Document text
Rudolf Steiner
A
Modern
Ar tof
Education
FGUNDATIONS OF WHLDORF EDUCATION
A MODERN ART OF EDUCATION
[XVII]
The Foundations of Waldorf Education
Rudolf Steiner
A MODERN
ART OF EDUCATION
Lectures presented in Ilkley, Yorkshire
August 5-17, 1923
(£/ Anthroposophie Press
2004
Published by Anthroposophie Press
400 Main Street
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.steinerbooks.org
Translatée! with permission from Rudolf Steiner's Gegenwartiges
Geistesleben und Erziehung (GA 307) copyright © 1961
Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung.
Translated by Jesse Darrell, except lecture 6 by Robert Lathe & Nancy
Whittaker, and lecture 8 by George Adams. Ail translations revised.
Revised édition by Anthroposophie Press copyright © 2004
Introduction by Christopher Bamford, copyright © 2004
Publication of this work was made possible by a grant from
The Waldorf Curriculum Fund
Ail rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without the written permission of the publishers, except for brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steiner, Rudolf, 1861-1925.
[Gegenwartiges Geistesleben und Erziehung. English]
A modem art of éducation : lectures presented in Ilkley, Yorkshire,
August 5-17, 1923 / Rudolf Steiner.
p. cm. — (The foundations of Waldorf éducation ; 17)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-88010-511-9 (alk. paper)
1 . Education — Philosophy. 2. Waldorf method of éducation. 3.
Anthroposophy. I. Title. II. Sériés.
LB775.S7G497 2003
370'. 1 — dc22
2003017769
Contents
Introduction by Christopher Bamford vii
1. Science, Art, Religion, Morality
August 3 , igzj 1
2 . The Principles of Greek Education
August 6 , îgzj ty
3 . Greek Education and the Middle Ages
August ?. igzj 34
4. SPIRIT’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY
August 8 , îgzj Ji
5. FREEING VOLITION IN THE HUMAN ORGANISM
August g , tgzj y o
6 . Walking, Speaking, Thinking
August io , îgzj 88
7 . Rhythm, Sleep, Imitation
August il , igzj îoj
8 . Reading, Writing, Nature Study
August 13 , 1923 izi
9 . Arithmetic, Geometry, History
August 14 , 1923 139
10 . Physics, Chemistry, Handwork, Language, Religion
August lj , 1923 133
11. Memory, Tempéraments, Physical Education, Art
August 16, 1923 lyo
12 . Education toward Inner Freedom
August VJ , 1 Ç2J l8j
The Three Eras of Human Religious Education
August 12 , 1923 204
Closing Address
August VJ , 1923 219
The Foundations of Waldorf Education 223
Rudolf Steiner’s Works on Education 227
Further Reading on Education & Anthroposophy ... 230
Index 232
Introduction
Christopher Bamford
Rudolf Steiner’s lectures and lecture courses on Waldorf éduca-
tion flll at least twenty volumes. Therefore, it is not surprising
that there is a certain amount of répétition in these works. It is
the différences that are surprising. These often hâve to do with
ivho Rudolf Steiner was addressing. He spoke differently, for
example, to anthroposophists in Germany or Swiss public
school teachers than he did to English audiences. The English
lectures are especially interesting and uncannily accessible for
the obvious reason that Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking culture
is doser to us in America than, for instance, German or Dutch
culture. Like The Kingdom of Cbildhood and The Spiritual
Ground of Education, A Modem Art of Education has an imme-
diacy and intimacy that makes it one of the best introductions
to Waldorf éducation.
Steiner presented the lectures printed here in England in
1923, his sixth visit. He had fîrst corne to London for Theo-
sophical Society congresses in 1902, 1903, and 1905, but did
not return again until May 1913, after the split with Theoso-
phy. When he did so it was at the request of the newly formed
English anthroposophical group. He spoke then on two topics:
“Occult Science and Occult Development” and “Christ at the
Time of the Mystery of Golgotha and Christ in the Twentieth
Century.” These important lectures hâve exceptional liveliness
A Modern Art of Education
viii
and depth, indicative of Steiner’s respect for honest British
“matter-of-factness,” which demanded that topics be broached
head on and without prévarication. He clearly enjoyed the free-
dom this offered. There was no need for long-winded intro-
ductions. The Great War, and its chaotic aftermath, then
intervened to make travel impossible.
As a resuit, Steiner was not able to cross the Channel again
until 1922, when he gave several lectures and courses, includ-
ing the éducation lectures published as The Spiritual Ground of
Education , given at Oxford university and hosted by Professor
Millicent MacKenzie of University College, Cardiff. As a con-
séquence of these lectures, Rudolf Steiner was invited to give a
lecture course the following year at Ilkley in Yorkshire under
the auspices of “The Union for the Realization of Spiritual Val-
ues in Education.” A number of experienced Waldorf teachers
(including Hermann von Baravalle, Carolyn von Hildebrand,
and Karl Schubert) accompanied Steiner (they were ail on their
way to the International Summer School in Penmaenmawr,
Wales) and gave démonstrations of the practice of Waldorf
éducation.
We are lucky enough to hâve Steiner’s own report on the
event. 1 His lectures, he says, were designed to show “how Wal-
dorf methods are related to present-day civilization.” He writes:
“On the artistic side, we wanted to show how we hâve evolved
eurythmy out of the anthroposophical movement. In addition,
six teachers from the Waldorf school were going to show how
they put into practice what was described in the lectures.”
On his way north, Steiner observed the industrial and coal
mining townships — for example, “Leeds, where unbelievably
blackened houses are strung together quite abstractly, where
1 . Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Speaks to the British: Lectures and Addresses in
Englandand Wales. London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1998
Introduction
IX
everything looks like a condensation of blackest coal dust, con-
centrated into the shapes of ho uses where people hâve to live.”
He remarked, “Do you see those thought forms — there you
hâve hell on earth.” He concludes, “This kind of expérience
makes obvious how absolutely necessary it is that spiritual
impulses should enter our présent civilization.”
He also remarks how struck he was by the simultaneous évi-
dence of remnants of ancient, Druidic culture:
Ilkley, then, is a place surrounded on the one hand by an
atmosphère created entirely by these industrial towns. On
the other hand, in the remains of dolmens and old Druidic
altars lying around everywhere, it has traces of something
that reminds one of the ancient spirituality that has, how-
ever, no successors. It is most moving to hâve on the one
hand the impression [of the industrialism] I just described
and then, on the other, to climb a hill in this région so filled
with the effects of those impressions and then find in those
very characteristic places the remains of ancient sacrificial
altars marked with appropriate signs.
He then describes the course itself:
Each morning began with a lecture in which I tried to put
before the audience the kind of éducation practiced in the
Waldorf school, basing this on the whole historical develop-
ment of éducation. My starting point was to describe how,
in Greek culture, éducation had arisen from ordinary Greek
life. This showed, I said, that no spécial method or practices
should be invented for use in schools, for schools ought to
bring children what is there in the culture around them.
I do not want to be generally critical about, say, Frôbel’s way
of teaching little children, but I hâve to say that it is not
right to invent spécial methods for doing things with chil-
dren — methods that are unconnected with general cultural
life and hâve not evolved from it. The right thing is for
X
A Modern Art of Education
teachers to hâve a firm footing in general cultural life, to
hâve a good feel and a good sense for it, so that they can
base their teaching on what is there in the culture, into
which the pupils will, after ail, enter in due course. So I
wanted to show how éducation and educational methods
must grow out of our own life, a life, however, which is
filled with the spirit. This led to an opportunity to shed
light on the Waldorf approach from another angle. What I
hâve just mentioned was the starting point. The actual con-
tent of the lectures was then the Waldorf approach as
such.... Following the lectures, there was a eurythmy perfor-
mance by the children of the Kings Langley School, and
performances in the Ilkley Theatre by the professional
eurythmists who had accompanied us there.... The third élé-
ment was the contributions from the teachers of the Wal-
dorf school who had corne with us.
These teacher démonstrations were “met with the greatest
interest.” One would hâve wanted to be there! For instance, Dr.
Baravalle’s démonstration, Steiner reports,
was extremely moving for one who cares deeply about the
development of Waldorf éducation.... To watch him setting
out his géométrie ideas in a simple way suitable for children;
to follow a kind of inner drama in the way Pythagoras’ theo-
rem suddenly arose from a sequence of metamorphosing
planes that was both artistic and mathematical; and to
watch the audience, chiefly teachers, being led step-by-step
without knowing where they were going, while various
planes were shifted around until, suddenly, Pythagoras’ the-
orem appeared on the blackboard — this was a most moving
expérience. The audience of teachers were quietly aston-
ished, their feelings and thoughts involved in an inner
drama, and they were so genuinely enthusiastic about such
methods coming into schools that it was truly moving to
behold.
Introduction
xi
Readers of Steiner’s lectures printed here will also be “quietly
astonished” and “genuinely enthusiastic.” After an introduc-
tion, in which he speaks of reuniting science (intellectual
knowledge), art, and morality once again, he turns to the prin-
ciples of Greek éducation, in which body, soûl, and spirit were
still a unity. He then traces the development through the Mid-
dle Ages, during which new, evolving éléments were added. In
our time, he says, we must understand the concrète connection
of the spirit with the human being, so that thinking, feeling,
and willing can once more become alive. He relates this to the
child’s developmental stages, as well as the human basics such a
sleeping and waking. Then he turns to the spécifies of the cur-
riculum: reading, writing, nature study, arithmetic, geometry,
history physics, chemistry, crafts, language, and religion.
Finally, he turns to memory, the tempéraments, physical cul-
ture, art, and the actual organization of a Waldorf school — to
which this volume is, ail in ail, one of the best introductions.
M I N-
Science, Art, Religion, Morality
August j, igzj
First, in response to the kind greeting from Ms. Beverley
to Dr. Marie Steiner and me, I can assure you that we
deeply appreciate the invitation to give this course of lec-
tures . 1 Essentially, my purpose is to show what spiritual
science says about éducation and to describe attempts by
the Stuttgart Waldorf school to apply the educational
principles arising from spiritual science. We gladly
accepted the invitation to corne to northern England, and
it gives me deep satisfaction to speak on a subject I con-
sider important, especially since I am also speaking to
those who arranged this course and hâve heard lectures
on éducation from this perspective before. Thus I hope
that there is more behind this conférence than the déter-
mination of those who organized it. And I hope it shows
that our previous activities are now bearing fruit.
English friends of spiritual science were with us at a
conférence during Christmas before last, when the Goet-
heanum — since taken by fire — still stood . 2 That confér-
ence was arranged by Mrs. Mackenzie, the author of an
able book on Hegel's educational principles, and the
sympathetic appréciation expressed there makes one
1. Ms. Beverley was chair of the invitation committee.
2. See Rudolf Steiner, Sou 1 Economy: Body, Soûl, and Spirit in Waldorf Edu-
cation. See the bibliography for this and other books cited.
2
A Modern Art of Education
hope that it is not, after ail, so very difficult to find
understanding that transcends the limits of nationality . 3
What I said about éducation at that conférence did not, of
course, emanate from the more intellectual philosophy of
Hegel but from spiritual science, the nature of which is
wholly spiritual. Again, however, it was Mrs. Mackenzie
who discovered that something fruitful for éducation
could be won from spiritual science, which goes beyond
intellectuality into the spiritual while taking full account
of Hegel.
I was also able to speak of our educational principles
and their application a second time last year, in the old
university town of Oxford . 4 Perhaps I am justified in
thinking that those lectures — which, among other things,
dealt with how éducation is related to society — may hâve
induced a number of English people concerned with édu-
cation to visit our Stuttgart Waldorf school. It was a great
joy to welcome them into our classes, and we were
delighted that they were happy with our work and fol-
lowed it with interest. During that visit, the idea formed
to hold this summer course on éducation. Its roots, there-
fore, lie in previous activities, and this fact gives us real
confidence and courage as we begin these lectures. Cour-
age and confidence are needed when we speak of matters
still unfamiliar in today's culture, with strong opposition
coming from many areas. Courage and confidence are
especially necessary when we try to explain principles
that would approach, in a Creative sense, the greatest
artistic achievement of the cosmos: humanity itself.
3. Hettie Millicent Mackenzie, Hegel's Educational Theory and Practice
(1909), New York, Haskell House, 1971. Mrs. Mackenzie was professor of
éducation at Cardiff University (1910-1915).
4. See Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Ground of Education.
Science, Art, Religion, Morality
3
Those who visited us realize how Waldorf éducation
essentially deals with the deepest fibers of modem life.
The educational methods applied there can really no
longer be described by the word pedagogy — a treasured
word that the Greeks learned from Plato and his follow-
ers, who had devoted themselves so sincerely to ail edu-
cational matters. Pedagogy is, in tact, no longer an apt
term today, because it immediately shows the bias of its
idéal s, and those who visited the Waldorf school under-
stand this to begin with. Today it is not unusual, of
course, to find boys and girls in the same classes and
taught in the same way, and I merely mention this to
show you that in this respect, too, the methods of the
Waldorf school are in keeping with recent trends.
What does the word pedagogy suggest? A "pédagogue"
is a teacher of boys . 5 We see immediately that, in ancient
Greece, éducation was very one-sided — half of humanity
was excluded from serious éducation. To Greeks, only
boys were capable of being fully human, and girls had to
remain in the background in terms of real éducation. A
pédagogue was a leader of boys and was concerned only
with that gender.
Today, the presence of female students in schools is
common, though it is a radical change from not-so-
ancient customs. Even today, however, another feature of
the Waldorf school will seem strange to many people.
Not only are boys and girls considered equal, but even on
the teaching staff there is no distinction between the
sexes — at least, not in principle — even up to the highest
classes. Universally human considérations required us to
set aside préjudice. First, we had to give up ail that the
5. Pédagogue, from the Greek word paidagogos, a slave who escorted chil-
dren to school ( Merriam-Webster's Coüegiate Dictionary, lOth ed.).
4
A Modern Art of Education
old term pedagogy implied before we could establish an
éducation in keeping with modern conditions. This is
only one aspect of the educational préjudice implied by
the term. In the broadest sense, it must be said that, until
recently, nothing was known of the human being as such
in éducation. Indeed, there hâve been many biased views
in the educational world — not only that of gender.
According to the old principles, once the years of édu-
cation were over, did "the human being as such" step
forth? Certainly not! Today, however, people are prepar-
ing to look for this — for pure, certain, undifferentiated
humanity. From the way the Waldorf school was formed,
we can see that this had to be worked for.
The original idea was to provide an éducation for chil-
dren whose parents were working in the Waldorf- Astoria
factory, and because the director was a member of the
Anthroposophical Society, he asked me to arrange this
éducation. 6 1 was able to do this only on the basis of spiri-
tual science. And so, to begin with, the school arose for
humanity as such, fashioned from the working class. It
was "anthroposophie" only in the sense that the man
who first had the idea happened to be an anthroposo-
phist. Thus we hâve an educational institution with a
social basis that wishes to base the whole spirit and
method of its teaching on spiritual science. But it was not
even remotely a matter of beginning an "anthropo-
sophie" school. On the contrary, we hold that, because
spiritual science can always make itself inconspicuous, it
can institute a school based on universal human princi-
ples, not on social rank, philosophical concepts, or any
other particular. Ail of this may hâve occurred to those
6. The director was Emil Molt (1876-1936).
Science, Art, Religion, Morality
5
who visited the Waldorf school, and it can be seen in
everything we do there. And it may hâve led to the invi-
tation to give these lectures.
In this introductory lecture, since I am not yet speaking
of éducation, let me thank those who arranged this
course. I also thank them for arranging eurythmy perfor-
mances, which hâve become an intégral part of spiritual
science. Let me begin by expressing this hope: A summer
course has brought us together. We are gathered in a
beautiful spot in northern England, far from the busy
winter months. You hâve given up part of your summer
récréation to matters that will play an important rôle in
the future, and the time will corne when the spirit uniting
us now for two weeks during the summer holidays will
inspire ail our winter work. I cannot thank you enough
for dedicating your holidays to the study of important
ideas for the future. With equal sincerity, I trust that the
spirit of our summer course will be carried into the win-
ter months; only then will this course bear real fruit.
Allow me to refer to Miss Macmillan's impressive
words yesterday, which expressed a deep social and
pedagogical impulse and showed that we must look for
profound moral impulses before human civilization can
progress further in terms of éducation. When we allow
the significance of such an impulse to work deeply in our
hearts, we are led to the most fundamental problems in
modem culture — problems related to the forms that our
culture and civilization assume in human history. We are
living in a time when certain areas of culture, though
standing side by side, remain separated. To begin with,
we hâve ail that we can learn about the world through
knowledge — for the most part, communicated intellectu-
ally. Then there is the realm of art, in which we try to
6
A Modern Art of Education
express deep inner expériences, imitating divine Creative
activity with our human powers. We also hâve the reli-
gious endeavors — longings that lead us to unité the roots
of our existence with those of the cosmos. And finally, we
try to evoke from within ourselves impulses that place us
as moral beings in the world's civilized life. In effect, we
face four aspects of culture: knowledge, art, religion, and
morality. Human évolution, however, has caused these
four branches to develop independently, and thus we no
longer recognize their common roots. It does no good to
criticize these conditions; they are necessary, but they
must also be understood.
Consequently, we will remind ourselves today of the
beginnings of civilization. There was an ancient period in
human évolution when science, art, religion, and moral-
ity were united. The intellect had not yet developed its
présent abstract nature, and humanity tried to solve the
mysteries of existence by using a kind of "picture" con-
sciousness. Grand images were displayed before the
human soûl, and these were passed down to us in a déca-
dent form as myths and sagas. Originally, they arose
from expérience and knowledge of the spiritual essence
of the universe. There was a time when, through direct
inner imagination, humankind could perceive the spiri-
tual ground of the sensory world. And human beings
made this instinctive imagination substantial by using
earthly material to make architecture, sculpture, painting,
music, and the other arts. In outer material forms, people
embodied the fruits of knowledge to their hearts' delight.
With human faculties, people copied divine création, giv-
ing visible form to ail that first flowed into humankind as
science and knowledge. In other words, art reflected for
the senses ail that the forces of knowledge had taken in.
Science, Art, Religion, Morality
7
In a diluted form, this faculty is revealed again by Goethe
in his vvord s, spoken from knowledge and artistic under-
standing: "Beauty is a manifestation of the secret laws of
nature, without which they would remain for ever hid-
den from us." And again: "Those to whom nature unveils
her open secrets are conscious of an irrésistible longing
for art, nature's worthiest expression."
Such views show that we are essentially predisposed
to view science and art as two aspects of the same truth.
Humankind was able to do this in ancient times, when
knowledge satisfied us inwardly by arising as idéal forms
before the soûl. The beauty that enchanted could be made
available to the senses through the arts, and expériences
such as these were the essence of early civilizations.
