so that the child gains a fully rounded picture of the world as well as a sense of the supersensible. People today are in a very difficult position in that regard. In the Waldorf School, pure externalities have kept us from following the proper pedagogical perspective in this area. Today we are unable to use all of what spiritual science can provide for education in our teaching other than to apply the consequences of it in how we teach. One of the important aspects of spiritual science is that it contains certain artistic impulses that are absorbed by human beings so that they not only simply know things, but they can do things. To put it in a more extreme way, people therefore become more adept; they can better take up life and thus can also exercise the art of education in a better way.

At the present time, however, we must refrain from bringing more of what we can learn from spiritual science into education than education can absorb. We were not able to form a school based upon a particular worldview at the Waldorf School. Instead from the very beginning I stipulated that Protestant teachers would teach the Protestant religion. Religion is taught separately, and we have nothing to do with it. The Protestant teacher comes and teaches the Protestant religion, just as the Catholic religion is taught by the Catholic priest or whomever the Catholic Church designates, the rabbi teaches the Jews, and so forth. At the present time we have been unable to bring more of spiritual science in other than to provide understanding for our teaching. The Waldorf School is not a parochial school.

Nevertheless the strangest things have occurred. A number of people have said that because they are not religious, they will not send their children to the Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish religion teachers. They have said that if we do not provide a religion teacher who teaches religion based solely upon a general understanding, they will not send their children to religion class at all. Thus those parents who wanted an anthroposophically oriented religion class to a certain extent forced us to provide one. This class is given, but not because we have a desire to propagate anthroposophy as a worldview. It is quite different to teach anthroposophy as a worldview than it is to use what spiritual science can provide in order to make education more fruitful.

We do not attempt to provide the content. What we do attempt to provide is a capacity to do. A number of strange things then occurred. For example, a rather large number of children left the other religion classes in order to join ours. That is something we cannot prohibit. It was very uncomfortable for me, at least from the perspective of retaining a good relationship to the external world. It was also quite dangerous, but that is the way it is. From the same group of parents we hear that the teaching of other religions will soon cease anyway. That is not at all our intent, as the Waldorf School is not intended as a parochial school. Today nowhere in the civilized world is it possible to genuinely teach out of the whole. That will be possible only when through the threefold social organism cultural life becomes independent. So long as that is not the case, we will not be able to provide the same religious instruction for everybody. Thus what we have attempted to do is to make education more fruitful through spiritual science.

When you have taught the children in the way I have indicated, at around the age of twelve you will see they are mature enough to comprehend history on the one hand and to learn about geography, physics, and chemistry on the other. At that age they are also mature enough to prepare for genuinely practical life. Today I would like to give you an outline of this.

Children are not mature enough to understand history before the age of twelve. You can certainly prepare them for learning about history by telling stories or by giving them short biographical sketches, or even by telling them stories with a moral. They become mature enough to learn history through learning about botany and zoology as I have described it. You can achieve a great deal in regard to history if, in botany, you have presented the earth as a unity and shown how the various plants grow upon the earth’s surface during the different seasons of the year, and if they understand the human being as a synthesis of various groups of animals—that is, if you have presented each of the animal groups as something one-sided which then harmoniously unites with the others in the human being. When children move through such ideas, you prepare them for learning history.

When we begin to teach children history, it is important that we use it to develop and support certain forces of human nature and, in a certain sense, to fulfill the longings of human nature during this period of life. If we present history in the ordinary fashion, however, we encounter considerable resistance. Today’s usual presentation of history is actually only the narration of certain events or the summarizing of those events or cultural forms from a particular causal perspective. It essentially emphasizes the superficiality of what occurred. If you remain objective about it, you will feel that this form of history fails to properly describe what really lies at the basis of human development.

We often hear that history should keep from talking about wars or other external events, and that it should instead present the causal relationships of cultural events. It is very questionable whether we are justified in assuming such causal relationships as, for example, that what occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century resulted from what occurred in the first half, and so forth. We could certainly express the basis of human historical development in a quite different way. In teaching history, it is important not to let ourselves go and try to teach in such a way that we ourselves understand only very little. Of course, we assume that we all learned history at the university, that we understand history as a whole, but that is not what I am talking about. What I mean is that when we begin to teach a particular history class, we normally just start somewhere and assume that what follows the given period will be properly taken up at a later time. That is why history is generally taught as just a series of events in time.

Teaching this way does not actually take into account the forces that emanate from human nature. And yet that is what we must do. We should, for example, be clear that the most important thing is what we, as human beings living in the present, experience as history. If we take the children back to Greek history in an abstract way, even if they are at a college-preparatory level, it leads only to an abstract placement in an earlier time. The children will not concretely understand why modern people need to know anything about the Greek era. They will immediately understand what is important, however, if you begin by describing how we experience the effects of the Greek period in the present. Therefore we first need to give the children a picture of these effects, which we can do in various ways. We could have prepared that previously, but in teaching history, we must begin by describing how what existed at a particular historical time still exists in the present.

An objective survey of our culture will easily show you the following. If I were to describe in detail what I now wish to outline, it would take too much time, but each of you can do that for yourself. Here I want only to indicate the general guidelines. Everything we have as comprehensive and universal ideas, that is, everything we live by in terms of ideas, we essentially have inherited from the Greek period. Certain feelings about art that occupy our souls are only a result of the Greek period. Take any of the most common examples, things we work with every day, for example, the concept of cause and effect, or even the concept of the human being itself. The Greeks developed every universal concept we have. They even developed the concept of history. Thus if we look at our entire life of ideas, we will find we have inherited it from the Greeks.

We can describe our entire universe of ideas and concepts for students at a quite elementary level without even mentioning that they arose in Greece. We can speak completely from the perspective of the present and leave it at that for the time being. We could then attempt to do something dramatic or lyrical with the children, so that we indicate, for instance, how a drama is divided into acts, how the drama is built up, leading to a climax, which is then resolved. In that way we can develop an elementary concept of catharsis. We do not need to develop any complicated philosophical ideas in children, but we can provide them with the concept of catharsis by showing how a certain feeling of tension is developed in the drama, how we are led into a feeling of sympathy or fear, and then how we can learn to have a balance in our feelings of fear or sympathy. Then we can tell them how the Greeks developed all these as the most important aspects of drama. This is all possible when we have properly prepared the children for what they are to learn around the age of twelve. We can then show the children some Greek work of art, say, a figure of Aphrodite, and explain how beauty is revealed in it. We could even go so far as to explain the artistic difference between what is at rest and what is in movement. We can also give them some ideas about public life if we discuss the basic political ideas during the Greek period in connection with modern public life.

After we have discussed all of these things, we can try to present the basic character of Greek history to the children. We should try to make it clear to the children how the Greek city-states worked, and that people with a certain character lived in Greece. Our main task, therefore, is to show that these things we are discussing are still alive today and that they arose with the Greeks, for example by showing how sculpture developed during the Greek period or how cities developed and so forth. Begin with what still exists today, then go on to show the children how such things first developed and took control of human development during the Greek period. That will give the children a very concrete idea of everything the Greek period gave to the development of humanity.

Through such a presentation, the children should get the idea that historical life is not something that endlessly repeats itself. Instead a specific period achieves something quite specific for humanity, something that then remains. The children should also learn how later periods achieved other things, which also remain. In that way they can gain a firm footing in the present and can then say to themselves that their own period of history has something quite specific to achieve for eternity. Such a presentation of history has a genuine effect upon the soul and excites the will. How you give such a presentation is extremely important. Through the presentation you have the opportunity to give the children a large number of ideas and impressions and to show that it was the Greeks who introduced such things into human life.

You can also speak to the children about things that happened a long time ago and are still living but do not contain any Christian aspects. When we speak about the ancient Greek culture in such a way that it is perceived as living, we are working with material that contains nothing of Christianity. However, it is precisely in awakening ideas in the children that have remained alive over a long period of time, and are neutral in relationship to Christianity, that we have the possibility of clearly presenting the effects of the event of Golgotha and the rise of Christianity. After we have presented Greek history by characterizing the entirety of Greek culture, we can go into the details. If we have covered Greek history this way, we will have properly prepared the children for an awakening of a feeling for Christianity.

Many of you may say, with a certain amount of justification, that my suggestion to avoid discussing the details of history at first and instead discuss the great movements and tendencies in ancient Greece is not the proper method because we would not begin with specific events and then put them together to form a picture of Greek history in its entirety. Here we come to an important question of method that we cannot answer out of our own desires and prejudices but instead should answer from a complete understanding of life. I would ask you in turn if the whole of life is always formed from individual events. If you were to make that demand of normal perception, you would have to teach people how to form a human head out of its individual parts, the brain, and so forth. In normal life, we look at the whole directly. We can gain a living relationship to life only when we look directly at the whole. We should never study the individual parts of the whole in some random fashion. Instead we need to characterize as a whole those things that occur as a whole. The Greeks themselves lived in a given decade and experienced as individual human beings the impressions that arose during that decade. The part of ancient Greece that is alive today is a summary. It forms a whole that the children will look past if we do not begin by characterizing what was alive within the entirety of Greek culture.

This also resolves another more practical question. I have experienced time and again what it means in a specific situation when the teacher does not complete the required material in a given grade. It can lead to complete nonsense in two ways. In the first case, you are not finished, which is simply silly. In the second case, you do finish, but you pile things together so much in the last weeks that all the work is for nothing. However, if you first present the material as a whole, you will have covered the period of history that you want to teach the class. In that way you don’t do nearly so much harm when you skip over some of the details in your discussion. If you have an overview of the subject, it is very simple later to look up the details in an encyclopedia. Not to have learned the overview is, under some circumstances, a lasting loss. You can get a proper overview of a subject only under the guidance of a really lively person, whereas you can learn the details yourself from a book. We will discuss how to divide the material throughout the curriculum and among the grades later.

