Document text
Rudolf Steiner
LEHE
EDUCATION
OF THE
CHILD
and Early Lectures on Education
Yj
yt eee
FOUNDATIONS OF WALDORF EDUCATION
THE EDUCATION
OF THE CHILD
[XXV]
FOUNDATIONS OF WALDORF EDUCATION
RUDOLF STEINER
The Education
of the Child
and Early Lectures on Education
& Anthroposophic Press
Copyright © Anthroposophic Press, 1996
Published by Anthroposophic Press
RR 4, Box 94 A-1, Hudson, N.Y. 12534
The essay “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science,” translated by
George and Mary Adams, appeared originally in German in the journal Lucifer-Gnosis
(nr. 33), 1907, under the title “Die Erzieuhung des Kindes vom Geschictspunkte der
Geisteswissenschaft.” It is included in vol. 34 of the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner,
published by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland, 1987. The lecture “Teaching
from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight,” translated by Robert Lathe and Nancy Whittaker,
is included in Ursprungsimpulse der Geisteswissenschaft, vol. 96, as “Erziehungspraxis auf der
Grundlage spiritueller Erkenntnis”; the lecture “Education in the Light of Spiritual Sci-
ence,” translated by Rita Stebbing, appeared as “Die Erziehung des Kindes vom Stand-
punkt der Geisteswissenschaft”; and the lecture “Education and Spiritual Science,”
translated by Rita Stebbing, appeared as “Schulfragen vom Standpunkt der Geisteswissen-
schaft” in Die Erkenntnis des Ubersinnlichen in unserer Zeit, vol. 55; the lecture “Interests,
Talent, and Education,” translated by Robert Lathe and Nancy Whittaker, is included in
Antworten der eisteswissenschaft auf die grossen Fragen des Daseins, vol. 60, as “Anlage,
Begabung und Erziehung des Menschen,” all of which are in the Collected Works of
Rudolf Steiner, published by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland, 1987. The lec-
ture “Interests, Talents, and Educating Children,” translated by Robert Lathe and Nancy
Whittaker, appeared originally in the magazine Die Menschenschule, vol. 31 (nr. 6),1957
and vol. 48 (nr.1), 1974.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steiner, Rudolf, 1861-1925.
[Selections. English. 1996]
The education of the child and early lectures on education / Rudolf Steiner.
p. cm. — (Foundations of Waldorf education ; 25)
Three lectures and an essay translated from the German.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-88010-414-7 (paper)
1. Education—Philosophy. 2. Anthroposophy. 3. Education— Experimental
methods. I. Title. II. Title: Education of the Child III. Series.
LB775.S7S7413 1996
370'.1—dc20 96-15013
CIP
10987654321
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form without the written permission of the publisher, except for
brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles.
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Introduction by Christopher Bamford
PART ONE
The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science
PART TWO
Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight
Berlin, May 14, 1906
Education in the Light of Spiritual Science
Cologne, December 1, 1906
Education and Spiritual Science
Berlin, January 24, 1907
Interests, Talents, and Educating Children
Nuremberg, November 14, 1910
Interests, Talent, and Education
Berlin, January 12, 1911
Bibliography
Index
vii
41
51
64
71
89
115
121
The publisher wishes to acknowledge the inspiration
and support of Connie and Robert Dulaney
INTRODUCTION
by Christopher Bamford
One of the keys to Rudolf Steiner’s ability to penetrate and
accomplish so much in so many different fields lies in the fact
that, in addition to possessing profound philosophical, spiri-
tual, and mystical abilities, he was both scientifically trained
and an eminently practical person. All his life, Rudolf Steiner
was a “doer,” able to take care of himself and those around him.
He could size up any task or situation that seemed to call for a
response and then act so as to bring it to a successful conclu-
sion in the world. Thus, though endowed with tremendous
innate capacities, Steiner was also in many ways a self-made
man. Indeed, it was this combination of practicality and hard
work together with a rich natural spiritual endowment that
enabled him to achieve his mission.
Outwardly and socially at least, the circumstances of his
birth did not apparently augur well for one destined to play a
world-historical role. He was born in 1861 in Kraljevec, a small
railroad town on the way to Trieste in the hinterland of the
Austro-Hungarian empire—on the border between Hungary
and Croatia. Eighteen months later, his father, who worked for
the railroad, was transferred from Kraljevec, first to Médling,
near Vienna, and then to Pottschach in Lower Austria, near the
Styrian border. There the family stayed for the next six years
vill THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
before moving again, this time to Neudörfl on the Hungarian
border, in the Burgenland. In such places, then, Rudolf Steiner
grew to adolescence, connected to the modern world by the
railroad and telegraph but still within the immemorial natural
beauty of the Central European landscape. A gifted student, he
entered the Oberrealschule—the “modern” school in contrast to
the “classic” Gymnasium— at the tender age of eleven. Thence,
in 1879, he went on to the Technische Hochschule in Vienna to
study natural history, mathematics, chemistry.
There is of course much more to the story—to discover it,
interested readers should turn first to the Autobiography and
then to other accounts.! In the texts presented here, we are
interested in what shaped Rudolf Steiner as an educator. Cer-
tainly, his native clairvoyant capacities played a role, as did his
scientific training. Nor should mention be omitted of the cru-
cial human and spiritual encounters that marked his early
years: Felix Kogutsky, the herb gatherer, with whom Steiner
became friends and with whom he could speak about the spiri-
tual world as with someone of experience;? the otherwise
unnamed Master;? and the various intellectual soul friends and
acquaintances—such as Marie Lang and Marie Eugenie della
1. For instance: Stewart C. Easton, Rudolf Steiner: Herald of a New Epoch; Rudi
Lissau, Rudolf Steiner: Life, Work, Inner Path, and Social Initiatives; A. P. Shep-
herd, Scientist of the Invisible, Günther Wachsmuth, The Life and Work of Rudolf
Steiner; Robert McDermott, The Essential Steiner.
2. In his Autobiography, Steiner writes further: “He was a deeply pious man. He
was quite uneducated in the usual sense of the word. True, he had read many
mystical books, but what he said was quite uninfluenced by his reading. It was
the outflow of a soul life which bore a quite elementary, creative wisdom within
it. One soon realized that he read books only because he was seeking in others
what he already knew.”See also Emil Bock, “The Search for Felix the Herbgath-
erer,” The Golden Blade, 1961. Felix Kogutsky also appears in Steiners Mystery
Dramas as the character Felix Balde.
3. See “Notes by Rudolf Steiner written for Edouard Schuré in Barr, Alsace, Sep-
tember 1907” in Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers, Correspondence and Docu-
ments 1901-1925.
Introduction ix
Grazie, Rosa Mayreder, Friedrich Eckstein, and Karl Julius
Schréer’—who likewise played their part in his Vienna years
and demonstrate the range of Rudolf Steiners interests. Men-
tion should be made, too, of the philosophers Robert Zimmer-
mann and Franz Brentano, whose lectures Steiner attended; and
of Edward Reitlinger, whose lectures on the mechanical theory
of heat and on the history of physics also made a deep impres-
sion on him. All were important to Rudolf Steiner’s formation.
More directly relevant to his development as an educator,
however, were his prolonged engagement with the works—
above all, the scientific works—of the great German student of
nature, poet, dramatist, and novelist Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe and the experiences Steiner gained as a tutor.
Though better known as a literary figure—he is usually
named with Dante and Shakespeare as one of the three giants
of Western literature—at the end of his life Goethe believed
his scientific writings would prove of greater consequence in
the world than his poems or dramas.® As he himself remarked,
4, Marie Lang, together with her husband, Franz Hartmann and Friedrich Eck-
stein formed a theosophical study group with which Rudolf Steiner came into
contact in 1888. Here he would have first encountered theosophical literature,
such as A.P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism. Marie Eugenie delle Grazie was a poet
and dramatist. Rudolf Steiner met her at a Saturday evening circle in the home of
Laurence Müllner, the Cistercian.
5. Rosa Mayreder (1858-1938) was a well-known writer, painter, freethinker,
and woman's advocate. Rudolf Steiner met her through Marie Lang.
6. Friedrich Eckstein (1861—1939)—“dear Eck”—was a close friend and fellow
seeker in Steiners Vienna days who remained in contact with him until his
death. Eckstein brought Steiner into early contact with both mystical, esoteric
circles and also with devotees of the “new music”— Wagner and Bruckner.
7. Karl Julius Schröer (1825-1900) was an educator, philologist, and Goethe
scholar who become Steiner’s “fatherly friend” and sponsor during the 1880s. In
1884, he recommended Steiner for the position of editor and commentator on
Goethe’s scientific writings to the publisher Joseph Kürschner who wished to
include them in his series of volumes on German literature.
8. See Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe. See also Douglas Miller, Goethes
Scientific Writings.
x THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
others had perhaps written as well and as deeply as he had, but
he alone among his contemporaries had understood the nature
of color. And in fact it is true that probably no one in modern
times penetrated nature as deeply as Goethe did. From
Goethe, Steiner learned above all two things: he learned how
to begin to realize an epistemology—or way of knowing the
world?—that was firmly rooted in experience and was non-
dualistic, participatory, and holistic; and at the same time, he
was led to understand the universal function of metamorpho-
sis and the polar/triadic nature of all evolutionary phenomena
in all nature, including human nature.
As for tutoring, this afforded the young Rudolf Steiner, as he
himself says, the sole possibility of a livelihood, while keeping
him from becoming one-sided. He began early, taking on his
first pupils at the age of fourteen. He writes that he had many
pupils, each needing preparation in a different field, so that he
found himself preparing lessons in the most varied fields from
mathematics to bookkeeping. As he did so, he recognized the
truth of his friend and teacher Schröer’s belief in “the necessity
of a comprehensive development of human nature.”
All of this, however, was but preparation for his engagement
by the Specht family with whom he lived from 1884 to 1890.
As Steiner writes:
Destiny brought me a special pedagogical task. I was recom-
mended to a family with four boys. Three of them had only to
be given preparatory instruction for the elementary school and
later supplementary tuition for the secondary school. But the
9. Steiner’s involvement with Goethe may be traced in the following works: Goet-
hean Science [Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften. Sämtliche Einleitungen zur
Herausgabe in Kürschners “Deutsche National Literatur’); The Science of Knowing
[Grundlinien einder Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung (1886)];
and Goethes World View [Goethes Weltanschauung(1897)]. See also John Barnes,
ed., Natures Open Secret: Rudolf Steiner on Goethe (forthcoming).
Introduction
fourth, who was about ten years old, was entrusted to me for his
entire education. He was a sorrow to his parents, particularly to
his mother. When I came into the family he had hardly
acquired the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. He
was considered so abnormal in his physical and mental develop-
ment that the family doubted that he could be educated at all.
His thinking was slow and dull. Even slight mental exertion
would cause a headache, lowered vitality, pallor, and there
would be alarming emotional behavior.
After I had come to know the child, I felt certain that an edu-
cation adapted to this particular constitution of soul and body
would awaken his sleeping capacities, and I proposed to the
parents that they leave the method of education in my hands.
The boy’s mother met my proposal with confidence, and thus I
was able to set myself this special pedagogic task.
I had to find access to a soul that was in a kind of sleeping
condition and that had gradually to be brought to master the
bodily functions. First, the soul had to be helped to fit, as it
were, into the body. I was convinced that the boy had great
intellectual capacities, though this was not apparent. And this
made my task deeply satisfying. After a short time I succeeded
in gaining the child’s love. This had an awakening effect on his
sleeping soul-faculties, merely through my being with him. I
had to devise special methods of teaching him. Even a quarter
of an hour over and above the specific length of time allotted to
lessons caused danger to his health. The boy could find relation
to most subjects only with great difficulty.
This pedagogical task became a rich source of learning for
me. The educational methods I had to adopt gave me insight
into the way the human soul and spirit are connected with the
human body. It became my actual training in physiology and
psychology. I came to realize that education and teaching must
become an art, based upon true knowledge of the human being.
I had to adhere to a carefully planned program. In order to
make use of the boy’s intellectual capacities to the best advan-
tage in the shortest possible time, and with the least strain on
his mental and physical forces, I often had to spend up to two
xi
xii THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
hours preparing the material I taught for half an hour. The
sequence of the subjects taught had to be carefully arranged and
the day divided into definite periods. I had the satisfaction of
seeing the boy catch up with the primary school curriculum in
the course of two years, and successfully pass the entrance
examination for the Gymnasium. His health also improved
considerably. The hydrocephalic condition was rapidly dimin-
ishing. I could advise the parents to send the boy to the public
school, for I thought it essential that he should grow up with
other children. I remained with the family for several more
years, devoting myself particularly to this boy, whose successful
progress through school depended entirely upon the fact that at
home his activities continued in the same spirit in which they
had begun. This was the occasion to which I referred earlier,
when I continued my study of Greek and Latin, ! for I had to
help this and one other boy in the family with these subjects,
since they were required for the curriculum of the Gymnasium.
I was grateful that destiny brought me such a vital task. I gained
insight into human nature in a living, practical way that would
have been hardly possible otherwise... 1!
Otto Specht, the young man in question, went on to become
a medical doctor, a dermatologist. He died in the First World
War, as a result of an infection. For Rudolf Steiner, as he him-
self says, the experience—when seen in the context of his other
intellectual and spiritual activities—was of inestimable value.
Through it, he came to understand the complex interplay of
body, soul, and spirit in the developmental process that is edu-
cation. In other words, the pedagogical seed that would germi-
nate thirty years later as Waldorf education was already planted
and being watered.
10. This was very fortunate, as Paul Allen points out in his edition of the Autobi-
ography, because Steiner required Greek and Latin when he took his Ph.D at the
University of Rostock.
11. Autobiography, Chapter VI.
Introduction Xil
* * *
STEINER then spent the next decade (more or less) in Weimar,
working mostly in the Goethe-Schiller Archives (where he
contributed to the famous Weimar edition of Goethe’s works).
There, one day, he met Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philoso-
pher’s sister, who was just then founding the Nietzsche Archive.
As a result, he was able to visit the dying philosopher, spend sev-
eral weeks in the Nietzsche Archive in Naumberg, and help orga-
nize Nietzsche's library. As he writes: “It was a wonderful task to
arrange the books Nietzsche had studied. One felt his spiritual
presence among his books. A volume of Emerson was filled with
marginal comments and showed every sign of devoted study.
And so did the writings of Guyau. There were books with pas-
sionate criticisms in the margins. In a number of these com-
ments one could detect the germ of many of Nietzsche's ideas.” !
Such was his outward life at this time: an independent man of
letters, a philosopher, scientist, and literary scholar. He received
his doctorate from Rostock University in 1891.1? He worked
deeply and passionately on developing an epistemology in har-
mony with Goethe’s scientific method, realizing that in it lay the
seeds for the overcoming of the dominant Kantian view. This
view restricted human knowing to narrow bounds that excluded
whole areas of natural, cosmic, and spiritual existence that he
recognized, from experience, were necessary for a complete
understanding of humanity's place and participation in true real-
ity.!4 Inwardly, during this period, Steiner strove to unite in an
12. See Autobiography, Chapter XVIII. Also, Steiners 1895 work, Friedrich
Nietzsche: Fighter for freedom.
13. His dissertation is available as Truth and Knowledge (Blauvelt, NY: Steiner-
books, 1981).
14. See, above all, Truth and Knowledge and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual
Path: A Philosophy of Freedom.
xiv THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
integral modern epistemological form knowledge of the spiritual
worlds with knowledge derived through the senses.
Though he managed to accomplish this almost impossible
task, this must have been a time of intense inner struggle for
Rudolf Steiner. Whatever darkness he endured, however, he
saw the first rays of dawn before the century ended. He writes
in the Autobiography: “During [this] period, when my state-
ments about Christianity seemingly contradict my later ones, '?
a conscious knowledge of true Christianity began to dawn
within me. Around the turn of the century this knowledge
grew deeper.... This experience culminated in my standing in
the spiritual presence of the Mystery of Golgotha in a most
profound and solemn festival of knowledge.” 16
Thus fortified, Rudolf Steiner moved to Berlin, where he
entered much more directly onto the stage of history. He edited
the Magazin fir Literatur, taught at the Working Men’s College
(founded by Wilhelm Liebknecht), the Giordano Bruno
Union, and began to speak openly of spiritual matters under
the auspices of the Theosophical Society—the Secretary of
whose German Section he became, on the strict understanding
that he would be completely independent and teach only what
he wanted. Steiners independence, in fact, was radical. Enter-
ing the stream of the renewal of the ancient Mysteries inaugu-
rated by H.P. Blavatsky—which broke down the barriers
between “esoteric” and “exoteric” and undid the separation that
had arisen between science, art, and religion—Steiner under-
took to speak of nothing that he had not himself experienced.
Thus, whatever echoes of theosophical literature and teaching
may be found in Steiners work, these ideas are transformed
15. Steiner is referring here to such radical philosophical statements as his Indi-
vidualism in Philosophy.
16. Autobiography, Chapter XXVI.
Introduction xv
and made authentic in the crucible of his own soul. Neverthe-
less, theosophy—which he soon began to call “spiritual sci-
ence,” Geisteswissenschaft—was the immediate context in and
out of which Rudolf Steiner first spoke as an educator. !”
* * *
THE TEXTS in this volume date from 1906 to 1912 and there-
fore predate by a number of years the actual founding of the first
Waldorf school in 1919. Many of the principles of Waldorf edu-
cational theory and practice, however, will be found to be
present. The emphasis, of course, is slightly different, for there
are not yet actual schools where the vital principles Rudolf
Steiner describes may be put into practice. Yet already Steiner is
very clear: schools must arise through which the truths of spiri-
tual science may be practically embodied for the benefit of
human beings and the ongoing evolution of humanity:
Spiritual science, by its inherent character and tendency, has the
task of providing a practical concept of the world—one that
comprehends the nature and essence of human life. ... For spir-
itual science is not intended as a theory that is remote from life,
one that merely caters to human curiosity or the thirst for
knowledge. Nor is it intended as an instrument for a few people
who for selfish reasons would like to attain a higher develop-
ment for themselves. No, it can join and work at the most
important tasks of modern people and further their develop-
ment for the welfare of humankind.'®
17. Rudolf Steiner continued to teach spiritual science under the auspices of the
Theosophical Society until 1912/13. At this time, the break between Rudolf
Steiner and Annie Besant and the Adyar theosophists was complete. On Febru-
ary 3, 1913, the first General Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society took
place. From then on, Rudolf Steiner worked, researched, and taught within the
Anthroposophical Movement. However, this “change” did not alter one iota
what he stood for. Therefore, with hindsight and yet in a real sense, one may say
that Rudolf Steiner, even as a “theosophist,” already taught anthroposophy.