And the situation today? Because of everything that
abstract intellectuality brought with it, we establish scien-
tific Systems of knowledge from which art is eliminated
as much as possible. It is believed a great sin to introduce
art into science, and anyone found guilty of this is imme-
diately denounced as a superficial amateur. It is said that
our knowledge must be sober and objective and that art
has nothing to do with objectivity, but arises only from
one's arbitrary will. A huge gap thus opens between
knowledge and art, and humanity can no longer find a
way to cross it. But this is our undoing. Whenever we
apply science that is valued because it is free of art, we
may in fact be led to a marvelous knowledge of nature,
but it is nature devoid of real life. We fully recognize the
wondrous achievements of science, yet science has noth-
ing to say when confronted by the mystery of humanity.
Look wherever you like in today's science; you will find
wonderful answers to the problems of outer nature, but
no answers to the human enigma. The laws of science
A Modern Art of Education
cannot approach us. Why? Although it sounds like her-
esy to modern ears, whenever we approach the human
being with natural laws, we must move into the realm of
art. Heretical indeed, because people will certainly say
that this is no longer scientific. If you try to understand
the human being artistically, you are ignoring the laws of
observation and strict logic, which must always be fol-
lowed. However emphatically one may argue that it is
unscientific, humanity is an artistic création of nature. Ail
sorts of arguments may claim that artistic understanding
is completely unscientific, but it remains a fact that
humanity cannot be understood only through scientific
modes of cognition. Despite ail our science, we corne to a
hait with the human being. Only when we drop our pre-
conceptions do we realize that we must turn to some-
thing else; scientific intellectuality must be allowed to
move into the area of art. Science itself must become an
art before it can approach the secrets of the human being.
If we follow this appropriate path of development with
ail our inner forces — not just looking in an outer artistic
sense — we can allow scientific intellectuality to flow over
into what I hâve described as "imagination” in Hozv to
Know Higher Worlds . 7 This " imaginative knowledge,"
although an object of suspicion and opposition today, is
indeed possible. It is the kind of thinking that is aroused
to living and positive activity, and does not passively
give itself up to the outer world, which is increasingly the
mode of thinking today. The difficulty of speaking of
7. The words imagination, inspiration, and intuition (italicized here) are
used here to mean particular levels of inner development. See, for exam-
ple, Rudolf Steiner, A Psychology of Body, Soûl, and Spirit: Anthroposophy,
Psychosophy, Pneumatosophy, especially the lecture titled "Imagination-
Imagination, Inspiration— Se\(-Fu I fi 1 lment, Intuition-Conscience."
Science, Art, Religion, Morality
9
these things has nothing to do with speaking against the
scientific habits of our time. Basically, when one goes into
it, one is speaking against ail of modem civilization.
There is an increasing tendency to disregard the activity
of thinking — inner, active participation in it — and to sur-
render to a sequence of events, allowing thoughts to sim-
ply run their course without doing anything oneself.
This situation began with the demand for a materialis-
tic démonstration of spiritual matters. Just consider a lec-
ture on spiritual subjects; visible evidence is out of the
question, because words are the only available media —
one cannot summon the invisible by some magical pro-
cess. Ail that can be done is to stimulate thinking and
assume that the audience will energize their thinking to
follow what one can indicate only with words. Neverthe-
less, it frequently happens that many listeners (I am not,
of course, referring to those in this hall) begin to yawn,
because they imagine that thinking should be passive.
They fall asleep, because they are not following actively.
People would like everything to be demonstrated to the
senses and illustrated with slides or the like, which
makes it unnecessary to think at ail. Indeed, such people
cannot think. That was the beginning, but it has gone fur-
ther. In a performance of Hamlet, for example, in order to
understand it we must go along with the sériés of events
as well as the spoken word. But today, drama has been
deserted for the cinéma, where we need not exert our-
selves at ail; images roll off the machine and may be
watched passively. Consequently, the inner activity of
thinking has been gradually lost, but this is exactly what
we must take hold of. When this is done, you will see that
thinking is not simply something to be stimulated from
outside, but an inner human force.
10
A Modern Art of Education
The thinking that is common in our modern civiliza-
tion is only one aspect of this thought force. If we
inwardly observe if — from the other si de, as it were — if is
revealed as the force that forms human beings from
childhood. Before we can understand this, we must acti-
vate the inner formative force that transforms abstract
thought into images. After the necessary efforts, we reach
"the beginning of méditation," as I called it in my book.
At this point, we not only begin to transform ability into
art, but also raise thinking to imagination. We are thus in a
world of imagination, knowing that it is not a création of
fantasy but a real and objective world. We are fully aware
that, although we do not yet possess this objective world
itself in imagination, we hâve the imagery of it. Now, the
point is to realize that we must go beyond the picture.
There is much to do before we arrive at this State of
inner créative thinking. It does not merely contain pic-
tures of fantasy, but images that contain their own reality.
Next, however, we must be able to eliminate ail of this
créative activity; we must accomplish an inner moral act.
This is, in fact, a moral act within our being. Once we
hâve taken the trouble to achieve this active, imaginai
thinking (you can read in my book just how much trou-
ble), when ail of one's soûl forces hâve been applied and
the powers of self exerted to their utmost, then one must
be able to eliminate what has been gained in this way. We
must develop the highest fruits of thinking raised to méd-
itation within ourselves, and then be capable of selfless-
ness; we must be able to eliminate ail that was gained.
This is not the same as having nothing — never having
gained anything to begin with.
Now, if one has first made every effort to strengthen
the self in this way and then destroys the results through
Science, Art, Religion, Morality
11
one's own powers, one's consciousness becomes empty
and a spiritual world surges into consciousness. It is then
seen that knowledge of the spiritual world requires the
spiritual forces of cognition. Active, imaginai thinking
can be called imagination. When the spirit world pours
into consciousness that has been emptied through the
greatest conceivable efforts, it does so by way of what
may be called inspiration. Having experienced imagina-
tion, through the moral act described we become worthy
of grasping the spirit world behind outer nature and
humanity.
Now I will try to show you how, from this point, we
are led to religion. Let me point out that, inasmuch as
spiritual science strives for true imagination, it leads not
only to knowledge, or to art that itself has the quality of
an image, but to the spiritual reality within the image.
Spiritual science bridges the gap between knowledge and
art. Thus, at a higher level — one more suited to the mod-
em âge — the abandoned unity of science and art can
reenter human civilization. This unity must be attained,
because the schism between science and art has disrupted
our very being. Above ail, modem humanity must strive
to move out of this State of disruption toward unity and
inner harmony.
So far, I hâve spoken of the harmony between science
and art. In the third part of this lecture I will develop this
subject further in relation to religion and morality.
Knowledge that draws Creative cosmic activity into itself
can then flow directly into art, and this path from knowl-
edge to art can be extended and taken further. It was
extended in this way through the forces of ancient imagi-
native knowledge, which also found the way directly into
the life of religion. Those who applied themselves to this
12
A Modern Art of Education
kind of knowledge — primitive and instinctive though it
was in early humanity — did not expérience it as external,
because, in their knowing and thinking, the divinity of
the world lived in them; the créative divine passed into
human artistic creativity. Th us, a way could be found to
raise physical artistic créations to an even higher consé-
cration. The activity that people made their own by
embodying divine spirit in physical substance could then
be extended to acts in which, as fully conscious human
beings, they expressed the will of cosmic divine powers.
They felt imbued by divine Creative power, and as this
path was followed from elaborating material substance to
human action, art passed, through ritual, into service of
the divine. Artistic création became service of God.
What is done in a cuit represents the consecrated artis-
tic accomplishments of ancient humanity. Artistic acts
were lifted to become cultic acts, thus glorifying God
through matter by dévotion to God through the service of
the cuit. As humanity bridged the gulf between art and
religion, religion arose in full harmony with knowledge
and art. Although primitive and instinctive, that knowl-
edge was a true picture, and as such it could lead human
acts, through ritual, to directly portray the divine. In this
way, the transition from art to religion was made possi-
ble. Is it still possible with our present-day mode of
knowledge? Ancient clairvoyant perception revealed to
humankind in images the spirit in every créature and nat-
ural process, and through human surrender and dévotion
to the spirit in raturai processes, the all-creative, omnipo-
tent spirit of the cosmos entered the cuit.
How do we know the world today? Again, it is better
to describe than to criticize, because (as the following lec-
tures will show) the development of our présent way of
Science, Art, Religion, Morality
13
knowing was needed in human history. Today I am sim-
ply presenting certain suggestions. Humankind gradu-
ally lost spiritual insight into the beings and processes of
nature. Today, people are proud of having eliminated
spirit from their observations of nature, finally reaching
théories that attribute the origin of our planet to the
movements of some primeval nebula. Mechanical activity
in this nebula are said to be the origin of ail the kingdoms
of nature, even humanity. According to these laws, which
loom so large in our "objective" thinking, this earth must
finally end through a so-called death by heat. Ail the ide-
als achieved by humanity, having arisen from nature as a
kind of fata morgana, will disappear, and in the end only
a tomb of earthly existence will remain.
If science recognizes this line of thinking as the truth,
and if people are honest and courageous enough to face
its inévitable conséquences, they must also recognize that
religion and morality are also illusions and will never be
otherwise. Nevertheless, people cannot endure such a
thought, and so they hold on to remnants of ancient times
when religion and morality were in harmony with
knowledge and art. Religion and morality no longer
spring creatively from our inner being; they are based on
tradition and are a héritage from times when ail things
revealed themselves through our instincts, when God
and the world of morality were made manifest. Our
efforts toward knowledge today cannot reveal God or
morality. Science attains the end of the animal species,
and humankind is cast out. Honest thinking cannot
bridge the gap between knowledge and religion.
Ail true religions arose from inspiration. True, the early
form of inspiration was not as conscious as that to which
we must now aspire, but it was there on an instinctive
14
A Modern Art of Education
level, and religions correctly trace their origins back to it.
Faiths that no longer recognize living inspiration or révé-
lation from the spirit in the immédiate présent must make
do with tradition. Such faiths, however, lack inner vitality
and immédiate direction of religious life. This direction
and vitality must be regained, otherwise our society can-
not be healed.
I hâve shown how humanity must regain cognition
that cornes through art to imagination, and then to inspira-
tion. If we regain ail that flows from the inspirations of
spirit worlds into human consciousness, true religion will
reappear. Intellectual discussions about the nature of
Christ will cease, for once again it will be known — as it
can indeed be known through inspiration — that the Christ
was the human bearer of a real divine being who
descended from spirit worlds into earthly existence.
Without suprasensory knowledge, there can be no under-
standing of the Christ. Before Christianity can once again
become deeply rooted in humanity, the path to supra-
sensory knowledge must be rediscovered. Inspiration
must again impart a truly religious life to humankind in
order that knowledge — derived no longer merely from
the external observation of nature — may find no abyss
dividing it alike from art and religion. Knowledge, art,
religion — these three will then be in harmony.
Primeval humans counted on the presence of God in
human deeds when they made their art a divine office,
and when they shared in the fire that can glow in the
human heart when the divine will pervades the acts of
ritual. And when the path from outer, objective knowl-
edge to inspiration is found once again, religion will flow
directly from inspiration and modern humankind will be
able — as was primeval humankind — to stand within a
Science, Art, Religion, Morality
15
God-given morality. In those ancient days people felt: "If
I hâve the cuit, if I hâve the divine service, if the cuit is in
the world and I am woven into it, then my inner being is
filled so that in the whole of my life and not only where
the cuit is celebrated I can make God présent in the
world."
To be able to make God présent in the world — this is
true morality. Nature cannot lead us to morality. Only
that which lifts us above nature, filling us with the
Divine-Spiritual — this alone can lead us to morality. Only
that intuition that cornes over us, when through the reli-
gious life we place ourselves in the spirit, can fill us with
real inmost morality at once human and divine. The
attainment of inspiration thus rebuilds the bridge that
once existed instinctively in human civilization between
religion and morality. As knowledge leads upward
through art to the heights of suprasensory life, so,
through religious worship, spiritual heights are brought
down to earthly existence, so that we can fill this exist-
ence with the impulse of an essential, primai, direct
morality actually experienced by human beings. Thus
will humans become in truth the individual bearers of a
life pulsed through by morality, filled with an immédiate
moral impulse. Morality will then be a création of the
individual, and the last abyss between religion and
morality will be bridged. The intuition in which primitive
humans stood as they enacted their ritual will be re-
created in a new form, and a morality truly correspond-
ing with modem conditions will arise from a modem reli-
gious life. We need this for the renewal of our civilization.
We need it so that what today is mere héritage, mere tra-
dition, may spring again into original life. This primor-
dial impulse is necessary for our complicated social life.
16
A Modern Art of Education
which is threatening to spread chaos through the world.
We need a harmony between knowledge, art, religion,
and morality. We need this in a new form — a way to gain
knowledge that leads from Earth, through inspiration and
the arts, to direct life in the suprasensory worlds; then,
the suprasensory that we hâve felt in religion and trans-
formed into volition can once again be grasped and
guided into earthly society Until we see our social prob-
lems as matters of morality and religion we cannot grap-
ple with them deeply, and this cannot be done until
morality and religion arise from spiritual knowledge. If
humanity regains spiritual knowledge, we will be able to
do what is needed and link our continuing évolution to
an instinctive origin.
We will find what is needed to heal humanity; it is har-
mony between science, art, religion, and morality
* 2 *
The Principles of Greek Education
August 6, 1923
There is no question that éducation is on the mind of
every soûl today. We can see it everywhere. And if we
advocate an art of éducation taken directly from spiritual
life and perception, it is its inner nature that distinguishes
it from the reforms generally demanded today, not the
urgency of its outward appeal.
There is a widespread feeling that the conditions of civ-
ilization are in rapid transition and that, for the sake of
society, we must heed the many recent changes and
developments. There is a growing feeling that children
today are very different from those of the recent past, and
that it is becoming increasingly difficult for older people
to reach an understanding with young people than it was
in earlier times.
The art of éducation I will speak of, however, is con-
cerned instead with the inner development of human
civilization. It is more concerned with what has changed
the soûls of men and women through the âges; it is con-
cerned with the évolution through which these soûls
hâve passed over hundreds, even thousands, of years.
We will attempt to explore the ways in which, in this
particular âge, we can reach the human being living
within the child. It is generally acknowledged that the
successive periods in nature can be differentiated. Just
18
A Modern Art of Education
consider the way we take these différentiations into
account in daily life. Take an immédiate example: the
day itself. Our relationship to natural processes changes
from morning, noon, and night, and we would think it
absurd to ignore the flow of the day And we would also
consider it absurd not to pay sufficient attention to the
development revealed in human life itself — to ignore, for
example, the fact that an older person's needs are differ-
ent from those of a child. In the case of nature, we respect
this fact of development, but we hâve not gotten used to
respecting the fact of the general human évolution. We
do not consider the fact that, centuries ago, human
beings were very different from those of the Middle
Ages or today. We must corne to understand the inner
forces of human beings before our treatment of children
can become practical and not merely theoretical. We
must investigate inwardly the ruling forces in human
beings today
The principles of Waldorf éducation — as it may be
called — are, thus, in no way revolutionary. Waldorf édu-
cation fully recognizes ail that is great and noteworthy in
the great achievements of educators everywhere during
the nineteenth century. There is no desire to throw out
everything and think that everything must be radically
new. Rather, the goal is to investigate the inner forces rul-
ing in human nature today, so that we can take them into
account in éducation and thus find a true place in society
for the human being in body, soûl, and spirit. As we shall
see in the course of these lectures, éducation has always
been a concern of society, and it remains so today And it
must also be a social concern in the future. In éducation,
therefore, there must be an understanding of what soci-
ety demands of any given era.
The Principles of Greek Education
19
First of ail, I want to describe, in three stages, the devel-
opment of éducation in the West. The best way to do this
is to consider the educational ideals of the various âges —
the ideals of those who wanted to rise to the highest level
of human existence, a stage from which they could render
the most useful service to humankind. Thus, it will help
to go back to the earliest of those âges that survive as cul-
tural influences in the présent time. Nobody today can
dispute the living influence of the Greek civilization in ail
human aims and aspirations. So, the fundamental ques-
tion for educators is: "How did the Greeks try to raise
human beings to the level of perfection?" We must con-
sider the progress of successive eras in relation to this
process of perfection — the éducation of the human being.
First, let's look at the Greek idéal for a teacher — that is,
the idéal for those who wanted to develop to the highest
stage of humanity not only for their own sake, but also to
be able to help others along the right path. The Greek
idéal of éducation was the gymnast. Gymnasts were
those who had completely harmonized their bodily
nature with, to the extent considered necessary, the quali-
ties of soûl and spirit. Gymnasts were those who could
express the divine beauty of the world through the
beauty of their own bodies, and also bring the divine
beauty of the world into bodily expression in the child;
they were the ones who upheld Greek civilization.
Through a feeling of modem superiority, it is easy to
belittle the gymnasts' manner of éducation, based as it
was on bodily nature. But this involves a complété misun-
derstanding of what it meant to be a gymnast in Greece. If
we nevertheless continue to admire Greek civilization and
consider it the highest idéal to be imbued with Greek cul-
ture, it will help to remember also that the Greeks were
20
A Modern Art of Education
not concerned primarily with developing "spirituality" in
human beings. Their only concern was to develop the
human body so that, through the harmony of its parts and
modes of activity, the body itself would blossom into a
manifestation of divine beauty. The Greeks' expectation of
the body was exactly what we expect of a plant: that, if the
root has been treated properly, it will blossom on its own
under the influence of sunlight and warmth. In our dévo-
tion to Greek culture today, we must remember that the
bearers of this culture were the gymnasts — those who had
not taken the third step first, but the first step: the harmo-
nization of bodily human nature. Ail the beauty, ail the
greatness, ail the perfection of Greek culture was not
sought directly; it was regarded as growing naturally out
of the beauty and harmony of a powerful body, by virtue
of inner human nature and activity. Our understanding of
Greek civilization — especially their éducation — will be
out of balance unless our admiration for the spiritual
greatness of Greece is linked to knowledge that gymnasts
were the idéal of Greek éducation.
As we follow the development of humanity, we corne
to a décisive moment in the transition from Greek to
Roman culture. In Roman civilization, we see first the
emergence of a cultivation of abstractions that led to the
séparation of spirit, soûl, and body and placed a spécial
emphasis on this threefold division. We can see how the
principle of beauty in the gymnastic éducation of Greece
was in fact imitated by Roman culture; but now, the édu-
cation of body and soûl became two separate areas. The
Romans still considered it important to train the body,
but gradually — almost imperceptibly — this fell to second
place. Their attention was directed increasingly toward
something they considered more important in human
The Principles of Greek Education
21
nature: the soûl. The Greek training that was related to
the idéal of the gymnast gradually changcd, in Roman
culture, into training the soûl qualities.
This continued through the Middle Ages, an epoch
when soûl qualities were considered higher than those of
the body. Now another idéal of éducation arose from this
"Romanized" human nature. Early in the Middle Ages,
an educational idéal appeared for the highest classes, the
fruit of Roman civilization. It was essentially a culture of
the soûl, insofar as soûl reveals itself outwardly in the
human being.