In examining teachers, what is important is to get an impression of their worldviews and then leave it up to the individual teachers to determine what they need to know in order to teach on a daily basis. Teachers’ examinations that test for details are complete nonsense. What is important is to gain a summary impression of whether someone is suited for being a teacher or not. Of course, we should not carry such things to an extreme. However, what I just said is true in general.

We can consider everything I have just described as living today as a kind of transition into Greece. We could then go on to those things living today that were not yet living in ancient Greece. You could certainly give a lively presentation about such concepts as general human dignity. You could discuss such concepts as individual human consciousness, of course at an elementary level. The Greeks did not yet have the concept of human dignity. They did have the concepts of the polis, of a community to which individuals belonged, but they were divided into groups, the masters and the slaves. The Greeks did not have a fundamental conception of the human being, and you should discuss that with the students. You could also discuss the concept of what is human, a concept that is not very alive because we are not nearly Christian enough in modern times, but that can be very alive for the children through their studies of natural history.

You can awaken the concept of what is universally human in the following way. Describe Leonardo’s Last Supper and what he wanted to achieve with that picture—it is actually there only in a sense, there are only some little specks of color left in Milan. Today, unless you can see clairvoyantly, you cannot understand what he wanted to achieve, but the thought of the picture still exists. You can enliven your presentation by placing the picture in front of the children. You can make clear to the children that there are twelve human beings, twelve people pictured by the artist as the twelve apostles surrounding the Lord in the middle, in their positions with various attitudes, from the devoted John to the traitorous Judas. In a certain sense, you can develop all human characters from these twelve pictures. You can show the children how different human characters are, and then indicate how the Lord in the middle relates to each of the individuals. You can then have the children imagine someone coming from another planet. Of course, you do not need to say it that way, but say it in some way so it is clear to them. If you imagine someone from a foreign planet coming down to earth and looking at all the pictures on earth, that being would need to look only at these twelve people and the transfigured face in the middle to know that that face has something to do with what gives the earth its meaning.

You can explain to the children that there was once a time during which the earth underwent a developmental preparation, followed by another time that had been awaited and that, in contrast to the preparatory period, provided a kind of fulfillment. You can show them that all of earthly human development is connected with that event of Golgotha, and that the earth’s development would have no meaning if that event had not occurred. That is something that is also alive today and that we can very easily enliven, at least to the extent that it has withered during our half-heathen times. In short, it is important that you explain this second age of humanity. It is an age that developed through the rise of Christianity, through the rise of what is universally human. In contrast, the central purpose of the previous period was the creation of concepts and artistic perception, which could be developed only by an aristocracy, and has remained in its entirety as our inheritance.

When you take up Roman history, you can show how it has a tendency toward something that has hardly any significance as such. It would be clear to an objective observer of Roman history how great the distance is between the Roman people and those of Greece. The Greeks gave both the Romans and us everything that has endured. The Romans were actually students of the Greeks in everything of importance to humanity, and as such were a people without imagination. They were a people who had prepared themselves for the Christian concept of humanity only through the concept of the citizen. At this age you can teach children about the effects of Christianity upon Roman culture. You can also show them how the old world declined piece by piece, and how Christianity spread piece by piece in the West. In that way, the first millennium of Christianity acquires a kind of unified character, namely, the spreading of the concept of universal humanity. When you teach the children such a living, intense concept as the importance of Christianity in human development, then you also have the possibility of describing the whole modern age for these young human beings.

After the first thousand years of Christian European development, something new slowly begins. Something I would call very prosaic for us clearly begins to enter the development of humanity. Things will look quite different for those who follow us in a thousand years, but today, of course, we need to teach history for our period. We look back at ancient Greece and at something that may be heathen, namely, art and the life of ideas, and so forth. Then we look at the first thousand years of Christian development and find that the feeling life of Europe had just developed. What we find when we then look at what occurred after the first thousand years of Christian development is the development of European will. We see primarily that the activities of economics become an object of human thinking as well as a source of difficulties. Earlier times took care of these activities in a much more naïve way. In connection with that, you can attempt to show how the earth has become a level stage for human beings due to the voyages of discovery and the invention of printed books. You can also attempt to show that this latter period is the one in which we still stand. You will no longer be able to give a broad overview in the same way that you did for the Greek and Christian Roman periods, and their effects upon life in Central Europe. You will need to more or less allow everything that occurred from the eleventh or twelfth century forward to fall into the disarray of details. However, in doing this you will be able to awaken in children the proper feeling for the rise of national will during that period of history.

What do we accomplish when we do this? We do not teach causal history or pragmatic history or any of the other wonderful things people have admired at various times. Causal history assumes that what follows is always the result of some event preceding it. However, if you have a surface of water and you look at the waves, one following the other, can you say that each wave is the result of the one preceding it? Would you instead not need to look into the depths of the water to find the reasons, the general cause of the series of waves? It is no different in history. People look past what is most important when they look only for cause and effect. They look past the depths of human developmental forces that bring individual events to the surface in the course of time. We simply cannot present those events from the perspective of cause and effect. What occurs in one century is not simply the result of what occurred in previous centuries. It is, in fact, independent and only secondarily an effect. In my opinion, what occurs is brought independently to the surface out of the depths of the stream of human development.

We can give children an impression of this, and we should do so at this stage of their development. If people do not develop an awareness for these patterns during childhood, they can remain obstinate in their belief of pragmatic or causal history. They remain fixed in their understanding of history and later have little tendency to accept anything that has a real future. In contrast to all other presentations of history, we could call our presentation symptomatological history. Those who try to view history symptomatologically do not believe it is necessary to look at each individual event and describe it for itself. Instead, they see such events as symptoms of deeper development. They might say to themselves that if Gutenberg1 lived and invented the art of printing books during a particular historical time, that was connected with what existed in the depths of humanity at that time. The invention of printing is only an indication that humanity at that time was mature enough to move on from certain simple concrete ideas to more abstract ones. If we come into life during a time that is held together more through printing than through direct and basic content, then we live life in a much more abstract manner.

The way life became more abstract during the course of historical events is seldom taken into account. Think for a moment about a simple example. I can say that my coat is shabby. Everyone can understand it when I say that my coat is shabby, but no one actually knows what that really means. What it means was originally connected with moths, with small insects.2 At that time people hung their coats in the closet and did not brush them properly. These little insects lived in them and ate the cloth. The coat then had holes in it, and the word shabby arose from the destruction of coats by moths. There you have the transition from the concrete to the abstract. Such transition continually takes place and is something we should take note of. In the area in Austria where I grew up, the farmers spoke about “sleep in their eyes.” For them, the sleep in their eyes was not something abstract in the way we think of it today when we say the sleep is in our eyes. The farmer rubbed his eyes, and what he rubbed out of the corners of his eyes in the morning, that specific excretion, he called “sleep.” Those farmers do not have any other concept of sleep; they must first be taught the abstract idea of sleep.

Of course, such things are now dying out. Those of us who are older can remember such things from our youth, if we did not grow up in the city. We can remember how everything was concrete, but with the close of the nineteenth century, such things more or less died out. I could give you a number of such examples, and you would hardly believe that people in the country thought in such a concrete way. You can experience many curious things in the country. There is an Austrian poet who wrote in dialect and wrote a number of beautiful things that are admired by all the city people. But only city people admire them; country people do not understand them. He used words the way city people use them—abstractly. People in the country do not understand his poetry at all because they have specific things in mind, so everything has a very different meaning. I recall, for example, that one of his poems speaks about nature. It is completely incomprehensible for farmers, because a farmer does not have the same concept of nature as an educated person. A farmer understands the word nature to mean something very concrete. In the same way, I can find examples everywhere that would show how the transition from the concrete to the abstract occurs throughout human development, and how a whole wave moving toward abstraction crashed in upon humanity with the rise of book printing. In a way, people began to filter their concepts through the influence of book printing.

It would not be bad to teach children some concepts of modern history that would make them more objective about life. There would be, for example, much less discussion about battling capitalism and so forth if the people who said such things did not speak as though they had never heard anything about capitalism, and had no idea that to simply angrily attack capitalism has absolutely no meaning. It has nothing to do with what people today really want; it only shows that such people do not properly understand the significance of capitalism. My books such as Social Renewal seem so unintelligible to them because they were written about life and not about the fantastic ideas of modern agitators.

A truly living consideration of history requires that people understand external events as symptoms of something hidden within, and they need some idea of what considering those symptoms means. When you consider history from a symptomatological perspective, you will slowly realize that first there is an ascent, then the highest point of a certain event is reached, and then a descent follows. Take, for example, the event of Golgotha. If you look at that part of history and see the external events as symptoms of an inner process, you rise above the purely historical into the religious. The historical thus deepens into the religious. Then, you will find a way that will lead you through feeling into an understanding of what we can teach children at an early age, for instance, the Gospels or the Old Testament. However, we cannot give them an inner understanding of such things, nor is that necessary. You teach them in the form of stories, and when the children have a living, historical feeling for the stories, the material in the Bible takes on a new life. It is good when certain things gain their full liveliness only in stages. Primarily though, considering history symptomatologically deepens a desire for religion, a feeling for religion.

I said before that we should prepare children for learning history by teaching them about nature and that we should proceed in the way I characterized earlier. At the same time, we prepare children for life on earth by teaching them about botany in the way I described. We can then go on to geography at this stage of childhood. We should base geography upon stories describing various areas, including far distant places, for example, America or Africa. Through our descriptions of natural history, thathave presented the plant realm as part of the entire earth, the children are prepared by about the age of twelve to understand geography. At this time it is important to show in geography that everything in history depends upon all the things that come from the earth—the climates, the formations, the structures of the earth in various places. After giving them an idea about the connection of land, sea, and climate to ancient Greece, you can move on to what we can portray as a symptom of the inner development of humanity in the characteristics of ancient Greece. It is possible to find an inner connection between our geographical picture of the earth and historical developments. Actually, we should always make inner connections between our descriptions of various parts of the earth and our descriptions of historical developments. We should not, for example, discuss American geography before we have presented the discovery of America in history. We should certainly take into account the fact that the human horizon has extended in the course of development, and we should not try to bring human feelings to some firm absolute point.