18. From “The Education of the Child,” this volume, page 3.
xvi THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
In other words, if the spiritual renewal promised by theoso-
phy was not to be a dead thing, its spiritual science “must pro-
vide the most fruitful and practical means for the solution of
the urgent questions of modern life.” One such question is, of
course, education. Steiner is quite clear, however, that whatever
guidance spiritual scientific insight can provide to the further-
ance of education, this must not take the form of an abstract
program but must arise naturally out of the nature of the child,
the evolving human being, which contains in itself the seeds of
its own future.
Thus these lectures are largely descriptive. In them, Rudolf
Steiner describes the picture of the human being as a fourfold
being— physical body, life-body or etheric body, sentient or
astral body, and the I—showing how these members work
together in the evolving human being, as well as in humanity as
such. Any educator who recognizes this interaction in the
developing child in the classroom will teach differently and will
teach different subjects, depending upon the child’s age and sit-
uation. “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual
Science,” the first, longest, best-known, and most loved piece
in this book, lays out the implications of this view in a masterly
way. Originally given as a public lecture in the Architektenhaus
in Berlin on January 10, 1907—the founding lecture of
anthroposophical pedagogy—it appeared in written form in
the journal Lucifer-Gnosis in April of that year.
The other lectures, while allowing readers to come to know
Rudolf Steiner better, amplify and extend the ideas contained
in “The Education of the Child.” These lectures reveal Steiner's
selfless love for human beings, his idealism, and his practicality,
and at the same time provide sustenance, inspiration, and
many useful insights for teachers and parents alike.
PART ONE
The Education of the Child
in the Light of Spiritual Science
Translated by George & Mary Adams
loss has inherited much from past generations
that contemporary life calls into question; thus, the numerous
“current crises” and “demands of our time.” How many such
matters occupy the world’s attention—social questions,
women’s issues, various educational concerns, health debates,
questions of human rights, and so on? Human beings endeavor
to come to terms with these problems in the most varied ways.
There are countless numbers of people who appear with some
remedy or program to solve—or at least partially solve—one or
another of them. In the process, all sorts and shades of opin-
ions are asserted: extremism, which casts a revolutionary air;
the moderates, full of respect for what exists, but trying to
evolve something new from it; and the conservatives, up in
arms whenever any of the old institutions are tampered with.
Aside from these main tendencies of thought and feeling there
are all kinds of positions in between.
Looking at these things in life with deeper vision one can
only feel—indeed the impression forces itself upon one—that
2 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
our contemporaries are in the position of trying to meet the
demands of modern life with completely inadequate methods.
Many try to reform life without really recognizing life’s founda-
tions. But those who make proposals for the future must not be
satisfied with only a superficial knowledge of life. They must
investigate its depths.
Life in its wholeness is like a plant. The plant contains more
than what it offers to external life; it also holds a future condi-
tion within its hidden depths. One who views a newly leafing
plant knows very well that eventually there will also be flowers
and fruit on the leaf-bearing stem. The plant already contains
in its hidden depths the flowers and fruit in embryo. Neverthe-
less, how can simple investigation of what the plant offers to
immediate vision reveal what those new organs will look like?
This can be told only by one who has come to recognize the
very nature and being of the plant.
Likewise, the whole of human life also contains within it the
seeds of its own future; but if we are to tell anything about this
future, we must first penetrate the hidden nature of the human
being. Our age is little inclined to do this, but instead concerns
itself with what appears on the surface, and believes it is walk-
ing on unsure ground when asked to penetrate what escapes
outer observation.
It is definitely a simpler matter in the case of the plant; we
know that others of its kind have repeatedly borne fruit.
Human life is present only once. The flowers it will bear in the
future have never been there before, yet they are present within
a human being in the embryo, even as the flowers are present in
a plant that is still only in leaf. And there is a possibility of say-
ing something of humankind’s future, if once we penetrate
beneath the surface of human nature to its real essence and
being. The various ideas of reform current in the present age
can become fruitful and practical only when fertilized by this
The Education of the Child 3
deep penetration into human life.
Spiritual science, by its inherent character and tendency, has
the task of providing a practical concept of the world—one
that comprehends the nature and essence of human life.
Whether what often passes as such is justified is not the point;
what concerns us here is the true essence of spiritual science,
and what it can be by virtue of its true essence. For spiritual sci-
ence is not intended as a theory that is remote from life, one
that merely caters to human curiosity or thirst for knowledge.
Nor is it intended as an instrument for a few people who for
selfish reasons would like to attain a higher level of develop-
ment for themselves. No, it can join and work at the most
important tasks of modern people and further their develop-
ment for the welfare of humankind.!
It is true that in taking on this mission, spiritual science
must be prepared to face all kinds of skepticism and opposi-
tion. Radicals, moderates, and conservatives in every sphere of
life are bound to meet it with skepticism, because in its begin-
nings it will scarcely be in a position to please any party. Its
promises are far beyond the sphere of party movements—being
founded, in effect, purely and solely on a true knowledge and
perception of life. If people have knowledge of life, it is only
out of life itself that they can take up their tasks. They will not
1. It should not be inferred that spiritual science is concerned only with the
greater questions of life. Spiritual science, as expressed here, is destined to
provide a basis for the solution of the greater questions of humankind. At
the same time it is no less true that spiritual science can bring help to every
individual person wherever they find themselves in life; it can be a source
from which we may draw the answers to the most common questions, from
which we may draw comfort, strength, confidence for life, and work. Spiri-
tual science can give strength for meeting the great life problems, and just as
surely also for meeting the immediate needs of the moment, even in the
apparently least significant matters of daily life.
4 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
draw up programs arbitrarily, for they will know that the only
fundamental laws of life that can prevail in the future are those
that prevail already in the present. The spiritual investigator
will therefore of necessity respect what exists. No matter how
great the need they may find for improvement, they will not
fail to see the embryo of the future within what already exists.
At the same time they know that in everything “becoming”
there must be growth and evolution. Thus they will perceive
the seeds of transformation and of growth in the present. They
will invent no programs, but read them from what is already
there. What they read becomes in a certain sense the program
itself, for it bears within it the essence of development. For this
very reason a spiritual-scientific insight into the being of
humankind must provide the most fruitful and the most prac-
tical means for the solution of the urgent questions of modern
life.
In the following pages we shall endeavor to prove this in rela-
tion to one particular question: the question of education. We
shall not set up demands nor programs, but simply describe
child-nature. From the nature of the growing and evolving
human being, the proper viewpoint for Education will, as it
were, result spontaneously.
If we want to perceive the nature of the evolving human being,
we must begin by considering hidden human nature as such.
What sense observation learns to know in human beings, and
what the materialistic concept of life would consider as the
only element in human beings, is for spiritual investigation
only one part, one member of human nature: that is, the phys-
ical body. This human physical body is subject to the same laws
of physical existence and is built up of the same substances and
forces as the world as a whole, which is commonly referred to
The Education of the Child 5
as lifeless. Spiritual science, therefore, designates that human-
kind has a physical body in common with all of the mineral
kingdom. And it designates as the physical body only what, in
human beings, are those substances that mix, combine, form,
and dissolve through the same laws that also work in the sub-
stances within the mineral world.
Now beyond the physical body, spiritual science recognizes a
second essential principle in the human being. It is the /ife-
body, or etheric body. The physicist need not take offense at the
term etheric body. The word ether in this connection does not
mean the same as the hypothetical ether of physics.” It must
simply be taken as a designation for what will be described here
and now. Recently it was considered highly unscientific to
speak of such an etheric body, although this was not the situa-
tion at the end of the eighteenth and during the first half of the
nineteenth century. In that earlier time people would say to
themselves, “The substances and forces at work in a mineral
cannot, by themselves, form the mineral into a living creature.
There must also be a peculiar “force” inherent in the living
creature. They called this the vital force and thought of it some-
what as follows: the vital force works in the plant, the animal,
and the human body, and produces the phenomena of life, just
as magnetic force is present in the magnet that produces the
phenomena of attraction. In the succeeding period of material-
ism, this idea was dispensed with. People began to say that liv-
ing creatures are built up in the same way as lifeless creation;
that the same forces are at work in both the living organism
and in the mineral; that the same forces merely work in a more
complicated way and build a more complex structure.
2. Ether was at that time hypothesized by physicists to occupy all of space
beyond our atmosphere, and was thought to account for the source of elec-
tromagnetic radiation throughout space. — ED.
6 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
Today, however, it is only the most rigid materialists who
hold on to this denial of a life-force, or vital force. There are a
number of natural scientists and thinkers who have been
taught by facts of life to assume the existence of something like
a vital force or life-principle. Thus modern science in its later
developments is in a certain sense approaching what spiritual
science says about the life-body. There is, however, a very
important difference. From sense-perceptible facts modern sci-
ence assumes, through intellectual considerations or inflec-
tions, a kind of vital force. This is not the method of genuine
spiritual investigation that spiritual science adopts and on the
results of which it bases its statements. It cannot be emphasized
too often how great the difference is in this respect between
spiritual science and today’s modern science. For modern sci-
ence considers sense experiences to be the foundation for all
knowledge. Anything that cannot be built on this foundation is
taken to be unknowable. From the impressions of the senses it
draws deductions and conclusions. What goes on beyond them
is rejected as lying “beyond the frontiers of human knowledge.”
From the standpoint of spiritual science, such a view is like
that of a blind person who only acknowledges as valid what can
be touched and the conclusions deduced from the world of
touch—a blind person who rejects the statements of seeing
people as lying beyond the possibility of human knowledge.
Spiritual science shows that human beings are capable of evolu-
tion, capable of bringing new worlds within their sphere by
developing new organs of perception. Color and light are all
around those who are blind. If they cannot see these things it is
simply because they lack the proper organs of perception. Sim-
ilarly, spiritual science asserts that there are many worlds
around human beings who can perceive them only if they
develop the necessary organs. Just as a blind person who has
undergone a successful operation looks out at a new world, so
The Education of the Child 7
through the development of higher organs human beings can
come to know new worlds—worlds totally different from what
our ordinary senses allow us to perceive.
Now whether one who is blind in body can be operated on
or not depends on the constitution of the organs. But the
higher organs whereby one can penetrate into the higher
worlds are present in the embryo of every human being. Any-
one can develop these organs who has the patience, endurance,
and energy to apply the methods described in How to Know
Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation?
Spiritual science, therefore, would never say that there are
definite frontiers to human knowledge. What it would rather
say is that for human beings those worlds exist for which they
have the organs of perception. Thus spiritual science speaks
only of the methods whereby existing frontiers may be
extended; and this is its position in terms of the investigation of
the life-body or etheric body, and of everything specified in the
following pages as still higher members of human nature. Spir-
itual science acknowledges that only the physical body is acces-
sible to investigation using the bodily senses; and, from the
perspective of this kind of investigation it would be possible, at
most, by intellectual deductions to surmise the existence of a
higher body. At the same time it tells how it is possible to open
up a world where these higher members of human nature
emerge for the observer, just as the color and the light of things
emerge after an operation in the case of a person born blind.
For those who have developed the higher organs of perception,
the etheric or life-body is an object of perception and not
merely an intellectual deduction.
Human beings have this etheric or life-body in common
with plants and animals. The life-body works in a formative
3. Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1994.
8 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
way on the substances and forces of the physical body and thus
brings about the phenomena of growth, reproduction, and
inner movement of vital body fluids. It is therefore the builder
and shaper of the physical body, its inhabitant and architect.
The physical body may even be spoken of as an image or
expression of the life-body. In human beings the two are
nearly—though by no means totally—equal in form and size.
However, in animals, and even more so in the plants, the
etheric body is very different in both form and extension from
the physical.
The third member of the human body is called the sentient
or astral body. It is the vehicle of pain and pleasure, of impulse,
craving, passion, and so on—all of which are absent in a crea-
ture that consists of only the physical and etheric bodies. These
things may all be included in the term sentient feeling, or sensa-
tion. The plant has no sensation. If in our time some learned
people see that plants will respond by movement or some other
way to external stimulus and conclude that plants have a cer-
tain power of sensation, they only show their ignorance of what
sensation is. The point is not whether the creature responds to
an external stimulus but whether the stimulus is reflected in an
inner process such as pain or pleasure, impulse, desire, and so
on. Unless we stick to this criterion, we would be justified in
saying that blue litmus-paper has a sensation of certain sub-
stances, because it turns red through contact with them.*
4. It is necessary to stress this point, because in our time there is a great need
for clarity on such matters. Many people obscure the distinction between a
plant and a sentient being, because they are not clear about the true nature of
sensation. If a being or thing responds in some way to an external stimulus, it
is not therefore justified to say that it has a sensation of the impression. It
can only be said to have sensation if it experiences the impression in its inner
life—that is, if there is a kind of inward reflection of the outer stimulus.
The Education of the Child 9
Humankind, therefore, has a sentient body in common with
the animal kingdom only, and this sentient body is the vehicle
of sensation or of sentient life.
We must not make the same mistake as certain theosophical
circles and imagine that the etheric and sentient bodies consist
simply of substances that are finer than those present in the
physical body. That would be a materialistic concept of these
higher members of human nature. The etheric body is a force-
form; it consists of active forces, and not of matter. The astral
or sentient body is a figure of inwardly moving, colored, and
luminous pictures. The astral body deviates in both size and
shape from the physical body. In human beings it presents an
elongated ovoid form in which the physical and etheric bodies
are embedded. It projects beyond them—a vivid, luminous fig-
ure—on every side.”
Human beings also possess a fourth member of their being,
and this fourth member is shared with no other earthly crea-
ture. It is the vehicle of the human I, or ego. The little word —
as used, for example, in the English language—is a name essen-
tially different from any other. To anyone who ponders rightly
on the nature of this name, an approach to the perception of
true human nature is opened up immediately. All other names
can be applied equally by everyone to what they designate.
(continued) The great advances of the natural sciences in our time—for
which a true spiritual investigator has the highest admiration—have never-
theless caused a lack of clarity concerning higher concepts. Some biologists
do not know what sensation is and thus ascribe it to a being that has none.
What they understand by sensation may well be ascribed even to non-sen-
tient beings. What spiritual science must understand by sensation is com-
5. A distinction must be made between human beings’ experience of the sen-
tient body within themselves and the perception of the sentient body by a
skilled seer. What is referred to here is what is revealed of the sentient body
to a developed spiritual eye.
10 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
Everyone can call a table “table,” and everyone can call a chair
“chair,” but this is not true of the name “I.” No one can use
this name to designate another. Every human being can only
call themselves “I”; the name “I” can never reach my ear as a
description of myself. In designating oneself as I, one has to
name oneself within oneself. Human beings who can say “I” to
themselves are a world unto themselves. Those religions
founded on spiritual knowledge have always had a feeling for
this truth; hence they have said, “With the J, the God, who in
lower creatures reveals himself only externally in the phenom-
ena of the surrounding world, begins to speak internally. The
vehicle of this faculty of saying “I,” of the faculty, is the body
of the I, the fourth member of the human being.°
This body of the I is the vehicle of the higher soul of human-
kind. With it human beings are the crown of all earthly cre-
ation. Now in human beings today the I is in no way simple in
character. We may recognize its nature if we compare human
beings at different stages of development. Look at an unedu-
cated, so-called primitive person next to a typical European, or
again compare the latter with a person of high ideals. They all
have the faculty to say “I” of themselves; the body of the I is
present in them all. But the so-called uneducated primitives,
with their I, more easily follow passions, impulses, and crav-
ings. The more highly formed Europeans say to themselves, I
may follow certain impulses and desires, whereas others are
held in check or suppressed altogether. Idealists have developed
new impulses and new desires in addition to those originally
6. The reader must not take offence at the expression “Body of the I.” It is
certainly not used in any grossly material sense. But in anthroposophical sci-
ence there is no other possibility than to use the words of ordinary language;
and as these are ordinarily applied to material things, they must, in their
application to a spiritual science, first be translated into the spiritual.
The Education of the Child 11
present. All of this has taken place through the I working upon
the other members of the human being. Indeed, this consti-
tutes the special task of the I. Working outward from itself it
has to ennoble and purify the other members of human nature.
In human beings who have reached beyond the condition
where the external world first placed them, the lower members
have changed to a greater or lesser degree under the influence
of the I. When human beings are only beginning to rise above
the animal, when their I is only just kindled, they are still like
an animal insofar as the lower members of their being are con-
cerned. The etheric or life-body is simply the vehicle of the for-
mative forces of life, the forces of growth and reproduction.
The sentient body gives expression only to those impulses,
desires, and passions, which are stimulated by external nature.
As human beings work their way up from this stage of develop-
ment through successive lives or incarnations to higher and
higher evolution, the I works upon the other members and
transforms them. In this way the sentient body becomes the
vehicle of purified sensations of pleasure and pain, refined
wants and desires. And the etheric or life-body also becomes
transformed. It becomes the vehicle of habits, of human beings’
more permanent intent or tendency in life, of the temperament
and memory. One whose I has not yet worked upon the life-
body has no memory of experiences in life. One just lives out
what has been implanted by Nature.
This is what the growth and development of civilization
means for humanity. It is a continual working of the I on the
lower members of human nature; this work penetrates all the
way into the physical body. Under the influence of the I the
whole appearance and physiognomy, the gestures and move-
ments of the physical body, are altered. It is possible, moreover,
to distinguish how the different ways of culture or civilization
work on the various members of human nature. The ordinary
12 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
factors of civilization work on the sentient body and permeate
it with pleasures and pains, and with impulses and cravings
that are different from what it had originally. Again, when a
human being is absorbed in the contemplation of a great work
of art the etheric body is being influenced. Through the work
of art one divines something higher and more noble than is
offered by the ordinary environment of the senses, and in this
process one is forming and transforming the life-body. Religion
is a powerful way to purify and ennoble the etheric body. Here
is where the religious impulses have their tremendous purpose
in human evolution.
What we call conscience is no more than the result of the Ts
work on the life-body through many incarnations. When peo-
ple begin to perceive that they should not do one thing or
another and when this perception makes a strong enough
impression that the impression passes into the etheric body,
conscience arises.