Gymnasts were gradually superseded by another type
of person. Today, we no longer hâve a strong historical
awareness of that change, but those who study the Mid-
dle Ages intimately will recognize the event. The idéal of
éducation was no longer the gymnast, but the orator,
whose main training was in speech, an essential quality
of soûl. The knowledge of how people can work through
speech as orators was a product of Roman culture carried
into the beginning of the Middle Ages. It represented a
change from purely physical éducation to an éducation of
the soûl, which continued to train the body as a second-
ary activity. And because the Middle Ages made use of
the orator to spread the spiritual life cultivated in monas-
tic schools and elsewhere in médiéval times, in the area of
éducation, orators (though called by various names)
assumed the place once held by Greek gymnasts. Thus, in
reviewing the ideals that hâve been considered the high-
est expression of humanity, we see how humanity
advances from the educational idéal of the gymnast to
that of the orator.
This affected the methods of éducation. The éducation
of children was brought into line with what people
22
A Modern Art of Education
thought of as the idéal of human perfection. And those
who can observe historically will see that even modern
educational practices, the ways that language and speech
are taught to children, are handed down from the Middle
Ages, which held the orator as its educational idéal.
Next came the middle of the Middle Ages, when there
was a great swing toward honor and respect for the intel-
lect. A new educational idéal of human development
arose — one that represents exactly the opposite of the
Greek idéal. This idéal gave the highest position to the
intellect and spiritual development. Those with knowl-
edge became the idéal. Throughout the Middle Ages,
those who could act through soûl power s — those who
could convince others — remained the idéal of éducation;
now the knower became the idéal. Just consider the earli-
est universities (the University of Paris, for example) dur-
ing the Middle Ages. You can see that the idéal there was
not the knower but the doer, the one who can be most
convincing through speech, the most skillful in argument,
the master of dialectic and the word, which now begins to
assume the color of thought. We still find the orator as the
idéal of éducation, although the rhetoric itself has become
tinged with the hue of thought.
Now, with modern civilization, another idéal arises for
evolving humanity — an idéal that is again reflected in the
éducation of children. Education, even in this âge of
materialism, is still under the influence of this idéal. Now,
for the first time, the idéal of the doctor, or professor,
arises. The doctor has become the idéal for the perfect
human being.
Thus we see three stages in human évolution: the gym-
nast, the orator, and the doctor. Gymnasts were those
who could handle the human organism out of what they
The Principles of Greek Education
23
considered the divine order and activity in the cosmos.
Gymnasts knew how to handle the soûl only to the
degree that it manifested physically in the body. A gym-
nast trains the body and, through it, the soûl and spirit, to
the heights of Greek civilization. The orator was con-
cerned with the soûl and attained a crown and glory as
the speaker of soûl matters, as a church orator. And
finally, we see how the ability to act is no longer valued.
Those who only know and no longer work with the soul's
nature in its physical activity, but only what rules invisi-
bly in one's inner being, became the idéal of the highest
level of éducation. This, however, is reflected in the most
elementary principles of éducation; it was the gymnasts
in Greece who also educated children. Later, it was the
orators who educated children. Finally, in more modem
times, just as materialism was arising in civilization, it
was the professors who educated children. Thus, physi-
cal éducation developed into rhetorical soûl éducation,
and this in turn developed into professorial éducation.
Modem éducation is the resuit of the doctoral idéal, and
those who want to understand the deepest principles of
modem éducation must carefully observe what was
introduced through this doctoral idéal.
Along with this, a new idéal has emerged to become
more and more prominent today: the idéal of the
"universal human." The doctoral éducation was being
crammed even into very young children, since it was
doctors who wrote the textbooks and invented the meth-
ods of éducation. Now there is a longing to educate the
whole human being, the universal human. Those today
who discern things from a basic, elementary feeling for
human nature want to hâve a say in matters of éduca-
tion. For inner reasons, the question of éducation today
24
A Modern Art of Education
has become a problem of our time. We must keep this
inner stream of human évolution in mind if we want to
understand the présent âge, because any true develop-
ment of éducation must do nothing less than supersede
this "professorial" principle. If I were to briefly summa-
rize one aspect of the goal of Waldorf éducation, I would
say (of course, merely in a preliminary sense) that we are
trying to turn this "professorial" éducation into an édu-
cation of the whole human being.
We cannot understand the essential nature of Greek
éducation — which continues to develop even today —
unless we look in the right light at the course of human
évolution going back to the Greeks. Their civilization was
really a continuation, or offshoot, of Eastern civilization.
Ail that had developed over thousands of years in human
évolution in Asia was finally expressed in Greece, espe-
cially, I believe, in Greek éducation. Then, that décisive
moment in évolution — the transition to Roman culture —
occurred. Roman culture is the source of ail that flowed
into Western civilization later on, even America.
We cannot understand, therefore, the essence of Greek
éducation unless we hâve the correct concept of Eastern
development as a whole. Those who stood by the cradle
of the civilization — out of which arose the wonderful
Vedas and Vedanta — would hâve considered it com-
pletely ridiculous that people would sit and study books
to pass examinations, hoping to attain the highest devel-
opment of human nature. It would hâve made no sense
to think that after years, if one is indus trious (or months
if one is lazy), one could become a perfected human
being by maltreating ( training is not the right word)
something vaguely called "the human spirit" — only to
be asked how much one "knows."
The Principles of Greek Education
25
We cannot understand the development of human civi-
lization unless we occasionally pause to consider how the
idéal of one era appears to another. What steps were
taken by those of the ancient East who wished to attain
the sublime culture offered in the previous âge that had
inspired the Vedas? What they practiced was basically a
kind of physical éducation. If it was in their destiny, they
hoped to attain the crown of human life, the most sub-
lime spirituality, through a cuit of the body — one-sided
though this might seem today. Th us, instead of reading
books and maltreating an abstract "spirit," an exceed-
ingly délicate culture of the body was adopted as the
highest educational method in the ancient East. For
example, this refined physical éducation involved a spé-
cifie and vigorous System of regulating the breath. When
we breathe — as indeed we must if we are to get enough
oxygen from minute to minute — the process is generally
unconscious. We breathe unconsciously. The ancient East
made this breathing process — which is essentially a
bodily function — into a conscious process. They would
breathe in, hold it, and breathe out, ail according to a spé-
cifie rule. While doing this, they arranged their bodies in
a certain way. The legs and arms had to be held in certain
positions — that is, the path of one's breath through the
physical organism when it reached the knee, for instance,
had to turn in a horizontal direction. Those who reached
for human perfection sat with their legs crossed beneath
them. If they wished to expérience spiritual révélation,
they had to achieve it by training the body, which
involved the human air processes, or, in any case,
involved one's bodily nature.
What is the basis of this kind of éducation? The flower
and fruit of a plant exist in the root, and if the root
26
A Modern Art of Education
receives proper care, both flower and fruit will develop
properly with sunlight and warmth. Likcwise, soûl and
spirit live in human bodily nature, the body created by
God. If we take hold of the body's roots — knowing that
divinity lives there — and develop them correctly, surren-
dering to the life that is freely developing, then the soûl
and spirit in those roots develop, as do the inner forces of
a plant, which pour from the root and develop in the
warmth of sunlight.
To those of the ancient East, abstract development of
spirit would hâve seemed no different than, say, hiding a
plant from the sunlight, perhaps placing it in a cellar to
grow under electric light, because one did not consider
the free light of the sun good enough. The fact that those
of the East looked only to bodily nature was rooted
deeply in their whole view of humanity. Of course, this
bodily development later became one-sided; it had
already done so in the Hebrew culture, but that very one-
sideness shows us that they universally viewed body,
soûl, and spirit as one. Here on earth, between birth and
death, we must look for soûl and spirit in the body.
It may corne as a surprise to look at ancient Eastern
spirituality in this light, but when we study the true
course of human évolution, we find that the highest
attainments of civilization were achieved in times when
people could still perceive soûl and spirit completely
within the body. This was a very significant development
for the core being of human civilization. Why were those
of the East justified in striving for spirit through methods
based on the physical human body — for it must be
remembered that their main concern was a quest for
spirit? They were justified because their philosophy
opened their eyes not just to the earthly, but also to the
The Principles of Greek Education
27
suprasensory world. They knew that, if you consider the
soûl and spirit on earth to be indépendant, it is like seeing
them (forgive this rather trivial analogy) as a "plucked
hen" — an incomplète hen. Our idea of soûl and spirit
would hâve seemed analogous to a hen with its feathers
plucked, for they knew soûl and spirit; they knew the
reality of what we seek in other worlds. They had a con-
crète, suprasensory perception of it. They considered it
proper to look for the human being through physical,
bodily révélation, because their basic conviction was that
in other worlds, the "plucked hen," the naked soûl, is
again endowed with spiritual "feathers" once it reaches
the proper place.
It was the very spirituality of their worldview that,
when considering human évolution on earth, prompted
those of the East to bear in mind that, resting within the
physical body in a most wonderful way, soûl and spirit is
within the body when we are born as purely physical
beings. They knew that, when our physicality is handled
in a truly spiritual way, soûl and spirit reveals itself. This
was the keynote of their éducation, including that of the
sages of the East. It was a belief that was handed down to
Greek culture, an offshoot of Eastern civilization. Now
we understand why the Greeks — who brought the East-
ern view to its ultimate expression — adopted, even for
the young, their own way of training human beings. It
was the resuit of Eastern influence. Attention to bodily
nature in Greek civilization simply represents what they
became by colonizing the East and by what they received
from Egypt. This is how they derived their whole mode
of existence.
When we look at the Greek arenas in which gymnasts
worked, in their activities we see a continuation of the
28
A Modern Art of Education
development that the East worked toward — from a
deeply spiritual view — as the being who would reach the
highest idéal of human perfection on earth. Those of the
East would hâve never considered a lopsided develop-
ment of soûl or spirit to be the idéal of human perfection.
The éducation that has become the idéal of later times
would hâve appeared to deaden what the Gods had
given to humanity for life on earth. And, basically, this
was also the view of the Greeks.
It is strange to realize how Greek spiritual culture —
which we still think of as so sublime — was regarded then
by non-Greeks. A traditional anecdote tells us that a bar-
barian prince once went to Greece, visited the places of
éducation, and spoke with one of the most famous gym-
nasts. The barbarian prince said, "I fail to understand
your ridiculous practices! First you rub these young men
with oil, a symbol of peace, then you throw sand over
them, as if preparing them for a peaceful ceremony, and
then they begin to rush around as though insane, seizing
and springing at one another. One knocks the other down
or hits him on the chin so hard that his shoulders hâve to
be shaken to prevent him from suffocating. I do not
understand such a performance, and it is certainly of no
use to anyone."
In spite of this, however, the spiritual glory of Greece
derived from what the prince believed to be such barbar-
ism. The gymnast only smiled at the barbarian, who did
not understand how the body must be trained in order to
manifest the spirit. Similarly, if those Greeks could see
our usual methods of éducation (which date from earlier
times), which speak abstractly of soûl and spirit, they
would laugh at the barbarism that has developed since
the days of Greece. They would say, "This is like a
The Principles of Greek Education
29
plucked hen. You hâve taken away the feathers!" The
Greeks would hâve considered it barbarie that children
do not wrestle and attack one another. But the barbarian
prince saw no meaning or purpose in Greek éducation.
By studying human évolution and by observing what
was valued in other eras, we can acquire a basis on which
to value things in our own time.
Now, let us turn to the places where the Greek gym-
nasts taught the youths entrusted to them in the seventh
year of life. Of course, what we find there differs essen-
tially from, say, the nineteenth-century national educa-
tional idéal. What I hâve to say here does not hold true
for any particular nation, but for ail civilized nations.
When we turn to a place in Greece where young people
were educated from the seventh year of life on, what we
see — if properly imbued with modem impulses — affords
us a real foundation for understanding what we need in
éducation today. They were trained (here trained is used
in its highest sense) both in an "orchestric" way and in a
"palestric" way. Orchestric, to the outer eye, was an
entirely physical exercise — a kind of concerted dance, but
arranged in a very spécial and complex way. The children
learned to move in a definite form according to measure,
beat, and rhythm, completely in keeping with a certain
formative principle of music. The children, moving
together in this choral dance, felt a kind of inner soûl
warmth pouring through and coordinating their limbs.
This dance was experienced by spectators as a beautifully
composed musical dance. The whole event revealed the
beauty of the Godhead and that beauty within human
beings. Every expérience of this orchestric movement was
felt and sensed inwardly. And, through this, it was trans-
formed from a physical process into an expression of
30
A Modern Art of Education
soûl, inspiring the hand to play the zithcr, inspiring the
word to become song. To understand singing and play-
ing a zither in ancient Greece, we must see that they blos-
som from the choral dance. Out of what they experienced
in dance, people were inspired to make the strings
vibrate, so that they could hear the sound arising from
the choral dance. From their own movement they experi-
enced something that poured into their words — and their
words became song.
Gymnastic and musical culture predominated in Greek
éducation in the arenas. But the musical and soûl quali-
ties they acquired arose from the outer, physical move-
ments, performed in wonderful harmonious form in the
arena dances. Today, if we directly perceive the meaning
of those orderly movements in a Greek arena — which
could not be understood by the barbarian prince — one
finds that ail the forms of an individual's movements
were wonderfully arranged, so that the most immédiate
resuit was not the musical element I described, but some-
thing else.
If we study the measure and the rhythm that were mys-
teriously interwoven into the orchestric dance, we find
that nothing could hâve been more healing to the breath-
ing and the blood circulation than these exercises in the
Greek choral dances. When do we breathe in the best
way? How can we cause our blood to move properly
through our breathing? The answer is that children must
perform dancelike movements from their seventh year
on. Then — as the Greeks said — the children's breathing
and blood circulation dépend not on decadence but on
healing. The whole goal of orchestric dancing was to
express the breathing and blood circulation in human
beings in the most perfected way. They believed that.
The Principles of Greek Education
31
when the blood is circulating properly, it works right into
the fingertips, and people will instinctively strike the
strings of a zither or lute in the right way. This was the
"flower" of the blood's circulation. The human rhythmic
System was kindled correctly through the choral dance.
As a resuit, it was expected that a musical spiritual
quality would develop in the playing, because it was
known that, when a person performs the corresponding
movements of a choral dance, the breathing becomes
inspired so that it functions naturally in a spiritual way.
The final resuit is that the breath will overflow into outer
expression through the larynx and related organs. It was
understood that the healing effects of choral dancing on
one's breathing would lead to singing. Thus, the crown-
ing climax — playing music and singing — was drawn
from the healthy organism trained in the right way
through choral dance. Physical nature, soûl, and spirit
were seen to be united inwardly, an inner human whole-
ness. This was the essential spirit of Greek éducation.
Now let us consider what was developed in "palestric"
exercise, which is named for the places of éducation in
Greece, since such exercises were the common property of
ail educated people. What was studied in those forms, in
which wrestling was evolved, for instance? We see that
the System existed to develop two human qualities. Voli-
tion, stimulated by bodily movement, grew strong and
forceful in two directions. Ail palestric movement in
wrestling was intended to bring suppleness, skill, and
purposeful flexibility into the wrestler's limbs. This Sys-
tem of human movement was harmonized so that the var-
ious parts worked together properly and, whatever the
soûl mood, one could move appropriately and with skill,
controlling the limbs from within. Rounding movements
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A Modern Art of Education
into purposeful life was one side of pales trie exercise. The
other side was the "radial" of the motion, in which force
must flow into the movement. Skill on the one side, force
on the other. On one side, the power to hold out and over-
come opposing forces, to be strong in order to expérience
the world. Skill, proficiency, and harmony of various
parts of the body, along with the development of power,
give the ability to freely radiate and express one's being
everywhere in the world.
They maintained that, when people harmonized their
System of movement through palestric exercises, they
enter a true relationship with the cosmos. The arms, the
legs, and the breathing developed by palestric exercises
were given over to human activities in the world. It was
known that when the arm is developed properly through
palestric exercise, it connects with the flow of cosmic
forces that then flow to the brain and, from the cosmos,
reveal the great ideas to humankind. They did not expect
the musical element to arise from spécial musical training;
it simply united — usually around the âge of twenty —
with what was drawn from breathing and the blood's cir-
culation. Likewise, what had to be learned as mathemat-
ics or geometry, for example, united with the physical
éducation in palestric exercise. It was known that geome-
try is inspired by proper movements of the arms.
Today, people do not learn of such things from history;
they hâve been forgotten. What I hâve said, however, is
the truth, and it justifies the Greeks in having placed the
gymnasts in charge of their educational institutions. The
gymnasts succeeded most in the spiritual development of
the Greeks by giving them freedom. They did not fill their
brains or try to create walking encyclopedias; they placed
the appropriate human organs into the cosmos in the
The Principles of Greek Education
33
right way. People thus became réceptive to the spiritual
world. As in the East, Greek gymnasts were convinced
that this happened, but in a later form.
By giving you an introductory description of an ancient
method of éducation, what I hâve really done today is to
présent you with a question. I hâve done this because we
must probe very deeply to discover the true principles of
éducation today. It is absolutely necessary to get to the
bottom of human évolution in order to discover the right
way to form questions that will help us answer the ques-
tion of educational methods today. Therefore, I want to
présent you with one aspect of the subject we are consid-
ering. As we go along, the lectures are meant to provide a
more detailed answer suited to the needs of today — an
answer to the question raised today, which will be further
developed tomorrow.
Our method of study must therefore be the resuit of
truly understanding the great question of éducation,
raised by the evolutionary course of humanity. We must
then move on to answers that may be given by under-
standing the nature and constitution of the human being
at the présent time.
« 3 *
Greek Education and the Middle Ages
August 7, igij
When I tried to présent the Greek idéal of éducation, its
only purpose was to stimulate the ideas that must prevail
in today's educational System. At the présent stage of
human life, it is naturally impossible to adopt the meth-
ods of the Greeks. In spite of this, an overall truth of édu-
cation can be learned from the Greek idéal, and we must
begin by placing this truth before us as it was affirmed in
the culture of ancient Greece.
Public éducation in ancient Greece dealt only with chil-
dren over the âge of seven. Until then, Greek children
were raised at home, where the women lived in séclusion
from outer society, which was the affair of men. That Sys-
tem confirms a truth of éducation, without which we can-
not really educate, because the seventh year of life is an
all-important period of childhood.
The main characteristic of the seventh year is the
change of teeth. This is an event that is assigned little
importance today. But think about it; the human organ-
isai brings the first teeth with it as an inheritance — or
rather, it brings the force to produce the first teeth from
the organisai, and by the seventh year they are worn out.
It is absolutely wrong to think that the force pushing up
the second teeth did not develop before the âge of seven.
It develops slowly from birth and culminâtes around the
Greek Education and the Middle Ages
35
seventh year. It then produces the second teeth from the
forces of the whole human organism. This event is
extraordinarily important in the course of human life,
because it does not happen again. The forces présent
from birth until the seventh year culminate with the
appearance of the second teeth, and they do not act again
in our earthly lives.