Nor is it good in so-called mathematical geography to begin dogmatically with a drawing of the Copernican solar system. Instead we should begin by describing for the children, at least as a sketch, how people came to such a perspective. In that way children do not learn concepts that are beyond the level of their human development. Of course, people taught children the fixed Ptolemaic concepts when the Ptolemaic view of the world predominated. Now we teach them the Copernican perspective. It is certainly necessary to give children at least some idea about how people determined the positions of the stars in the sky and, from a summarization of those positions, came to some conclusion that then became a description of the planetary system. We do not want the children to believe, for example, that such a description of the planetary system came about by someone sitting in a chair outside of the universe and simply looking at the planets. When you draw the Copernican system on the blackboard as though it were a fact, how can a child imagine how people came to that view? Children need to have some living idea about how such things develop; otherwise they will go through their entire lives with confused ideas, which they believe are absolutely certain. That is how a false belief in authority develops, something that does not occur when you develop a proper feeling for authority between the ages of seven until fourteen or fifteen.

In the same way it is good to recognize that it is not only significant for the development of the children’s souls to teach them the proper ideas at the proper moment, but that it also has a significance for the entire human being, including healthy physical functioning. Try to think for a moment what it means to teach a child between the ages of seven and twelve exactly the amount of material he or she can remember, or to not do that. Try to understand what it means when you misuse the so-called good memory of a child. You should not work to strengthen the memory of a child who has a good memory. Instead you should be careful to see that the child often receives new impressions that erase earlier impressions. If you emphasize memory too strongly, the child will grow stocky and not as tall as he or she would if you worked with memory in the proper way. The restrained growth you can see in people is due to an improper working with their memory. In the same way people who are incapable of controlling their facial expressions, or who have a certain fixed expression, did not receive sufficient artistic or aesthetic impressions around the age of nine.

Particularly during childhood, the effects upon the physical body of properly working with the soul are enormous. It is enormously important that you try to see that children speak clearly and with full tones and, as I described before, that they speak well-roundedly, in full sentences and with full syllables. In human beings, proper breathing depends upon proper speaking; thus the proper development of the human chest organs depends upon proper speaking. In this regard it would be interesting to take a survey about the currently common chest illnesses. We could ask to what extent tuberculosis is the result of too little attention to proper speaking while attending school or too little attention to proper breathing while speaking. We should remember that speaking does not begin with breathing, but the other way around. Children should therefore speak properly. They should acquire a feeling for proper speech, for long and short syllables and words, and their breathing will develop accordingly. It is pure nonsense to believe that we should first train breathing in order to then come to proper speaking. Breathing, proper breathing, results from a proper feeling for speech, which then brings about proper breathing. In just this way, we should look more thoroughly at the connections between the physical body and the development of the spirit-soul.

I would now like to turn to a question I have often been asked, which has some significance, the question of left-handedness and ambidextrousness.

Right-handedness has become a general human habit that we use for writing and other tasks. It is appropriate to extend that by making the left hand more dexterous, in a sense. That has a certain justification. When we discuss such things, however, our discussion will bear fruit only if we have some deeper insight into the conditions of human life.

When we move into a period when the entire human being should be awakened; when, in addition to the capacities for abstraction that are so well developed today, developing the capacities for feeling as well as for doing plays a role, we will be able to speak quite differently about many questions than we can now.

If education continues as it is today and does not help us understand the material through the spiritual, so that people are always stuck in abstractions (materialism is precisely being stuck in abstractions), then after a time you will realize that teaching people to use both hands for writing traps them in a kind of mental weakness. This results in part from how we are as modern human beings, how we presently use the right hand to a much greater extent than the left. The fact that the whole human being is not completely symmetrical also plays a part, particularly in regard to certain organs. Using both hands to write, for example, has a deep effect upon the entire human organism.

I would not speak about such things had I not done considerable research in this area and had I not tried, for example, to understand what it means to use the left hand. When people develop a capacity for observing the human being, they will be able to see through experimenting what it means to use the left hand. When human beings reach a certain level of independence of the spirit and the soul from the physical body, it is good to use the left hand. But the dependence of modern people upon the physical body causes a tremendous revolution in the physical body when the left hand is used in the same manner as the right, for example, in writing. One of the most important points in this regard is that this stresses the right side of the body, the right side of the brain, beyond what modern people can normally tolerate. When people have been taught according to the methods and educational principles we have discussed here, then they may also be ambidextrous. In modern society, we may not simply go on to using both hands; however, these are things that can be said only from experience. Statistics would certainly support what I have said.

If you want an idea of how strongly the effects of the spirit-soul act in parallel with the physical body of the child, then we need to look to the spiritual world. That is why I find eurythmy so promising in educating children, because eurythmy is an ensouled movement and thus increases the activity of the will, in contrast to the normal passivity of the will, which is what normal gymnastics primarily trains.

We have already seen that teaching history is beneficial only for developing children at about the age of twelve. Considering history is a kind of preparation for the period of life that begins with sexual maturity, that is, at about the age of fourteen or fifteen. Only at that time can human beings gain the capacity for independent reasoning. A capacity for reasoning, not simply intellectual reasoning, but a comprehensive reasoning in all directions, can only develop after puberty. With the passing of puberty, the supersensible aspect of human nature that carries the capacity of reason is born out of the remainder of human nature. You can call this what you like. In my books I have called it the astral body,but the name is unimportant. As I have said, it is not through intellectual judgment that this becomes noticeable, but through judgment in its broadest sense. You will perhaps be surprised that what I will now describe I also include in the realm of judgment. If we were to do a thorough study of psychology here, you would also see that what I have to say can also be proven psychologically.

When we attempt to have a child who is not yet past puberty recite something according to his or her own taste, we are harming the developmental forces within human nature. These forces will be harmed if an attempt is made to use them before the completion of puberty; they should only be used later. Independent judgments of taste are only possible after puberty. If a child before the age of fourteen or fifteen is to recite something, she should do so on the basis of what an accepted authority standing next to her has provided. This means she should find the way in which the authority has spoken pleasing. She should not be led astray to emphasize or not emphasize certain words, to form the rhythm out of what she thinks is pleasing, but instead she should be guided by the taste of the accepted authority. We should not attempt to guide that intimate area of the child’s life away from accepted authority before the completion of puberty. Notice that I always say “accepted authority” because I certainly do not mean a forced or blind authority. What I am saying is based upon the objective observation that from the change of teeth until puberty, a child has a desire to have an authority standing alongside her. The child demands this, longs for it, and we need to support this longing, which arises out of her individuality.

When you look at such things in a comprehensive way, you will see that in my outline of education here I have always taken the entire development of the human being into account. For this reason I have said that between the ages of seven and fourteen, we should only teach children what can be used in a fruitful way throughout life. We need to see how one stage of life affects another. In a moment I will give an example that speaks to this point. When a child is long past school age, has perhaps long since reached adulthood, this is when we can see what school has made of the child and what it has not. This is visible not only in a general abstract way but also in a very concrete way.

Let us look at children’s play from this perspective, particularly the kind of play that occurs in the youngest children from birth until the change of teeth. Of course, the play of such children is in one respect based upon their desire to imitate. Children do what they see adults doing, only they do it differently. They play in such a way that their activities lie far from the goals and utility that adults connect with certain activities. Children’s play only imitates the form of adult activities, not the material content. The usefulness in and connection to everyday life are left out. Children perceive a kind of satisfaction in activities that are closely related to those of adults. We can look into this further and ask what is occurring here. If we want to study what is represented by play activities and through that study recognize true human nature so that we can have a practical effect upon it, then we must continuously review the individual activities of the child, including those that are transferred to the physical organs and, in a certain sense, form them. That is not so easy. Nevertheless the study of children’s play in the widest sense is extraordinarily important for education.

We need only recall what a person who set the tone for culture once said: “A human being is only a human being so long as he or she plays; and a human being plays so long as he or she is a whole human being.” Schiller1 wrote these words in a letter after he had read some sections of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. To Schiller, free play and the forces of the soul as they are artistically developed in Wilhelm Meister appeared to be something that could only be compared with an adult form of children’s play. This formed the basis of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. He wrote them from the perspective that adults are never fully human when carrying out the activities of normal life. He believed that either we follow the necessities of what our senses require of us, in which case we are subject to a certain compulsion, or we follow logical necessity, in which case we are no longer free. Schiller thought that we are free only when we are artistically creative. This is certainly understandable from an artist such as Schiller; however, it is one-sided since in regard to freedom of the soul there is certainly much which occurs inwardly,in much the same way that Schiller understood freedom. Nevertheless the kind of life that Schiller imagined for the artist is arranged so that the human being experiences the spiritual as though it were natural and necessary, and the sense-perceptible as though it were spiritual. This is certainly the case when perceiving something artistic and in the creation of art.

When creating art, we create with the material world, but we do not create something that is useful. We create in the way the idea demands of us, if I may state it that way, but we do not create abstract ideas according to logical necessity. In the creation of art, we are in the same situation as we are when we are hungry or thirsty. We are subject to a very personal necessity. Schiller found that it is possible for people to achieve something of that sort in life, but children have this naturally through play. Here in a certain sense they live in the world of adults, through only to the extent that world satisfies the child’s own individuality. The child lives in creation, but what is created serves nothing.