Now this work of the I on the lower members may be some-
thing that is either proper to the whole human race, or it may
be entirely individual—an achievement of the individual I
working on itself alone. In the former case the whole human
race collaborates, as it were, in the transformation of the
human being. The latter kind of transformation depends on
the activity of the individual I alone, in and of itself. The I may
become so strong that it transforms, through its very own
power and strength, the sentient body. What the I then makes
of the sentient or astral body is called spirit-self (or by the Fast-
ern term, manas). This transformation is performed mainly
through a process of learning, an enriching of one’s inner life
with higher ideas and perceptions.
The I can rise to an even higher task, one that belongs essen-
tially to its own nature. This happens not only when the astral
body is enriched but also when the etheric or life-body is
The Education of the Child 13
transformed. People learn many things in the course of life, and
if from some point we look back on our past, we can say to
ourselves that we have learned much. But we can speak to a far
lesser degree of a transformation in temperament or character
during life, or of an improvement or deterioration in memory.
Learning relates to the astral body, whereas the latter kinds of
transformation relate to the etheric or life-body. It is thus not a
happy image if we compare the astral body’s degree of change
during life with the progress of a clock’s minute hand, and the
transformation of the life-body with the hour hand’s progress.
When people enter a higher training—or occult training, as it
is called—above all, it is important to take up this latter forma-
tion out of the I’s very own power. Individually and with full
consciousness, we have to work out the transformation of hab-
its and temperament, character and memory; insofar as we
work thus into the life-body, we transform it into what is called
in spiritual-scientific terms, /ife-spirit (or, in the Eastern expres-
sion, buddhi).
At a still higher stage we come to acquire forces whereby we
can work upon the physical body and transform it—transform-
ing, for example, the circulation of the blood, the pulse. The
amount of the physical body that is thus transformed becomes
spirit-body (or, in the Eastern term, atman).
As a member of the whole human race or some section of
it—for example, of a nation, tribe, or family—human beings
also attain certain transformations of the lower parts of their
nature. In spiritual science the results of this kind of transfor-
mation are known as the following: the astral or sentient body,
transformed through the I, is called the sentient soul; the trans-
formed etheric body is called the intellectual soul; and the trans-
formed physical body the spiritual soul. We must not imagine
that the transformations of these three members take place one
after another in time. From the moment the I lights up, all
three bodies undergo transformation simultaneously. Indeed,
14 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
the work of the I does not become clearly perceptible to a per-
son until a part of the spiritual soul has already been formed
and developed.
From what has been said, it is clear that we may speak of four
members of human nature: the physical body, the etheric or life-
body, the astral or sentient body, and the /-body. The sentient
soul, the intellectual soul, the spiritual soul, and beyond these
the even higher members of human nature—spirit-self, life-
self, spirit-human being—appear in connection with these four
members as products of transformation. When speaking of the
vehicles of human qualities, it is indeed only the first four
members that are considered.
The educator works on these four members of the human
being. Therefore, if we want to work in the right way we must
investigate the nature of these parts of human beings. One
must not imagine that they develop uniformly in human
beings, so that at any given point in life—the moment of birth,
for example—they are all equally developed; this is not the sit-
uation. Their development occurs differently in the different
ages of a person's life. The correct foundation for education and
for teaching involves a knowledge of these laws of development
of human nature.
Before physical birth, growing human beings are surrounded
by the physical body of another. They do not come into inde-
pendent contact with the physical world. Their environment is
the physical body of the mother, and it alone works on them as
they grow and ripen. Indeed, physical birth consists in this: the
physical mother-body, which has been as a protecting sheath,
frees human beings, thus allowing the environment of the
physical world to work thereafter directly on them. Their
senses open to the external world, and in this way the external
The Education of the Child 15
world gains an influence over human beings that was previ-
ously exercised by the physical envelope of the mother-body.
A spiritual understanding of the world, as represented by
spiritual science, sees the birth of the physical body in this pro-
cess, but not yet that of the etheric or life-body. Even as human
beings are surrounded by the physical envelope of the mother-
body until the moment of birth, so until the time of the change
of teeth—until approximately the seventh year—they are sur-
rounded by etheric and astral envelopes. It is only during the
change of teeth that the etheric envelope liberates the etheric
body. And an astral envelope remains until puberty when the
astral or sentient body also becomes free on all sides, even as
the physical body becomes free at physical birth and the etheric
body at the change of teeth.’
7. To argue that a child has memory and so on before the change of teeth, or
that a child has the faculties connected with the astral body before puberty
would indicate a misunderstanding of what is being said here. We must
understand that the etheric and astral bodies are present from the beginning,
but that they are within their protecting envelopes. It is indeed the protect-
ing envelope that allows the etheric body, for example, to evolve and mani-
fest the qualities of memory very obviously before the change of teeth. But
the physical eyes are also present before birth within the protecting envelope
of the mother’s womb. The eyes are protected in the embryo, and external
physical sunlight must not be allowed to affect their development. In exactly
the same sense, external education must not endeavor to train or influence
the shaping of memory before the change of teeth. If, however, we simply
nourish it and do not try as yet to develop it externally, we will come to see
how memory unfolds during this period, freely and on its own.
It is the same with the qualities that the astral body bears. Before the age
of puberty, one must nourish them while remembering that the astral body,
as explained above, still lies within a protecting envelope. It is one thing to
nurture the seeds of development inherent in the astral body before puberty;
it is another thing to expose after puberty the now independent astral body
to influences in the outer world that it can receive and work on, unprotected
by the surrounding envelope. The distinction is certainly a subtle one; but
without penetrating it, one cannot understand what education truly is.
16 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
Thus, spiritual science speaks of three births of human
beings. Until the change of teeth certain impressions intended
for the etheric body can no more reach it than the air and the
struggle of the physical world can reach the physical body
while it rests in the mother’s womb.
Before the change of teeth occurs, the free life-body is not
yet at work in human beings. Just as within the body of the
mother the physical body receives forces not its own, gradually
developing its own forces within the protecting sheath of the
mother’s womb, so also are the forces of growth until the
change of teeth. During this first period the etheric body is
only developing and shaping its own forces together with
those—not its own—it has inherited. While the etheric body is
thus working its way toward freedom, the physical body is
already independent. The etheric body, as it liberates itself,
develops and works out what it has to give to the physical body.
The second teeth—that is, the person’s own teeth—that take
the place of those inherited, represent the culmination of this
work. They are denser than anything else embedded in the
physical body and thus appear last at the end of this period.
After this point the growth of the human physical body is
brought about by one’s own etheric body alone. But this etheric
body is still under the influence of an astral body that has not
yet escaped its protecting sheath. At the moment the astral
body also becomes free, the etheric body concludes another
period of its development; this conclusion is expressed in
puberty. The organs of reproduction become independent
because, from this time on, the astral body is free, no longer
working inwardly, but openly and without its envelope, meet-
ing the external world.
Just as the physical influences of the external world cannot
influence the unborn child, so until the change of teeth one
should not influence the etheric body with forces that are, for
The Education of the Child 17
it, the same as the impressions of the physical environment are
for the physical body. And in the astral body the corresponding
influences should not be allowed influence until after puberty.
Vague and general phrases like “the harmonious develop-
ment of all the powers and talents in the child,” and so on, can-
not provide the basis for a genuine art of education. A genuine
art of education can only be built on true knowledge of human
beings. Not that these phrases are incorrect, but basically they
are as useless as saying about a machine that all its parts must
be activated harmoniously. To work a machine you must
approach it not with phrases and truisms but with real and
detailed knowledge. Thus, what is important for the art of edu-
cation is a knowledge of the members of the human being and
of their various developments. We must know what part of the
human being especially needs to be worked on at a certain age
and how to work on it in the proper way. There is, of course,
no doubt that a truly realistic art of education, such as that
indicated here, will make its way slowly. This is, indeed,
because of the whole mentality of our age, which will continue
for a long time to consider facts of the spiritual world to be the
empty talk of a wild imagination, while it takes vague and
completely unreal phrases as the result of realistic thinking.
Here, however, we shall describe unreservedly what will eventu-
ally come to be common knowledge, though many today
might still consider it a figment of the imagination.
With physical birth the physical human body is exposed to
the physical environment of the external world. Before birth it
was surrounded by the protecting envelope of the mother’s
body. What the forces and fluids of the enveloping mother-
body have done for it thus far, must from now on be done by
the forces and benevolence of the external physical world.
Before the change of teeth in the seventh year the human body
has to accomplish a task on itself that is essentially different
18 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
from the tasks of any other period of life. In this period the
physical organs must form themselves into definite shapes;
their whole structural nature must receive particular tendencies
and directions. Growth takes place in later periods as well; but
throughout the whole succeeding life growth is based on the
forces developed in this first life-period. If true forms were
developed, true forces would grow; if misshapen forms were
developed, misshapen forms would grow. We can never repair
what we have neglected as educators in the first seven years;
just as nature causes the proper environment for the physical
human body before birth, so after birth the educator must pro-
vide for the proper physical environment. The right physical
environment alone works on the child in such a way that the
physical organs correctly shape themselves.
Two “magic” words indicate how children enter into rela-
tionship with their environment. These words are imitation
and example. The Greek philosopher Aristotle called human
beings the most imitative of creatures. For no age in life is this
truer than for the first stage of childhood, before the change of
teeth. Children imitate what happens in their physical environ-
ment, and in this process of imitation their physical organs are
cast in the forms that thus become permanent. “Physical envi-
ronment” must, however, be understood in the widest sense
imaginable. It includes not just what happens around children
in the material sense, but everything that occurs in their envi-
ronment—everything that can be perceived by their senses,
that can work on the inner powers of children from the sur-
rounding physical space. This includes all moral or immoral
actions, all wise or foolish actions that children see.
It is not moralistic talk or wise admonitions that influence
children in this sense, but it is, rather, what adults do visibly
before their eyes. The effect of admonition is that it shapes the
forms—not of the physical, but of the etheric body; and the
The Education of the Child 19
etheric body, as we saw, is surrounded until the seventh year by
a protecting etheric envelope, even as the physical body is sur-
rounded before physical birth by the physical envelope of the
mother-body. Everything that must evolve in the etheric body
before the seventh year—ideas, habits, memory, and so on—all
of this must develop “by itself,” just as the eyes and ears
develop within the mother-body without the influence of
external light. The things that we read in Jean Paul’s excellent
educational work, Levana or Science of Education, is no doubt
true. He says that travelers have learned more from their nurses
in their first years of life than they will in all of their journeys
around the world. Children, however, do not learn by instruc-
tion or admonition, but through imitation. The physical
organs shape themselves through the influence of the physical
environment. Good sight will be developed in children if their
environment has the proper conditions of light and color,
while in the brain and blood circulation the physical founda-
tions will be laid for a healthy moral sense if children see moral
actions in their environment. If before their seventh year chil-
dren see only foolish actions in their surroundings, the brain
will assume the forms that adapt it to foolishness in later life.
As the muscles of the hand grow firm and strong through
doing the work for which they are suited, so the brain and
other organs of the physical body of human beings are guided
into the correct course of development if they receive the
proper impressions from their environment. An example will
best illustrate this point. You can make a doll for a child by
folding up an old napkin, making two corners into legs, the
other two corners into arms, a knot for the head, and painting
eyes, nose, and mouth with blots of ink. Or you can buy the
child what is called a “pretty” doll, with real hair and painted
cheeks. We need not dwell on the fact that the “pretty” doll is
of course hideous and apt to spoil the healthy aesthetic sense
20 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
for a lifetime; for education, the main question is different. If
the children have the folded napkin before them, they have to
fill in from their own imagination what is necessary to make it
real and human. This work of the imagination shapes and
builds the forms of the brain. The brain unfolds as the muscles
of the hand unfold when they do the work they are suited for.
By giving the child the so-called “pretty” doll, the brain has
nothing more to do. Instead of unfolding, it becomes stunted
and dried up. If people could look into the brain as a spiritual
investigator can, and see how it builds its forms, they would
certainly give their children only the toys that stimulate and
enliven its formative activity. Toys with dead mathematical
forms alone have a desolating and killing effect on the forma-
tive forces of children; on the other hand whatever kindles the
imagination of living things works in the proper way. Our
materialistic age produces few good toys. It is certainly a
healthy toy, for example, that, with movable wooden figures,
represents two smiths facing each other and hammering an
anvil. These things can still be bought in rural areas. The pic-
ture books where the figures can be moved by pulling threads
from below are also excellent and allow children themselves to
transform a dead picture into a representation of living action.
All of this causes a living mobility of the organs, and through
such mobility the proper forms of the organs are built up.
Of course, these things can only be touched on here, but in
the future, spiritual science will be called on to give the neces-
sary indications in detail, which it is in a position to do. For it
is not an empty abstraction, but a body of living facts that can
provide guidelines for the conduct of life’s realities.
A few more examples may be given. With regard to the envi-
ronment, “nervous” children, that is, excitable children, should
be treated differently from those who are quiet and lethargic.
Everything comes into consideration, from the color of the
The Education of the Child 21
room and the various objects that are generally around the
child, to the color of the clothes they wear. One will often do
the wrong thing if one does not take guidance from spiritual
knowledge, for in many cases the materialistic idea will be the
exact reverse of what is proper. Excitable children should be
surrounded by and dressed in red or reddish-yellow colors,
while lethargic children should be surrounded by blue or blu-
ish-green shades of color. The important thing is the comple-
mentary color that is created within the child. In the case of red
it is green, and in the case of blue, orange-yellow. This can be
seen very easily by looking for awhile at a red or blue surface
and then quickly looking at a white surface. The physical
organs of the child create this contrary or complementary
color, and this is what causes the corresponding organic struc-
tures that the child needs. If excitable children have a red color
around them, they will inwardly create the opposite, the green;
and this activity of creating green has a calming effect. The
organs assume a tendency of calmness.
One thing must be thoroughly and fully recognized for this
age in a child’s life: the physical body creates its own scale of
measurement for what is beneficial to it. It does this by prop-
erly developing craving and desire. Generally speaking, we may
say that the healthy physical body desires what is good for it. In
the growing human being, so long as it is the physical body
that is important, we should pay the closest attention to what
healthy, craving desire and delight require. Pleasure and delight
are the forces that most properly enliven and call forth the
organs’ physical forms.
In this matter it is all too easy to do harm by failing to bring
children into the proper physical relationship with their envi-
ronment. This may happen especially in regard to their
instincts for food. Children may be overfed with things that
make them lose completely their healthy instinct for food,
22 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
whereas by giving them the proper nourishment, the instinct
can be preserved so that they always want what is wholesome
for them under the circumstances, even a glass of water, and
this works just as surely with what would do harm. Spiritual
science, when called on to build up an art of education, can
indicate all these things in detail, even specifying particular
forms of food and nourishment. For spiritual science is realistic
and not gray theory; it is something for life itself.
The joy of children in and with their environment must
therefore be counted among the forces that build and shape the
physical organs. They need teachers that look and act with
happiness and, most of all, with honest unaffected love. Such a
love that streams, as it were, with warmth through the physical
environment of the children may be said to literally “hatch” the
forms of the physical organs.
The children who live in such an atmosphere of love and
warmth, and who have around them truly good examples to
imitate, are living in their proper element. One should thus
strictly guard against anything being done in the children’s
presence that they should not imitate. One should not do any-
thing that one would then have to say to a child, “You should
not do that.” The strength of children’s tendency to imitate can
be recognized by observing how they paint and scribble written
signs and letters long before they understand them. Indeed, it
is good that they paint the letters first by imitation and only
later learn to understand their meaning. For imitation belongs
to the time when the physical body is developing, while mean-
ing speaks to the etheric, and the etheric body should not be
worked on until after the change of teeth, after the outer
etheric envelope has fallen away. All learning associated with
speech in these years should be especially through imitation.
Children will best learn to speak through hearing; no rules or
artificial instruction of any kind can be good for this.
The Education of the Child 23
It is important to realize the value of children’s songs, for
example, as a means of education in early childhood. They
must make pretty and rhythmical impressions on the senses;
the beauty of sound is of greater value than the meaning. The
more alive the impression on eye and ear the better. Dancing
movements in musical rhythm have a powerful influence in
building up the physical organs, and this should also not be
undervalued.
With the change of teeth, when the etheric body lays aside its
outer etheric envelop, the time begins when the etheric body
can be worked on through external education. We must be very
clear about what works on the etheric body from the outside.
The formation and growth of the etheric body means the shap-
ing and developing of inclinations and habits, of the con-
science, character, memory, and temperament. The etheric
body is worked on through pictures and examples—that is,
through a child’s carefully guided imagination. Just as before
the age of seven we have to give the child the actual physical
pattern to copy, so between the time of the change of teeth and
puberty we must bring into the child’s environment things that
have the proper inner meaning and value. Growing children
will now take guidance from the inner meaning and value of
things. Whatever is filled with deep meaning that works
through pictures and allegories is proper for these years. The
etheric body will unfold its forces if a well-ordered imagination
is allowed to take guidance from the inner meaning it discovers
for itself in pictures and allegories—whether seen in real life or
communicated to the mind. It is not abstract concepts that
work in the right way on the growing etheric body, but rather
what is seen and perceived—indeed, not with external senses,
but with the mind’s eye. Such seeing and perceiving is the
proper means of education for these years.
24 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
For this reason it is most important that boys and girls
should have for their teachers people who can awaken in them,
as they observe them, the proper intellectual and moral powers.
As imitation and example were, as it were, the magic words for
education in the first years of childhood, for the years of this
second period, the magic words are discipleship and authority.
What children see directly in their educators with inner percep-
tion must, for them, become authority—not authority com-
pelled by force, but authority that they accept naturally
without question. Through this they will build up their con-
science, habits, and inclinations. They will bring their tempera-
ment along an ordered path. They will look at things of the
world through its eyes, as it were. The beautiful words of a poet
who said, “Everyone must choose their heroes, in whose foot-
steps they will tread as they carve out their paths to the heights
of Olympus,” have special meaning during this time of life.
Veneration and reverence are forces whereby the etheric body
grows in the right way. If it were not possible during these years
to look up to another person with unbounded reverence, one
would have to suffer for this loss throughout all of later life.
Where reverence is lacking, the living forces of the etheric body
are stunted in their growth.