This fact must be properly understood, but it can be
understood only by observing, without preconceptions,
other processes in the human being around the seventh
year. Until the seventh year, a person grows and devel-
ops according to natural principles. Natural formative
forces, the soûl, and the spirit hâve not yet separated
from one another in the child's organism; they form a
unity until the seventh year. As a child develops the
organs, nervous System, and blood circulation, this devel-
opment also reveals the évolution of soûl and spirit. A
child is given a strong inner force that produces the sec-
ond teeth, because everything during this period of life is
still interwoven. With the second teeth, this force weak-
ens. It withdraws somewhat and no longer works as
strongly from the inner being. Why is this?
Suppose we were to get new teeth every seven years (I
will take an extreme example for the sake of clarity). If the
organic forces we carry within us up to the seventh
year — if this unity formed by body, soûl, and spirit were
to continue throughout life — we would receive new teeth
approximately every seven years. The old teeth would
fall out and be replaced by new ones. However, through
our whole life we would remain children, just as we were
before the seventh year. We would not develop the life of
soûl and spirit that séparâtes from physical nature.
Because the physical force decreases in the seventh year.
36
A Modern Art of Education
and because the body no longer thrives so well in a cer-
tain sense (the body now produces weaker, more délicate
forces from itself), it becomes possible for the subtler
forces of soûl life to develop. The body grows weaker, the
soûl stronger, as it were.
A similar process takes place at puberty, around thir-
teen or fourteen. The soûl element weakens to a certain
extent, and the spiritual aspects appear. Thus, if we look
at the first three periods of life, until the seventh year we
are beings of united body, soûl, and spirit; from around
seven to fourteen, we are beings of body and soûl with a
separated nature of soûl and spirit; and after puberty, we
are threefold beings: a being of body, a being of soûl, and
a being of spirit.
This truth opens deep vistas into the whole of human
évolution. Indeed, unless we appreciate this, we really
ought not to educate children. Unless we realize the far-
reaching conséquences of this fact, ail éducation must be
considered a fairly superficial matter.
The Greeks — and this is the amazing thing — knew this.
To them, it was an unshakable truth that, once a boy
reached his seventh year, he should be removed from his
parents' house, from the mere natural principles and the
basic, matter-of-fact nurturing. This fact was so deeply
rooted in Greek society that we do well to remind our-
selves of it today. Later, during the Middle Ages, traces of
this important educational principle still existed.
The modern rational and intellectual âge has forgotten
these things, and even takes pride in showing that it
places no value on such a truth. Children are usually
required to go to school at an earlier âge, a year or more
before the âge of seven. We may say that this departure
from such eternal principles of human évolution is typical
Greek Education and the Middle Ages
37
of the prevailing chaos in our System of éducation, from
which we must extricate ourselves. The Greeks placed
such a high value on this fact that ail éducation was based
on it. Ail that I described yesterday happened in order to
regulate éducation in its light.
What did the Greeks see in a small child between birth
the change of teeth? They saw a being sent to earth from
spiritual heights. They saw a being who had lived in a
spirit world prior to earthly life. As they observed the
child, they tried to discover whether the body was prop-
erly expressing the divine life of existence before birth.
The Greeks considered it important to recognize, in chil-
dren up to the seventh year, that the physical body holds
a spirit being who has descended. There was a very bar-
barie custom in certain areas of Greece. People exposed
and thus killed children who were instinctively believed
to be mere sheaths, not expressing a true spirit being in
their physical nature. This was the resuit of rigidly
adhering to the belief that the physical human being dur-
ing the first seven years of life is the garment of a divine
spirit being.
When children pass the seventh year (this, too, was
known in Greece), they descend a stage lower. During the
first seven years, children are, in a sense, released from
the heavens, still bearing the sheath they inherited, which
is then set aside at the seventh year. Not just the first
teeth, but the whole body is cast off around the âge of
seven and, indeed, every seven years. In the first seven
years, the bodily sheath revealed to the Greeks what the
forces of prénatal life had made of children. Children
carry their earthly sheath proper, their first true earthly
sheath, only after the seventh to fourteenth years and
onward.
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A Modern Art of Education
I am trying to express these things as they were con-
ceived by the highest type of Greeks. They thought that,
if they revere the divine in little children, there was no
need to be concerned with them during the first seven
years of life. They could grow up in whatever families the
Gods had placed them. Supraearthly forces continue to
work in them from before earthly life. Once the seventh
year is reached, however, it is wise to take responsibility
for the development of forces within children.
So how do we approach éducation if we understand
how to pay real reverence to the divine in human beings?
As much as possible, we must develop the human facul-
ties that unfold in a child up to the seventh year. The
divine power — the spirit's expression in the body — must
be developed to the greatest possible degree. Thus, the
gymnast had to be convinced of the need to understand
the divine power in the human body and the ability to
develop it there. The healing, life-sustaining forces that a
child brings from pre-earthly existence — forces that hâve
been nurtured in a very basic way up to the change of
teeth — must be preserved between the seventh and four-
teenth years through human understanding and art. Edu-
cation thus had to proceed in harmony with the natural
being. Consequently, ail éducation was "gymnastic,"
because the éducation of the divine in a human being was
seen as gymnastic. Such "divine gymnastics" must be
continued through éducation.
This was more or less the attitude of the Greeks toward
children. Teachers thought that, if through insight they
could preserve the freshness and health of the formative
forces that developed up to the seventh year, if they
could enable those natural forces to continue throughout
earthly life until death, then they were teaching in the
Greek Education and the Middle Ages
39
best possible way. To see that the child in a human being
is not lost until death was the great principle, the tremen-
dously far-reaching truth of Greek éducation. Greek
teachers thought that they should make sure human
beings could preserve for themselves, throughout life, the
forces of childhood, and that between the seventh and
fourteenth years, those forces retain their living nature.
This is a tremendously far-reaching and deeply signifi-
cant principle of éducation. Gymnastic exercises were
based on the perception that the forces of early childhood
do not disappear, but merely slumber and must be
reawakened each day. Gymnastic éducation was meant
to awaken those slumbering forces between the seventh
and the fourteenth years, to draw out forces that were
présent naturally during the first period. The greatness of
their culture and civilization arose from the fact that the
Greeks, by introducing the right éducation, were able to
preserve the child in human beings right up until death.
When we wonder at this greatness, we must ask our-
selves whether we imitate that idéal? We cannot, because
it is based on three facts, without which it is unthinkable.
These three facts must be remembered by modem
teachers who look back to Greece. The first to bear in
mind is that the Greek principles of éducation were
applied to only a small portion of humanity, the upper
classes, and they présupposé the existence of slavery.
Without slavery it would hâve been impossible to edu-
cate even a small portion of humanity in this way. This
éducation dictâtes that part of humankind's work on
earth fell to those who were limited to an elementary
human destiny and without éducation in the Greek sense.
Greek civilization and éducation are unthinkable without
slavery. Thus, the delight of those who look back fondly
40
A Modern Art of Education
to what Greece accomplished in the history of human-
kind must be tempered by the tragic realization that it
was achieved at the cost of slavery.
The second fact is women's position in Greek society
Their lives were withdrawn from the direct impulses at
the root of Greek civilization, and this séclusion made it
possible for a child under seven to be left in the care of
instinctive home life — instinct that was cultivated with-
out any knowledge whatever. Out of human instinct, the
elemental formative forces guided child until the change
of teeth. It was necessary that a child's life until then
should, despite its different character, proceed just as
unconsciously in the environment of the family as the
embryonic life had through the forces of nature. This is
the second fact.
The third is really a paradox to modern thinking, but
we must understand it, nevertheless. The second point —
the position of women in Greece — is easier to under-
stand, because we know from a superficial observation of
modern life that, between the Greek âge and our own
time, as a resuit of what took place in the Middle Ages,
women hâve attempted to share in society. If we still
want to be as Greek as the Greeks were — with conscious
éducation confined exclusively to men — I wonder how
small this audience might be if it were made up of only
those men who were allowed to concern themselves with
éducation.
The third fact goes even deeper, and its nature makes it
difficult for modern civilization to acknowledge. We
attain our spiritual life through active human effort. Any-
one who observes the spiritual activities of civilization
will hâve to admit that, in the most important area of civi-
lized life, we must count on what human activity will
Greek Education and the Middle Ages
41
achieve in the future. Looking at ail the human labor that
must go toward the attainment of a spiritual life today,
we are somewhat astonished by the spiritual life of
ancient Grccce, and especially that of the ancient East.
Spiritual life was simply there. The rôle of the seventh
year in life — a fact that modem humanity simply does not
realize — was deeply rooted in Greece. (Outer indications
suggest its significance, but modem culture is very far
from understanding it.) It was one of the great truths that
flowed through ancient spirituality. We stand in wonder
before that spiritual life when we realize the wisdom and
spiritual knowledge that humanity once possessed.
Without being confused by modem naturalistic and
materialistic presuppositions, if we look back at early civ-
ilization and the beginning of history, we find a univer-
sal, penetrating wisdom that guided human lives. It was
not acquired wisdom; it flowed to humankind through
révélation and inspiration. This is what people today will
not acknowledge. It will not recognize that a primai wis-
dom was bestowed upon us spiritually, and that we
evolved it in such a way that even in Greece, for example,
there was still a concern to preserve the child in the
human being ail the way through earthly life. This révéla-
tion of primeval wisdom can no longer be found, which is
a fact deeply connected with human évolution. A part of
human progress involves the fact that primai wisdom no
longer cornes to us without activity on our part; we must
attain wisdom through our own efforts. This is related, in
an inner sense, to the growing impulse of human free-
dom, which is in its strongest phase today. Human
progress does not ascend, as is readily believed, in a
straight line from one stage to the next. Out of ourselves,
we hâve to attain something today that requires losing
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A Modern Art of Education
the révélation that cornes from without and holds the
deepest of ail wisdom.
The loss of primordial wisdom, the need to attain wis-
dom by our own effort, is related to the third fact in
Greek éducation. Their form of éducation may fill us with
admiration, but it cannot be divorced from these three
facts: slavery, the position of women, and the relationship
between primordial wisdom and spirituality. None of
these exist today, nor would they be considered worthy
of true humanity. We live in a time when we must ask
how we should teach children, while realizing that these
three facts hâve been swept away by human évolution.
We must observe the signs of the times if we want look
into the inner depths and find the true impulse for mod-
ern éducation.
The whole so-called médiéval development of human-
ity — which followed Greek civilization and has indeed
corne right down to modern times — proved by its very
nature that, in regard to éducation, new paths are
required, not those of the Greeks, which were well suited
to an earlier time. Human nature had, indeed, changed.
The efficacy and reliability of Greek éducation arose from
the fact that it was based on human habit — on what could
be built into the very structure of the human body.
Until the change of teeth around the seventh year,
human development is related inwardly to the body.
One's physical development, however, functions uncon-
sciously. Indeed, only when the faculties work uncon-
sciously do they function correctly — indeed, they are
reliable only when skills are implanted in the dexterity of
one's hands and accomplished without further thought.
Once practice becomes habit, I become secure in what I
need to do through my body. The true goal of Greek life
Greek Education and the Middle Ages
43
was to make one's whole earthly existence a matter of
habit in this sense. From éducation until death, human
activities were intended to become habituai — to the
degree that it would be impossible not to do them. When
éducation is based on such a principle, the natural forces
of a child before the change of teeth can be maintained
until the end of life.
What happened when, through historical circum-
stances, people poured over from East to West during the
Middle Ages and established a new civilization in Cen-
tral Europe and the West — even in America? They assim-
ilated the qualities natural to the Southern régions, but
they also brought different habits of life with them. As a
resuit, it set up the conditions for a totally different kind
of individual human development. For example, human
consciousness saw that slavery should end and that
women should be respected. In relation to évolution of
the individual, it was seen that, between the seventh and
fourteenth years when development is no longer only
physical and the soûl is becoming freed from the body,
children were no longer susceptible to the treatment used
in earlier times. In effect, it was no longer possible to con-
serve the forces of early childhood for the âges between
seven and fourteen. This is the most significant historical
phenomenon since the beginning of the Middle Ages.
Only today do we see the powerful forces of that phase
after the fourteenth and fifteenth years, when human
nature rebels most strongly — indeed, when it inwardly
carries the forces of rébellion.
How was this rébellion in human nature expressed? In
Roman and médiéval traditions, the primordial wisdom
that had flowed naturally into the Greeks had to be pre-
served in books and writings. In fact, it was accepted only
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A Modern Art of Education
on the authority of tradition. The concept of faith — as
developed in the Middle Ages — did not exist in very
ancient civilizations, nor even in Greek culture; it would
hâve made no sense then. Belief began only when the pri-
meval wisdom was merely preserved and no longer
flowed directly into human beings. Basically, this is still
true of most people today. Everything of a suprasensory
nature belongs to tradition; it belongs to the realm of
belief, no longer direct and real. Reality now is nature
and the perception of nature, but anything related to
suprasensory worlds is tradition. Until the Middle Ages
and beyond, people surrendered to such tradition, some-
times believing that they did indeed expérience such
things. But, in truth, direct spiritual révélation came to be
preserved in writing, handed down from génération to
génération as a héritage, based merely on tradition. This
was the outer aspect.
What about the inner aspect? Let's consider Greece
again. Soûl faculties developed on their own, because the
whole human being acquired life habits whereby the
child was preserved in adults until death. Music arose
from breathing and blood circulation, intellect from gym-
nastics. Without being cultivated, a marvelous memory
evolved in the Greeks because bodily habits were devel-
oped. Today, we lack any idea of the kind of memory
that, even among the Greeks, was not cultivated in any
way. In the ancient East, this was even more significant.
The body was nurtured, habits were cultivated, and
memory arose from the body itself. A marvelous memory
was the resuit of the proper physical éducation.
The fact that we need shorthand notes from lectures to
help us remember proves that we no longer hâve any idea
of the Greek means of memory, which in a wonderful way
Greek Education and the Middle Ages
45
made it easy to hand down spiritual treasures for the com-
mon good. Lecture notes would hâve seemed absurd to
the Greeks; mernory, the capacity of a healthy body, pre-
served everything. The soûl developed from this physical
capacity and perceived primordial spiritual wisdom,
which came, as it were, through révélation. Such wisdom
disappeared and became mere tradition. It had to be
passed from génération to génération externally by the
priesthood, who preserved tradition. Inwardly, human-
kind was forced to cultivate a faculty that the Greeks
never considered necessary. In éducation during the Mid-
dle Ages, it became increasingly necessary to cultivate
mernory. Everything preserved by tradition was commit-
ted to mernory. Thus, éducation had to cultivate historical
tradition and inner mernory; mernory was the first soûl
quality to be cultivated after the soûl was freed. Those
who remember how important mernory has become in
our schools can see how rigidly mernory has been pre-
served because of historical necessity.
Throughout the Middle Ages, because it was so diffi-
cult to gain access to the soûl, éducation struggled for-
ward unsteadily, like a ship thrown out of balance by a
storm. We can access the body and corne to terms with
spirit, but soûl is so connected with human individuality
that it is less accessible.
Cultivating enough piety to find an inner path to
receive the words of the priests and teachers who pre-
served tradition was a matter of soûl. It requires tact of
soûl to cultivate another's mernory without violating that
person's individuality — without subtly suggesting one's
own preferences. What was necessary for the soûl culture
of the Middle Ages was heeded by tactful people as much
as it was ignored by the tactless. This was the situation
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A Modern Art of Education
for médiéval éducation: it fluctuated between helping
and harming the human soûl in its depths. And, much of
this médiéval éducation has been preserved even today,
though completely unnoticed.
Education during the Middle Ages assumed this char-
acter, because, to begin with, the soûl no longer wanted
to preserve the "child." The soûl itself had to be educated.
And because of the conditions then, the soûl could be
educated only through tradition and memory. A person
is in a kind of flux between the seventh and the four-
teenth years. The soûl must function without the security
afforded by the physical constitution before the seventh
year, and direction is not yet available from the spirit.
Everything has a very intimate quality, which requires
piety and tact.
Ail of this affected éducation, with the resuit that, for a
long period of human évolution, éducation entered a
vague, indefinite path. That period during which tradi-
tion and memory had to be cultivated was full of extra-
ordinary difficulties for éducation. Today we live in a
time when, because of the natural course of development,
we desire another kind of certainty, no longer based on
the unstable ground of the Middle Ages. We see this
search for new foundations in the countless efforts
toward educational reform today, and knowledge of this
has led to Waldorf éducation.
Waldorf éducation is based on the question of how to
educate in a time when the soûl still rebels against pre-
serving the "child" after the seventh year. And, in addi-
tion to this, how do we educate now that humankind has
lost even the old médiéval connection with tradition?
Outwardly, we hâve lost faith in tradition. Inwardly we
strive to be free and to face life at every moment without
Greek Education and the Middle Ages
47
restraint. We do not want to stand on a foundation of
memory throughout life. Such is the modem individual,
inwardly wishing to be free of tradition and memory No
matter how much certain people today would like to pré-
serve ancient traditions, it simply won't work. The very
existence of numerous efforts to reform éducation shows
that we face a great problem. It was impossible during
the Middle Ages to educate as the Greeks did, and today,
éducation can no longer be based on tradition and mem-
ory We must educate according to our immédiate
présent here on earth, where we hâve to make decisions
as free beings with the given facts of the moment. How to
educate free human beings is a question that has never
confronted humankind before.
Greek educators, the gymnasts, aimed to preserve the
forces of childhood into the second period of life, from
around seven to fourteen. The forces of childhood, they
said, must be conserved and remain in a person until
earthly death. Gymnasts had to foster, in general, what
they could only indicate in children of seven to fourteen
as they inherited their natural foundation. They had to
learn how to détermine this and preserve it through their
own spiritual wisdom. Evolution during the Middle Ages
went beyond this and led to our présent condition. It is
only today that one's position in society become a con-
scious matter. This conscious life can manifest only after
puberty, after the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then
something appears in a person that I will describe in fol-
lowing lectures as an awareness of the true nature of
inner freedom. Then, indeed, a person "cornes to one's
self." If, as occasionally happens today, one seems to
hâve reached such awareness before puberty, it is not
actually a true, but a clumsy imitation of later life.
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A Modern Art of Education
The Greeks purposely tried to avoid this in an individ-
ual's development. The intensity with which they
invoked the "child nature" into human existence over-
shadowed and obscured the full expérience of this
moment of consciousness after puberty. One passed
through it with one's awareness dimmed by nature.
Because of historical course of human évolution, how-
ever, this is no longer possible. This conscious urge
would break out with elemental, volcanic force after the
âge of puberty if one attempted to hold it back.
During what we call the elementary school âge,
between seven and fourteen, the Greeks had to consider
the earliest natural life of a child. Today, we hâve to con-
sider the time following puberty and ail that will be expe-
rienced then in full human awareness by a boy or girl we
hâve been guiding for the past seven years. We can no
longer suppress this into dreamlike obscurity, as the
Greeks did, even those of the highest levels — for exam-
ple, Plato and Aristotle, who therefore accepted slavery
as an obvious necessity. Because éducation obscured this
all-important phenomenon of human life after puberty,
the Greeks were able to preserve the forces of early child-
hood into the period of life between seven and fourteen.