Schiller’s perspective, from the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, can be used as a basis for further development. The psychological significance of play is not so easy to find. We need to ask if the particular kind of play that children engage in before the change of teeth has some significance for the entirety of human life. We can, as I said, analyze it in the way that Schiller tried to do under the influence of Goethe’s adult childishness. We could also, however, compare this kind of play with other human activities. We could, for example, compare children’s play before the change of teeth with dreaming, where we most certainly will find some important analogies. However, those analogies are simply related to the course of the child’s play, to the connection of the activities to one another in play. In just the same way that children put things together in play—whatever those might be—not with external things but with thoughts, we put pictures together in dreams. This may not be true of all dreams, but it is certainly so in a very large class of them. In dreaming, we remain in a certain sense children throughout our entire lives.

Nevertheless we can only achieve a genuine understanding if we do not simply dwell upon this comparison of play with dreams. Instead we should also ask when in the life of the human being something occurs that allows those forces that are developed in early children’s play until the change of teeth, which can be fruitful for the entirety of external human life. In other words, when do we actually reap the fruits of children’s play? Usually people think we need to seek the fruits of young children’s play in the period of life that immediately follows, but spiritual science shows how life passes in a rhythmical series of repetitions. In a plant, leaves develop from a seed; from the leaves, the bud and flower petals emerge, and so forth. Only afterwards do we have a seed again; that is, the repetition occurs only after an intervening development. It is the same in human life.

From many points of view we could understand human life as though each period were affected only by the one preceding, but this is not the case. If we observe without prejudice, we will find that the actual fruits of those activities that occur in early childhood play become apparent only at the age of twenty. What we gain in play from birth until the change of teeth, what children experience in a dreamy way, are forces of the still-unborn spirituality of the human being, which is still not yet absorbed into, or perhaps more properly said, reabsorbed into the human body.

We can state this differently. I have already discussed how the same forces that act organically upon the human being until the change of teeth become, when the teeth are born, an independent imaginative or thinking capacity, so that in a certain sense something is removed from the physical body. On the other hand, what is active within a child through play and has no connection with life and contains no usefulness is something that is not yet fully connected with the human body. Thus a child has an activity of the soul that is active within the body until the change of teeth and then becomes apparent as a capacity for forming concepts that can be remembered.

The child also has a spiritual-soul activity that in a certain sense still hovers in an etheric way over the child. It is active in play in much the same way that dreams are active throughout the child’s entire life. In children, however, this activity occurs not simply in dreams, it occurs also in play, which develops in external reality. What thus develops in external reality subsides in a certain sense. In just the same way that the seed-forming forces of a plant subside in the leaf and flower petal and only reappear in the fruit, what a child uses in play also only reappears at about the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, as independent reasoning gathering experiences in life.

I would like to ask you to try to genuinely seek this connection. Look at children and try to understand what is individual in their play: try to understand the individuality of children playing freely until the change of teeth, and then form pictures of their individualities. Assume that what you notice in their play will become apparent in their independent reasoning after the age of twenty. This means the various kinds of human beings differ in their independent reasoning after the age of twenty in the just the same way that children differ in their play before the change of teeth.

If you recognize the full truth of this thought, you will be overcome by an unbounded feeling of responsibility in regard to teaching. You will realize that what you do with a child forms the human being beyond the age of twenty. You will see that you will need to understand the entirety of life, not simply the life of children, if you want to create a proper education.

Playing activity from the change of teeth until puberty is something else again. (Of course, things are not so rigidly separated, but if we want to understand something for use in practical life, we must separate things.) Those who observe without prejudice will find that the play activity of a child until the age of seven has an individual character. As a player, the child is, in a certain sense, a kind of hermit. The child plays for itself alone. Certainly children want some help, but they are terribly egotistical and want the help only for themselves. With the change of teeth, play takes on a more social aspect. With some individual exceptions, children now want to play more with one another. The child ceases to be a hermit in his play; he wants to play with other children and tobe something in play. I am not sure if Switzerland can be included in this, but in more military countries the boys particularly like to play soldier. Mostly they want to be at least a general, and thus a social element is introduced to the children’s play.

What occurs as the social element in play from the change of teeth until puberty is a preparation for the next period of life. In this next period, with the completion of puberty, independent reasoning arises. At that time human beings no longer subject themselves to authority; they form their own judgments and confront others as individuals. This same element appears in the previous period of life in play; it appears in something that is not connected with external social life, but in play. What occurs in the previous period of life, namely, social play, is the prelude to tearing yourself away from authority. We can therefore conclude that children’s play until the age of seven actually enters the body only at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, when we gain an independence in our understanding and ability to judge experiences. On the other hand, what is prepared through play between the ages of seven and puberty appears at an earlier developmental stage in life, namely, during the period from puberty until about the age of twenty-one. This is a direct continuation. It is very interesting to notice that we have properly guided play during our first childhood years to thank for the capacities that we later have for understanding and experiencing life. In contrast, for what appears during our lazy or rebellious years we can thank the period from the change of teeth until puberty. Thus the connections in the course of human life overlap.

These overlapping connections have a fundamental significance of which psychology is unaware. What we today call psychology has existed only since the eighteenth century. Previously, quite different concepts existed about human beings and the human soul. Psychology developed during the period in which materialistic spirit and thought arose. Thus in spite of all significant beginnings, psychology was unable to develop a proper science of the soul, a science that was in accord with reality and took into account the whole of human life. Although I have tried hard, I have to admit that I have been able to find some of these insights only in Herbart’s psychology. Herbart’s psychology is very penetrating; it attempts to discover a certain form of the soul by beginning with the basic elements of the soul’s life. There are many beautiful things in Herbart’s psychology. Nevertheless we need to look at the rather unusual views it has produced in his followers. I once knew a very good follower of Herbart, Robert Zimmermann, an aesthete who also wrote a kind of educational philosophy in his book on psychology for high-school students. Herbart once referred to him as a Kantian from 1828. In his description of psychology as a student of Herbart, he discusses the following problem:

If I am hungry, I do not actually attempt to obtain the food that would satisfy my hunger. Instead, my goal is that the idea of hunger will cease and be replaced by the idea of being full. My concern is actually with ideas. There exists an idea that must arise contrary to inhibitions, and which must work against those inhibitions. Food is actually only a means of moving from the idea of hunger to the idea of being full.

Those who look at the reality of human nature, not simply in a materialistic sense, but also with an eye toward the spiritual, will see that this kind of view is somewhat one-sidedly rationalistic and intellectual. It is necessary to move beyond this one-sided intellectualism and comprehend the entire human being psychologically. In so doing, education can gain much from psychology that otherwise would not be apparent. We should consider what we do in teaching not simply to be the right thing for the child, but rather to be something living that can transform itself. As we have seen, there are many connections of the sort I have presented. We need to assume that what we teach children in elementary school until puberty will reappear in a quite different form from the age of fifteen until twenty-one or twenty-two.

The elementary-school teacher is extremely important for the high-school teacher or the university teacher—in a sense even more important, since the university teacher can achieve nothing if the elementary-school teacher has not sent the child forth with properly formed strengths. It is very important to work with these connected periods of life. If we do, we will see that real beginning points can be found only through spiritual science.

For instance, people define things too much. As far as possible, we should avoid giving children any definitions. Definitions take a firm grasp of the soul and remain static throughout life, thus making life into something dead. We should teach in such a way that what we provide to the child’s soul remains alive. Suppose someone as a child of around nine or ten years of age learns a concept, for instance, at the age of nine, the concept of a lion, or, at the age of eleven or twelve, that of Greek culture. Very good; the child learns it. But these concepts should not remain as they are. A person at the age of thirty should not be able to say she has such-and-such a concept of lions and that is what she learned in school, or that she has such-and-such a concept of Greek culture and that was what she learned in school. This is something we need to overcome. Just as other parts of ourselves grow, the things we receive from the teacher should also grow; they should be something living. We should learn concepts about lions or Greek culture that will not be the same when we are in our thirties or forties as they were when we were in school.

We should learn concepts that are so living that they are transformed throughout our lives. To do so, we need to characterize rather than define. In connection with the formation of concepts, we need to imitate what we can do with painting or even photography. In such cases, we can place ourselves to one side and give one aspect, or we can move to another side and give a different aspect, and so forth. Only after we have photographed a tree from many sides do we have a proper picture of it. Through definitions, we gain too strong an idea that we have something.

We should attempt to work with thoughts and concepts as we would with a camera. We should bring forth the feeling within the child that we are only characterizing something from various perspectives; we are not defining it. Definitions exist only so that we can, in a sense, begin with them and so that the child can communicate understandably with the teacher. That is the basic reason for definitions. That may sound somewhat radical, but it is so. Life does not love definitions. In private, human beings should always have the feeling that, through incorrect definitions, they have arrived at dogmas. It is very important for teachers to know that. Instead of saying, for instance, that two objects cannot be in the same place at the same time, and that is what we call impermeable, the way we consciously define impermeability and then seek things to illustrate this concept, we should instead say that objects are impermeable because they cannot be at the same place at the same time. We should not make hypotheses into dogmas. We only have the right to say that we call objects impermeable when they cannot be at the same place at the same time. We need to remain conscious of the formative forces of our souls and should not awaken the concept of a triangle in the external world before the child has recognized a triangle inwardly.

That we should characterize and not define is connected with recognizing that the fruits of those things that occur during one period of human life will be recognized perhaps only very much later. Thus we should give children living concepts and feelings rather than dead ones. We should try to present geometry, for example, in as lively a way as possible. A few days ago I spoke about arithmetic. I want to speak before the end of the course tomorrow about working with fractions and so forth, but now I would like to add a few remarks about geometry. These remarks are connected with a question I was asked and also with what I have just presented.