Picture to yourself how an incident such as the following
works on the character of children. An eight-year-old boy hears
of someone who is truly worthy of honor and respect. Every-
thing he hears about him inspires holy awe in the boy. The day
draws near when he will be able to see him for the first time.
With trembling hand he lifts the latch of the door, behind which
will appear before him, the person he reveres. The beautiful feel-
ings that such an experience calls forth are among the lasting
treasures of life. It is the happy person who, not only in the sol-
emn moments of life but continually, can look up to one’s teach-
ers and educators as natural and unquestioned authorities.
The Education of the Child 25
Beside these living authorities who embody, as it were, intel-
lectual and moral strength for children, there should also be
those they can only apprehend with the mind and spirit, who
likewise become their authorities. The outstanding people of
history, life stories of great men and women—allow these to
determine the conscience and the direction of the mind.
Abstract moral maxims are not useful yet; they can only begin
to have a beneficial influence when, at the age of puberty, the
astral body liberates itself from its astral mother-envelope.
Especially in history lessons, teachers should direct their
teaching as indicated. When telling all kinds of stories to little
children before their change of teeth, our aim cannot be more
than to awaken delight, liveliness, and a happy enjoyment of
the story. But after the change of teeth we have to remember
something else in selecting material for stories—that is, that we
are placing before boys and girls pictures of life that will arouse
a spirit of emulation in the soul.
It should not be overlooked that bad habits may be over-
come completely by pointing to appropriate examples that
shock or repel the child. Reprimands give but little help, at
best, in the matter of habits and inclinations. If, however, we
show the living picture of a person who has given way to a sim-
ilar bad habit and allow the child to see where such an inclina-
tion actually leads, this will work on the young imagination
and go a long way toward uprooting the habit. One fact must
always be remembered—that abstract ideas do not influence
the developing etheric body but rather, living pictures that are
seen and comprehended inwardly. The suggestion that has just
been made certainly needs to be carried out with great tact so
that the effect is not reversed and results in the very opposite of
what was intended. When telling stories everything depends on
the art of telling. Word-of-mouth narration cannot, therefore,
simply be replaced by reading.
26 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
In another connection, for the period between the change of
teeth and puberty, it is important to present living pictures—or
symbols, as it were—to the mind. It is essential that the secrets
of nature, the laws of life, be taught to children, not in dry
intellectual concepts, but as far as possible in symbols. Parables
of the spiritual connections of things should be brought before
the souls of children in such a way that behind the parables
they divine and feel, rather than understand intellectually, the
underlying law in all existence. “Everything passing is but a
parable,” must be the maxim guiding all of our education dur-
ing this time. It is of vast importance for children that they
receive the secrets of nature in parables before they are brought
before their souls as “natural laws” and so on. An example may
serve to make this clear. Let us imagine that we want to tell a
child of the immortality of the soul, of the coming forth of the
soul from the body. The way to do this is to use a compari-
son—for example, the butterfly coming out of the chrysalis. As
the butterfly soars up from the chrysalis, so after death the
human soul comes forth from the house of the body. No one
can properly understand this fact in intellectual concepts who
has not first received it through such a picture. By a parable
such as this we speak not just to the intellect but to the feelings
of children, to their whole soul. Children who have experi-
enced this will approach the subject with a completely different
mood of soul when later it is taught to them in the form of
intellectual concepts. It is a very serious matter indeed for any-
one who is not first given the ability to approach the problems
of existence through feeling. It is therefore essential that educa-
tors have at their disposal parables for all the laws of nature and
secrets of the world.
Here we have an excellent opportunity to observe the effects
that spiritual-scientific knowledge works to affect in life and
practice. When teachers come before their children in class,
The Education of the Child 27
ready with the parables they “made up” out of an intellectual
materialistic way of thinking, in general, they will make little
impression upon them, for teachers first have to puzzle out the
parables for themselves with all their intellectual cleverness.
Parables that first have to be condescended to have no convinc-
ing effect on those who listen to them. When one speaks in
parables and pictures, it is not just what is spoken and shown
that works on the hearer, but a fine spiritual stream that passes
from the one to the other, from the one who gives to the one
who receives. If the one who tells does not have the warm feel-
ing of belief in the parable, no impression will be made on the
other. For true effectiveness, it is essential to believe in one’s
parables as one does in absolute realities. And this can only be
so when one’s thought is alive with spiritual knowledge. Take,
for example, the parable we have been speaking of. True stu-
dents of spiritual science need not torment themselves to get it
out. For them it is reality. In the coming forth of the butterfly
from the chrysalis they see at work, on a lower level of being,
the very same process that is repeated, on a higher level, at a
higher stage of development, when the soul comes forth from
the body. They believe in it with all their might; and this belief
streams, as it were, unseen from speaker to hearer, carrying
conviction. Life flows freely, unhindered, back and forth from
teacher to pupil. But for this it is necessary that teachers draw
from the full fountain of spiritual knowledge. Their words,
everything that comes from them, must have feeling, warmth,
and color from a truly spiritual-scientific way of thought.
A wonderful prospect is thus opened throughout the field of
education. If it will only let itself be enriched from the well of
life that spiritual science contains, education will also be filled
with life and understanding. There will no longer be the grop-
ing so prevalent now. All art and practice of education that
does not continually receive fresh nourishment from roots such
28 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
as these is dry and dead. The spiritual-scientific knowledge has
appropriate parables for all the secrets of the world—pictures
taken from the very being of the things, pictures not first made
by human beings, but put in place by the forces of the world
within things themselves, through the very act of their creation.
Therefore this spiritual knowledge must form the living basis
for the whole art of education.
A force of soul that has particular value for this period of
human development is memory. The development of the
memory is connected with the shaping of the etheric body.
Since this shaping occurs so that the etheric body becomes lib-
erated between the change of teeth and puberty, so this is also
the time for conscious attention from outside toward the
growth and cultivation of the memory. If what is due to human
beings at this time has been neglected, their memory will
always have less value than it would have had otherwise. It is
not possible to make up for later what was left undone.
In this connection many mistakes can be made through an
intellectual, materialistic way of thinking. An art of education
based on such a way of thought easily arrives at a condemna-
tion of what is mastered simply by memory. It will often place
itself untiringly and emphatically against the mere memory
training, and will employ the subtlest methods to ensure that
children commit nothing to memory that they do not intellec-
tually understand. Yes, and after all, how much has really been
gained by such intellectual understanding? A materialistic way
of thought is so easily led to believe that any further penetra-
tion into things beyond intellectual concepts that are, as it
were, extracted from them, simply does not exist; only with
great difficulty will it fight its way through to the perception
that other forces of the soul are at least as necessary as the intel-
lect to comprehend things. It is no mere figure of speech to say
that people can understand with their feeling, their sentiment,
The Education of the Child 29
their inner disposition, as well as with their intellect. Intellec-
tual concepts are only one way we have for understanding
things of this world, and only to the materialistic thinker do
they appear as the sole means. Of course there are many who
do not consider themselves materialists, who nevertheless con-
sider an intellectual conception of things to be the only kind of
understanding. Such people perhaps profess an idealistic or
even spiritual outlook. But in their souls they relate themselves
to it in a materialistic way, for the intellect is in effect the soul’s
instrument for understanding what is material.
We have already alluded to Jean Paul’s excellent book on
education; a passage from it relating to this subject of the
deeper foundations of the understanding may well be quoted
here. Indeed, Jean Paul’s book contains many golden words on
education, and deserves far more attention than it has received.
It is of greater value for the teacher than many of the educa-
tional works currently held in highest regard. One passage fol-
lows:
Have no fear of going beyond the childish understanding,
even in whole sentences. Your expression and the tone of
your voice, aided by the child’s intuitive eagerness to
understand, will light up half the meaning and with it, in
the course of time, the other half. With children as with
the Chinese and people of refinement, the tone is half the
language. Remember, children learn to understand their
own language before they ever learn to speak it, just as we
do with Greek or any other foreign language. Trust to time
and the connections of things to unravel the meaning. A
child of five understands the words “yet,” “even,” “of
course,” and “just.” But now try to explain these—not just
to the child, but to the father! In the one word “of” there
lurks a little philosopher! If an eight-year-old child with
developed speech is understood by a child of three, why do
30 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
you want to narrow your language to the little one’s child-
ish prattle? Always speak to a child some years ahead—do
not those of genius speak to us centuries ahead in books?
Talk to one-year-olds as if they were two, to two-year-olds
as if they were six, for the difference in development
diminishes in inverse ratio with age. We are far too prone
to credit teachers with all that children learn. We should
remember that the children whom we have to educate bear
half their world within them, all there and ready-taught—
that is, the spiritual half, including, for example, the moral
and metaphysical ideas. For this very reason, language,
equipped as it is with material images alone, cannot give
the spiritual archetypes; all it can do is to illumine them.
The very brightness and decisiveness of children should
give us brightness and decisiveness when we speak to
them. We can learn from their speech as well as teach them
through our own. Their word-building is bold, yet
remarkably accurate! For example, I have heard the follow-
ing expressions used by children three or four: “the bar-
reler” (for the maker of barrels); “the sky-mouse” (for the
bat); “I am the looking-through person” (standing behind
a telescope); “Id like to be a gingerbread eater”; “he joked
me down from the chair”; “see how one o’clock it is?”
It’s true that our quotation refers to something other than our
immediate subject; but what Jean Paul says about speech has its
value in the present connection also. Here there is also an
understanding that precedes intellectual comprehension. Little
children receive the structure of language into the living organ-
ism of their souls and, for this process, do not require the laws
of language formation in intellectual concepts. Similarly, for the
cultivation of the memory, older children must learn much that
they cannot master with their intellectual understanding until
The Education of the Child 31
years later. Those things are afterward best apprehended in
concepts that have first been learned simply from memory dur-
ing this period of life, just as the rules of language are best
learned in a language one can already speak. So much talk
against “mindless rote learning” is simply materialistic preju-
dice. Children, for example, only need to learn the essential
rules of multiplication in a few given examples, for which no
apparatus is necessary—the fingers are much better for the pur-
pose than any apparatus—they are then ready to get to work
and memorize the whole multiplication table. Proceeding in
this way, we shall be acting with due regard for growing chil-
dren’s nature. However, we shall be offending against their
nature if, at the time when the development of the memory is
the important thing, we are calling too much on the intellect.
The intellect is a soul-force only born with puberty, and we
should not try to influence it in any way externally before this
time. Until puberty children should be storing in their memo-
ries the treasures of thought on which humankind has pon-
dered; later intellectual understanding may penetrate what has
already been well imprinted in memory during the earlier
years. It is necessary for human beings to remember not only what
they already understand, but to come to understand what they
already know—that is, what they have acquired by memory in
the way the child acquires language. This truth has a wide
application. First there must be an assimilation of historical
events through the memory, then the apprehension of them in
intellectual concepts; first the faithful commitment to memory
of geographical facts and then an intellectual understanding of
the connections between them. In a certain sense, understand-
ing things through concepts should proceed from the stored-up
treasures of the memory. The more children know in memory
before they begin to understand through intellectual concepts
the better.
32 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
There is no need to emphasize the fact that these things
apply only to the period of childhood we are concerned with
here, and not later. If at some later age in life one has occasion
to take up a subject for any reason, then of course the opposite
may easily be the correct and most useful way of learning it,
though even here much will depend on the mentality of the
person. During the time of life we are now concerned with,
however, we must not dry up a child’s mind and spirit by filling
it with intellectual conceptions.
Another result of materialistic thinking may be seen in the
lessons that are based too exclusively on sense-perception. At
this time in childhood all perception must be spiritual. We
should not be satisfied, for example, with presenting a plant, a
seed, a flower to children only as it is perceived with the
senses. Everything should become a parable of the spiritual. In
a grain of corn there is far more than meets the eye. There is a
whole new plant invisible within it. Children must compre-
hend in a living way with their feeling and imagination that
something like a seed has more within it than is sense-percep-
tible. They must divine through feeling the secrets of exist-
ence. One cannot object that pure perception of the senses is
obscured in this way—on the contrary, by going no further
than what the senses observe, we stop short of the whole truth.
For full reality consists of the spirit as well as the substance,
and there is no less need for faithful and careful observation
when bringing all the faculties of the soul into play, than when
only the physical faculties are employed. If people could only
see, as the spiritual investigator sees, the desolation achieved in
soul and body by instruction based on external perception
alone, they would never insist on it as strongly as they do. In
the highest sense, what good is it that children have been
shown all possible varieties of minerals, plants, and animals,
and all kinds of physical experiments, if nothing further is
The Education of the Child 33
connected with teaching these things—that is, to make use of
the parables that the world offers to awaken a feeling for the
secrets of the spirit?
Certainly a materialistic way of thinking has little use for
what has been said here, and spiritual investigators understand
this all too well. But they also know that the materialistic way
of thought will never produce a truly practical art of education.
As practical as it appears to itself, materialistic thinking is
impractical when what is needed is to enter into life in a living
way. In the face of reality, materialistic thought is fantastic—
although, indeed, to a materialistic thinker spiritual-scientific
teachings, adhering as they do to the facts of life, can only
appear fantastic. There will no doubt be many obstacles yet to
overcome before the principles of spiritual science—which are,
in fact, born from life itsel—can make their way into the art of
education. It cannot be otherwise. At the present time the
truths of this spiritual science can only seem strange to many
people. Nevertheless, if they are indeed true, they will become
part of our life and civilization.
Teachers can have the tact to meet any occasion that arises only
when they have a conscious and clear understanding of how
various subjects and methods of education work in the proper
way on growing children. They have to know how to treat the
various faculties of the soul—thinking, feeling, and willing—
so that their development can react on the etheric body, which
during this time between the change of teeth and puberty can
attain more and more perfect form under external influences.
By a proper application of fundamental educational prin-
ciples during the first seven years of childhood, the foundation
is laid for the development of a strong and healthy will; for a
34 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
strong and healthy will must have its support in well-developed
forms of the physical body. Then, from the change of teeth on,
the etheric body that is now developing must bring to the
physical body the forces whereby it can make its forms firm
and inwardly complete. Whatever makes the strongest impres-
sion on the etheric body also works most powerfully toward
consolidating the physical body. The strongest of all the
impulses that can work on the etheric body come from the feel-
ings and thoughts through which human beings consciously
divine and experience their relationship to the Eternal Pow-
ers—that is, they come from religious experience. Never will a
person’s will—nor as a result a person’s character—develop in a
healthy way, if one cannot during this period of childhood
receive religious impulses deep into the soul. How people feel
their place and part in the universal whole will be expressed in
the unity of their life of will. If they do not feel linked with
strong bonds to a divine-spiritual, their will and character must
remain uncertain, divided, and unsound.
The world of feeling is developed in the proper way through
parables and pictures, which we have spoken of, and especially
through the pictures of great men and women, taken from his-
tory and other sources and brought before children. A corre-
spondingly deep study of the secrets and beauties of nature is
also important for the proper formation of the world of feeling.
Last but not least, there is the cultivation of a sense of beauty
and the awakening of the artistic feeling. The musical element
must bring to the etheric body the rhythm that will then
enable it to sense in everything the rhythm otherwise con-
cealed. Children who are denied the blessing of having their
musical sense cultivated during these years will be the poorer
because of it for the rest of their lives. If this sense were entirely
lacking, whole aspects of the world’s existence would necessar-
ily remain hidden, nor should the other arts be neglected. The
The Education of the Child 35
awakening of the feeling for architectural forms, for molding
and sculpting, for line and design, for color harmonies—none
of these should be left out of the plan of education. No matter
how simple life must be under certain circumstances, the
objection can never be valid that the situation does not allow
something to be done in this way. Much can be done with the
simplest resources, if only the teacher has the proper artistic
feeling, joy, and happiness in living, a love of all existence, a
power and energy for work—these are among the lifelong
results of the proper cultivation of a feeling for beauty and art.
The relationship of person to person—how noble, how beauti-
ful it becomes under this influence! Again, the moral sense is
also being formed in children during these years through the
pictures of life placed before them, through the authorities
whom they look up to—this moral sense becomes assured if
children, from their own sense of beauty, feel that the good is
beautiful, and also that the bad is ugly.
Thought in its proper form, as an inner life lived in abstract
concepts, must still remain in the background during this
period of childhood. It must develop of itself, as it were, with-
out external influences, while life and the secrets of nature are
being unfolded in parable and picture. Thus between the sev-
enth year and puberty, thought must be growing, the faculty of
judgment ripening, in among the other experiences of the soul;
so that after puberty is reached, young people may be able to
form independently their own opinions about the things of life
and knowledge. The less direct the influence is on the develop-
ment of judgment in earlier years, and the more a good indirect
influence is exercised through the development of the other
faculties of soul, the better it is for all of later life.
Spiritual-scientific insights afford the true foundations, not
just for spiritual and mental education, but also for physical
36 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
education. This can be illustrated by referring to children’s
games and gymnastic exercises. Just as love and joy should per-
meate children’s surroundings in the earliest years of life, so
through physical exercises the growing etheric body should
experience an inner feeling of its own growth, of its continually
increasing strength. Gymnastic exercises, for example, should
be such that each movement, each step, gives rise to the feeling
within a child: “I feel growing strength within me.” This feel-
ing must take hold in the child as a healthy sense of inner hap-
piness and ease. To think out gymnastic exercises from this
perspective requires more than intellectual knowledge of
human anatomy and physiology. It requires an intimate intui-
tive knowledge of the connection between a sense of happiness
and an ease of positions and movements of the human body—
a knowledge that is not merely intellectual, but permeated with
feeling. Those who arrange such exercises must be able to expe-
rience in themselves how one movement and position of the
limbs produces a happy and easy feeling of strength, while
another, as it were, an inner loss of strength. To teach gymnas-
tics and other physical exercises with these things in mind, the
teacher will need what only spiritual science—the spiritual-sci-
entific habit of mind—can give. They do not need to see
directly into the spiritual worlds themselves, but they must
have the understanding to apply in life what springs only from
spiritual knowledge. If the knowledge of spiritual science were
applied in practical spheres such as education, the idle talk that
such knowledge has to be proved first would quickly disappear.
Those who apply it correctly will find that the knowledge of
spiritual science proves itself in life by making life strong and
healthy. They will see it is true because it is valid in life and
practice, and in this they will find a proof stronger than all the
logical, so-called scientific arguments can afford. Spiritual
truths are best recognized in their fruits and not by what is
The Education of the Child 37
called a proof, no matter how scientific; indeed, such proof can
never be more than logical skirmishing.