We must be able to see the future humanity if we wish
to educate correctly. The Greeks were able to rely on
instinct, because their purpose was to conserve the foun-
dations laid by nature. As educators today, we must be
able to develop intuitions. We must anticipate human
qualities if we wish to be true teachers. Essentially, our
éducation must give children between seven and four-
teen something they can remember when the awareness I
hâve described manifests — a memory that looks with sat-
isfaction at what we hâve planted in their beings; it
Greek Education and the Middle Ages
49
allows them positive feelings when recalling their teach-
ers. Our teaching has been wrong if, later on in life, our
students cannot think of us in a positive way.
Consequently, we need teachers who hâve developed
intuition, who take the path leading to the spiritual life
attainable by human beings, and who can give children
of seven to fourteen ail that will cause them in later life to
look back with satisfaction. Greek teachers were preserv-
ers. They saw what lived in children during earlier life
and lay dormant there after the seventh year, and they
knew they had to reawaken it. What kind of éducation
allows us to implant something during childhood that
will later awaken of itself in free human beings? We must
lead éducation into the future, which today requires a
complété change in éducation. In Greece, éducation arose
through dévotion to the nature of children. Education
was a fact of nature that played into human life. But,
because of the way life as a whole has developed until
now, it has worked its way out of its natural foundations.
As schoolteachers, we must recognize that it is time to
offer children something to which they can say "yes"
later on in life, when they hâve awakened to independent
consciousness. Children must not only love us while in
school, but find their love justified later on by mature dis-
cernment. Otherwise, éducation is only halfway, weak,
and ineffective. Once we are aware of this, we realize the
extent to which éducation, as a fact of nature that works
into human beings, must become a moral fact.
This is the deep inner struggle of those who, from the
core of their being, hâve some understanding of what
éducation must become. This feeling becomes the ques-
tion of how we can make teaching itself into a free activ-
ity in the highest sense and to the greatest degree. How
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A Modern Art of Education
can éducation become an all-encompassing moral con-
cern of humankind? This is the great question before us
today, and it must be answered before the best efforts to
reform éducation can be directed correctly into the
future.
M 4 S?
SPIRIT’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY
August 8, 1923
Education during any era will accord with the prevailing
civilization. The gifts of civilization as a whole can be
passed from teacher to child. When I spoke of the Greeks,
I said that they knew intimately the whole human being,
which enabled them to educate in a way that is no longer
possible. Their knowledge of the human being was
derived entirely from the human body, which was, in a
sense, transparent to them and revealed soûl and spirit,
insofar as their understanding allowed. We hâve seen
how the Greeks educated the whole human being, begin-
ning with the body Anything that could not be drawn
from the body (as music was, for example) was given to
the student relatively late, only after physical éducation
was completed, around twenty or even later.
Today, we hâve a different situation. The greatest illu-
sions about human évolution are caused by the belief that
ancient periods — when humanity was totally different —
can be revived. Especially in our présent time, however,
it is wise to face reality with common sense. Once we
understand history, we realize that, just as the Greeks
had to direct ail of their éducation from the body, we
must now direct ours from spirit. We must find ways to
approach even physical éducation out of spirit, because,
whether we like it or not, humanity has corne to the point
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A Modern Art of Education
where we must take hold of the spirit as such; we must
win spirit as our human essence through human effort.
And, right when we develop the desire to educate
according to the needs of our time, we expérience how lit-
tle progress our civilization has made in becoming
imbued with spirit. Then a longing arises to make spirit
increasingly a human possession.
Where do we find, at a relatively high level, the idea of
modern humanity possessing spirit? Don't be shocked if I
describe this with examples from the height of modern
culture. What appears at the top only symbolically, and
within the limits of the culture, really prevails in civiliza-
tion as a whole. In our endeavor to understand spirit, we
hâve only today reached the stage of apprehending spirit
conceptually through thinking. Perhaps the best way to
understand human thinking today in its greatest scope is
to observe modern thought as it appears, say, in John Stu-
-i
art Mill or in Herbert Spencer. I asked you not to be
shocked by the fact that I point to the highest level of cul-
ture, because, while Mill and Spencer appear to be merely
outstanding symptoms, in reality those "symptoms"
dominate every sphere and represent the thinking of our
civilization. Thus, when we inquire into how people
know the spirit from which they must educate, just as the
Greek educated the body, we hâve to say that people
know the spirit just as Mill or Spencer knew it.
Now, how did they know spirit? Let us consider for a
moment the idea people hâve today when they speak of
spirit. I do not mean that absolutely vague image that
1. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), English empiricist philosopher and social
reformer. He was leader of the Benthamite utilitarian movement and
helped form the Utilitarian Society. His essay "On Liberty" is his most
popular work. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) wrote Education (1861).
Spirit’s Relationship to the Body
53
hovers somewhere above the clouds, the one given to us
by tradition; there is no real expérience connected with
that. We can speak only of the spirit possessed by human-
ity when we observe how people deal with this spirit,
how it works, and what we do with it. We hâve to look at
the way people apply spirit, not what they hâve to say
about it in abstract terms. Spirit in our présent civilization
is the spirit that John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer
hâve already worked into their philosophies. There it is,
and that is where we must look for it.
Now let us consider this "thought out" spirit, because
in our time spirit is primarily something thought — a
spirit capable, perhaps, of thinking philosophically. But,
compared to the real essence perceived by the Greeks
when they spoke of humanity, or Anthropos, we move
spiritually in a "distilled" element when we think; it is
extremely rarefied. When they spoke of humanity, the
Greeks always had a physical image of the person before
them, and this physical human also revealed soûl and
spirit. This person was in a spécifie place and time, lim-
ited by the boundary of skin. Those who trained a person
in a Greek gymnasium covered the skin with oil to
emphasize that boundary. One was a wholly concrète
entity, existing somewhere in time and formed in one
way or another.
And now consider our idea of spirit today. Where is it?
What is its form? It is vague; there is no "how" or
"when," and no definite form or image. People try to
build some sort of image, but look, for instance, at John
Stuart Mill's idea of imagery. We think in ideas, which
are the inner images of words, and Mill said that, when a
person thinks, one idea is followed by a second, and
again a third. As one idea links to a second, third, and
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A Modern Art of Education
fourth, the ideas associate themselves. Modern psychol-
ogy speaks in many and various ways about those associ-
ated ideas, calling them the real inner essence of spiritual
life. What kind of feeling and perception should we hâve
in relation to our own being if this association of ideas
were truly what we hâve as spirit? We stand in the world,
ideas begin to move, and they associate themselves. Then
we look back at ourselves and our true nature as spirit in
these associated ideas. This leads to an awareness of self
that is no different than looking at ourselves in a mirror
and seeing a skeleton — a dead skeleton.
Think of the shock of looking in a mirror and seeing a
skeleton. In one's skeleton, the bones are associated with
one another; they are held together by external means,
fixed to one another according to mechanical principles.
In our idea of spirit, therefore, we merely imitate
mechanics. To those who hâve a full sense of humanity
and feel healthy in a human sense, this idea of spirit is
like looking in a mirror and seeing one's spirit made up
of bones, because the association psychology described in
books sees as though in a mirror. We may always hâve
this pleasure (not in a physical sense, of course), for it
arises whenever we compare our modern situation with
that of the Greeks. Spiritually, we hâve this expérience
repeatedly. We seek out philosophers, thinking they
might be able to give us self-knowledge, but they give us
their books as a mirror in which we see ourselves as the
skeletons of associated ideas.
This is what takes hold of us today when we try to
think in a practical way about éducation and attempt to
approach it from the perspective of our culture. We get
no indication of what éducation ought to be. Instead, we
are shown how to find a pile of bones and how to piece
Spirit’s Relationship to the Body
55
them together into a skeleton. This is how the typical per-
son feels today. People long for a new éducation, and
everywhere they ask how to educate. But where can we
turn? We must turn to the general form civilization has
taken, and it shows us that we can build up only a skele-
ton. Now a "strong feeling for civilization" must take
hold of the human being. If our feeling is healthy, we
must feel imbued with the intellectual nature of modem
thinking and ideas. And this is what confuses people
today We would like to think that the mirror reveals
something sublime and perfect; we would like to be able
to make something of it; above ail, we would like to be
able to use it in éducation, but we cannot; we cannot use
this to educate.
So, if we want to hâve enough enthusiasm as teachers,
we must first learn to perceive dead in our intellectualis-
tic culture, because a skeleton is dead. If we saturate our-
selves with the knowledge that our thinking is dead, we
quickly discover that ail death arises from the living. If
you were to find a corpse, you would not take it as the
original being. You cannot think of a corpse as a person
unless you hâve no concept of a human being. If, how-
ever, you hâve an idea of what a human being is, you
know that a corpse has merely what's been left behind;
the nature of the corpse leads you conclude that a human
being was once présent.
If you recognize the thinking that people cultivate
today as being a dead corpse, you can also relate it to
something alive. Moreover, you begin to hâve an inner
urge to make thinking corne to life again and to revitalize
our whole civilization. It then becomes possible for some-
thing practical to emerge from modem civilization, some-
thing that can reach living human beings, not merely a
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A Modern Art of Education
skcleton, just as the Greeks reached the living human in
their éducation.
Let us not underestimate the importance of the feelings
a teacher must hâve from the beginning. The teachers at
our Waldorf school were initially given a seminar. It was
not merely a matter of following the points of a given
program. It imparted a definite soûl condition, reconnect-
ing what today's culture values as its héritage with our
innermost being. Thus, dead thinking cornes to life; dis-
engaged thinking becomes full of character; artificial
thinking begins to be penetrated by one's whole being,
becoming truly human. First of ail, then, thoughts must
become truly alive in a teacher.
When a thing lives, something cornes of this life. A
human being is embodied in space and time, has spirit,
soûl, and body, a definite form and boundary, and does
not merely think; we also feel and will. When a thought is
communicated to us, that thought is the seed of a feeling
and an impulse of volition; it becomes complété. The
idéal of modern thinking is what people call "objective"
thinking, which is as motionless as possible and intended
to be an undisturbed reflection of the outer world, a mere
handmaiden of expérience. Such thinking contains no
force, and no impulse of feeling or will arises from it.
The Greeks began with the physical human standing
there before them. We must begin with a human idéal
(everyone feels the truth of this), but such an idéal must
not be only a theory; it must be alive and contain the force
of feeling and volition. When we think about changing
éducation, the first thing we need to do is to get beyond
abstract, theoretical ideals. When we take these into our
soûls, they cannot become inner feeling and volition or
bring human qualities into the physical body.
Spirit’s Relationship to the Body
57
Thoughts today do not become gcsturcs, but they
must become so again. It is not enough for children to
take in these thoughts passively; they must guide them
as they go out into the world as unified human beings;
for we must again educate unified human beings, whose
physical éducation is a continuation of what we gave
them in the classroom. People do not think like this now.
Their idea of what to give in school is so much intellec-
tual information, something needed. But it fatigues and
stresses children, perhaps even causes nervous prob-
lems. When people feel that something else is needed,
physical exercises are given as an "extra." So today we
hâve two very separate branches: intellectual éducation
and physical éducation, and one does not promote the
other. And we really hâve two human beings — one
vague and hypothetical, and one real, whom we do not
understand as the Greeks did. We "squint" when we
look at a person, because there appear to be two in front
of us. We must learn again to see straight, to see people
as unified, whole human beings. This is most important
in éducation.
What we must do, therefore, is to move beyond the
more or less theoretical facts of éducation as it exists
today, moving toward an éducation that is practical in
the true sense of the word. From what I hâve said, it fol-
lows that much dépends on how we return spirit — which
we grasp only in an intellectual way — to the human
being, so that this vague spirit with which we observe
people will become human. We must learn to see people
in spirit, as the Greeks saw people in the body.
Let me give you an example to describe how, through
spirit, we can begin to understand the human being right
down into the body. In discussing how spirit may be
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A Modern Art of Education
connected with a spécifie human organ, I will choose the
most striking example, but only temporarily. (These mat-
ters will become clearer in following lectures.) Let me
show you a process that the Greeks, too, considered
deeply symbolic and extraordinarily significant in a
child's development — the change of teeth. This change, in
Greece, indicated the âge at which a child entered public
éducation. Try to picture the relationship between spirit
and human teeth. It will seem odd, perhaps, that when
discussing people as spiritual beings, I begin by speaking
of the teeth. Nevertheless, it seems strange only because,
as a resuit of modern culture, people may, for example,
be familiar with the form of a tiny germ when they look
through the microscope, but they know very little about
what lies before them. It is recognized that teeth are
needed for eating; this is the first striking thing about
them. It is also known that they are needed for speech.
Certain sounds are related to the teeth; air flows in a par-
ticular way from the lungs and larynx and out through
the palate and lips, and certain consonant sounds require
the teeth. We know that our teeth serve a useful purpose
when eating or speaking.
A truly spiritual understanding of the human being
shows us something else as well. If you are able to study
the human being as I described in the previous lecture, it
will occur to you that a child develops teeth not only for
eating and speaking, but also for another purpose. As
strange as it sounds, a child develops teeth for the pur-
pose of thinking. Modern science is unaware that our
teeth are the most important of ail our organs of thought.
In small children, before the change of teeth, the physical
teeth as such are the most important organ of thought.
Children, through their interaction with the environment.
Spirit’s Relationship to the Body
59
spontaneously find their way into thinking. As thinking
rises from the dim life of sleep and dreams of infancy, the
whole process is related to the teeth pressing through in
the head. The forces that press the teeth out of the jaw are
also the inner soûl forces that now bring thinking to the
surface from the unformed sleep and dreams of child-
hood. A child learns to think with the same intensity as
that used to teethe.
So how do children learn to think? They learn to think
because they are imitative beings and, as such, are com-
pletely surrendered to the world around them. At the
very core of their being, they imitate events in their sur-
roundings, including what happens because of the
impulses of thinking. And then, to the same degree that
thought arises in a child, the teeth emerge. In effect, the
force that appears in the soûl as thinking is also within
these teeth.
Let us now follow childhood development further.
Around the seventh year, children go through the change
of teeth and the second teeth emerge. I said that this force
that produces the first and second teeth was présent in
the child's whole organism, but manifests strongest in the
head. The second teeth corne only once. The forces that
drive those teeth out of the child's organism do not work
again as physical forces during earthly life. They become
soûl and spirit powers; they enliven the souks inner
being. When we observe children around the seventh to
fourteenth years — with particular attention to soûl quali-
ties — we find that those soûl qualities between the sev-
enth and fourteenth years, especially thinking, were
organic forces until the seventh year. They were active in
the physical organism, culminating as a physical force that
pushed out the teeth, and finally becoming soûl activity.
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These things can, of course, be truly observed only
when we press forward to the mode of cognition I
described previously as the first stage of exact clairvoy-
ance, imaginative knowledge. The abstract, intellectual
knowledge of the human being that is common today
does not lead to this other knowledge. Thought must
corne to life from within, and become imaginative, so that
through thought as such, one can really understand.
Nothing can be truly understood through intellectual
thinking; its objects ail remain external. One looks at
them and forms mental images of what is seen. But think-
ing can be reinforced inwardly and made active. Then
imaginative pictures fill the soûl, replacing abstract intel-
lectuality. At the first stage of exact clairvoyance (as I
described it), one can perceive how, besides the forces of
the physical body, a suprasensory body is working in
us — if you will forgive the paradoxical expression. This is
the first suprasensory member of the human being.
Now, what are the characteristics of the physical body?
It can be weighed; it tends in the direction of gravity. This
is its outstanding characteristic. If through imagination we
become aware of the suprasensory body, which I call the
ether body, or body of formative forces, we find that it
cannot be weighed. It weighs nothing; on the contrary, it
tends away from the earth in every direction toward cos-
mic space. It contains forces opposed to gravity, and
works perpetually against gravity. Ordinary physical
knowledge teaches us about the physical body; likewise,
imaginative cognition, the first stage of précisé clairvoy-
ance, teaches us about the ether body, which is always
striving away from earthly gravity. Just as we gradually
learn to relate the physical body to its environment, we
also learn to relate the ether body to its environment.
Spirit’s Relationship to the Body
61
When studying the physical body, we look out into
nature for the substances of its composition. We realize
that everything within us that is subject to gravity — our
weight — has weight in outer nature as well. It enters us
when we assimilate nourishment. Thus, we gain a natural
concept of the human organism, insofar as the organism
is physical.
Similarly, through imagination, we gain a concept of the
relationship between our self-enclosed ether body and
the surrounding world. In spring, the force that drives
the plants out of the soil toward the cosmos in ail direc-
tions, and against gravity — the force that organizes
plants, brings them into relation to the upward tending
stream of light and works in the chemistry of the plant as
it strives upward — ail this is related to the ether body,
just as foods like sait, cabbage, turnips, and méat are
related to the physical body. Thus, in the first stage of
exact clairvoyance, this thinking that forms a unity and is
self-sufficient is related to the ether body.
Until the change of teeth, the ether body is intimately
connected to the physical body. It organizes the physical
body from within and is the force that pushes the teeth
outward. Once the second teeth arrive, the part of the
ether body that pushes the teeth out has finished its pur-
pose in the physical body, and its activity is freed from it.
With the change of teeth, these etheric forces are freed,
and it is with these forces that we begin to think freely
from the seventh year on. The force of the teeth becomes
less physical than it was while the teeth acted as the
organs of thought; it is now an etheric force. This same
force that produced the teeth now works in the ether
body and thinks. When we expérience ourselves as think-
ing beings and feel that thinking arises in the head (many
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A Modern Art of Education
people do not hâve this expérience unless thinking has
caused a headache), true knowledge shows us that the
force we use to think with is the same as that once con-
tained in the teeth.
Thus our knowledge brings us close to the unity of the
human being. We again learn how the physical connects
with the soûl. We know that children first think with the
forces of the teeth, and this is why teething troubles are
so connected inwardly with the whole life of a child. Con-
sider ail that occurs as a child is teething. Ail those trou-
bles arise from the process of teething because of its
connection to thinking; it is intimately connected with the
innermost spirituality of a child. The formative forces of
the teeth are liberated and become the independent
forces of human thinking. If we hâve the necessary gift of
observation, we can see that process of gaining indepen-
dence; we can see how, along with the change of teeth,
thinking frees itself from the body. And then what hap-
pens? To begin with, the teeth corne to the aid of speech.
The teeth, which initially had the independent task of
growth according to the forces of thought, are now forced
down a stage, so to speak. Thinking no longer takes place
in the physical body but in the ether body, so it descends
one stage. This was happening during the first seven
years as well, since the whole process is sequential,
merely culminating with the second teeth. Then, when
thinking seeks expression in speech, the teeth become
helpers of thought.
So, we look at a human being and we see the head. In
the head the formative forces of the teeth free themselves
and become the force of thinking. Then, pressed down, as
it were, into speech, we hâve ail the processes for which
the teeth are no longer directly responsible, because the
Spirit’s Relationship to the Body
63
ether body now assumes the responsibility, and the teeth
corne to the aid of speech. Here, their relationship to
thinking is still obvious. Once we understand how dental
sounds find their way into the process of thinking, we see
the task performed by the teeth — how we use the teeth to
make the sounds of "à" or "t" and bring the spécifie
thought element into speech.