Geometry can be seen as something that can slowly be brought from a static state into a living one. In actuality, we are speaking of something quite general when we say that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180°. That is true for all triangles, but can we imagine a triangle? In our modern way of educating, we do not always attempt to teach children a flexible concept of a triangle. It would be good, however, if we teach our children a flexible concept of a triangle, not simply a dead concept. We should not have them simply draw a triangle, which is always a special case. Instead we could say that here I have a line. I can divide the angle of 180° into three parts. That can be done in an endless number of ways. Each time I have divided the angle, I can go on to form a triangle, so that I show the child how an angle that occurs here then occurs here in the triangle. When I transfer the angles in this way, I will have such a triangle. Thus in moving from three fan-shaped angles lying next to one another, I can form numerous triangles and those triangles thus become flexible in the imagination. Clearly these triangles have the characteristic that the sum of their angles is 180° since they arose by dividing a 180° angle. It is good to awaken the idea of a triangle of a child in this way, so that an inner flexibility remains and so that they do not gain the idea of a static triangle, but rather that of a flexible shape, one that could just as well be acute as obtuse, or it could be a right triangle (see diagram).

Imagine how transparent the whole concept of triangles would be if I began with such inwardly flexible concepts, then developed triangles from them. We can use the same method to develop a genuine and concrete feeling for space in children. If in this way we have taught children the concept of flexibility in figures on a plane, the entire mental configuration of the child will achieve such flexibility that it is then easy to go on to three-dimensional elements—for instance, how one object moves past another behind it, forward or backward. By presenting how an object moves forward or backward past another object, we present the first element that can be used in developing a feeling for space. If we, for example, present how it is in real life—namely how one person ceases to be visible when he or she moves behind an object or how the object becomes no longer visible when the person moves in front of it—we can go on to develop a feeling for space that has an inner liveliness to it. The feeling for three-dimensional space remains abstract and dead when it is presented only as perspectives. The children can gain that lively feeling for space if, for instance, we tell a short story.

This morning at nine o’clock I came across two people. They were sitting someplace on a bench. This afternoon at three, I came by again and the same two people were sitting on the same bench. Nothing had changed.

Certainly as long as I only consider the situation at nine in the morning and three in the afternoon, nothing had changed. However, if I go into it more and speak with these people, then perhaps I would discover that after I had left in the morning, one person remained, but the other stood up and went away. Though he was gone for three hours,he then returned and sat down again alongside the other. He had done something and was perhaps tired after six hours. I cannot recognize the actual situation only in connection with space, that is, if I think only of the external situation and do not look further into the inner, to the more important situation.

We cannot make judgments even about the spatial relationships between beings if we do not go into inner relationships. We can avoid bitter illusions in regard to cause and effect only if we go into those inner relationships. The following might occur: A man is walking along the bank of a river and comes across a stone. He stumbles over the stone and falls into the river. After a time he is pulled out. Suppose that nothing more is done than to report the objective facts: Mr. So-and-So has drowned. But perhaps that is not even true. Perhaps the man did not drown, but instead stumbled because at that point he had a heart attack and was already dead before he fell into the water. He fell into the water because he was dead. This is an actual case that was once looked into and shows how necessary it is to proceed from external circumstances into the more inner aspects.

In the same way if we are to make judgments about the spatial relationship of one being to another, we need to go into the inner aspects of those beings. When properly grasped in a living way, it enables us to develop a spatial feeling in children so that we can use movements for the development of a feeling for space. We can do that by having the children run in different figures, or having them observe how people move in front or behind when passing one another.

It is particularly important to make sure that what is observed in this way is also retained. This is especially significant for the development of a feeling for space. If I cast a shadow from different objects upon the surface of other objects, I can show how the shadow changes. If children are capable of understanding why, under specific circumstances, the shadow of a sphere has the shape of an ellipse—and this is certainly something that can be understood by a child at the age of nine—this capacity to place themselves in such spatial relationships has a tremendously important effect upon their capacity to imagine and upon the flexibility of their imaginations.

For that reason we should certainly see that it is necessary to develop a feeling for space in school. If we ask ourselves what children do when they are drawing up until the change of teeth, we will discover that they are in fact developing experience that then becomes mature understanding around the age of twenty. That understanding develops out of the changing forms, so the child plays by drawing; at the same time, however, that drawing tells something. We can understand children’s drawings if we recognize that they reflect what the child wants to express.

Let us look at children’s drawings. Before the ages of seven or eight or sometimes even nine, children do not have a proper feeling for space. That comes only later when other forces slowly begin to affect the child’s development. Until the age of seven, what affects the child’s functioning later becomes imagination. Until puberty, it is the will that mostly affects the child and which, as I mentioned earlier, is dammed up and becomes apparent through boys’ change of voice. The will is capable of developing spatial feeling. Through everything that I have just said, that is, through the development of a spatial feeling through movement games and by observing what occurs when shadows are formed—namely, through what arises through movement and is then held fast—all such things that develop the will give people a much better understanding than simply through an intellectual presentation, even though that understanding may be somewhat playful, an understanding with a desire to tell a story.

Now, at the end of this lecture, I would like to show you the drawings of a six-year-old boy whose father, I should mention, is a painter so that you can see them in connection with what I just said. Please notice how extraordinarily talkative this six-year-old boy is through what he creates. I might even say that he has in fact created a very specific language here, a language that expresses just what he wants to tell. Many of these pictures,which we could refer to as expressionist, are simply his way of telling stories that were read to him, or which he heard in some other way. Many of the pictures are, as you can see, wonderfully expressive. Take a look at this king and queen. These are things that show how children at this age tell stories. If we understand how children speak at this age—something that is so wonderfully represented here because the boy is already drawing with colored pencils—and if we look at all the details, we will find that these drawings represent the child’s being in much the way that I described to you earlier. We need to take the change that occurred with the change of teeth into consideration if we are to understand how we can develop a feeling for space.

I would be very sorry if anything I have said here were to be taken dogmatically or to become one-sided in some way. That spiritual science can be fruitful for education is the basis of everything I have said. Anthroposophy could help teaching and education to gain a more living character, and the general directions I have described here can be put into practice in many ways. It would be good if there were an exchange of opinions among the listeners as well as others who are interested in some way in the further development of education as it is conceived here. It is important to arrive at what is necessary in our time through a living comprehension of human development as a whole and of present developments in education. We are not concerned with developing a new formal basis for education, but rather with extending the circle of people who have an interest in the perspective presented with regard to human development.

What is the state of the development of humanity today? What must we teach children if we are to take into account the perspective of the present state of humanity today and of the near future? If we do not recognize what has recently occurred as a clear indication of the need of a renewal in education, we do not understand our present time.

Of course there are an uncountable number of details to mention. Consider for a moment how appropriate it would be to include my characterization of arithmetic—to place analytical methods alongside synthetic methods, and to work with the sum and products and not simply from adding and factoring—along with what is normally done. You can see how appropriate it would be to treat fractions and everything connected with them from this perspective. When we move from working with whole numbers to working with fractions, we move in a quite natural way into the analytical. Moving from whole numbers to fractions means just that: analyzing. It is therefore appropriate to bring in another element when working with fractions than we use when working with whole numbers.

We certainly cannot object to the fact that in the nineteenth century computing machines were introduced into schools. Nevertheless computing machines should not lead to an overly materialistic valuation of illustrative materials. While we should be clear about the value of examples, what is important is that human capacities be developed through teaching. The primary task of the period from the change of teeth until maturity is to develop memory. We should avoid underestimating the value of examples as a basis for forming memory as well as the value of memory when viewing examples. We should begin in a simple way—and here for those who are capable of teaching in a living way, the ten fingers on our hands are sufficient—by presenting the number ten in all kinds of ways that show the various arithmetic operations. In doing so, however, we should present arithmetic in a way that is appropriate to life, to the life of the soul in a human being. There are certainly detailed discussions in philosophy, whole sections of philosophy, concerning what a number or fraction really is. This shows that as children, we may learn about numbers or fractions, but in later life, even if we were philosophers, we could say that we now need to research what a number signifies in reality, or what a fraction is in reality. It is not necessary to go into all kinds of minute details if we want to make this process clear to children. Instead we need to bring many other things to children that then become part of their memory and which only can be studied in more detail later, when they are mature enough. I have already spoken about such things from another perspective.

Working with fractions is another question. Since fractions are in a certain sense analytical, we need to take the need for analysis into account, as I mentioned in some of the previous lectures. For that reason, we would do well to make working with fractions as visual as possible. We could perhaps divide a large cube into smaller cubes, for example, taking a large cube and dividing it into sixteen smaller cubes. From that, we can go on to the concept of a quarter by dividing the large cube first into quarters, then each quarter again into a further quarter. In this way you can show the children all kinds of relationships between a sixteenth or an eighth and so forth. If, later, you give each of the portions a different color, you can then place the various fractions of the larger cube together again in different way, which then gives a very pretty picture.

I do not want to make the transition from normal fractions to decimal fractions in some irrational way, in a way that does not correspond to reality. From the very beginning, the children should gain a feeling that the use of decimal fractions is based upon human convention or convenience. They should also gain a feeling that the way we write decimal fractions is nothing more than a continuation of the way in which we write normal numbers: we first count to ten and then, when we go on to twenty, which is twice ten, the first series of ten is included in that so that by going to twenty, we have simply added a new series of ten, and so forth. If we work toward the left using the same principle that we used when working with decimal numbers to the right, the children will realize that all this is relative and that it would form a unity if I set the decimal point two places to the right. From the very beginning, we should teach children about these conventions, which are hidden in the way we divide things. In this way many other kinds of conventions then fit into the social fabric. Many erroneous beliefs in authority would disappear if we show the children that everything that is based simply upon tradition is nothing more than social convention. Most important, however, is that through a spiritual-scientific permeation of education, we attempt to work with children during the period from the change of teeth until puberty by taking into account everything that I have said here about that period of life and how different capacities appear in different periods.