At the age of puberty the astral body is first born. Hence-
forth the astral body in its development is open to the outside
world. Therefore, now we can approach the child only from
the outside, with everything that opens up the world of
abstract ideas, the faculty of judgment, and independent
thought. It has already been pointed out how, until this time,
these faculties of soul should be developing free from outer
influence within the environment provided by the education
that is proper to the earlier years, even as the eyes and ears
develop free from outer influence within the organism of the
mother. With puberty the time has arrived when human beings
are ripe for the formation of their own judgments about what
they have already learned. Nothing is more harmful to children
than to awaken independent judgment too early. Human
beings are not in a position to judge until they have collected
material for judgment and comparison in their inner life. If
they form their own conclusions before doing so, their conclu-
sions will lack foundation. Educational mistakes of this kind
are the cause of all narrow onesidedness in life, and all barren
creeds based on a few scraps of knowledge, ready on this basis
to condemn ideas experienced and proven by humankind often
throughout long ages.
One’s ripeness for thought requires that one has learned to be
full of respect for what others have thought. There is no healthy
thought that has not been preceded by a healthy feeling for the
truth, a feeling for the truth supported by faith in authorities
accepted naturally. If this principle were observed in education
there would no longer be as many people who all too quickly
imagine themselves ripe for judgment, and spoil their own
power to receive openly and without bias the general impres-
sions of life. Every judgment that is not built on a sufficient
38 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
foundation of gathered knowledge and experience of soul
throws a stumbling block in the way of those who form it. For
having once pronounced a judgment on a matter, we are there-
after influenced by this judgment. We no longer receive the new
experiences we would if we had not already formed a judgment
about it. Thought must take hold in a living way in children’s
minds so that they first learn and then judge. What the intellect
has to say about any matter should only be said when all the
other faculties of the soul have spoken. Before then the intellect
only has an intermediary part to play; its task is to comprehend
what occurs and what is experienced in feeling, to receive it
exactly as it is, not letting unripened judgment immediately
come in and take over. For this reason, until puberty children
should be spared all theories about things; the main consider-
ation is that they should simply meet the experiences of life,
receiving them into their souls. Certainly they can be told what
various people have thought about this and that, but exercises of
judgment, too early, about one view or another must be
avoided. Thus, children should receive people’s opinions with
the feeling power of the soul. Without jumping to a conclusion
or taking sides with this or that person, they should be able to
listen to all, saying to themselves: “So and so said this, and
another said that.” The cultivation of such a mind in a boy or
girl certainly demands the exercise of great tact from teachers
and educators; but tact is just what spiritual-scientific thought
offers.
All we have been able to do is to unfold a few aspects of edu-
cation in the light of spiritual science. And this alone was our
intention—to indicate how great the task is that the impulse of
spiritual-science must fulfill in education for the culture of our
time. Its power to fulfill the task will depend on the spread of
an understanding for this way of thinking in wider and wider
circles. For this to happen, however, two things are necessary.
The Education of the Child 39
First, people should relinquish their prejudices against spiritual
science. Anyone who honestly pursues it will soon see that it is
not the fantastic nonsense that many today consider it to be.
We are not making any reproach against those who hold this
opinion; for everything that the culture of our time offers
tends, on a first acquaintance, to make one consider the adher-
ents of spiritual science to be fantastic dreamers. Superficial
consideration can reach no other judgment, for in the light of
it, spiritual science with its claim to be a science of the spirit
will appear to be in direct contradiction to everything that
modern culture gives to humankind as the foundation of a
healthy view of life. Only a deeper consideration will reveal
that the views of the present day are in themselves deeply con-
tradictory and will remain so as long as they are without a spir-
itual-scientific foundation. Indeed, by their very nature they
call out for such a foundation and cannot in the long run exist
without it.
The second thing that is needed concerns the healthy culti-
vation of spiritual science itself. Only when it is perceived in
spiritual-scientific circles everywhere that the point is not
merely to theorize about the teachings, but to let them bear
fruit in the most far-reaching way in all the relationships of
life—only then will life itself open up to spiritual science with
sympathy and understanding. Otherwise people will continue
to consider it a variety of religious sectarianism for a few cranks
and enthusiasts. If, however, it performs positive and useful
spiritual work, the spiritual science movement cannot in the
long run be denied intelligent recognition.
PART TWO
Teaching from a Foundation
of Spiritual Insight
BERLIN, MAY 14, 1906
Translated by Robert E Lathe & Nancy Parsons Whittaker
I HAVE often repudiated prejudices that foster the idea of
theosophy as foreign to practical life. On the contrary, I have
often spoken of how theosophy can lead us into practical life,
because it teaches the laws that continuously form life around
us. If you know only the laws of ordinary life, then you know
only a small part of life. The major portion lies in those things
hidden in life—that is, hidden from ordinary senses. People will
soon recognize that to live better they must study the hidden
worlds, since the materialistic approach leads to a crisis in nearly
every area, but primarily in health care and education. The
question arises of how we should educate people in the coming
generations. Materialism leads to a crisis in all important social,
political, and cultural questions, since if we followed this path
life would eventually be such that we would no longer know
how to help ourselves. To illustrate this I would like to say a few
things of general interest about the question of education.
Those who consider education in a materialistic way will
easily come to distorted conclusions. They will fail to consider
the strong regularities of life and will therefore not consider
the existence of clearly delineated periods of life. They simply
42 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
cannot imagine, for example, why the period of childhood
ending around age six to eight years is so fundamentally differ-
ent from the period beginning at approximately age seven and
continuing until puberty. If you have no idea of what happens
to people during this time, you cannot imagine how impor-
tant it is to observe it accurately. It is not of little importance
to know what people are like during the first three periods of
life. The first period proceeds until six to eight years of age,
the second until the age of fourteen or fifteen, and the follow-
ing period includes the next seven to eight years. We need to
study these three stages in human life very accurately, not just
externally but also from the standpoint of spiritual science, for
spiritual science concerns itself with those worlds hidden from
the ordinary senses.
You know that the human being does not consist of only the
physical body; the human being also consists of an etheric body,
which forms the basis of the physical and has a similar shape,
and an astral body, which for the clairvoyant appears similar to a
cloud, and in which the first two bodies are embedded. Within
these, we find the vehicle of the I. We want to look more closely
at these three bodies of the developing human being.
If you want to create a complete picture of the human
being, then you must recall that a time exists before we can see
people physically—that is, the time before birth when the
child lives in the mother’s body. On a purely physical level,
you must differentiate clearly between the period before birth
and the following periods, since the child could not live if
born too early, if the child were to enter the ordinarily visible
world too early. The child could not live because the sense
organs, the means of interacting with the outer world, are not
yet well enough developed. Those organs—the eyes, ears, and
everything needed to live in the physical world—develop dur-
ing the time before birth while the child is still embraced by
Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight 43
the mother’s body. The child cannot come into contact with
the physical world before its organs develop sufficiently within
the protective mantle of another physical body. Birth occurs
when a child is mature enough to encounter the physical envi-
ronment without a protective mantle. We cannot say the same
of the etheric and astral bodies. They are not nearly developed
to the degree that they could come into direct contact with
the physical surroundings.
During the period from birth until about seven years of age,
the etheric body undergoes a process similar to that undergone
by the physical body before birth. Only at the end of that time
can we say that the etheric body is “born.” In the same way, the
astral body is “born” at the age of fourteen or fifteen, and can
then unfold its free and independent activity in the world.
You need to be aware that we may not place any particular
demands on the etheric body until the age of seven, nor on the
astral body until the age of fourteen. Exposing the baby’s etheric
body to the brutal demands of the world would be the same as
exposing the fetus to the physical world in the fifth month of
pregnancy, although we could not see it so readily. The same is
true of exposing the astral body before the age of fourteen. Allow
me to restate what I have just said. Until the age of seven, only
the physical body is developed well enough to withstand the full
effects of the world. Until that time, the etheric body is so occu-
pied with its own development that it would be detrimental to
try to affect it. Until then, we may, therefore, work only with the
physical body. From the age of seven until fourteen, we may take
up the development of the etheric body, and only beginning
with the age of fifteen can we work upon the astral body.
To affect the human physical body means to provide the
child with external stimuli. Such impressions act to develop the
physical body, and for this reason, we can hardly compensate
for things neglected before the age of seven. Until the age of
44 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
seven, the physical body exists in a state that requires external
sense impressions to develop it. If a child’s eye sees only beauti-
ful things until the age of seven, the eye will develop so that it
retains a feeling for beauty throughout life. Afterward, the
child’s sense of beauty can no longer develop in the same way.
What you say to a child and what you do until the age of seven
are much less important than the environment you create,
what the child sees and hears. During this time, we must use
external stimuli to support the child’s inner growth. The child’s
free spirit creates a human figure from a piece of wood using
only a couple of holes and some marks for the eyes, nose and
mouth. If you give a child a beautiful doll, then the child
becomes bound to it. The child’s inner spirit clings to it and
cannot develop its own activity; in this way, children almost
entirely lose their imaginative powers.
It is essentially the same with all impressions of the sense-
perceptible world. Who you are in the presence of the child,
what the child sees or hears, is important. The child will
become a good person when surrounded by good people.
Children imitate their surroundings. We must place particular
value upon learning by example and the child’s capacity to
imitate. Thus, the correct thing to do is to act so the child can
imitate as much as possible. In that sense, we must emphasize
the child’s physical development between the first and seventh
year. During that period we cannot affect the higher bodies
through educational methods, quite certainly not through
conscious education. You affect these bodies through who you
are insofar as they are not occupied with their own develop-
ment. People can activate the child’s good sense through their
own good sense. Just as the mother’s healthy body has a
healthy effect upon the child’s body, the teacher must attempt
to be a well-rounded and self-contained person, to have high
and good thoughts while in the presence of the child.
Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight 45
At the age of seven the period begins when you can deliber-
ately affect the etheric body. Here, two things connected with
the development of the etheric body come into consider-
ation—that is to say, habit and memory. The development of
the etheric body depends on habits and remembrances. For this
reason you should try to give children a firm foundation for life
anchored in good habits. People who act differently every day,
who lack a stable basis for their deeds, will later lack character.
The task to fulfill between the ages of seven and fourteen is to
create a basic set of habits and to stimulate memory develop-
ment. Children need to learn upright habits and to have a rich
store of memorized knowledge.
It is an erroneous belief of our materialistic times that very
young children should learn to decide for themselves. On the
contrary, we should do everything possible to hinder that. Dur-
ing this period of childhood, children should learn through
authority. During the second seven-year period, people should
instruct children and not teach through example. We form a
strong memory, not by explaining all the “whys” and “where-
fores,” but through authority. We must surround children with
people they can count on, people they can trust—people who
can awaken in children a belief in the authority they hold.
Only after this stage of life should we guide children into their
capacity for judgment and independent reason. By freeing the
child from the limitations imposed by authority, you rob the
etheric body of the possibility of a well-founded development.
During the second seven-year period, it is best to give children
examples and analogies, not proofs and conclusions. Conclu-
sions affect the astral body, which is not yet free to receive them.
You should tell children about great people, tell them in a way
that great historical figures become examples for them. The same
is true concerning questions of death and birth. If you can draw
examples from nature, you will see what can be accomplished.
46 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
You could show children a caterpillar, how it spins a cocoon and
afterward a butterfly emerges. This is a wonderful example of
how the child is created from the mother. You can accomplish a
great deal if you use examples from nature.
It is just as important to teach children moral parables and
not moral rules. We can clearly see this in a few sayings from
Pythagoras. Instead of saying, “If you want to accomplish
something, concern with things that you can see from the start
will only be futile,” Pythagoras simply said, “Don't strike at fire
with your sword.” In another example instead of saying, “Don't
meddle with things you know nothing about,” Pythagoras said,
“Keep your bean.” Along with the physical meaning, there is
also a moral meaning here. In ancient Greece when people
needed to make a decision they passed out black and white
beans and then counted the number of beans of each color
returned. That is how they took votes. In this sense, instead of
saying, “Dont meddle in public affairs you know nothing
about,” Pythagoras said simply, “Keep your bean.”
In this way, you can appeal to the formative forces of imagi-
nation and not to those of the intellect. The more you use pic-
tures, the more you affect the child. Goethe’s mother could not
have done anything better for him than to tell moral stories.
She never preached at him. Sometimes she did not finish the
story, so he made up the ending himself.
If we force children into critical thinking before the age of
fourteen, it is particularly disadvantageous for them and forces
them to create their own conclusions or lose the well-intended
power of the surrounding persons of authority. It is very bad if
children cannot look up to anyone. The etheric body becomes
stunted, weak, and shallow from lack of good examples on
which to build. It is also particularly bad if children prematurely
determine their religion and draw conclusions about the world.
Children can do this only when their astral bodies can unfold
Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight 47
freely. The more we protect children from premature judgmen-
tal and critical activities, the better it is for them. When the
child’s astral body has not yet become free, a wise teacher
attempts to make reality comprehensible through the events
themselves. Wise teachers do not demand a firm decision about
religious confession, as is increasingly the common way of mate-
rialistic education.
The chaotic conditions between the religious confessions
would quickly dissolve if we adhered to this more often. We
should develop the capacity for judgment and reason as late as
possible, only after the children’s sense of individuality awak-
ens—that is, when the astral body emerges. Before then chil-
dren should not decide for themselves whom they believe but,
instead, that should be a given. In the years that follow, the
interrelationships of the sexes most strongly express individual-
ity, that is, when one individual feels drawn to another.
You can see that if you study the three human bodies prop-
erly, you will find a practical basis for the proper education of
children. Spiritual science is not impractical, not something liv-
ing in the clouds; rather, spiritual science can provide the best
guide for working with life.
That is precisely why we need a deepening of spiritual-sci-
entific insight today, since without it humanity would reach a
dead end. People today criticize the past, saying children were
not called on at an early enough age to decide about God and
the world, but in reality that was a healthy instinct. Now we
must achieve that instinctive knowledge more consciously.
The instinctive knowledge of earlier times disappeared, and
along with it a certain feeling of certainty about life’s details.
On the other hand, we cannot suddenly damn humanity.! If
we had strictly followed the dictates of materialism concerning
1. The original is unclear at this point.
48 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
education, medicine, justice, and so on, then human society
would have fallen apart long ago. However, we did not destroy
everything, and some of the past still remains alive. We need
the spiritual-scientific movement because materialism would,
of necessity, lead people to a dead end.
Teachers who still have a feeling for the child’s soul suffocate
under a school bureaucracy and regulations that are only carica-
tures of what should actually exist, and they arise from a super-
stitious belief that teachers should deal only with the physical
body. This belief exists despite their own religious beliefs.” It is
important that people gain a sense of the spiritual and what
exists beyond sense-perceptible life. Those who cling to educa-
tional formulas will never find the right things to do. They cling
to traditional church dogmas and dont want to know anything
about spiritual development. But we seek spiritual development,
since the answers to today’s needs must come from the spiritual
worlds. The fruits of materialism only cause illness in the
human physical and higher bodies. We cannot avoid a major
crisis if people do not take up a spiritual deepening.
Many things point clearly to important decisions now being
made within our society, but you must look beneath the sur-
face—superficial considerations are insufficient. We cannot do
away so easily with people’s spiritual desires and tendencies.
Spiritualism meets the needs of some people who have such
desires, but it attempts materialistically to prove spiritual exist-
ence. The Catholic Church has a remarkable relationship to
spiritualism, given that the Church should be concerned only
with spiritual matters, and that every act of the Church should
reflect the spirit. A recent event is very curious. A member of
the Church sought material proof of the existence of the spirit.
A book by Lapponi, the Pope’s personal physician, recently
2. The original is unclear at this point.
Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight 49
appeared in which he supports spiritualism. This is so remark-
able because the book apparently addresses people who are no
longer spiritually sensitive; they need clear material proof for
the existence of a spiritual world. We certainly have something
to think about when the Pope’s personal physician openly sup-
ports spiritualism. Clearly, he wants to know that the spiritual
world exists, but he has no understanding of the Church's
teachings about the spiritual world.
In this way, materialism sneaks into religion, into what
should not be materialistic at all. You can see from this the
importance of a movement such as ours, which appeals to real
human understanding of the spirit without asceticism and
withdrawal from life, that continually attempts to render the
practicality of spiritual life comprehensible.
We should not, however, ask how we can quickly develop
occult powers or how we can encapsulate ourselves so that we
do not encounter reality. Anyone who asks such questions is
only an egoist—no more than a spiritual gourmet. If you want
to partake only in what you find spiritually pleasing, then you
are only slightly more subtle that someone who begins the day
with a gourmet breakfast. Someone with jaded physical taste
often creates the tastiest spiritual dishes. In the proper sense,
you are a theosophist only if you exert yourself to comprehend
and serve life. Parents are theosophically-minded when they see
that their task is to support their children at every step on the
path of development. Don’t ask, “How can we do that these
days?” You should know that the important thing is to con-
sciously remember that the soul is eternal.
People readily believe in eternal life, a life they want to begin
as quickly as possible after death. For those truly convinced of
the eternity of the soul; the period between two and eighty years
of age is only seventy-eight years and has but little significance
compared to eternity. Such people believe in eternal existence
50 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
and feel the need for patience. We must become accustomed to
acting in the service of all humanity. It is not so important that
we immediately use what we learn. Instead, we must continue to
try to use it, and eventually we will find some small area of appli-
cation. We will never achieve this if we merely criticize every-
thing. It is better to do whatever we can and not complain about
how little we can use of what we have learned, rather than to do
nothing at all. We should accept this in our souls as something
truly practical. When we work in that way with spiritual science,
our lives will automatically change. Without realizing it, people
can change the world when they become theosophists. The
main thing is that we gain a true understanding of spiritual sci-
ence and then to live by it. That is the wise thing to do since it is
then applied in life, and the remainder will happen by itself. A
mother, a teacher, a theosophist will automatically act differently
from one who is not aware. If you know what a human being
truly is, then you will instinctively see the changes in the devel-
oping child. Most important, however, is that through genuine
theosophical insight all the hypocrisy will cease—such as the
tomfoolery the “great” people around us practice and transform
into seriousness when they address questions of raising children.
This happens because people have no faith in the spirit.