I hâve shown through this example of the teeth — which
may seem a bit exaggerated — how we can understand the
human being through the spirit. If we proceed in this
way, thinking gradually ceases to be an abstract wander-
ing of associated ideas and connects with the human
being. We no longer see merely the physical functions in
a human being, such as chewing with the teeth or the
movements that produce the dental sounds of speech.
Instead, we see the teeth as an outer imagination in
nature of the process of thinking. Thinking "flashes
forth" and reveals itself though the teeth; there in the
teeth is the outer appearance of thinking. When we really
corne to understand the teeth, thought that is otherwise
abstract and vague becomes a definite image. We see how
thought works in the head where the teeth lie, and how
thought develops from the first to the second teeth.
Again, the whole process assumes formative boundaries.
A real image of the spirit begins to arise in nature itself.
Spirit is again créative.
We need more than anthropology, which studies
human beings in a completely external way and associ-
âtes human éléments just as various properties of ideas
are associated. What we need is the kind of thinking that
is unafraid to press on toward the inner being, unafraid
to speak of how spirit functions in the teeth. This is
indeed what we need, because then we penetrate the
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A Modern Art of Education
human being through the spirit. And something artistic
arises. Thinking that is abstract, theoretical, and impracti-
cal merely develops a person with a skeletal thinking and
must be led into the imaginai. Theoretical observation
becomes artistic perception and creativity. One must
form an image of the teeth when trying to perceive the
spirit working within. The artistic element, then, begins
to be the guide to the first stage of exact clairvoyance —
that of imagination. This is where we begin to understand
the true human being. Otherwise, a human being is
merely an abstraction in our thinking.
When it cornes to éducation, we find ourselves con-
fronted by real human beings. They stand there before us,
but there is an abyss between us, because we are there
with our abstract spirit, and we must cross that abyss.
First we must know how we can cross it. Our knowledge
of human beings today is limited to being able to put on a
cap. We do not know how to put spirit into the whole
human being, and we must learn to do this — how to
clothe human beings spiritually, just as we learned how to
clothe ourselves externally. We must learn to treat spirit
as we treat the outer garments. When we approach people
in this way, we achieve a living educational method.
The period of life beginning at around seven is signifi-
cant because of ail the facts I described. There is another
point in earthly life that is equally significant because of
the symptoms that arise in life. These seven-year periods
are approximate, of course, occurring earlier or later in
different people. Around fifteen, when puberty is
reached, is another time of extraordinary importance in
earthly existence. But the emergence of sexual life is only
the most outer indication of a complété inner transforma-
tion taking place between seven and fourteen. We hâve to
Spirit’s Relationship to the Body
65
look at the formative forces of the teeth in the head for the
physical origin of thinking, which frees itself at around
seven to become a soûl function. Si mil a rl y, we must look
for the activity of the second soûl force, feeling, in other
parts of the human organism.
Feeling releases itself from the physical constitution
much later than does thinking. Between seven and four-
teen, a child's feeling life is still inwardly connected to the
physical organism. Thinking has been freed, but feeling is
still inwardly connected to the body. Ail the feelings of
joy, sorrow, and pain that a child expresses maintain a
strong physical corrélation with organic sécrétions and
with the accélération or slowing of a child's breathing. If
our perception is sharp enough, when the outer symp-
toms of the change appear, we can see in these phenom-
ena the great transformation taking place in the feelings.
Just as the appearance of the second teeth indicates one
climax of growth, speech expresses the end of the next
phase — when feeling is gradually released from its con-
nection with the body to become a soûl function. We see
this most clearly in boys with the change of voice. The
head reveals the change that lifts thinking out of the
physical organism, and the breathing System — the seat of
organic rhythmic activity — expresses the libération of
feeling, which détachés itself from the physical organism
and becomes an independent function of soûl. We know
how this is expressed in a boy. The larynx changes, and
the voice becomes deeper. In girls, different phenomena
appear in physical development, but this is only external.
Anyone who has reached the first stage of exact clair-
voyance, imaginative perception, knows, because it is per-
ceived; the larynx of a boy transforms at about fourteen.
The same thing happens in girls to the ether body. The
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change withdraws to the ether body of the female and
assumes a form exactly like the physical body of the
male. And the ether body of a boy of fourteen assumes a
form resembling the physical body of a female. However
extraordinary it may seem to a mode of cognition that
clings to the physical, it is nevertheless true that, from
this very important phase onward, a man carries etheri-
cally a woman, and the woman carries etherically a man.
This is expressed in different ways in males and females.
If one goes beyond imagination and reaches the second
stage of exact clairvoyance (described in greater detail in
my books), one attains inspiration — perception of inde-
pendent spirit, no longer connected to the physical body.
One then becomes aware how, during this important
period around fourteen and fifteen, the third human
member reaches a state of independence. In my books I
hâve called this third aspect the astral body, according to
an older tradition. This astral body is more essentially
soûl than is the ether body; indeed, the astral body is soûl
and spirit. It is the third member and second supra-
sensory member of the human being.
This astral body works through the physical organism
until the fourteenth or fifteenth year, when it becomes
independent. Thus, a very significant task falls to teach-
ers — to help this development toward independence of
soûl and spirit hidden in the depths of the organism
before the âge of seven or eight. Gradually, because the
process is successive, it frees itself. We must assist this
graduai process of detachment when we teach children
between the âges of seven and fourteen. Then, if we hâve
gained the kind of knowledge I hâve spoken of, we notice
2. You must not be shocked by such expressions; we hâve to use words
for everything. — R. STEINER
Spirit’s Relationship to the Body
67
how a child's speech changes. Today's crude science (if I
may call it so) is concerned merely with the grosser
human soûl qualities, speaking of the other phenomena
as secondary sexual characteristics. To spiritual observa-
tion, however, these secondary phenomena are primary,
and vice versa. These métamorphosés, as well as the way
feeling withdraws from the organs of speech, are
extremely significant.
As teachers, it is our wonderful task — one that inspires
our innermost being — to gradually release speech from
the bodily constitution. It's wonderful to see in a child of
seven the natural, spontaneous movements of the lips,
which corne from organic activity. When a seven-year-
old speaks labial sounds, it is different from the way a
child of fourteen or fifteen says them. For a seven-year-
old, the labial sounds are organic; the circulation of the
fluids involuntarily shoots into the lips. When a child
reaches around thirteen, this organic activity is trans-
ferred into the organism proper, and the soûl activity of
feeling must emerge and move the lips voluntarily, with
the expression of feelings in speech.
The hardened thought element of speech is manifested
in the teeth, and the soft, loving element of feeling mani-
fested in the lips. It is the labial sounds that give warmth
and loving sympathy to speech. This marvelous transi-
tion from the organic activity of the lips to the activity
brought into play by the soûl — this development of the
lips in human organic and psychological nature — is
something a teacher can accompany, and thus a wonder-
ful atmosphère can be brought into the school. Just as we
see the suprasensory etheric element that permeates the
body emerging in the seventh year as independent think-
ing power, similarly we see the element of independent
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A Modern Art of Education
soûl and spirit emerging at the âge of fourteen or fifteen.
As teachers, we help bring the soûl and spirit to birth.
What Socrates meant is seen at a higher level.
In following lectures I will explain the new éléments
that appear in walking and movement when a person
reaches approximately twenty-one years of âge, the third
period of life. It is enough today that we saw how think-
ing frees itself from organic activity and how feeling frees
itself from organic activity until fourteen or fifteen. And
we saw how this gives us insight into human develop-
ment and how an otherwise merely abstract mode of
thinking can become an image, or imagination. We hâve
also seen how human speech appears in its true form as
soûl and spirit when a person reaches fourteen or fifteen.
We can say, therefore, that if we wish to reach a person
in a living way and bring vital spirit to humankind, we
must enter the artistic. And if we wish to bring the feeling
spirit to a human being, we must go about this not only
artistically, but also with a religious feeling, which alone
can penetrate the reality of spirit.
Education between seven and fourteen, therefore, can
be carried on in a truly human sense only if it is done
within a religious atmosphère, becoming almost a sacra-
mental office — not in a sentimental sense, but in a truly
human sense. So we see that whatever we do returns to
us when we bring life and soûl to our otherwise abstract
thinking, which arises from the mere association of ideas.
We see how one finds the way to an artistic understand-
ing of humanity and to a sense of the human within the
religious life. Art and religion are thus united with éduca-
tion. Thus, the way becomes clear, from the matter of the
student to that of the teacher, when we realize that éduca-
tion should become knowledge so practical, so clear, and
Spirit’s Relationship to the Body
69
so living that teachers cannot become true educators of
young people unless they are inwardly able to become
truly artistic and religious.
« 5 *
Freeing Volition
IN THE HUMAN ORGANISM
August g, z 923
Yesterday I tried to describe the way thinking becomes
independent around the seventh year, and feeling around
the fourteenth year, thus releasing themselves from the
physical organism. Today I want to show how volition
gradually presses on toward independence during the
growth processes.
The human will remains connected to the organism
longer than does thinking and feeling. Until about twenty
or twenty-one, the human will dépends very much on
organic activity, in particular on the way the breathing
continues into the blood's circulation and on the way,
through the inner warmth that has developed, the blood
circulation then takes hold of the motor organization. The
blood circulation takes hold of the force arising in the
legs, feet, arms, and hands when we move, transforming
it into a manifestation of volition.
It can be said that volition as a whole in a child, even
up to fifteen and twenty-one, dépends on the way in
which the forces of the organism work into movement.
Teachers, more than anyone else, must cherish the power
to observe such things without preconceptions. They
must be able to notice when a child is energetic or pre-
disposed to an energetic will — for example, when a child
Freeing Volition in the Human Organism
71
walks, whether the heel is placed firmly on the ground. It
indicates a less energetic will if the child uses the front
part of the foot and has a "tripping" gait.
Even after the fifteenth year, however, this is still ail an
ou ter, physical expression of volition — the way the legs
are placed, the capacity to prolong a movement of the
arms into dexterity of the fingers. Not until around
twenty is the will released from the organism in the same
way that feeling was released at about fourteen, and
thinking around seven with the change of teeth. The
outer processes that are revealed by the liberated think-
ing are very striking and can readily be perceived; the
change of teeth is a remarkable phenomenon in human
life. The émancipation of feeling is less obvious; it
expresses itself in the development of the so-called sec-
ondary sexual organs — for example, the change of voice
in a boy or the change of inner life habits of a girl. Feeling,
therefore, becomes independent of the physical body in a
more inner way The outer symptoms of the émancipa-
tion of the volition at about twenty or twenty-one are
even less obvious, and thus they are generally unnoticed
in an âge that lives in externals.
In our day (in their own opinion), people are "grown-
up" when they reach fourteen or fifteen. Our young peo-
ple will not recognize that, between fifteen and twenty-
one, they should not only acquire external information,
but also develop inner character and, most important,
volition. Even before twenty-one, young people set them-
selves up as reformers and teachers, and instead of
applying themselves to what they can learn from those
who are older, they write pamphlets and that sort of
thing. This is understandable in an âge that is directed so
much toward outer life. The décisive change that occurs
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A Modern Art of Education
around twenty-one is hidden from people today, because
it is completely inner. But this change does indeed take
place, and it can be described.
Up until sometime around the âge of twenty-one, one
has not yet become a self-contained personality; one is
strongly influenced by the earth's gravitational forces,
with which one struggles. Conventional science will dis-
cover much about these things, which are already known
to the exact clairvoyance I described yesterday.
We hâve iron within the corpuscles of our circulatory
System, and until around twenty-one those blood corpus-
cles are such that gravity weighs them down. After the
âge of twenty-one, our being receives a push upward
from below, which also affects the blood. From twenty-
one on, we place our feet on the earth in a new way. This
is largely unknown today, but it is a fundamentally
important fact for understanding the human being in rela-
tion to éducation. After twenty-one, with every step we
take, a new force works into the human organism from
below upward. Previously, our formative forces flowed
downward from the head, but at twenty-one, we become
self-contained beings, because now the forces that work
upward from below hâve stopped the forces working
downward. This downward stream of forces is strongest
in smaller children, up to the âge of seven. The whole pro-
cess of physical development during this period begins in
the head. Up until seven, the head does everything, but
when thinking liberated at the change of teeth, the head
frees itself from this strong downward force.
Much is known today about the polar nature of magne-
tism and electricity, but little is known about what occurs
in a human being. The fact that forces flow from the head
to the feet and from the feet to the head only during the
Freeing Volition in the Human Organism
73
first twenty years of one's life is a very significant spiri-
tual scientific truth — indccd, one that is extremely impor-
tant for éducation. It is a fact that people today are
completely unaware of. Yet ail éducation is based on the
question of ivhy we educate in the first place. This is the
grand question.
Because we are human and not animais, we must ask:
Why do we need to educate people? How do animais
grow up and function in life without éducation? Why
can't we acquire what we need in life by simply observ-
ing and imitating? Why should teachers intervene in the
freedom of children? People seldom ask these questions,
because such matters are taken for granted. We cannot
become real teachers, however, unless we no longer
accept this as a matter of fact. We must recognize that we
interfère with children when we stand before them and
try to educate them. And why should children accept it?
We consider it an obvious fact that we must educate
our children, but in the children's subconscious life, they
do not. Consequently, we talk a great deal about the
behavior of children, but it never occurs to us that, to
their subconscious, we probably appear very comical
when we teach something of the outer world. And they
are quite justified in their antipathy. The great problem
for educators is how to change an object of apathy for
children into something they can relate to. We are given
the opportunity to do this between the seventh and four-
teenth years, because at seven, the head — the carrier of
thought — is liberated. It no longer generates the down-
ward forces as strongly as it did; it settles down and
becomes more concerned with its own affairs.
Not until around fifteen does the System of movement
assume a more personal quality of volition. The will
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A Modern Art of Education
gains independence from the System of movement, and
the forces of vvill, which flowed upward, now begin to
work for the first time. Ail volition works its way
upward, ail thinking downward. The direction of
thought is from heaven to earth; the direction of will is
from earth to heaven. Between seven and fifteen, these
two functions are not connected, nor do they interpene-
trate. In the central System of the body, where the breath-
ing and circulation originate and take place, one's feeling
nature is présent, and it frees itself at this time. If feelings
are properly developed between seven and fifteen, we
establish a true relationship between the downward and
upward moving forces.
It cornes down to the fact that, between seven and fif-
teen, we must help a child establish the right relationship
between thinking and volition, and here it is possible to
fail. Because of this, we hâve to educate our children. In
animais, this interaction between thinking and volition
happens automatically, insofar as animais hâve volition
and think in a dreamlike way. In a human being, the
interaction of thinking and volition does not occur auto-
matically. In animais, the process is natural; in human
beings, it must be the resuit of a moral process. We can
become moral beings because we hâve the opportunity
on earth to unité thinking and volition. The whole human
character — insofar as it arises from one's inner being —
dépends on whether human activity establishes true har-
mony between thinking and willing.
The Greeks brought about this harmony of thinking
and volition through gymnastics, evoking the flow of
forces from the head into the limbs (which happens natu-
rally in the earliest years of life) and allowing the arms
and legs to move through dance and wrestling. Thus, the
Freeing Volition in the Human Organism
75
head's activity moves into the limbs. We cannot, how-
ever, return to Greek culture, nor can we repeat their civi-
lization. We must now begin with spirit. Thus, we must
understand how, at twenty-one, the will is freed through
inner processes of the System of movement, just as feeling
was freed at fourteen, and thinking at seven.
Modem civilization is mostly unaware of this. It is
asleep to the insight that éducation must unify thinking
and the will. Thinking was already released at seven, and
volition now appears in full freedom as a soûl quality
around the twentieth year. We cannot acquire true rever-
ence for human development unless we bring spirit into
contact with physical human nature, as we showed yes-
terday with regard to thinking and feeling, and as we
hâve just tried to show with volition. With the twentieth
or twenty-first year, we must be able to see the will at
work in the organization of human movement — in dis-
tinct movements of the fingers and arms and in individ-
ual ways of walking. The young person has been
preparing for this, however, since the fifteenth year. If we
can thus reclaim a sense of spirit that is no longer a mere
association of ideas — a "skeleton" of spirit — but a living
spirit that can even perceive how a person walks or
moves the fingers, then we hâve also reclaimed the
human being, and we can now teach.
The Greeks' power of perception was instinctive, but it
was very slowly lost, to be continued as a tradition until
the sixteenth century. The most conspicuous thing about
the sixteenth century is that civilized humanity in general
lost their understanding of the relationship between
thought and volition. Since then, people hâve begun to
reflect about éducation, yet hâve no regard for the most
significant problems in their understanding of the human
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A Modern Art of Education
being. The human being, whom they want to educate, is
simply not understood. This tragedy has existed ever
since the sixteenth century.
Today, people expérience and recognize that éducation
must be transformed. Educational reform organizations
are springing up everywhere. People sense that éduca-
tion needs something but fail to arrive at the essential
question: How can thought and volition be harmonized
in human beings? People might at least realize that there
is too much intellectuality — that éducation must become
less intellectual and begin to educate the will. But the will
must not be educated for its own sake. And it is superfi-
cial to talk only about which is better, educating thinking
or educating the will. There is only one question that is
truly practical and relevant to human nature: How can
we establish real harmony between thinking, which is lib-
erating itself in the head, and the will, which is becoming
free in the limbs?
To be educators in the truest sense, we cannot take a
one-sided approach; rather, we must consider the whole
being, in every aspect. And we cannot do this merely
through the usual association of ideas we use to describe
spirit today; it is impossible unless we recognize that the
prevailing mode of thinking today is merely the corpse of
living thinking (as shown in my previous two lectures),
and understand that we must work our way toward liv-
ing thinking through self-development.
In this sense, let me frankly présent one fundamental
principle of ail educational reform. I must ask your
patience if I say this too bluntly, because to say it almost
seems like an insult to modern humanity, and one is
always reluctant to be insulting. It is peculiar to modern
civilization that people understand that éducation must
Freeing Volition in the Human Organism
77
change, which has led to the countless groups advocat-
ing educational reform. People know very well that édu-
cation is not right and that it needs to change. However,
people are just as convinced that they know exactly what
éducation should become, that each group can dictate
how we ought to educate. But people should consider
the fact that, if éducation is so poor that it must be
reformed fundamentally, they themselves hâve suffered
from it, and a poor éducation may not hâve rendered
them capable of understanding what is right for éduca-
tion. Today, people realize that they hâve ail been edu-
cated poorly, but they also assume that they know
perfectly well what a good éducation should be. And
these educational reform groups spring up like so many
mushrooms.
The Waldorf method did not begin with this principle,
but from the fact that people do not yet know what édu-
cation should be and that we must first acquire a basic
knowledge of the human being. Consequently, the first
seminar for the Waldorf school involved teaching about
fundamental human nature, so that teachers would grad-
ually learn what they could not yet know: how children
should be taught. It is impossible to know how to teach
without an understanding of the human being.
The first thing we gave teachers in the seminar was a
basic knowledge of the human being. We hoped that, by
contemplating the true nature of humanity, inner enthu-
siasm and love for éducation would grow within them.