In addition, we need to give children an idea of the practicalities of life. Each topic in our teaching should be used to guide the children to a view of practical life. If we understand children properly, we will begin to teach them about physics and chemistry at around the age of twelve as well as teaching them about minerals in the way I have discussed here. At about the same time, or perhaps one year earlier, we might attempt to present arithmetic similarly to the way we would teach about minerals, physics, or chemistry, namely, by always taking the practical into account. In arithmetic, the children should gain an idea about how monetary exchange rates work—what a discount rate is, how financial accounts are held. They should learn about writing letters describing business and financial practices or relationships with another business. Instruction from the ages of twelve until about fourteen or fifteen needs to be arranged that by the time children are fifteen years old and leave grammar school to go on to a higher school or into life, they have a real and practical idea about the most important areas of life.

Some may object by saying, where are we to find the time for all this? How are we to find time to give children a real idea of how paper or soap or cigars or such things are manufactured? If we are well-organized, we can take typical examples, such as typical industries or typical methods of transportation. We can enable children to go out into the world with an understanding of all the major areas in the environment that confront them. We can certainly see how children from the city have not the slightest idea of the difference between rye and wheat. We can also see how children who do not live near a soap factory do not have the slightest idea of how soap is made. But even children who live near a soap factory still have no idea how soap is manufactured because they have been taught nothing about what is in their neighborhood.

Consider how many people today step onto or leave a streetcar without having even the dimmest idea of how a streetcar is made or how it moves and so forth. Generally speaking, today we use the products of our culture without having the slightest idea of what these products actually are.1 For this reason we have become anxious. If we are continuously surrounded by things we do not understand, we become confused, and that confusion has an effect upon our subconscious. Of course it is not possible for people to understand everything in modern life in all details. But everything that is not directly connected with our own jobs or professions should not remain a mystery. If a person is not a bookkeeper, generally accounting is a mystery. Or if a person is not a teacher, how school is held is a mystery. All those things that fragment our modern society need to be overcome. We need to understand one another again.

We should not allow children’s capacities to understand practical life to lie fallow. During the period beginning at the age of twelve, when the capacities for human reason develop, it is possible to teach children about the most important aspects of practical life. I do not know what the subjects for essays are here in Switzerland (though I have read the school curriculum), but in the former monarchical countries, instead of writing essays about frivolous subjects such as the monarch’s birthday, essays should be written that somehow involve business life, sales practices, or industrial questions.

This is certainly not an area that should be based upon idealism or some intellectual perspective. A spiritual perspective does not need to continuously emphasize ideals and how they should be taught. Instead a spiritual attitude can be held by having the students work out of a spiritual impulse, that is, by allowing that which desires to arise out of the spirit from year to year to rise to the surface. In that way the overall perspective is connected with the individual details.

I have been asked whether it is possible to explain the late eruption of the wisdom teeth from a spiritual-scientific perspective. Is the growth of wisdom teeth connected with the freeing of certain cognitive forces in the same way as the regular change of teeth?

The change of teeth indicates that certain forces, which previously permeated the entire organism and gave it strength, have now become free and have become, as I have explained to you earlier, the forces of independent thinking. We certainly cannot strictly encapsulate everything that occurs in the organism, as that would certainly be contrary to the way things develop. The things that are primary during one period of human development continue to exist, but to a much lesser extent. We grow wisdom teeth much later because at a later time in the life of our organism there is something that continues to work that was particularly active up to the age of seven. Some small amount must still remain. If everything were suddenly completed, then people would experience a very strong jolt every time they would want to begin thinking of something. When we begin to think about something, we voluntarily activate those forces that were involuntarily active in the organism before the age of seven. Those things must exist as a bridge between the separated realms of the spirit soul. What was organic at that time must continue to exist to a certain extent. For imaginative thinking we need to become independent, but at the same time we still need to be connected to our organism. That is what is expressed by the late eruption of the wisdom teeth. Some of the strength that is freed for imaginative thinking still remains in organic development. We could discover all kinds of things in human development that are similar to the situation with wisdom teeth.

Another interesting question was posed: to what extent is it possible for teachers working out of a spiritual-scientific pedagogy to help children recognize their capacities and find their right place in social life?

From the perspective of spiritual science, such questions are of little importance, since they are based upon rationalistic and materialistic thinking. In fact we have to protect children from situations where they might pose such abstract questions as, how can I find my proper place in life based upon my own capacities? Children need to slowly come to such decisions through all the stages associated with feeling. If some day the abstract question of how can we utilize our capacities in the service of humanity should arise in our soul, that is actually an illness of the soul. We need to grow slowly into our relationship to the development of humanity and to other human beings. We will do that if we have been brought up in the way I described here. In that case, we would never fall into the unwholesome situation of asking, how can I be of social service with my specific capacities? We would have a healthy, practical understanding by the time we leave grammar school, so we would recognize that life itself will present us with our position in it. The fact that such questions arise and are seriously discussed shows how much we have fallen into an intellectual and materialistic way of thinking in our time.

For that reason, I would like to mention how concrete general rules can always be developed into practical action if we have the will to do so. I would therefore like to answer in detail a question given to me about what we should do about those who are weak in spelling where the weakness arises in words where what is written is not clearly indicated, for example, whether an h or an e is in the word to form a longer sound.

As I already mentioned, training in clear listening is the basis of proper spelling. Training in proper hearing will support proper spelling. Clear hearing, if trained properly, will also train precise seeing. The different capacities support one another. If one capacity is developed in the proper way, the others will also have to develop properly. If we accustom ourselves to exact listening, we will tend to retain the appearance of the word as such, that is, its inner appearance. Exact listening supports exact seeing. For words that appear to have an arbitrary spelling, such as those that have silent letters that make the preceding vowel long, we can support the child’s proper spelling by having the child repeat the syllables of the word clearly and with varying emphasis.

I would ask you not to take what I have just said in a dogmatic way. Instead you should take it so that it can be used in many various ways. For example, someone may view the position of the Greeks in the general course of Western culture differently than I did in my discussion of teaching history a few days ago. Someone could have a very different perspective but could nonetheless present it with the same methods I used. For me, it is not important to say something dogmatic about the Greeks. I wanted to show how a particular perspective about one topic or another could be taught through a symptomatological understanding of history. I believe that it is particularly necessary for teachers today to be aware of how much we need to allow the spirit and the influences of the spiritual upon the totality of human activity to flow into teaching. We need to look without prejudice at what children bring with them if we are to raise them as they need to be raised so that the next generation will move past the social ills that have such a terrible effect upon us at present.

If you objectively observe human life, you will see that by developing the intellect in children, something that is so terribly characteristic of human nature arises: the desire for comfort, even laziness. What is necessary in order to develop intellect is—and you may laugh at this paradox—the development of will. Children will have a healthy intellect if we develop a healthy will in them through the methods I previously discussed; that is, through an introduction to art at the earliest possible time in elementary school, since art strengthens the will. We develop the will and thus in a quite particular way take care of the intellect. The reverse is also true. If we widen the view of the child by presenting broad and noble pictures, as it is possible to do in teaching history and religion, we will also have an effect upon the will.

Strangely, the proper development of intellect activates the will, and the proper development of will activates the intellect. Because of the terrible materialism of the last few centuries, an enormous dark cloud has spread over such things. Today we hardly notice how in the depths of human nature there is a certain kind of inner laziness in the soul that acts against the development of thinking. We should study egotism because it has such a subtle yet strong effect on the development of feeling today. That is something we always need to be aware of. People can develop a strong will in the proper way only if we continue to enlarge their perspective and direct them toward those things that act spiritually in the world, those things coming from the stars that have a spiritual effect upon world history and upon the depths of the human heart. It is only when people’s worldview includes the spiritual that they can properly activate their wills.

We need to move beyond certain things. In the attitudes that we have toward teaching, there is still much too much Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe and everything connected with him is characteristic of all the narrow-mindedness, all the pedantry of life. Robinson Crusoe was created for the hard-hearted middle class worldview of the eighteenth century and was then imitated everywhere else afterward. The English Robinson was barely there and then came the Czech, Polish, German, even a Croatian Robinson? There are Robinsons in every European language. Robinson Crusoe is a person who is not actually a person, because in a certain way he is a person who was mechanically placed in a situation of need and left alone so that out of his own inner activity and out of his external circumstances only those things necessary for healthy human development could develop piece by piece.

We could go through page by page of the Robinson Crusoe story and show the narrow-mindedness that is expressed through his character. We could show the weakness of a rationalistic religious worldview, which says that God is a unity and that human beings are good only when they are not spoiled through one thing or another. This unimaginative view completely puts aside the fact that human beings need a living spirit, one that permeates their souls, one that can be found everywhere in history and which has an effect right up to the stars. This Robinson Crusoe view lives even where the book is not read as the general attitude. This narrow-minded attitude must be removed from humanity, as it has subtly formed life as it is today,so that we find everywhere only a sense for what is mediocre, and people today can no longer rise above a certain level. It is Robinson Crusoe who has brought about this feeling for only the average, for nothing that is special or spectacular.

By pointing to Robinson Crusoe and his imitators and by making people aware of the intellectual adventures of the European- American civilization that overvalues the Robinson Crusoe ideal, I realize I am going against the feelings of many people. We need to leave people with that feeling a little bit, the feeling that they have moved into a little bit of the realm in which they grew up. People grew up with a Robinson Crusoe attitude and now need to think about it a little, in order to rid themselves of that part of this attitude that has permeated modern humanity.

In one sense Robinson Crusoe was a kind of protest against something that has developed more and more in Christianity. Although this is not the original Christian impulse, Christianity has developed in such a way that it assumes human nature is spoiled. Rationalism and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment out of which Robinson was conceived and written assume that human nature is still good and that all that is needed is for its evil enemies to be removed so that that goodness can come forth. Both of these positions are terribly one-sided. It is certainly understandable that a prejudice toward the basic goodness of human nature arose to oppose the prejudice of the basic evil of human nature. Basically, it is nothing more than the last remains of narrow-mindedness, but a very severe form of narrow-mindedness in which Jean- Jacques Rousseau3 lives. It is essentially the opinion that if we allow people to grow as some child of nature, they will do everything just as Robinson Crusoe did in the best and most conscientious way (even though they may be under the influence of some French Baptist minister). That is about what people think.