Here we have a small insight into spiritual science. It is a
part of practical life. We can see that the opponents’ claim that
it distances us from life is only nonsense; in truth, it leads us
into life. Every narrow-minded Tom, Dick, and Harry believe
they are above theosophy when they speak about it, but a time
will come when they will think differently. In the future such
people will be called reactionaries, unable to move into the
future—people who did not want to know about practical life
or what theosophy could tell us about the spirit. It will be said
that they had no desire to learn about practicality from the
theosophical convictions living and burning within us.
Education in the Light
of Spiritual Science
COLOGNE, DECEMBER 1, 1906
Translated by Rita Stebbing
Wu EN the spiritual-scientific movement began its activity
some thirty years ago, its aim was not to satisfy curiosity about
the spiritual worlds, but to make spiritual knowledge available
to a wider public, and provide insight that will help solve not
just spiritual problems but everyday practical problems as well.
The subject of today’s lecture is one such problem. It is part of
everyday life and should be of interest to everyone. Knowledge
of human nature and problems of education are intimately con-
nected. No aspect of social life can benefit more from spiritual
research than education, because supersensible knowledge can
provide practical guidelines in this realm.
To deal with this subject we must again look at the nature of
human beings. For spiritual science, that aspect of the human
beings understood by the intellect is only part of their nature.
The physical, bodily aspect that we can see and touch is what a
person has in common with the rest of the natural world. The
spiritual investigator’s research is not based on speculation, but
on what is discovered through the higher sense of clairvoyant
sight. This reveals the ether body as the second member of a
52 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
person’s being. It is a spiritual organism, considerably more
delicate and refined than the physical body. It has nothing to
do with physical ether, and is best described as a sum of forces
or currents of energy rather than as substance.
The ether body is the architect of the physical body. The
physical body crystallizes out of the ether body much as ice crys-
tallizes out of water. We must therefore regard everything that
constitutes the physical aspect of a person’s being as having
evolved from the ether body. Human beings have this member
in common with every being endowed with life—that is, with
the vegetable and animal kingdoms. In shape and size the ether
body coincides with the physical body except for the lower part,
which differs in shape from the physical. The ether body in ani-
mals extends far beyond the physical body. For one who has
developed the spiritual faculties asleep in every human being,
there is nothing fantastic about this description of the ether
body—in the same way that it is not fantastic for a person who
can see to describe colors such as blue or red to a blind person.
The third member of a person's being, the astral body, bears
all kinds of passions—lower as well as higher—joys and sorrows,
pleasure and pain, cravings and desires. Our ordinary thoughts
and will-impulses are also contained in the astral body. Like the
ether body, it becomes visible when the higher senses are devel-
oped. The astral body permeates the physical and ether bodies
and surrounds humans like a kind of cloud. We have this in
common with the animal kingdom. It is in continuous move-
ment, mirroring every shade of feeling. But why the name astra?
The physical substances that make up the physical body con-
nect it with the whole Earth; similarly, the astral body is con-
nected with the world of stars. The forces that permeate the
astral body and condition a person’s destiny and character were
called astral by those who could look deeply into their mysteri-
ous connection with the astral world surrounding the Earth.
Education in the Light of Spiritual Science 53
The fourth member of a person’s being, the power that
enables one to say “I,” makes the human being the crown of
creation. This name can only be applied to oneself; it expresses
the fact that the soul’s primordial divine spark is what speaks.
We share the designations of everything else with others; a per-
sons ear can be reached from outside, but not the name that
refers to what is god-like in every individual human soul. That
is why in Hebrew esoteric schools it was called the “inexpress-
ible name of God, Jahve,” and “I Am the I Am.” Even the
priest could utter it only with a shudder. The soul ascribes “I
am the I am” to itself.
The human physical body is related to the mineral kingdom,
the ether body to the vegetable kingdom and the astral body to
the animal kingdom. Human beings have the I in common
with no other earthly being; the I makes a human being the
crown of creation. This fourfold entity has always been known
in esoteric schools as the “quaternity of human nature.”
These four bodies develop in each person in a particular way,
from childhood until old age. That is why, if we are to under-
stand a person, we must always consider each human being
individually. A person’s characteristics are indicated already in
the embryo. However, humans are not isolated beings, but
develop within a certain environment and thrive only when
surrounded by all the beings of the universe. During embry-
onic life they must be enveloped by the maternal organism
from which they become independent only when a certain
stage of maturity is reached. During further development a
child goes through more events of a similar nature. Just as the
physical body during the embryonic stage must be enveloped
by the maternal organism, so is it surrounded after birth by
spiritual sheaths related to spiritual realms. The child is envel-
oped by an etheric and an astral sheath and reposes in them
just as the child did in the womb before birth.
54 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
At the time of the change of teeth an etheric covering loosens
itself from the ether body, as the physical covering did at physi-
cal birth. That means that the ether body is born and becomes
free in all directions. Until then an entity of like nature to itself
was attached to it, and spiritual currents flowed from this
entity through it just as physical currents flowed from the
maternal covering through the child before birth. Thus, the
child is born a second time when the ether body is born. Mean-
while the astral body is still surrounded by its protective
sheath—a covering that strengthens and invigorates it until
puberty. Then that also withdraws, the birth of the astral body
takes place, and the child is born a third time.
The fact that a threefold birth occurs indicates that these
three entities must be considered separately. While it is
impossible for external light to reach and harm the eyes of the
unborn child, it is not impossible—though certainly highly
damaging to the soul—that foreign influences can be brought
to bear on the ether body before it has become completely
independent. The same applies to the astral body before
puberty. We should, according to spiritual science, avoid all
education and training before the change of teeth, except
what relates to the child’s physical body; indeed, we should
influence the ether body as little as we influence the child’s
physical body before birth. However, just as the mother must
be cared for because her health influences the development of
the embryo, so one should now respect the inviolability of the
ether body for the benefit of the child’s healthy development.
This is important because, before the change of teeth, only
the physical body is ready for the influences of the external
world; all training should be restricted, therefore, to what
concerns the physical body. Any external influence of the
ether body during this period is a violation of the laws that
govern human development.
Education in the Light of Spiritual Science 55
The human ether body is different from that of the plant
world because it becomes, in a person, the bearer of enduring
traits such as habits, character, conscience, memory, and tem-
perament. The astral body is the seat of both the life of feelings
already mentioned, and the ability to discern, to judge.
These facts indicate the correct time to exert influence on
the natural tendencies. In the period until the seventh year the
child’s bodily faculties develop; they become independent and
self-contained. The same applies to the time between the sev-
enth and the fourteenth years concerning habits, memory, tem-
perament, and so on; the time between the fourteenth and the
twentieth or twenty-second years is when the faculty of critical
intellect develops, and a certain independence of the surround-
ing world is attained. All these things indicate that different
principles of education are required in the various life periods.
Special care must be exercised until the seventh year concern-
ing everything that affects the physical body. This includes a
great many things. It is a time when all the essential physical
organs are gradually developing and the effect on the child’s
senses is of immense importance. It matters greatly what is
seen, heard, and absorbed in general. The faculty most promi-
nent at this time is imitation. The Greek philosopher Aristotle
remarked that human beings are the most imitative of all ani-
mals. This is especially true of a child before the change of
teeth. Everything is imitated during this time, and since what-
ever enters a child through the senses as light and sound works
formatively on the organs, it is most important that what sur-
rounds the child should be beneficial.
At this age nothing is accomplished through admonition;
commands and prohibitions have no effect at all. But the exam-
ple is most significant. What children see, what happens in
their surroundings, they feel must be imitated. For example,
parents were astonished to discover that their well-behaved
56 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
child had taken money from a cashbox; greatly disturbed, they
thought the child was inclined to steal. Questioning revealed
that the child had simply imitated what his parents were seen
to do every day.
It is important that the examples the child sees and imitates
are of a kind that awaken inner forces. Exhortations have no
effect, but the way a person acts in the child’s presence matters
greatly. It is far more important to refrain from doing what
the child is not permitted to do than to forbid the child to
imitate it.
It is vital, therefore, that during these years educators are
exemplary examples, that they only do what is worthy of imita-
tion. Education should consist of example and imitation. The
truth of this is recognized when one gains insight into the
nature of human beings, and it is confirmed by the results of
education based upon it. Therefore, because the capacity to
understand what things mean is a function of the ether body,
the child should not learn the significance of the letters of the
alphabet before the change of teeth; before then, children
should do no more than trace their form with paint.
Spiritual research makes all these subtleties understandable
and sheds light even on the details of what should be done.
Everything the child perceives—also in a moral sense—acts on
the formation of its physical organs. It does make a difference
whether the child is surrounded by pain and sorrow or happi-
ness and joy. Happiness and joy build sound organs and lay the
foundation for future health. The opposite can create a disposi-
tion toward illness. Everything that surrounds the child should
breathe an atmosphere of happiness and joy, including objects,
colors of clothing, and wallpaper. The educator must ensure
that this is the situation, while also considering the child’s par-
ticular disposition.
Education in the Light of Spiritual Science 57
A child who is inclined to be too earnest and too quiet will
benefit from being surrounded by rather sombre, bluish, green-
ish colors, while a lively, over active child should have yellow,
reddish colors. This may seem like a contradiction but, in fact,
through its inherent nature the sense of sight calls up the oppo-
site colors. The bluish shades have an invigorating effect, while
in the lively child the yellow-reddish shades call up the oppo-
site colors.
So you can see that spiritual investigation sheds light even on
practical details. The developing organs must be treated in ways
that promote their health and inner forces. The child should
not be given toys that are too finished and perfect, such as
building blocks or perfect dolls. A doll made out of an old table
napkin on which eyes, nose and mouth are indicated is far bet-
ter. Any child will see such a homemade doll as a lady attired in
beautiful finery. Why? Because it stirs the imagination, and that
induces movement in the inner organs, and it produces a feeling
of well-being in the child. Notice how such a child plays in a
lively and interested way, throwing body and soul into what the
imagination conjures up, while the child with the perfect doll
just sits, unexcited and unamused. It has no possibility to add
anything through imagination, so the inner organs are con-
demned to inactivity. Children have an extraordinarily sound
instinct for what is good for them, as long as only the physical
body has become free to interact with the external world, and as
long as they are in the process of development. Children will
indicate what is beneficial to them. However, if from early on
this instinct is disregarded, it will disappear. Education should
be based on happiness, on joy and a child’s natural cravings. To
practice asceticism at this age would be synonymous with
undermining healthy development.
When the child approaches the seventh year and the baby
teeth are gradually being replaced, the covering of the ether
58 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
body loosens and becomes free, as the physical body did at
physical birth. Now the educator must bring everything that
will further the development of the ether body. However, the
teacher must guard against placing too much emphasis on
developing the child’s reason and intellect. Between the sev-
enth and twelfth years, it is primarily a question of authority,
confidence, trust, and reverence. Character and habit are spe-
cial qualities of the ether body and must be fostered; but it is
harmful to exert any influence on the reasoning faculty before
puberty.
The development of the ether body occurs in the period
from the seventh until the sixteenth year in boys, and until the
fourteenth year in girls. It is important for the rest of a person’s
life that feelings of respect and veneration are fostered during
this period. Such feelings can be awakened by means of infor-
mation and narration—the lives of significant people can be
depicted to children, not only from history, but from their own
circle, perhaps that of a revered relative. Awe and reverence are
awakened in children that forbid them to harbor any critical
thoughts or opposition against the venerated person. The chil-
dren live in solemn expectation of the moment they will be
permitted to meet this person. Finally the day arrives and the
children stand before the door filled with awe and veneration;
they turn the handle and enter the room that, for them, is a
holy place. Such moments of veneration become forces of
strength in later life. It is immensely important that the educa-
tor, the teacher, is at this time a respected authority for the
child. A child’s faith and confidence must be awakened—not
through axioms, but through human beings.
People around the children, with whom they have contact,
must be their ideals; children must also choose such ideals
from history and literature: “Everyone must choose the hero
whose path to Olympus they will follow,” is a true saying. The
Education in the Light of Spiritual Science 59
materialistic view that opposes authority and undervalues
respect and reverence is totally wrong. It regards children as
already self-reliant, but their healthy development is impaired if
demands are made on the reasoning faculty before the astral
body is born. At this time it is important that memory be
developed. This is done best in a purely mechanical way. How-
ever, calculators should not be used; tables of multiplication,
poems and so on should be committed to memory in a parrot-
like fashion. It is simply materialistic prejudice to maintain that
such things should be inwardly felt and understood at this age.
In the previous times educators knew better. Between the
ages of one and seven all kinds of songs were sung to the chil-
dren, such as the good old nursery rhymes and children’s songs.
Sense and meaning was not what mattered, but sound; the chil-
dren were made aware of harmony and consonance, and we
often find words inserted purely for the sake of their sound.
Often the rhymes were meaningless. For example: “Fly beetle
fly / your father is away / your mother is in Pommerland, Pom-
merland / fly beetle fly.” Incidentally, in the idiom of children
Pommerland meant motherland. The expression stemmed from
a time when it was still believed that human beings were spir-
itual beings and had come down to Earth from a spiritual
world. Pommerland was the land of spiritual origin. Yet it was
not the meaning in such rhymes that was important, but the
sound, thus, many children’s songs made no particular sense.
This is the age when memory, habit and character must be
established, and this is achieved through authority. If the foun-
dation of these traits is not laid during this period, it will result
in behavioral shortcomings later. Just because axioms and rules
of conduct have no place in education until the astral body is
born, it is important that prepubescent children, if they are to
be properly educated, can look up to authority. Children can
sense a person’s innermost being, and that is what they revere in
60 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
those with authority. Whatever flows from the educator to chil-
dren forms and develops conscience, character and even the
temperament—their lasting dispositions. During these years
allegories and symbols act formatively on the ether body of
children because such things manifest the world-spirit. Fairy
tales, legends, and descriptions of heroes are a true blessing.
During this period, the ether body must receive as much care
as the physical body. During the earlier period happiness and
joy influenced the forming of the organs; from seven until
fourteen—in this case boys until sixteen—the emphasis must
be on everything that promotes feelings of health and vigor.
Hence, the value of gymnastics. However, the desired effect
will not be attained if the instructor aims at movements that
solely benefit the physical body. It is important that the teacher
can intuitively enter into how children inwardly sense them-
selves, and in this way to know which movements will promote
inner sensations of health, strength, well-being, and pleasure in
the bodily constitution. Only when gymnastic exercises induce
feelings of growing strength are they of real value. More than
the external aspect of the bodily nature benefits from correct
gymnastic exercises; the way a person inwardly experiences the
self also benefits.
Anything artistic has a strong influence on the ether body, as
well as the astral body. Excellent vocal and instrumental music
is particularly important, especially for the ether body. And
there should be many objects of true artistic beauty in the
child’s environment.
Most important of all is religious instruction. Images of
things supersensible are deeply imprinted in the ether body.
The pupil’s ability to have an opinion about religious faith is
not important, but receiving descriptions of the supersensible,
of what extends beyond the temporal. All religious subjects
must be presented pictorially.
Education in the Light of Spiritual Science 61
Great care must be taken that teaching is brought to life.
Much is spoiled in the child if it is burdened with too much
that is dull and lifeless. Whatever is taught in a lively interest-
ing manner benefits the child’s ether body. There should be
much activity and doing, which has a quickening effect on the
spirit. This is also true when it comes to play. The old kind of
picture books have a stimulating effect because they contain
figures that can be pulled by strings and suggest movement and
inner life. Nothing has a more deadening effect on the child’s
spirit than putting together and fixing some structure, using
finished geometrical shapes. That is why building blocks
should not be used; the child should create everything from the
beginning, learning to bring to life what is thus formed from
the lifeless. Our materialistic age extinguishes life through
mass-produced lifeless objects. Much dies in the young devel-
oping brain when the child has to do meaningless things like,
for example, braiding. Talents are stifled and much that is
unhealthy in our modern society can be traced back to the
nursery. Inartistic lifeless toys do not foster trust in spiritual
life. A fundamental connection exists between today’s lack of
religious belief and the way young children are taught.
When puberty is reached the astral covering falls away, and
the astral body becomes independent. With the awakening feel-
ings for the opposite sex, the ability to judge, to form personal
opinion, also awakens. Only now should the reasoning faculty
be appealed to—the critical intellect’s approval or disapproval.
This is not to say that one can form independent judgment the
moment this age is reached, let alone earlier. It is absurd for
such young people to judge issues or to have a say in cultural
life. A young person under the age of twenty has a still undevel-
oped astral body, and can no more make sound judgments than
a baby still in the womb can hear or see. Each life period
requires a corresponding influence. In the first, it is a model to
62 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
imitate; in the second an authority to emulate; the third
requires rules of conduct, principles, and axioms. The teacher is
of utmost significance for the young person at this time—the
personality that will guide students’ eagerness for learning and
their desire for independence in the right directions.
Thus, the spiritual-scientific world-view provides an abun-
dance of basic principles that help the teacher’s task of develop-
ing and educating the young generations. We have shown that
spiritual science can be applied to everyday life and is capable
of practical intervention in important issues. We must under-
stand all the members of the human being and how they inter-
relate in order to know when to influence which member in a
truly beneficial way. The embryo will be affected if the expect-
ant mother is not properly nourished; for its sake the mother
must be cared for. Similarly, what later still surrounds and pro-
tects the child must also be cared for since this in turn will ben-
efit the child. This holds true on both physical and spiritual
levels. Therefore, as long as a child still slumbers as if within an
etheric womb, and is still rooted in the astral covering, it is very
important what happens in the environment. Children are
affected by every thought, every feeling, every sentiment moti-
vating those around them, even if not expressed. Here a person
cannot maintain that one’s thoughts and feelings do not matter
as long as nothing is said.
Even in the innermost recesses of their hearts, those around
the child cannot permit themselves base thoughts or feelings.
Words affect only the external senses, whereas thoughts and
feelings reach the protecting sheaths of the ether and astral
bodies, and they pass over to the child. Therefore, as long as
these protective coverings envelop the child, they must be cared
for. Impure thoughts and passions harm them, just as unsuit-
able substances harm the mother’s body.
Education in the Light of Spiritual Science 63
Even subtle aspects are thus illumined by spiritual science.