With such knowledge cornes a spontaneous love for
humanity that is the very best quality for the practice of
éducation. Pedagogy is a love for humanity, resulting
from knowing humanity, and only on this basis can it be
established.
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A Modern Art of Education
To those who observe human life as expressed exter-
nally today, ail the educational reform groups are only an
outer indication that people know a great deal about how
children should be taught these days. To those who hâve
a deeper understanding of human life, this is not so. The
Greeks educated instinctively; they did not talk much
about éducation. Plato was the first to speak a little about
éducation from the perspective of a sort of philosophical
miseducation.
Before the sixteenth century, people didn't talk a great
deal about éducation. Indeed, people in general speak
very little of what they can do and much more of what
they cannot. To those with a deeper knowledge of human
nature, too much talk about anything is not a good sign
that it is understood; on the contrary, life reveals that,
when people of any era tend to discuss some subject too
much, it is a sign that very little is known about it. So, for
those who can truly see modern civilization, the "prob-
lem of éducation" emerged because it is no longer under-
stood how human development occurs.
In making a statement such as this, one must of course
ask forgiveness, and I do this with ail due respect. The
truth, however, cannot be denied and must be stated. If
the Waldorf method achieves anything, it will happen by
substituting knowledge of the human being for ignorance
of the human being, by replacing mere external anthro-
pology with true spiritual scientific understanding of
inner human nature. This brings living spirit right down
into the physical human constitution.
Someday in the future, it will be no less natural to
speak of human nature with understanding than it is to
speak with ignorance today. Someday it will be known,
even in society as a whole, how thinking is connected
Freeing Volition in the Human Organism
79
with the force that enables the teeth to grow. Someday
people will be able to observe how the inner force of feel-
ing is connected to what cornes from the chest and is
expressed through the lips' movement. The variations in
lip movements and the control of them through feeling,
which sets in between seven and fourteen, will be a sig-
nificant outer sign of inner development. And it will be
seen how, between fourteen and twenty-one, the forces
flowing upward consolidate and are stopped in the head
itself. The quality of thought manifests in the teeth and
the quality of feeling in the lips. Likewise, in the signifi-
cant way that the palate limits the mouth cavity at the
back, true knowledge of the human being will see how
the upward forces work and, stopped by the gums, pass
into speech. Someday people may go beyond looking at
the smallest and largest through microscopes or téle-
scopes, and instead observe closely what they see in the
outer world — and this is not seen today, despite the tools
available. If so, people will perceive how thinking lives in
the labial sounds and volition in the palatal sounds
(which influence especially the tongue), and how,
through those sounds, speech, like every other function,
becomes an expression of the whole human being.
There are people today who try to read the lines of the
hand and other such outer phenomena. They try to
understand human nature according to symptoms. These
things cannot be correctly understood unless it is also
understood that we must look for the whole human being
in what one expresses. People must see how speech,
which makes individuals into social beings, has an inner
movement and configuration that reflects the whole
human being. Dental sounds, labial sounds, and palatal
sounds do not exist in speech by chance; they occur
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A Modern Art of Education
because the whole human being enters speech through
the dental sounds of the head, the labial sounds of the
breast, and the palatal sounds of the remaining human
organization.
Our civilization must, there fore, learn to speak of a rév-
élation of the whole human being; then spirit will be
brought to the whole human being. A way will be found
from spirit into the most intimate expressions of our
being: our moral life. From this will proceed an inner
impulse for the éducation we truly need.
The Gospel of St. John is the most significant document
that reveals how we must change our worldview and civ-
ilization from that of ancient times. It is the deepest and
most beautiful document of Greek culture. From the very
first line, this marvelous Gospel tells that we must rise to
very different ideas — living ideas — before we can learn
something from the ancients for our time. In John's Gos-
pel, Greek thought and feeling were a garment for the
newly arising Christianity. The first line says, "In the
beginning was the Word" ( Logos in Greek). When we
hear someone say "word" today, there is nothing left in
our feelings for what the writer felt when writing the sen-
tence "In the beginning was the Word." The feeble, insig-
nificant meaning we give that word was certainly not in
the mind of the Gospel writer when he wrote this line.
Something very different was meant by word. To us, the
"word" is a weak expression of abstract thoughts. To the
Greeks, it was still a call to human volition. When a sylla-
ble was spoken, the body of a Greek would "tingle" and
express this syllable throughout one's whole being. The
Greeks still had the knowledge that one does not just
express oneself by saying, for example, "It's ail the same
to me." When they heard someone say this, they tingled.
Freeing Volition in the Human Organism
81
prompting them to make a corresponding movement
(shrugging the shoulders). Word did not live only in the
speech organs, but in the whole human organism of
movement. Humankind has forgotten these things.
If you want to realize how word — which in ancient
Greece still summoned a gesture — can live throughout
the human being, you should go to the eurythmy perfor-
mance next week. It is just a beginning, a very modest ini-
tiative to bring the word back into the will, to show the
human being (on the stage at any rate, even if it is not
possible in ordinary life) that the word does in fact live in
the movements of one's arms and legs. When we intro-
duce eurythmy into our schools, it is a humble beginning
(even today) to make the word once more an aspect of
movement in ail of life.
In Greece, a very different feeling remained, which had
corne from the East. There was a tingling, or urge, in a
person to allow volition to reveal itself through the limbs,
with every syllable, word, or phrase, with the rhythm
and measure of that speech. The Greeks realized how the
word could become Creative in every movement. But they
also knew more. To them, words expressed the forces of a
cloud formation, plant growth, and natural phenomena
in general. Word rumbled in the rolling waves and
worked in the whistling wind. Just as the word lives in
our breath, leading to a corresponding movement, the
Greeks found the word living in the raging winds, in the
surging waves, and even in rumbling earthquakes. These
were words that poured out of the earth.
The paltry ideas that arise in us when we hear "word"
would be very misplaced if I could transfer them to the
world's primai beginning. I wonder how we might hâve
begun with words and ideas if, at the beginning of the
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world, our feeble ideas of "word" had been présent then,
and had been thought to be créative. Our words hâve
become intellectualized; they no longer hâve any créative
power.
Thus, above ail, we must rise to what the Greeks felt as
a révélation of the whole human being, a call to the will
when they spoke of the word, or Logos. The Greeks felt
Logos surging and sounding throughout the cosmos.
They could feel what really sounds when one says, "In
the beginning was the Word." In ail that was conjured up
in these words, a living créative force lived not only in
humanity, but in wind, wave, cloud, sunlight, and star-
light. Everywhere, the world and the cosmos revealed the
word. Greek gymnastics revealed the word. And in its
weaker expression of musical éducation, there was a
vague image of ail that was felt in the word. The word
worked in Greek wrestling. The vague image of the word
in music functioned also in the Greek dances. The spirit
worked into the nature of humanity, even though it
involved a physical, gymnastic éducation.
We must realize how weak our ideas hâve become,
and begin to see correctly how the grand impulse rever-
berating in a line such as "In the beginning was the
Word" was reduced as it passed into Roman culture,
becoming increasingly vague, until we feel today only an
inner lassitude when speaking of it. In ancient times, ail
wisdom, ail science, was a commentary on "In the begin-
ning was the Word." Initially, the word, or Logos, lived in
the ideas that arose in people when they spoke those
words, but this increasingly weakened. Then came the
Middle Ages, and Logos died; only a dead Logos could be
tolerated. Educated people were taught in the dead
Logos, the dead word of decaying Latin. The dying word
Freeing Volition in the Human Organism
83
of speech became the main medium of éducation until
the sixteenth century, when certain inner revoit arose
against it.
So what did civilization mean up to the sixteenth cen-
tury and the death of human feeling for the living Logos
as contained in the Gospel of John? The attachment to a
dead language was merely an outer manifestation of this
death of the Logos. If we wanted to briefly describe the
course of civilization as it affects éducation, we would
hâve to say that everything humanity lost is expressed
most clearly by the fact that it no longer understands
matters such as those in John's Gospel.
The course of civilization, through the Middle Ages
until the sixteenth century, lost the inner force of a text
such as John's Gospel, and this has led to the inadequacy
of humanity today; hence the clamor for educational
reforms. The question of éducation will not get its bear-
ing until people understand the barrenness of the human
heart when trying to understand the Gospel of John, com-
paring this to the intense dévotion of those who felt trans-
ported from their being into the Creative forces of the
universe, allowing the real meaning of that first sentence
of the Gospel to reverberate inwardly. We must realize
that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries called for a
new kind of éducation because the most godly people,
those who most deeply felt the need for a renewal of édu-
cation, also sensed the loss of the inner elemental life-
force that enables us to understand spirit. After ail, the
Gospel of John refers to spirit when speaking of Logos.
Indeed, we hâve reached a point where we long for
spirit, but our speech is made up of mere words; we hâve
lost the spirit of the word. This still existed for the Greeks,
and their whole being and activity in the world dawned
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in them when a word was spoken. Similarly, in even ear-
lier times, cosmic activity dawned in human beings when
they recognized the divine spiritual ground of the world
in universally Creative words. These must corne to life in
each of us if we are to become completely human. And
teachers must become whole human beings if they are to
educate whole human beings. Teachers must return to an
understanding of the word. But before we can bring the
full mystery of the word before our soûls, as it functioned
and was understood when the real meaning of John's
Gospel was still experienced, we must realize that spirit
was présent in the word for ancient human conscious-
ness — even in the weakened words of speech. Spirit
poured into the word and became its power.
I am not criticizing any period, nor am I saying that one
era is less important than any other. I merely want to
describe how the âges differ as they follow one another,
each having its own spécial value. But some âges must be
described in a more négative way, some more positive.
Imagine the darkness that gradually crept over the liv-
ing impulse in the words of a sentence such as "In the
beginning was the Word." Consider civilization of the
sixteenth- or seventeenth-centuries and how humankind
had to préparé for the growing inner force of freedom.
One must also value éléments that were absent during
certain periods — in a sense, value them properly for the
first time. Now consider the fact that humanity had to
gain freedom in a fully conscious way, and that this
would hâve been impossible if spirit still poured into
words and inspired them as in earlier times. Then we can
understand how éducation in its older form became
impossible once Francis Bacon of Verulam made a signif-
iant statement around the seventeenth century that.
Freeing Volition in the Human Organism
85
when we face it honestly, implies the annihilation of the
essence of a phrase such as "In the beginning was the
Word." Before then, there was always a shadow of the
spirit in the word, or Logos. Bacon asks us to see only an
"idol" in the word, not spirit any longer, but an idol; one
could no longer hold the word in its own power, but had
to guard against the intellectualized word.
Once one loses the true essence of the word, from
which knowledge, civilization, and power had been
drawn in earlier times, one clings to an idol — or so
believed Bacon. We see in this doctrine of idols a shift
away from the word during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. There was a time when humankind not
only received the word in word, but also in spirit —
indeed, the cosmic créative spirit in the word, or Logos.
Then came the âge when the word began to mislead, as
an idol does, into intellectualism. Human beings were
taught to hold onto outer, sensory phenomena, lest they
fall prey to the idol in the word. Bacon demanded that
humankind no longer hold onto what pours into words
from the gods, but hold onto the outer world and its dead
objects — or, at best, objects enlivened externally. Human-
ity is directed away from words to the outer physical
world. People are left with only the feeling that we must
educate the human being, within whom the spirit is in
fact présent; but the word is an idol. People today can
look with eyes only at what exists externally. Education
no longer uses what is truly human, but what exists out-
side the human being.
Along with this cornes the problem of éducation, bring-
ing tierce enthusiasm but also today's tragedy. We see it
very typically during the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies in persons of Michel de Montaigne and John Locke
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and (along with what was happening here in England)
Amos Comenius on the Continent. In these three men —
Montaigne, Locke, Comenius — we can almost see how
the human departure from Logos and the turn toward
physical objects was the strongest impulse in civilization.
Fear of the idol in the word arose in humanity; Logos dis-
appeared. The décisive factor was so-called observation,
a justifiable function (as we shall see in following lec-
tures) but now understood to be sensory observation. We
see how anxiously Montaigne, Locke, and Comenius
desired to divert humanity from the suprasensory and ail
that lives in the Logos. Locke and Comenius always
pointed toward the external expressly and tried to avoid
anything not available to the senses. In educating the
young, they tried to bring as much of the sensory world
as possible. We see Comenius writing books, whose pur-
pose is to show that we should not work through the
word, but through synthetic sensory perceptions. We see
how this transition was accomplished and how humanity
lost ail sense of connection with spirit through the word.
We understand that civilization as a whole can no longer
inwardly accept something like "In the beginning was the
Word," clinging instead to outer facts of senses; the Logos
is accepted today only as tradition.
Thus a longing arises — with intense enthusiasm but
also with fearful tragedy — to educate through sensory
perception, because the word is considered an idol in
Bacon's sense. This longing appeared most typically in
Montaigne, Locke, and Comenius. But, they also show us,
from their position of prominence, what lives in human-
ity as a whole; they show us how the mood, which is
expressed today as a deep longing to return spirit to
human beings, arose right when humanity could no
Freeing Volition in the Human Organism
87
longer believe in the spirit, but only in the idol of the
word, as did Bacon. Educational reform groups, begin-
ning with Montaigne and Comenius (and fully justified
in those times), must now develop something for the sake
of our time that brings spirit to human beings — spirit that
has been given form and experienced and carries forces
of will, something that sees spirit revealed in the human
body and its earthly activities.
A new era of éducation begins with this rediscovery of
the suprasensory within the sensory, the rediscovery of
spirit that was lost to the word when word became an
idol. Montaigne, Locke, and Comenius knew very well
what éducation should be. Their programs are just as
good as those of modem educational groups, and ail the
demands for éducation today were already présent in the
abstract writings of those three. What we need today,
however, is a way that leads us to reality, because no édu-
cation will develop out of abstract principles or pro-
grams, but only from reality. Because human beings are
soûl and spirit — because our nature is physical, soûl, and
spiritual — reality must return to our lives. And, along
with reality, spirit will also return to our lives, and only
such spirit can sustain an educational art for the future.
* 6 *•
Walking, Speaking, Thinking
August 10 , igzj
What I hâve presented thus far should not simply lead to
some theory about the need for a new form of éducation,
but to a new attihide toward éducation. In my earlier lec-
tures, I wanted to speak less to the intellect and more to
the heart. This is most important for the teacher, because,
as we've seen, we must base an art of éducation on a full
understanding of the human being.
For some time now, whenever people discuss an art of
éducation, we hear that it is the child who is important.
There are many educational goals and, in a sense, theo-
retical demands about how we should approach chil-
dren. But this is not the way to develop complété
dévotion in a teacher toward éducation. This is possible
only when teachers can understand the whole human
being, in body, soûl, and spirit. Those who hâve living
ideas about the human being (as I hâve described) will
find that those ideas are transformed directly into voli-
tion. In a practical way, from hour to hour, teachers will
learn how to answer an important question. But who
asks this question? It is the children themselves. Conse-
quently, the most important thing is to learn how to read
children. And, in this, we are guided by a truly practical
understanding of the human being in body, soûl, and
spirit.
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89
It is difficult to speak about so-called Waldorf éduca-
tion, because it is not really something we can learn or
discuss. Waldorf éducation is strictly a practical matter,
and the only way to describe it is by using examples of
how it is practiced in one situation or another according
to spécifie needs. Expérience détermines how we practice
Waldorf éducation. When we begin with this attitude, we
assume that the teacher has an appropriate understand-
ing of the human being. When this happens, in a sense
éducation involves very general social questions, because
teaching children should begin immediately after birth.
This means that humanity as a whole, every family and
every group of people, is responsible for éducation. This
is something that we understand from the nature of chil-
dren before the change of teeth at the âge of seven.
Jean Paul, a German writer, said something truly won-
derful when he claimed that people learn more about life
during their first three years than they do in three years at
a university . 1 It is true, in fact, that the first three years as
well as the following years before seven are the most
important for the overall development of a human being.
A child is a very different being at a later âge.
During those first years, a child is really an organ of
sensory perception. The problem is that people do not
usually comprehend the importance of this. We must
make very drastic statements if we are to reveal the full
truth of that idea. Later in life, when people eat, they
taste with the mouth, gums, or tongue; taste is localized
in the head. That is not true of children, especially during
the first years of life. Taste affects their entire organism.
1. Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763-1825), a novelist whose
Works were popular in the early nineteenth century. His pen name
reflected his admiration for Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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Children can taste their mother's milk and their first food
right down into the limbs. For a young child, what hap-
pens later only on the tongue happens throughout the
entire organism. In a sense, children live by tasting
everything they encounter. This is something animal-like
in young children, but never imagine that this is the same
as in animais. "Animal-like" in young children is, in a
sense, at a higher level. A human being is never an ani-
mal, not even as an embryo — indeed, least of ail at that
time. We can clarify such ideas by comparing them to
something else.
If you hâve ever observed natural processes with some
understanding — say, a herd of cows grazing in a field,
then lying down to digest, each devoted to the whole
world in a sense — then you may hâve some impression of
what actually occurs in an animal. An entire universe, an
extract of cosmic events, is underway in an animal, and it
expériences the most wonderful visions while digesting.
Digestion is the most important way that animais hâve for
understanding. While an animal digests, it devotes itself
in a dreamy, imaginative way to the entire world. This
might seem overstated, but the strangest thing is that it is
not overstated at ail and corresponds to reality. If we raise
that image a step, we see the expérience of a young child's
physical functions. Taste accompanies ail physical func-
tions. And, just as taste accompanies ail physical func-
tions, something else permeates a child's whole organism
and is later localized in the eyes and ears.
Consider the wonder of an eye. We see when it receives
something formed outside and filled with color, and then
creating an image inwardly. It is localized and separate
from the totality of our expérience. We comprehend intel-
lectually what the eye créâtes in this wonderful way. The
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91
intellect makes it into a kind of shadow image. It is the
same for the wonderful processes localized in an adult's
ears. What is localized as a sense in adult ears, however,
is spread throughout the whole organism of a young
child. Thus children do not differentiate between spirit,
soûl, and body. Everything that affects a child from out-
side is re-created within. Children imitate their entire
environment inwardly.
Now that we hâve considered matters from this per-
spective, let's look at how children learn three important
activities during the first years: walking, speaking, and
thinking. These early capacities hâve great importance
for the rest of children's lives.
"Learning to walk" is a kind of shorthand for some-
thing much more comprehensive. Because the process of
learning to walk is most obvious, we say "children learn
to walk." But learning to walk is connected directly to
balancing ourselves in relation to the spatial world. As
children, we try to stand, trying to bring our legs into
such a relationship to gravity that we gain our balance.
We try to do the same with our arms and hands. Our
entire body becomes oriented in this way. Learning to
walk means orienting ourselves spatially.
It is important to see that young children are imitative
and sensory perceptive, because, during the early years,
they must learn everything through imitation, copying
what happens around them. It is clear to everyone that a
child's organism develops its own powers of orientation
and that the human organism tends to bring itself into a
vertical position and not remain horizontal, or crawling,
and to bring the arms into a similar balance spatially. Ail
of this is inhérent to young children, and it arises from
the organism's own impulses.