From the present point of cultural development, we cannot progress if we allow ourselves to fall into either of these one-sided perspectives. This one-sidedness needs to be resolved through a normal synthesis. Human beings are certainly naturally good; human nature is good. Children as they enter the world as imitative beings certainly show that they unconsciously believe in the goodness of the world that has accepted them. Nevertheless, although it is true that human beings in their nature are good, it is just as true that human beings are a product of living. Fresh meat is good, but after eight days it is no longer good. It is bad because it then stinks, and something must be done to improve it if we are still to enjoy eating it after a week. Human beings are in their nature basically good. However, if they remain as they are when they entered the physical world from their pre-earthly existence, they become bad if the strength is not awakened in them to improve themselves.

There you have both: human beings are in their original nature good, but strengths must be awakened in them in order to retain the good. They are not bad in their origins, but can be spoiled if we do not awaken the forces in them that can enable them to retain their original strengths. It is just as erroneous to say that the good would shine through if we allowed people to be as they like as it is erroneous to say that people are basically not good. What is correct to say is that human beings by their nature are good, but the forces must be reawakened in them that enable what is good within to develop. If it is not supported with guidance toward the good, human nature will spoil.

We should always carry this attitude within us in regard to human development. It will be transferred to children when we tell a fairy tale or describe a ladybug or a star in such a way that it is possible to perceive, either in the details or in the general context, that we are convinced that human beings have something which is good. However, this goodness must be continuously cared for; the goodness of the world depends upon our care for human beings. It is the responsibility of human beings to participate in the formative development of the world.

In this regard we have moved away from the wisdom of our ancestors. This kind of wisdom genuinely exists in humanity. It is curious how even in ancient Greece, not to mention Egypt, it was common practice for all instruction, all activities of the priests or other religious people with the general population, to be connected with healing. In ancient times, providing knowledge was closely connected with healing. I could even say that in essence a physician was just another kind of priest and a priest another kind of physician. (Even today we find a deep-seated feeling among people that being a doctor is somehow connected with making better. “Dr. Mammon” is, of course, simply a product of the present.) All things connected with learning or understanding and providing it to others, such as being a teacher or a physician, were one in the original instincts of humanity, and the concept of healing was connected with all of them. Why is that? It was based upon a particular perspective, a perspective that we today in our materialistic times unfortunately no longer have, but one toward which we must turn again. It is the perspective that to the extent that natural forces play a role in the historical development of humanity, there is an element of demise, an element that leads toward decadence, and human beings are called upon out of their own strength to transform that decline continuously into ascent.

Culture continually threatens to become ill. Through teaching and activity, humans continually need to heal what tends to become ill in culture. History contains forces of decline, and we cannot expect these forces of decline to support humanity. The fact that Marxism today lives from the idea that everything is based upon economic forces and that which is spiritual is only a superstructure is fundamentally based upon the materialism of the past centuries. What would occur if these purely economic forces were left to themselves, if people did not continuously attempt to improve? Those forces would only make social life ill. Trotskyism and Leninism only mean to make the entire cultural development of Europe ill. If Marxism is realized, if Marxism permeates schools, then the East will become an artificial illness of European culture. It assumes that culture can develop only out of those things lying outside of human beings. But culture can only develop when human beings continuously heal what exists outside of humanity and which tends to decline.

We must revive the idea that a teacher, when he or she enters the school, acts as a kind of physician for the development of the human spirit and provides the medicine for cultural development to developing children. It is neither vanity nor arrogance when a teacher feels herself to be a physician for culture. If this is felt in the proper way, it gives us a feeling, particularly if we are teachers, to look toward those things that have always been of greatest interest to humanity. The teacher’s view cannot be broad enough. The teacher’s importance cannot be high enough. If we are aware of what education should achieve for humanity, the high-mindedness of the educator’s view will always bring with it the necessary sense of responsibility and humility.

During these lectures, you will have seen that I have attempted to make true for a spiritual-scientific foundation of education something Herbart said: he could not imagine instruction that was not at the same time upbringing, nor could he think of any upbringing without instruction. It is important to permeate ourselves with enough spirit that is sufficiently alive that we bring all the material available to us about the progressing development of humanity into school, so that in our hands it becomes an upbringing for the children. Humanity as a whole has given us a very high task. We need to recognize what humanity has achieved and transform it so that it is appropriate for even the youngest child. We can do this if we comprehend the spirit with such liveliness as it is presented in spiritual science, and as it should be perceived here when we speak of a fructification of education through spiritual science.

I do not want to bring these lectures to a conclusion with some kind of summary. Rather I prefer to let them resound with something that I say without sentimentality, but which arises out of what I have attempted to present to you. Education can only be properly practiced if it is understood as healing and when educators are aware that they are also healers. If these lectures have provided some insight toward deepening an awareness of education so that we can all again feel how we are healers; and how we must become physicians of the spirit if we are to teach and educate in the highest sense, then these lectures will have at least achieved a hint of their goal. I hope only for what the chairman of this conference has already spoken of, namely, for a working through of the material of these lectures. I am, of course, always ready to do what you wish so that what I have presented in an incomplete form in these fourteen lectures, and which I wish so much to enter into the awareness of humanity, can be realized so that it continues to pervade our consciousness.

Today we offer you a performance of eurythmy. Through this art we want to place something into the spiritual development of humanity. We can view eurythmy from three perspectives: from the purely artistic, the educational, and the hygienic.

As an art, eurythmy represents a kind of voiceless, visible speech. Although it takes the form of gestures and movements, either in groups or individually, you should not confuse it with mime or pantomime or with some form of artistic dance. Eurythmy uses the entire human being as its language; this visible unvoiced speech is developed through a study of the laws of voiced speech.

Voiced speech is a way of expressing what lies within the human being. Schiller was right when he said, “When the soul speaks, then, sadly, the soul no longer speaks.” Language carries the human soul to the external world—or at least it should. It is also the means of communication between one person and another, and is therefore subject to convention. In a certain sense language is a social artifact. The more language must serve as a means of communication and of expressing thoughts, the less it can serve as a means of artistic expression, since art must arise out of the whole person.

Language has two sides. The first is the social side. The person must bow to the social world when speaking. Only in that way does language retain something that is intimately connected with the entirety of the human being. Young children do not learn language from their dreams. They learn it during that time when they need to adjust their entire being to their surroundings. This natural adjustment protects language from being just a means of communication.

When a poet—that is, an artist with words—wants to express something, he or she needs everything that hovers behind language. A poet needs pictures and, above all, musicality. True poetry, that is, the artistic aspect of a poem, is not at all found in the direct content of the words; rather it is in the way the content is formed. In poetry we need most of all to take into account what Goethe said in Faust: “Consider the what, but even more so, the how.” The way the poet shapes the poem is what is most important in poetry.

You can see this much more clearly if, when you express yourself artistically, you do not use a means of expression that is too strongly permeated by thoughts but instead use your entire being. For this reason we have used both sensory and supersensory observation to study the way the human larynx, tongue, and other organs of speech move when people express themselves through voiced speech. We studied the movements that are transformed into sounds, into vibrations in the air through normal speaking. We transferred those movements to other human organs, particularly those that are most comparable to primitive organs of speech: the arms and hands.

When people first see eurythmy, they are often surprised that the performers use their hands and arms more than their other limbs. You can see this as an obvious outcome if you consider that even in normal speech, when someone wants to express more than simple conventions, if someone wants to express his or her own individuality or perception or feelings through speech, that person finds it necessary to move into these more agile, more spiritual organs.Of course eurythmy takes the entire human being into account, not just the arms and hands. Eurythmy uses the expressiveness of movements in space, whether of groups or of individuals.

The most important thing to remember is that those movements, whether they are done by individuals or groups, are not at all arbitrary. They are the same movements that are the underlying foundation of what we express through voiced speech, transferred to the entire human being.

I need to emphasize once again that what we see on stage is essentially the entire larynx, represented through the whole person. What we present is the function, rhythm, and tempo of the larynx. It represents the musical and the pictorial aspects, as well as what is poetic when poetry is genuine art. The entire group reveals it all.

What is presented in eurythmy as voiceless and visible speech is also accompanied by music or recitation. Since music and speech are just other forms of expression for what lives in the human soul, we need to use that good old-fashioned form of recitation that Goethe had in mind when he was working with actors. He kept a conductor’s baton in his hand so that they would not only understand the content of the words but would also learn their rhythms. In our case, we need to avoid precisely the things that our inartistic age sees as important in recitation, namely, the emphasis upon the literal content of the words. We need to go back to what was artistic in more primitive recitations. This is rarely seen today, particularly if you live in a city. However, much of it is still alive in people my age, who can remember the traveling speakers of their childhood who recited their street ballads. They drew pictures on a blackboard and then spoke the text. They never spoke without keeping time with their foot, and at an exciting point in the story, they marched up and down or did other things to indicate that the tempo of the verse and its inner form were as important as the inner content. They wanted the listener to be aware of that. You will see that we attempt at every turn to emphasize this deeper aspect of art. Even on those occasions where we attempt to present poetry in humorous or fantastic ways through eurythmy, we do not present the literal content through such things as facial gestures or pantomime. We do not present the content of the poem through musical or poetic forms expressed solely in space but not in time. Instead we present what the poet or artist has shaped from the content.

These are a few things I wanted to mention about the artistic aspect of eurythmy. Since the human being is the instrument, not a violin or piano, not colors and shapes, eurythmy is particularly able to portray what exists within the microcosm of the human being of the ebb and flow of cosmic forces.

The second aspect of eurythmy is that of education. I am convinced that ordinary gymnastics, which developed during a materialistic period, focuses too much on anatomical and physiological aspects. In addition to physical development, there is also a development of the life of the soul and the will. We very much need these things, but mere gymnastics does not develop them in the growing human being. In the future, when people can look at such things more objectively, they will recognize that such gymnastics can strengthen human beings in a certain way, but that this strengthening does not at the same time strengthen the soul and will.