Through knowledge of the human being the educator gains the
insight needed. Spiritual science does not intend to persuade; it
is not a theory, it is practical knowledge applicable to life. Its
effect is beneficial, for it makes human beings both physically
and spiritually healthier. It provides effective truth that must
flow into every aspect of life. There is no better way for spir-
itual science to serve humanity than fostering social impulses in
the young during the formative years. What takes place in
human beings during the time they grow up and mature is one
of life’s greatest riddles; those who find practical solutions will
prove to be true educators.
Education and
Spiritual Science
BERLIN, JANUARY 24, 1907
Translated by Rita Stebbing
Wien we discuss subjects such as that of today’s lecture,
we must keep before our mind’s eye all of human evolution.
Only then can we understand individual evolution and guide
young people through education. At the center of education is
the school. We shall attempt to understand what is required of
education on the basis of human nature and a persons evolu-
tion in general.
We see the being of a person as consisting of four distinct
members: physical body, ether or life body, astral body, and, at
the center of one’s being, the I. When an individual is born
only the physical body is ready to receive influences from the
external world. The ether body is not born until the time that
the teeth change, and the astral body is not born until puberty
is reached. The faculties of the ether body, such as memory,
temperament, and so on, are, until the change of teeth, pro-
tected by an etheric sheath, just as the physical senses of eyes
and ears are protected before physical birth by the maternal
body. During this time the educator must not disturb what
should develop naturally by itself.
Education and Spiritual Science 65
Jean Paul expressed it by saying no world traveler learns as
much on far-flung journeys as the child learns from the nurse
before the age of seven. Why then must we have schools for chil-
dren?
What evolves after the physical birth has occurred needs a
protective covering, just as the embryo needs the maternal
body’s protection. The human being begins a life that is
entirely new after a certain stage of development is reached.
Until then life is a repetition of earlier epochs: the embryo
repeats all the primordial stages of evolution up to the present,
and after birth the child repeats earlier human evolutionary
epochs.
Friedrich August Wolf! described the stages through which a
human being evolves from childhood as follows: the first
epoch, until the third year, he called the “golden, gentle, har-
monious age,” corresponding to the life of today’s Indian and
South Sea Islander. The second epoch, until the sixth year,
reflects the Asiatic wars and their repercussions in Europe, and
also the Greek heroic age, as well as the time of the native
North American. The third epoch, until the ninth year, corre-
sponds to the time from Homer? to Alexander the Great.” The
fourth epoch, until the twelfth year, corresponds to the time of
the Roman Empire. The fifth epoch lasts until the fifteenth
year, when the inner forces should be ennobled through reli-
gion, and corresponds to the Middle Ages. The sixth epoch,
until the eighteenth year, corresponds to the Renaissance. The
1. Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824), German philologist and scholar of
classicism, was a friend of Goethe. He contended that the Miad and Odyssey
are the work of more than one author.
2. Homer (8th or 9th century B.C.), Greek poet, traditionally considered the
author of the Jad and Odyssey.
3. Alexander III (356-323 B.C.), tutored by Aristotle, conquered many
lands, and became king from 336-323 B.C.; he died of fever in Babylon.
66 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
seventh epoch lasts until the twenty-first year, corresponding to
the Reformation; and the eighth epoch lasts until the twenty-
fourth year, when a person reaches the present era.
This system is a valuable spiritual foundation, but it must
be widened considerably to correspond to reality. It must
include all of a human being’s evolutionary descent. Human
beings do not stem from the animal kingdom—though cer-
tainly from beings who were far below what human beings are
today in physical development, they did not resemble apes in
any way.
Spiritual science points back to a time when human beings
inhabited Atlantis; compared to modern human beings, the
Atlantean’s soul and spirit were constituted differently.“ Their
consciousness could be called somnambulistic; the intellect was
undeveloped—they could neither count nor write, and logical
reasoning did not exist for them. But they beheld many
aspects of the spiritual world. The will that flowed through
their limbs was immensely strong. The higher animals such as
apes were degenerate descendants of the Atlanteans.
Our dream consciousness is a residue of the Atlantean’s nor-
mal pictorial consciousness, which could be compared with
what a person experiences in vivid dreams during sleep. But the
pictures of an Atlantean were animated, more vivid than
today’s most fertile imagination. Furthermore, Atlanteans
could control their pictures, so that they were not chaotic. We
see an echo of this consciousness when young children play,
endowing their toys with pictorial content.
Human beings first descended into physical bodies during
Lemurian time. That event is repeated during physical birth
when, having descended into a physical body, a person begins
4. See Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man, Steinerbooks, Blauvelt,
NY, 1990.
Education and Spiritual Science 67
to develop through soul and spirit to higher levels. The
Lemurian and Atlantean epochs are repeated in a child’s
development up to the seventh year. The epoch of evolution
when great spiritual teachers appeared among humankind—
Buddha, Plato, Pythagoras, Hermes, Moses, Zarathustra’ —is
repeated in the child between the change of teeth and
puberty. In those days, the influence of the spiritual world was
much greater, a fact we find preserved in heroic legends and
sagas. It is therefore important that what is taught during this
period of the child’s life conveys the spirit of the earlier cul-
tural epochs.
The period between the seventh and fourteenth years corre-
sponds in the child to the time up to the twelfth century, the
time when cities were founded. The main emphasis must now
be on authority and community. The children should experi-
ence something of the power and glory that surrounded the
early leaders. The most important issue that concerns a school,
therefore, is the teacher. The teacher’s authority must be self-
evident for the children, just as what was taught by the great
teachers was self-evident to the human soul. It is bad, it does
great harm if the child doubts the teacher. The child’s respect
and reverence must be without reservation, so that the
teacher’s kindness and good will, which must be present natu-
rally, seem to the child like a blessing. Pedagogical methods
and principles are not what is important, but rather the
teacher’s profound psychological insight. The study of psy-
chology is the most important subject of a teacher's training.
An educator should not be concerned with how the human
being ought to develop, but with the reality of how the stu-
dent actually does develop.
5. See Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity, Rudolf
Steiner Press, London, 1972.
68 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
Since every age makes different demands it is useless to lay
down general rules. Knowledge or proficiency in pedagogical
methods are not what matters in a teacher, but character and a
certain presence that makes itself felt even before the teacher
has spoken. The educator must have attained a degree of inner
development, and must have become not merely learned, but
inwardly transformed. The day will come when teachers will
not be tested for knowledge, or even pedagogical principles,
but for what they are as human beings.
For children the school must be their life. Life should not
just be portrayed; former epochs must come to life. The
school must create a life of its own, not draw it from outside.
Human beings must receive at school what they will not be
able to receive later in life. Pictorial and symbolic concepts
must be fostered. The teacher must be deeply aware of the
truth that “Everything transient is only appearance.” When
teachers present a subject pictorially, they should not be think-
ing it is merely allegory. If teachers fully participate in the life
of the children, forces will flow from their soul to that of the
children. Processes of nature must be described in rich imagi-
native pictures. The spiritual behind the sense-perceptible
must be brought to life. Modern teaching methods fail com-
pletely in this regard, because only the external aspects are
described. But a seed contains not only the future plant, it
contains forces of the sun, indeed of the whole cosmos. A feel-
ing for nature will awaken in the child when the capacity for
imagery is fostered. Plants should not merely be shown and
described, but rather the child should make paintings of them;
then happy human beings for whom life has meaning will
emerge from their time at school.
Calculators should not be used; one must do math with the
children on living fingers. Vigorous spiritual forces must be
stimulated. Nature study and arithmetic train the powers of
Education and Spiritual Science 69
thinking and memory; history the life of feeling. A sense for
what is noble and beautiful awakens love for what is worthy of
love. But what strengthens the will is religion; it must permeate
the teaching of every subject. Children will not immediately
grasp everything they are capable of absorbing; this is true of
everyone. Jean Paul made the remark that one should listen
carefully to the truth spoken by a child, but to have it
explained one must turn to his or her parents. In our material-
istic age too little is expected of memory. The child first learns;
only later does it understand, and only later still will the under-
lying laws be understood.
Between the seventh and fourteenth years is also the time to
foster the sense for beauty. Through this sense we grasp sym-
bolic meaning. But most important is that the child is not bur-
dened with abstract concepts; what is taught should have a
direct connection with life. The spirit of nature—in other
words the facts themselves existing behind the sense-percepti-
ble—must have spoken to the child, who should have a natural
appreciation of things before abstract theories are introduced;
this should only be done after puberty. There is no need to be
concerned that what is learned may be forgotten once school is
finished; what matters is that what one teaches bears fruit and
forms the character. What the child has inwardly experienced
will also be retained; details may vanish but the essential, the
universal, will remain and grow.
No education can be conducted without a religious founda-
tion; school is an illusion without religion. Even Haeckel’s Rid-
dle of the Universe contains religion. No theory can ever replace
religion, nor can a history of religion. A person of a basically
religious disposition, who has deep conviction, will also be able
to convey religion. The spirit that lives in the world also lives in
human beings. Teachers must feel that they belong to a spiri-
tual world-order from which a task is received.
70 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
There is a saying: A person’s character is formed partly by
study and partly by life. But school and education should not
be something separate from life. It should be said, rather, that
a person’s character will be correctly formed when study is
also life.
Interests, Talents, and
Educating Children
NUREMBERG, NOVEMBER 14, 1910
Translated by Robert E Lathe & Nancy Parsons Whittaker
Warn outsiders consider the attitude and way of think-
ing of spiritual science and judge its content using the preva-
lent way of thinking they could easily conclude, somewhat
correctly from their standpoint, that spiritual science creates
high ideals out of thin air. Those ideals tend toward what out-
siders might call “self-styled” knowledge of nature and the
human soul and spirit. They might then say that those ideas
and understandings are quite beautiful and satisfy the inner
longings of the soul, and that it is understandable that those
unconvinced by conventional science would be led to believe
spiritual science the thirst of their souls. If someone familiar
with spiritual science says something about the sense per-
ceptible world or things in the conventional scientific domain,
then an outsider might say it all sounds fantastic. That fantas-
tic aspect is quite evident to an outsider. Those within spiri-
tual science can easily understand how someone could find so
much fantasy there. People with a conventional scientific per-
spective might easily say they cannot do anything with spiri-
tual science. We can easily understand that.
72 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
In contrast, let us now consider someone who has penetrated
spiritual science more deeply, who has gained insight into what
the soul presents and has learned what the human soul and the
human spirit actually are. Such a person will have quite different
feelings. Such a person could look at the conventional view of
the world and see what has arisen as its tasks, goals, and values,
and how it has affected practical life. What materialism says
about various areas of cultural activity seems quite fantastic to
someone within spiritual science. For example, we need only
hear what it has to say about education. To the spiritual
researcher it simply sounds like a lot of slogans and clichés. We
can look at the wide range of pedagogical effort and everywhere
find sugar-coated words. Who has not heard, for example, “We
should avoid stuffing things into children’s souls,” or, “We
should develop human individuality”? But who can say anything
beyond such extravagant slogans if what human individuality is
has not been properly comprehended. In contrast to spiritual
science, materialistic science is simply a sum of abstractions and,
as such, is unrealistic. Someone who comprehends spiritual sci-
ence must, therefore, reply that spiritual science not only wants
to be practical, but also attempts to see the real foundation of
things. That is possible particularly in the area of education.
If we use spiritual science to think imaginatively about a
child, then, as we face the growing child living into life, we are
overcome by the feeling that before us stands a sacred riddle. If
we work with the child, we must seek to solve that riddle with a
deep sense of reverence. We feel in that growing soul something
different from everything we see. We feel that something
unknown lives in the developing human being, and that feeling
is correct. Our modesty and reverence cannot be great enough
when we face the task of educating the child. Our humility
before that being who presents us with a new riddle to solve can
also not be great enough. I would not dare to speak about it if I
Interests, Talents, and Educating Children 73
had worked only with spiritual science. I do, however, dare to
speak about it because, as a teacher, I have felt that sacred riddle
for some fifteen years. From the modern standpoint, it is child’s
play not only to deride such things but, also with an apparent
right, to refute as fantastic the idea of human reincarnation and
the reappearance of people in new lives. Today, we will only
mention in passing the idea of reincarnation, that our embodied
souls living today through the period between birth and death
have often gone through life. We will only mention that we live
today so that later we can experience the effects and fruits of this
life. People can easily refute that in theory. However, things look
different when you teach with the correct feelings and see how
the growing soul of the child develops from week to week and
from year to year. If you approach your desire to teach with the
proper attitude, then you will recognize that you will be affect-
ing something developed over millennia. If you consider every-
thing children do and everything you do from that perspective,
then you can see how fruitful education can be. Those who
know the laws of logical proof know the impossibility of prov-
ing this point of view through formal logic. However, if you
work with this in mind, then you will feel the truth.
We certainly confront a difficult task when we want to
understand how the child’s soul develops. Everyone knows the
purely external facts. However, who has not experienced how
powerless teachers often are when the law or parents’ demands
define their tasks? Who has not experienced the frustration
when the assigned tasks contradict the child’s innate interests
and talents? Who has not felt and seen the truth that even the
greatest efforts achieve nothing if we do not take the child’s
aptitudes into account? How often life has shown us that we
are powerless not only before the child’s lack of ability, but also
before our own lack of understanding. We attempt to educate,
but if we educate improperly, the effects are not immediately
74 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
visible. However, if we follow a student’ life, we often see
something quite curious, namely, that talents and predisposi-
tions later arise from the child’s soul only after difficult strug-
gles. Then we can see that had we only recognized them and
been more helpful, we could have spared the child much that
occurred later. We see how necessary it is to focus upon the dif-
ficult question of the child’s innate interests and gifts, and that
we must take them into account in our teaching. People are
very unclear about such basic questions today, because modern
ideas and concepts inevitably numb people. One such concept
is that of heredity, but such concepts form people's entire atti-
tude. When speaking of a child’s aptitudes, who would not first
think of asking how much the child inherited from his or her
parents and ancestors? Goethe once spoke of that with under-
standable modesty, but in a way based upon a deep awareness:
From Father I have stature,
For the seriousness of life,
From Mother a happy nature
And a love for storytelling.
After relating a few other things about heredity, he closes with:
What now lives in the little imp
That can still be called original?!
Posterity has already given a partial answer and will continue
to answer in future generations. Someone who has spent some
twenty years studying Goethe certainly has a right to say some-
thing. With all due respect to the Frankfurt councilman from
1. Wolfgang Johannes Goethe, Zahme Xenien (Gentle satires), volume VI,
No. 32.
Interests, Talents, and Educating Children 75
whom Goethe inherited his stature for the seriousness of life...
If you look at how Goethe led his life, you will certainly have
respect for what he inherited from his father. If you look at the
agile and caring way his mother looked at life and interacted
with people, then you will certainly see what Goethe wants to
say he inherited from his mother. What is the result if you put
these together? If you put them together and think about it,
you will find that what he could not have inherited is his effec-
tiveness. What could vot be inherited is Goethe himself and
what the Guiding Forces allowed to stream into him and used
to express themselves. It is the same with everyone as it is with
great people. You cannot move forward if you try to attribute
everything to heredity without considering the individual, who
develops according to its own laws. Thus, if you consider life
objectively the question becomes less simple—that is, what is
the relationship between what we can trace back to our ances-
tors and what is obviously there, what is personal?
Spiritual science certainly does not deny inherited characteris-
tics, but how does it view heredity? You can, of course, see
“heredity” everywhere. There are people who claim that when
characteristics appear that cannot be found in the ancestors, we
can still point to heredity because those abilities may have been
present previously, though undeveloped. This is often said and
often disputed. People who speak this way have only a vague
concept of innate capacities, which is not realistic because they
invent explanations for everything. It seems to me that someone
who does that is the same as one who says that every brick has a
tendency to fall on people’s heads. It just needs someone to be
there. One who thinks realistically certainly cannot speak of
innate capacities in that way. The task of a genuine pedagogy is
to separate the hereditary from the nonhereditary. By using an
example from the animal kingdom, we can create a picture of
heredity. A chicken egg contains the whole “seed” of the
76 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
chicken, but it needs heat from outside. Therefore, we can see
that heat is a basic element but does not exist in the “seed” itself.
Nevertheless, superficial observation will show that animals can
inherit certain things, whereas when we speak of human beings,
we must certainly admit that there are some things we cannot
inherit. Think of what we call instinct. It is unquestionably in
the animal from the very beginning, so we must consider it to
be inherited. Because an animal is part of a whole species and
inherits all of the characteristics of that species; its manual skill,
for example, is much greater than that of human beings.
Human beings are much worse off than animals in that way.
People who speak with humility customarily create humble
concepts. Those who speak with pride create proud concepts;
they tend to say that animals are lower than human beings. This
is not true in an absolute sense. For instance, anyone can read
about how long it took human intelligence to develop paper, but
wasps developed it long before that. If we study the animal king-
dom, then we can see how ostensibly intellectual activities
develop from simple instincts. However, we may not then con-
clude that human beings are less intelligent than animals. People
cannot inherit certain things. Everyone would agree that a wasp
inherits the skill to construct its nest; however, there can be no
doubt that a human being set in the wilderness would never
develop language or self-awareness. Human beings cannot
inherit speech and self-awareness. Heredity does not contain
them. People must always learn them anew. Thus, even superfi-
cial observation shows that we cannot address the most impor-
tant things for humanity in the same way as we do those of the
animal kingdom. On the other hand, who could deny the exist-
ence of things that we can inherit? Who would deny Schopen-
hauer’s statement that he inherited much of his thoughtful
character from his mother and much of the nature of his will
from his father? Who would deny that there is something
Interests, Talents, and Educating Children TT
important and truthful in that, even if awkwardly expressed? We
can see that human beings do, in fact, enter earthly existence
with inherited characteristics, and it is our task to differentiate
those inherited traits from those not inherited. This is what
experience shows us. Nevertheless, someone could agree that we
do not inherit speech and self-awareness, but that we still do not
need to make such subtle distinctions because everything will
work out. When a human being is born into a particular linguis-
tic region, he or she will learn to speak.
Are there other nonhereditary characteristics, whose source we
must seek at a deeper level in the human personality? It is not so
easy to differentiate those nonhereditary traits and talents within
human nature from hereditary ones. Clearly, it is heredity when
seven musicians are born to the Bach family. Nevertheless, those
who approach education realistically can do nothing other than
separate the essence of the individual from what is inherited. We
must be very clear about the role of heredity.