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We spoil the human organism for life if, as teachers, we
introduce even a little compulsion into the true desires of
human nature; we should leave human nature free and
act only as its assistants. If we do not simply help a child
but use inappropriate external actions to force a child to
begin to walk, we ruin that child's life, right up to the
time of death. In particular, we ruin that child's life in old
âge. In properly educating a child, it is important not to
look only at the présent but at the child's whole life until
death. We must understand that the seeds of a person's
whole life exist in that individual during childhood.
Because children are very subtle organs of sensory per-
ception, they are réceptive not only to surrounding phys-
ical influences, but also to moral influences, particularly
those of thoughts. As odd as this may seem to materialis-
tic thinking today, children perceive what we think when
we are around them. As parents or teachers, when we are
around young children it is important not only to avoid
acting in ways we should not in front of children, but we
should also be inwardly true and moral in our thinking
and feeling, which children can sense. Children form
their being not just according to our words and actions,
but also according to our attitudes, thoughts, and feel-
ings. During this first period of childhood, before the âge
of seven, the most important thing for éducation is a
child's environment.
Now we corne to the problem of what we can do to
guide children who are learning to walk and orient them-
selves. It is important that, through spiritual science, we
see the living relationships that we cannot see with a
dead, materialistic science. Consider a child who was
forced, in ail sorts of ways, to walk and find an orienta-
tion in space, simply because people felt it was the thing
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93
to do. Now imagine that child at the âge of fifty or sixty.
If nothing else has acted to correct the situation, we might
see that this person has various metabolic illnesses, rheu-
matism, goût, and so on. Everything we do to children by
forcing them into the vertical position so they can walk —
even when we do it only halfheartedly — goes so deeply
into the soûl that the spirit affects the physical body. The
forces we create through such dubious means remain
throughout life, and, if they are not the right forces, they
manifest later on as physical illnesses.
Ail éducation of young children is also physical éduca-
tion. You cannot isolate physical éducation, because ail
éducation of spirit and soûl affects children's physical
bodies, and thus it is also physical éducation. When you
see children beginning to orient themselves by standing
and beginning to walk, if you lovingly view the wonder-
ful secret of the human organism that causes children to
move from horizontal to vertical; if you hâve a feeling of
reverence and modesty when you see God's créative
forces in the way children orient themselves in space; if
you deeply love the human nature of children, because
you love every expression of human nature — in other
words, when you assis t children in learning to walk and
orient themselves — you create healthy forces in children
that will manifest as a healthy metabolism when they
reach fifty or sixty, a time when people require some con-
trol over their metabolisms.
The true secret of human development is contained in
the fact that whatever becomes ensouled and made spiri-
tual at a certain stage of life will manifest physically later
on, often after many years. This is how it works with
learning to walk. A child who is guided with love into
learning to walk will grow up to be healthy. Using love to
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help children walk makes up much of basic physical and
health éducation.
Speech develops from a child's orientation in space.
Modern physiology knows little about that, but it does
know something. Physiologists recognize that, although
we generally use our right hands, there is a certain area
on the left side of the brain that is the source of speech.
Physiology thus indicates a correspondence between
movements of the right hand and the so-called Broca's
Area in the left side of the brain . 2 The hand's movements,
its gestures and means of strength, enters the brain and
forms the source of speech. That is only a small aspect of
what science knows on the subject. The fact is, however,
that speech arises not only from right-hand movements
(which correspond to the left side of the brain) but also
from motor functions as a whole. The way children learn
to walk and orient themselves spatially and the way they
learn to transform their first dangling, uncontrolled
movements of the arms into meaningful movements in
the outer world mysteriously passes into the organization
of the head. That inner organization manifests as speech.
Those who correctly understand such things also real-
ize that children who drag their feet also vocalize, espe-
cially with the lips, in a different way than do those with
a firm walk. Ail the nuances of speech arise from the
forms of movement. Life involves gestures first; gestures
are transformed inwardly into the source of speech.
Speech is thus a resuit of walking and spatial orientation.
The way a child speaks dépends largely on our loving
2. Paul Pierre Broca (1824-1880), a French surgeon and anthropologist,
described a patient who was able to say only one word: "tan." When the
patient died, Broca examined his brain and found damage in part of the
left frontal cortex, which came to be called "Broca's Area."
Walking, Speaking, Thinking
95
help when that child learns to walk. These are the subtle
associations that resuit from a real understanding of the
human being. I had a reason for going into such detail in
the previous lectures about how spirit enters the human
constitution. Thus, we bring the spirit to the physical
body, because the physical body follows spirit with each
step, as long as spirit is brought to it in the proper way.
Initially, children learn to speak by using their entire
organism. When you look it, you see that first there are
outer leg movements, which lead to strong contours of
speech. These are followed by arm and hand movements,
which lead to inflections in words and their forms. We
can see that external movements lead to a flexibility of
language in a child. We need to provide guidance
through love when assisting children in learning to walk;
likewise, when helping them in learning to speak, we
need inner truth. Life's greatest lies are created while a
child is learning to speak, because the truth of speech is
absorbed through the physical organism.
If, as teachers, we always speak truthfully to children,
they will imitate their surroundings and learn to speak so
that the subtle, continuous activity of breathing will
become stronger. We should not, however, think of these
things in a coarse way, but very subtly. They hâve a very
subtle existence, but they manifest throughout life. We
inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Within our
bodies, we must transform oxygen into carbon dioxide
through the breathing process. The world gives us oxy-
gen and receives carbon dioxide from us. Whether we are
able to transform oxygen into carbon dioxide properly
dépends upon whether we were treated honestly by
those around us when we learned to speak. In this situa-
tion, spirit is transformed completely into the physical.
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One such lie is the belief that we are doing something
good by lowering our speech to childish language when
we are around children. Subconsciously, children hâve
no desire for childish language. They want to hear the
real speech of adults. We should speak normally to chil-
dren, not with some invented childish speech. Because of
their incapacities, children initially babble imitations of
what we say to them, but we should not babble. That is a
big mistake. When we use babbling baby talk, we hurt a
child's digestive organs, because spirit always becomes
physical and affects the physical organism in its forma-
tion. Everything we do spiritually with children is also
physical éducation, because children are insubstantial in
themselves. An unhealthy digestive organ later in life is
often caused by learning to speak incorrectly.
Just as speaking cornes from walking and gestures,
thinking develops from speaking. We need to give loving
assistance when helping children learn to walk, and like-
wise we should pay spécial attention to honesty when
they are learning to speak, because they inwardly imitate
their surroundings. Because children are completely
beings of sensory perception and physically re-create
spirit, we need to emphasize clarity in our thinking, so
they will develop proper thinking from speaking.
The worst thing we could do to a child is to say some-
thing and then retract it, saying something different. This
leads to confusion. Using confused thinking with a child
is the real cause of so-called nervousness today. Why are
so many people nervous? When they were children, they
learned to think after learning to speak, and the people
near them did not think clearly and precisely.
The greatest mistakes in the behavior of any génération
are a true reflection of the previous génération. If, later in
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97
life, you observe the children you taught and see their
vices, it should make you consider yourself. There is a
very close connection between everything that occurs in
children's surroundings and what those children express
through the physical body. In young children, the physi-
cal constitution is formed by love as they learn to walk,
truthfulness as they learn to speak, and clarity and firm-
ness in their environment as they learn to think. Chil-
dren's organs and vessels form according to the way love,
truthfulness, and clarity develop in their environment.
Metabolic illnesses arise from learning to walk without
love; digestive problems may resuit from untruthfulness
while the child is learning to speak; and nervousness
cornes from confused thinking in a child's surroundings.
When you look at how common nervousness is in the
1920s, you must conclude that teachers were very con-
fused around the beginning of the century. The confused
thinking of that time manifests as nervousness today.
Further, nervousness at the turn of the century is no more
than a picture of the confusion around 1870. We cannot
look at such things and say that there was a physiologi-
cal, hygienic, and psychological éducation, or that a doc-
tor should hâve been brought in whenever the teacher
needed to handle something in a healthy way. Instead,
physiological pedagogy and school hygiene form a
whole, and it is part of the teacher 's mission to work with
the effects of spirit on the physical, sensory organism.
Because everyone is a teacher for children between
birth and the âge of seven, we face the social task of
achieving genuine understanding of the human being.
Otherwise, humanity will regress instead of moving for-
ward. Our more humane âge has rightly eliminated a
common practice in schools: beating and spanking. No
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one should accuse me of supporting beatings, but the
only reason beatings were successfully removed from our
schools was because such close attention was paid to
externals. Society is quite capable of seeing how physi-
cally harmful beatings are and the moral conséquences
arising from them. Much today is oriented toward the
physical, sensory world, and little toward spirit and soûl.
Consequently, we hâve brought another form of beatings
into éducation, a form that people do not recognize,
because they look so little toward the spirit.
For example, mothers today (and to a certain extent
fathers) find it very important to give "beautiful" dolls to
little girls to play with. Despite the best of intentions,
such dolls look horrible, because they are so inartistic.
Nevertheless, people often think that a beautiful doll
must hâve real hair, real makeup, and even moving eyes,
so that the eyes close when the doll is lying down, and
when you pick it up, the eyes look at you. There are even
dolls that move. In other words, we give children toys
that imitate life in odd, inartistic ways. Such dolls are
merely typical examples. Our civilization is gradually
making ail toys this way. In effect, they give a terrible
inner beating to children. Children may be well-behaved
in public and never reveal the conventional upbringing
and the beatings they receive at home; likewise, children
do not reveal the antipathy deep within their soûls
toward so-called beautiful dolls. We force children to like
them, but the unconscious forces within children, their
dislike of everything about the beautiful dolls, also play a
strong rôle. As I will show in a moment, such things beat
children inwardly.
When you consider everything that children expéri-
ence in their simple thinking before the âge of four or
Walking, Speaking, Thinking
99
five — even six or seven — while learning to stand and
walk, the appropriate resuit will be a doll that is perhaps
made from a handkcrehief, with a head on top and
maybe two ink spots for eyes. In this doll, you hâve
everything a young child can understand and love. It pré-
sents the simplest characteristics of the human form — at
least, to the degree that a young child can absorb it.
A child knows no more about human beings than that
they stand up; they hâve an up and a down. And on top
sits a head with a pair of eyes. In children's drawings,
you often find that they draw the mouth on the forehead.
The position of one's mouth is not entirely clear to young
children. What a child can really expérience exists in a
doll made from a handkerchief with a pair of ink spots on
it. An inner créative force is active within young children.
Everything they receive from their environment is trans-
lated into inner development, which includes the forma-
tion of organs.
If a child's father is often angry — if at any moment, an
unmotivated event could shock that child, then that is
also experienced. A child expériences it in such a way
that it is expressed in the breathing and circulation. Since
it is expressed in the rhythmic System, it actively forms
the lungs and heart — indeed, the entire circulatory Sys-
tem. Children carry that sculpted inner organization
throughout life; it is a constitution formed by seeing the
actions of an angry father.
What I said is meant only to indicate how children
hâve a wonderful inner formative force, and how they
continuously work on themselves as sculptors. If you
give a child a doll made from a handkerchief, those for-
mative forces move quietly into the brain — that is, those
forces affecting the rhythmic System through breathing
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and blood circulation move gently into the brain and give
it form. They shape a child's brain in much the same way
a sculptor works with a subtle, light, spiritualized, and
soulful hand. Everything proceeds through an organic
development. Children look at a doll made from a hand-
kerchief, and the formative forces arising from the rhyth-
mic System begin to work on the brain.
If you give a child a so-called beautiful doll, one that
might even be able to move or close its eyes, painted and
with beautiful hair, a doll that looks so artistic but is actu-
ally quite ugly, the formative forces arising from the
rhythmic System to form the brain act like the lashes of a
whip. Everything a child cannot yet understand whips
the brain; the brain is thoroughly beaten in a terrible way.
That is the problem with "beautiful" dolls, and it is also
the problem with much of children's play.
When we want to lovingly guide children's play, we
must be clear about how much of their inner develop-
mental strengths are called on. In this sense, our entire
civilization sees things in the wrong way. Our society
bas, for example, created a form of animism. A child is
hurt by bumping into a table, and then responds by strik-
ing it back. People today would say that the child has ren-
dered the table "alive" through imagination. They say
that the child "dreams" the table to life and then hits it.
But this is not how it works. The child does not dream
anything into the table. Rather, children dream life from
real living beings. It is not that children dream life into a
table; they dream life from actual living beings. When
children injure themselves, they strike back out of reflex,
because things are in fact without life for children. They
do not dream life into a table, but respond in the same
way toward animate or inanimate objects.
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101
We can see that our civilization is unable to approach
children correctly because of such backward ideas. The
important thing is that we work in a truly loving way
with children, so that we guide them only with love
toward what they want. Consequently, we should not
beat children inwardly with "beautiful" dolls. We should
live with them and make a doll that reflects the way they
expérience it inwardly
And this is true of ail play Play requires real under-
standing of childhood. If we babble like a small child, if
we reduce our language to that of a child and do not
speak as they should hear and as is appropriate to our
own nature, we présent children with a lie. We should
not, however, place ourselves in a position of untruthful
speech, but we should place ourselves specifically at the
level of children in relation to willed activities, specifi-
cally play If we do that, it will be clear that intellectual-
ity, which our civilization loves so much, exists nowhere
in children. Thus, we should not interject anything influ-
enced by intellect into children's play.
Children naturally imitate in their play what occurs in
their surroundings. We seldom see children who want to
be, say, linguists when they play. It would certainly be a
rare expérience for a four-year-old to hâve ambitions to
be a linguist. Under some circumstances, however, a
child might want to be a chauffeur. Why? Because we can
see everything a chauffeur does, and it makes a direct
pictorial impression. But there is no image of what a lin-
guist does, and it completely passes by a child's life. We
should involve only those things that do not go unno-
ticed by children, and intellectual things pass them by.
What do we, as adults, need to guide children's play
properly? Adults plow fields, make hats, sew clothing.
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and so on. Ail of this is oriented toward the practical, and
within it lies the intellectual. Wherever we find a goal in
life, we hâve penetrated it with the intellect.
On the other hand, everything in life, besides being
directed toward a goal, also has an outer form — whether
plowing or something like building a wagon or shoeing
horses. When you see a farmer guiding a plow through
the furrows, aside from the goal of the activity, we feel (if
I may use the expression) what lives in that image. If, as
adults, we can work our way through to understand
what exists in an activity aside from its purpose, we can
présent it to children in play. Our sense of aesthetics
enables us to do that. In particular, by not pursuing the
kind of beauty that today's dolls strive for, which is com-
pletely intellectual, but by going into what speaks to
human feeling, we arrive at that primitive, genuinely
enjoyable doll that looks more like this [a doll carved by a
Waldorf student], not the so-called beautiful doll. But
this, of course, is something for older children.
Most important, educators should be able to see the
aesthetics of work in the activity itself, so that we can
présent this as we make toys. If we bring such aesthetics
into the toys we make, we approach what children really
want. We hâve become almost completely utilitarian, or
intellectual, in our civilization, and thus we présent chil-
dren with ail kinds of invented things. It is important,
however, not to présent young children with things from
later life, things we think up. Instead, we want to give
them something they can feel when they become older.
This is what needs to be in toys. We may want to give a
boy a toy plow, but it is important that we instill into that
toy something formative and aesthetic about plowing.
This fully develops the strength of human beings.
Walking, Speaking, Thinking
103
This is where many otherwise good kindergartens
make major mistakes. The Frôbel kindergarten and others
created with a genuine love of children must become
clear that young children are imitative, but they can imi-
tate only what is not intellectual. Therefore, we should
not bring ail kinds of invented activities into a kinder-
garten. Games such as pick-up sticks or braiding, which
often play such an important rôle in kindergarten, are
simply invented. In kindergarten, we should do only the
things that big people do, not things invented for play.
People who really understand human nature are often
overcome by a tragic feeling when they corne into these
well-intended kindergartens. On the one hand, there is an
endless amount of goodwill there and much love for the
children. On the other hand, there is no considération for
the fact that everything is intellectual. Kindergartens
should exclude everything that is thought up for chil-
dren's play, and kindergarten children should imitate
only visible adult activities.
When we train children intellectually before the âge of
four or five, they take something terrible into life: materi-
alism. The more we raise children intellectually at such
an early âge, the more we create materialists for later life.
The brain develops in such a way that spirit lives within
its form, but people intuit inwardly that everything is
merely physical, because the brain was taken over by
intellectualism at an early âge.
If you want to educate people to understand spirit, you
must wait as long as possible to présent the intellectual
version of the externally spiritual. Although it is neces-
sary, especially today, for people to be completely awake
in later life, it is equally necessary to let children live in
their gentle dreamy expériences as long as possible, so
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A Modern Art of Education
that they move slowly into life. They need to remain as
long as possible in their imaginations and pictorial capac-
ities without intellectuality. In our modern civilization, if
you allow the organism to be strengthened without intel-
lectualism, children will move into the necessary intellec-
tualism in the proper way.
If you beat a child's brain as I described, you will ruin
the soûl for the rest of life. Just as you ruin a person's
digestion by babbling, or a person's metabolism by a lack
of love, likewise you ruin a person's soûl by beating a
child from within. An idéal of our éducation must be to
avoid beating a child's soûl, and because a child is united
as a being of body, soûl, and spirit, we must also elimi-
nate the inner physical beatings. In other words, our idéal
is to eliminate so-called beautiful dolls and, most impor-
tant, to bring play to the proper level.
I would like to conclude my remarks today by saying
again that we need to avoid what is falsely spiritual, so
that what is properly spiritual — the whole human
being — can appear later in life.
4 7 *
Rhythm, Sleep, Imitation
August il . IC ) 1 j
The transition from early childhood to school is marked
by the change of teeth around the seventh year, and in
studying this period it must be remembered that, until
the seventh year, children work, so to speak, as inner
sculptors. Formative forces emanate from the head, orga-
nizing and shaping the child's whole being. Everything
in a child's environment, including the moral qualities,
now plays a rôle in developing the vascular System, the
circulation of the blood, and the processes of breathing,
so that, as physical beings, we bear within us throughout
life the results of the imitative period of childhood, from
birth until the second dentition.
It cannot be said, of course, that this is our only condi-
tioning, because much can be rectified in the body later
through the exercise of moral forces and inner soûl activ-
ity. Nevertheless, we should recognize what a wonderful
héritage we can give children on their path through life if
we help make their physical body into a container for
moral, spiritual qualities. If, in other words, we help chil-
dren's inner sculptor up to the âge of seven by bringing
them only what is moral and conducive to fruitful activ-
ity in life. I spoke more in detail about these things yes-
terday, and much more will emerge as the lectures
proceed.
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A Modern Art of Education
Tea chers, therefore, must understand that once chil-
dren hâve passed their seventh year, these formative
forces are transformed into soûl activity, so that they long
for imagery, and this should indicate the fundamental
principle of childhood éducation.
After the second dentition until adolescence, most
important is the
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