From a pedagogical perspective, we can see eurythmy as ensouled gymnastics, ensouled movement. In the small example we will present to you today with the children, you will see how those movements are carried by their souls.

We also need to say that although we are presenting some children’s exercises here, the children can study eurythmy only during those few hours available during school time. However, that is not really right. The education lying at the basis of our efforts in Dornach—which the Waldorf School in Stuttgart has realized to a certain extent—has the goal of not requiring children to attend any lessons outside of regular school time.

For that reason, it is especially important that we clearly understand the educational significance of eurythmy and completely integrate it into the school curriculum. Then the children will have everything that can serve them for normal spiritual, soul, and physical development, particularly the content of eurythmy.

Third is the hygienic element. The human being is a little world, a microcosm. All ill health essentially stems from the fact that human beings tear themselves away from the great laws of the cosmos. We could represent ill health by saying that if I removed my finger from my organism as a whole, it would no longer be a finger; it would wither away. My finger retains its inner function only in connection with my organism as a whole. In the same way, the human being realizes its inner nature only in connection with the universe as a whole. What happens in human beings really is connected with the entirety of the universe. People are not merely enclosed within the boundaries of their skin. Just a moment ago the air you now have within you was outside of you. After you have inhaled it, it becomes part of your organism, and what you now have within you will be exhaled. As soon as you have exhaled it, it will be outside you. Even if we only lived within our skin, we could not prove we are only that which is enclosed by our skin. We are not just a part of the air but of the entire cosmos.

We can therefore see that everything unhealthy results from things that people do that are not appropriate, that are not befitting of the entirety of human nature or the age in which we live, and that do not support the harmony and fulfillment that must exist between human beings and all creation. However, since every movement in eurythmy naturally comes forth out of the entire human organism, just as the movements of the larynx and its associated organs do for normal speech, everything done in eurythmy can bring the human being into harmony with the entire universe. We can certainly say that what a person, even as a child, can gain from the movements of eurythmy has a healing element. Of course, it must be performed properly and not clumsily. This is something we can certainly consider as an aspect of soul, spirit, and physical hygiene.

These are, then, the three perspectives from which we should see eurythmy and from which we have placed it in our spiritual movement.

Even though many visitors may have been here often and may have seen our recent attempts to move forward in our forms and utilization of space in the groups, we still need to appeal to your understanding for today’s presentation. Eurythmy is at its very beginnings. This is an attempt at a beginning, but it is an attempt that we are convinced will improve and become more perfect. Perhaps others will need to join in and take up what we can accomplish with our weak forces and develop it further. Nevertheless it is certainly possible to see our intent from what will be shown today. Eurythmy opens the artistic wellsprings at their source, because it uses the entire human being as its means of expression, because it pedagogically develops the soul, spiritual, and physical aspects of the child, and also because it places human beings into movements that have a health-giving effect. Therefore it is an art that can be justifiably placed alongside the other, older arts, especially when our contemporaries turn their interest toward it.

Today, as in the past, I would like to say a few introductory words before this performance of eurythmy. I do this not in order to explain what will be presented since, of course, what is artistic will need to have its effect through direct experience, and it would be inartistic to give some theoretical explanation before such a performance. Nevertheless I might say that the art of eurythmy is an attempt to reach down into a source of art that exists in human beings. That wellspring seeks expression in artistic forms that are particularly well-suited for revealing the needs of all art, namely, to bring what is artistic into the realm of the sense and super-sense-perceptible.

Goethe coined the expression “sensible and supersensible viewing” 1out of the depths of his world perspective and his feeling for art. The form of the art of eurythmy is completely based upon this sense and supersensible perception.

On the stage you will see all kinds of movements performed by individuals and groups. At first you might have the impression that the eurythmy presentation should be accompanied by poetic or musical performance and that the eurythmy is simply another expression of that. You might have the impression that eurythmy is simply gestures invented to mimic what is presented through the poetry or music. That is not the case. Eurythmy is based upon movements exercised by the organs of speech themselves and which have been revealed through a careful sensory and supersensible study of human speech.

In normal speech, the movements of the lips and gums and so forth directly affect the air. They are transformed into subtle vibrations that form the basis of what we hear. It is, of course, not these vibrations that are important here in eurythmy; rather what is important lies at the basis of an entire system of such vibrations.

This has been studied and was transferred from the organs of speech to the entire human being according to the Goethean principle of metamorphosis, according to which, for instance, the entire plant is only a leaf that is more complicated in form.

What you will see on the stage are not simply random movements. Instead they are movements that strictly follow certain laws. They follow the same laws and occur in the same order as do the movements of the organs of speech when giving tone while speaking or sounds while singing. Within these forms resides an inner necessity of the same sort as is created by music in forming a series of tones. What we are concerned with here is, in fact, a kind of visible speech that closely follows certain rules.

Modern culture will need to find its way into this visible speech, as modern culture contains something quite inartistic within it. Things that were quite common during the Romantic period are much less so today—for example, people intently listened to poems when they did not actually understand the words; they listened more to the rhythm and the inner form of the sounds. We will see this in the recitations that accompany the eurythmy presentations in much the same way as does music, that there is nothing other that we could emphasize in this element of artistic eurythmy than the actual artistic element of the poetry itself. It is not the word-for-word content of the poem that is important; rather, it is the formal form that the artist has created which is important. Thus you will see that we attempt to present forms and spatial forms created by groups. They are not simply mimicking the content of the poetry; rather something follows from the character of the poem that the poet developed into the words. Even when the presentation is concerned with something surreal, something affected, such as we will attempt to present in the second part of the presentation today, you will see that it is concerned not with some imitative presentation of the content, but rather with forming connections of such a nature that the individual movements have little effect; the effect is formed through the harmonious forms acting together.

In general, we can say that through eurythmy we return to the sources of art because eurythmy is an art that should not affect us solely through our thoughts. When our concern is with science in our modern materialistic sense, it is only thoughts that affect us, and for that reason, we can penetrate only into the sense-perceptible content of the world. In the art of eurythmy, our concern is more that the sense and supersensible character should be expressed than the fact that the entire human being or groups of human beings are the means of expressing it.

We can thus say that the human being, the ensouled human being, the human being permeated by spirit, places soul and spirit into each movement, namely, that soul and spirit that we can hear through the truths sounding from the poetry. All this shows how the sense-perceptible, which we can see through the limbs of the human being, at the same time carries the spirit on its wings. It is, therefore, genuinely sensory and super-sensibly perceptible. Eurythmy thus expresses what Goethe demanded of all art when he said, “Those to whom nature begins to reveal its secret will have a deep desire for nature’s highest level of expression, namely, art.”3 For Goethe, art is in a certain sense a way of experiencing nature through feeling. How would it be possible to better correspond to nature than to bring to expression those capacities that enable human beings to move based upon their will, so that a kind of visible speech is therefore expressed? Thinking, which in general ignores art, is thus shut out. It is only will that is expressed in the movements. The personality of human beings is transferred to these movements in an impersonal way, so something that is highly artistic and represents something sense- and super-sense-perceptible is expressed through these presentations.

Eurythmy also has a significant educational effect in that it is at the same time a kind of ensouled gymnastics. If you think about these things objectively, then you will see that what has long been treasured as gymnastics and something which we certainly do not wish to eliminate is something that experiences a particular kind of growth when we place alongside it this ensouled form of gymnastics as we have done for the children at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. You will see some of this children’s eurythmy during the second part of our presentation today.

Normal gymnastics strengthens the body, of course, and for that reason we certainly do not want to go without it. However, ensouled gymnastics, which has an effect not simply upon the physical body but the spirit and soul as well, is particularly effective in developing the will. Future generations, who will have an increasingly difficult life, will need stronger will energies.

Eurythmy also has an important hygienic side. The movements of eurythmy are those movements through which individuals can best place themselves into the rhythm and harmony of the world. All unhealthy things are essentially based upon people separating themselves from that rhythm. We are certainly not doing anything reactionary, and I would ask therefore that you do not consider me to be rejecting the aspects of modern culture. There are many things today that are necessary, things we need, things we cannot eliminate. We must also admit there are many reasons modern human beings would want to separate themselves from the rhythm and harmony of the world. Each time we sit in a railway car or an automobile, and when we do many other such things at the same time, we undertake actions that separate us from universal rhythms. This separation sneaks slowly into human health and undermines it in a way that is not even noticed. These things can be seen only by those who have an intimate understanding of the relationship of human beings with the universe. However, the universe seeks today to give something that will return human beings to health.

Where do people today seek health? I know that with the following I am saying something contrary to what is commonly held today, but in the future people will think more objectively of this. Prior to this terrible world catastrophe that crashed in upon us, there was an attempt to achieve health through such things as the Olympic Games. That is a terrible thought that lies entirely outside of any genuine understanding. The Olympic Games were appropriate for the Greek body. When undertaking such things, people do not at all realize that each cultural period has its particular requirements.

That is something, however, that we attempt to do through the art of eurythmy. We do not attempt to provide humanity with something based upon some abstract theory or something from the past. Instead we try to do what is necessary for modern civilization, something that we can find within human nature and which is appropriate for the structure of modern humanity.

Such things certainly cannot be proven anatomically or physiologically, because we cannot dissect the ancient Greeks. Those who can look into cultural development through spiritual science recognize that modern human beings in their physical form and especially in their soul and spiritual structure require something else. Eurythmy is a beginning toward finding those requirements placed before us by our cultural period itself. Eurythmy attempts to correspond to our culture.

As you know, what we will present here today is at its very beginnings, and therefore remains simply an attempt. We are nevertheless convinced that because we are serious about working based upon the requirements of our cultural period, others will further develop what we can present here today, so that a mature art form will arise that is worthy of being placed alongside its older sisters.