We see that when a child enters earthly existence, he or she is
more like the father in some ways and more like the mother in
others. We see the child has certain characteristics from the
mother and others from the father. Someone who considers life
objectively will soon notice that there is, in fact, a difference
between what the father gives to the child and what the mother
gives. Of course, these things intermingle, but we can differenti-
ate between the elements coming from the mother and those
coming from the father. If you look more closely, the distribu-
tion of these two factors becomes clear. We can see that all the
inherited characteristics related to the quality of intelligence and
the capacity for reason can in some way be traced back to some
characteristics of the mother. The traits we can summarize as
steadfastness of character, strength and an ability to enter into life,
which have a will-like quality—whether in the son or in the
daughter—can be traced back to characteristics of the father.
78 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
Notice, I did not say that we can trace the child’s intelligence
back to the intelligence of the mother, but that we can trace it
back to the nature of the mother’s intelligence, and that we can
trace the child’s steadfastness back to the nature of the father’s
character.
If you look at these things in more detail, you will soon see
significant differences between the course of the parents’ lives
and the nature of the child’s life, particularly regarding whether
a child is born early or late in the marriage. An educator can see
quite different relationships of the child to the parents depend-
ing upon whether the child is born early or late in the marriage.
Observation shows that in children born later in the marriage,
when the parents have already had experience in their work,
the mother’s or father’s characteristics are much more strongly
represented, and the children bear the imprint of the parents
much more clearly. In that case, there is greater intellectual
flexibility and a more firmly contoured character. It is interest-
ing to consider children in this manner when we attempt to
answer the question of what heredity carries.
Heredity is an expression of prior processes in the physical
world. What is hereditary? Hereditary characteristics are genu-
inely part of the physical body. If we say characteristics of
intelligence are hereditary, then we must say these are con-
nected with the physical body—that is, the brain. Since we are
given that instrument, it is natural that we show hereditary
characteristics. We inherit the finer details of our organs, and
we must accept them. In this way we can explain our depen-
dencies on those organs since we inherit them. To make a
gross comparison, if you are born with one hand you will see
how much you depend on it. Essentially, it is always the phys-
ical body that comes into consideration when we speak of
heredity as I have done here. What practical observations of
life reveal as the core of our being crystallizes from that, and we
Interests, Talents, and Educating Children 79
are unable to understand it if we trace it back to heredity. The
child is born with a certain intellectual flexibility, with a
capacity to reason; we can look at the mother and see that it
originates with her. We study the child’s character and then
look at the father and can gain some insight about it.
However, something special remains that is the most impor-
tant thing for the educator, since only when we can bring it
into harmony with inherited traits can education be successful.
We can trace the way reason develops back to the mother, but
the quality of reasoning indicates particular realms of life, and
we cannot trace that back to the mother. The characteristics of
one mother will show us a tendency toward music, those of
another toward mathematics. It would be a great error to direct
intelligence everywhere. The quality of intelligence is heredi-
tary, but we cannot inherit the particular direction, the talent
for this or that, although it is contained within the kind of
intelligence. Thus, as teachers, our task is to look at the mother
and comprehend the flexibility of intelligence, for instance,
why a child thinks slowly or quickly. But we must also recog-
nize the child’s specifically individual tendency toward this or
that. We can clearly see the characteristics inherited from the
father in a different way. We can understand the child’s stead-
fastness of character and certainty of will when we look at the
father. However, one thing we cannot so easily understand is
the direction of interest that crystallizes out of the core of the
child’s being. We see in one child one direction of interest and
in another child, another. These are specific to the individual.
To proceed wisely as educators, we must ask how the
mother’s way of reasoning and the father’s character traits
present themselves. If we are to properly educate, we must rec-
ognize interests lying within the child’s character and the direc-
tion of intelligence. We can easily confuse these. That is why the
father has so much difficulty raising a child who is particularly
80 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
like him. And the other way around, when a child is particu-
larly like the mother, the mother has great difficulty with the
child. Children who are particularly like their father are more
easily raised by the mother, and children who are particularly
like their mother are more easily raised by the father. If a child
is like the father, then he or she has the will impulses of the
father. However, the father cannot transfer his interests to the
child. The child’s talents arise within the realm of the mother
with the result that, in this area, the father can understand very
little of the child. The child will hone itself on the father’s char-
acter, but the mother can best care for the child’s talents. In the
reverse case, when the child is more like the mother, it will be
difficult for the mother to follow the child’s interest in the way
the father can. The golden rule is: Talents form in all quietude,
character in the rush of the world! Talents develop in the loving
care of the mother, character in the firm care of the father.
Usually, we do not meet people who clearly present the mix-
ture of characteristics inherited from the mother and the father.
Generally, either the father’s or the mother’s influence predom-
inates. A very important rule for teaching follows from that.
Suppose the motherly element predominates. Then, we can
often see how much the child seems like the mother and can
easily guess his or her specific talent. However, when the
fatherly element has been pushed aside, we will have consider-
ably more difficulty finding the particular interests that lie
within what the child has inherited from the father. In that
case, as teachers we must look at what heredity has not accom-
plished. We must look particularly closely at the father to see
whether he is easygoing or rigid. Then, we must develop the
repressed inherited characteristics. We can do that if we direct
our attention toward the other side. We will soon discover the
child’s talents and capabilities, but what heredity does not pro-
vide, we must achieve through education. What should the
Interests, Talents, and Educating Children 81
educator do? Here we have something of tremendous impor-
tance: When the teacher sees that something the child could
have inherited from the father is not clearly apparent, then he
or she must work to direct the child’s talents; the child’s atten-
tion must be directed toward tasks and activities consistent
with the child’s talents. The talents must be captivated by
external objects. Children who are more like the mother must
become accustomed to being surrounded by objects consistent
with their talents, toward which their attention can be directed.
It is not appropriate to follow the rule that, because children
have interests, they should be allowed to simply follow them.
Suppose a child is particularly like the father. Then we will
have difficulty guessing what his or her talents and capacities
are, but the child’s interests will be clearly expressed through
the will. The interests will live in the strength of the child’s
desires. We must be particularly careful not to base our conclu-
sions about the child’s real talents upon his or her interests. In
this case, we must carefully study the child’s interests in the
proper manner. If we allow interests to mature for which no
talent exists, we harm the child. An interest of the soul for
which there is no corresponding talent will turn upon the soul.
This constantly causes illness and disturbs the physical nervous
system. Many such cases can be traced back to people’s lack of
understanding about how to harmonize interests with talent.
We can learn much by seeing how children’s impulsive expres-
sions of particular interests lead to awkwardness and, on the
other hand, how other interests lead to gracefulness. We give
this little attention, but we should carefully classify interests.
Furthermore, as a teacher you have the task of restraining inter-
ests that would lead to awkwardness. You can best accomplish
that if you ask how the father and the mother are. You must
then discover the essence of the child’s nature that crystallized
out of the heritage of the mother and the father. We can truly
82 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
say, therefore, that education must be based on knowledge, not
on slogans like “Educate in harmony” or “Consider the indi-
vidual.” Just try to educate harmoniously when you dont know
where interests lead, or try to emphasize the individual when
you dont know how to find what is specific to the individual!
This is only one aspect of education, however. Human
beings come into the world not just for their own sake, but also
for the sake of humanity. We cannot simply accept what
appears in the child. The teacher will soon notice a comple-
mentary relationship that we in spiritual science call the laws of
karma. You can easily see that beings are placed where they
have something to do in the world. Edelweiss does not grow in
the plains, but upon the mountaintops. Everything grows
within its own element and cannot thrive where it does not
belong. It is the same with the essence of the human being,
which places itself in that element where it belongs. Things are
more harmonious than we might think. For this reason, talents
are more in harmony with those of the mother and interests
more with those of the father. Nevertheless, we must also look
in the other direction. Human beings depend upon the fact
that individuals do not speak their own private languages but
the language of the area where they are born. That is, they are
dependent upon the people in their surroundings. Thus, an
entire manner of thinking and feeling enters deeply into the
soul through language. That is coarsely observable. Compare
the soul of someone from Frankonia with that of someone
from West Prussia,” and then try to see how language affects
the entire manner of thinking and perceiving. It is that way
with everything, namely, people are placed into life according
to their qualities. Thus, if we want to educate consciously, we
2. Translators’ note: This would be comparable in contemporary United States
to comparing someone raised in Louisiana with someone from New York.
Interests, Talents, and Educating Children 83
must know that we do not educate people only as individuals.
Just as we cannot provide each child with an individual lan-
guage, so we also cannot do something special for each child.
Human nature is organized so that people adapt to the existing
cultural process. We must raise children in what belongs to
humanity, and it must take root in them.
When this becomes apparent to us, we must acknowledge
powerlessness against those elements. If we look at the child’s
talents and then at the demands of life, it might appear impos-
sible for us to bring them into harmony. Let us look at two
children. One child is born in an environment and learns a par-
ticular language. He or she grows up with that language and it
becomes a part of his or her soul, a part of the innermost
human being. Anyone who has thought about the relationship
of language to human nature will know that through language
people learn not only how to reason logically, but also how to
reason through feeling. For example, the way the a or u sound
works in a language tremendously effects the soul’s capacity to
feel. Language provides a “skeleton” for feelings and percep-
tions. Imagine another child who, due to life’s events, had to
learn another language immediately after barely learning his or
her mother language. Compare this child with one who is
totally integrated with his or her language, so that not only is
thinking done in that language, but also the child has learned
to be in it. Then you will see that the soul life of this second
child is much less settled and much less solid. A language that
forms a skeleton for the soul results in a sounder nature. A lan-
guage that “carries” the soul makes the soul less stable and less
certain. Thus, the soul of a child who develops in the latter way
is much more easily irritated, and does not meet life’s external
influences as vigorously.
Language can teach us the great importance of connecting
educational principles and what later becomes the content of
84 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
life with what occurs earlier. Everything inconsistent in educa-
tion significantly destroys the life of the soul. When we fail to
build upon what occurred earlier, we inflict the greatest damage
upon the soul. In contrast, a conscious connection has a mar-
velous effect. If you often sit with a child with a weak character
and begin, so that the child does not notice, to speak about
things that happened three years before, you can more easily
reprimand the child than when you refer to events of the
present. You can strengthen the child’s character by using
memories of earlier occurrences. We commit major errors if we
attempt to correct the child through punishment or controls
that arise out of our present anger. We can easily make mistakes
when the deed is fresh. Life is not without contradiction and
people must make errors; however, we can correct them. If you
need to correct, then sit with the child and speak about an ear-
lier misbehavior, since the child is past it and no longer feels
what occurred earlier. Feelings become numb and go a very dif-
ferent way than thoughts and memory. We see that we can
objectively discuss things that occurred earlier, and the more
often we do that and refresh the child’s memory of what hap-
pened, the more we can develop character. These are simply
rules that result from objective observations.
Of course, you need a spiritual-scientific view to gather the
individual events together. But then you can understand them
and draw important conclusions. We must look not only at the
individual, but at the whole. Then we must look toward creat-
ing harmony between individual nature and human nature. If
you return to past events it is possible to bring out a certain
kind of sympathy. You will, for example, find it difficult to
bring selfishness into harmony with the demands of the sur-
roundings. However, if you go back to past experiences, then
you will notice that you can engage the child. The educator
must bring earlier experiences into harmony with what occurs
Interests, Talents, and Educating Children 85
later. Teachers must be careful to bring individual children into
harmony with the demands of all humankind by working with
past occurrences. The more you reach back into the child’s pre-
vious experiences, the better you can teach. This is how you
should look for what is good for educating children.
We are amiss in allowing obvious talent to go undeveloped
and by placing children in continuous contradiction to their
surroundings; this causes illness. Suppressed talents and inter-
ests slip into people’s inner being, and later, can result in ill-
nesses of the soul. We sin against human health if we allow
children’s interests to go undeveloped. We are also amiss to
neglect the adjustment of children to their surroundings. If we
fail to do this a contradiction between the child’s soul and life’s
demands will cause a deep dissatisfaction with life. One who
understands the human soul could say that all the interests that
should have been nurtured, and all the talents that should have
been developed are missing in those who wander through life
saying how difficult life is. This results in people who cannot
find their way in life and become dissatisfied as a result.
Now you could easily say that everything I have said relates
to inner soul characteristics found within the intellect and the
will. However, those are the most important things for the edu-
cator since they show the essence of the soul, and this is where
teachers can create the most misfortune. How is that? The
development of interests and talents results in a kind of fluidity
of reasoning at an early stage, but at thirty years of age, it
becomes a dexterity in the fingers and hands. Awkwardness at
the age of thirty can be traced back to the fact that flexible
thinking was not learned around age seven. The lack of partici-
pation that occurs if we do not develop interests reveals itself as
indifference in all manner of practical responsibilities. We must
recognize that the core of human nature expresses itself in those
character traits.
86 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
A spiritual scientist would recommend that a child play. Why
do children play, and why should they play? Here I want to say
something about later life. You all certainly are aware of some-
thing that occurs in life, namely, being tired. However, where
does fatigue arise? You often hear the reply that fatigue occurs in
the evening when the muscles are worn out. Is it true that the
muscles, due to their nature, come into a state of fatigue? If that
were so, then we could certainly ask how tired the muscles in
our heart would be. They would certainly need to rest. It is not
in the nature of muscles to become tired. Muscles do what they
need to do. They do not become tired. External activity does
not affect the muscles of the heart. Fatigue arises only when you
make your muscles do something related to the external world,
something connected with conscious activity. Disharmony
between the demands of the outer world and our muscles causes
fatigue. The truth is that fatigue arises only because of a dishar-
mony between our inner constitution and the outer world.
Fatigue shows that a certain contradiction exists between the
outer world and inner life. You must be aware that the human
cultural process proceeds not only according to laws implanted
in the individual constitution.
The nature of the human soul is directed not only toward
the preservation of the species, but also toward the develop-
ment of soul and spirit. Here, two streams are expressed:
progress and organic structure. In the eternal laws of existence
it is written that human beings must sacrifice purely natural
laws to spiritual laws. Those who understand these things will
not complain, but will comprehend entirely that a counterbal-
ance is necessary. We must have a healthy preparation for life so
that we can act on external things with our hands and think
about external things with our brains. We must create a balance
that is possible only when we are in a position to do things at a
particular time that the outer world does not require and to be
Interests, Talents, and Educating Children 87
satisfied with the activity itself. Human nature meets that need
through playing. It is best for the child if we allow play to be
individually oriented, since that creates inner strength. If we
structure play, then you will certainly see what results. Today,
people want to standardize everything. Modern people cannot
even admit that we need clothing cut to the individual. A basic
tendency of modern culture is that we should feed even the
most extreme followers of Nietzsche from the same pot.” We
should not introduce standardization into the upbringing of
children, especially not in play. We must allow play to be indi-
vidualistic. We must give special attention to what the talents
and interests of each child are, for otherwise we would sin.
That brings us, as practicing teachers, to the need to believe
that it is the child’s spirit and not the muscles that must have
the strength to resist wear and tear. Spirit and soul must be
independent in play so that material things have no effect.
Thus, in play children can remain unaffected by the tiring
influences of the outer world. If we do not believe in an
inwardly free soul, we cannot teach effectively.
If you really work that way, however, you will see something
important. You will recognize that in childhood we must be
free of the coarsely material laws of the world. The earlier you
apply such rules to the child, the more you bring the child to a
state in which playing is no longer a “free activity.” Children
need truths they can embrace with heart and soul, so they
need not be slaves to what occurs in the outer world. This is
why you should tell fairy tales and myths that go into the soul.
In that way, you can create inner truths that free the soul. Pre-
viously, humanity did that instinctively, but in our time it is
necessary to be more conscious of the need to do it.
3. Translators note: Nietzsche’s core value was that of extreme individualism.
88 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
Now, someone might ask how a teacher could recognize a
child’s particular talents. That is really not so difficult. One of
the basic characteristics of a teacher, as I mentioned in a more
comprehensive manner, is modesty before what is struggling to
free itself as the essence of an individual. If we are humble before
something that has been developing for thousands of years,
something that we must help develop further, we will feel a
responsibility that brings life to our souls. It gives us a particular
quality, it gives us a stroke of genius. Teachers often have no idea
why they do the right things. Children say what they need. The
most important thing that we need in the education profession
is the love that results when we learn to love the personality just
beginning to develop. We will see what this love can accomplish
with the spirit. In outer life, love is often blind. However, when
we connect love to inner development, then it acts to open the
soul. Behind that love exists a still more powerful belief, which
acts on us to create the capacity to consider life in the proper
manner, and which reveals to us the human being placed into
the world of spiritual and sense perceptible life. As teachers, our
task is to create the connection between those two. We see in the
child how the spirit descends and weds human physicality.
When we see that, when we see how the spirit weds human
physicality in the child, our teaching will express what we can
call a true belief in life, and this can be expressed as follows:
The richness of matter
impinges upon the human senses
from the mysterious depths of the cosmos;
The clear light of the spirit
floods into the depths of the soul
from the heights of the cosmos.
They unite within the human being
to create wisdom-filled reality.
Interests, Talent,
and Education
BERLIN, JANUARY 12, 1911
Translated by Robert E Lathe & Nancy Parsons Whittaker
I: we look at what runs as a kind of /eit motif through the
previous winter lectures, and at the living essence of human
beings living not only between one birth and death but in
repeated earthly lives, then we must ask, “What shapes a
human being during one earthly life and has particular signifi-
cance in modern times?” Modern people certainly question and
try to understand the relationship between innate interests and
talents, and education. However, since people have little incli-
nation to turn their gaze from what appears to be formative,
and direct it toward the Creator of human beings, their ques-
tions easily take on an incomplete and vague character. If you
assume that human nature contains something that gives life
and exists throughout many lifetimes, you will recognize the
complexity of questions concerning the essence of the human
being. You will want to consider questions about innate inter-
ests, talent, and education in a new light, which is very differ-
ent from simply considering what modern people so often
emphasize—that is, heredity, or characteristics inherited from
ancestors.
90 THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
Spiritual science does not deny the existence of such inher-
ited traits, nor does it ignore anything that can be learned from
careful observation or through external senses and intellectual
considerations. However, spiritual science recognizes how all of
that relates to and serves the essence of the human being. This
human essence absorbs it in the same way that matter in physi-
cal life supports the tiny seed of a living plant as it determines
its form out of itself. What makes it possible for that plant
being to create its form externally is the substance, the matter,
it absorbs from its surroundings. Thus, in the general way a
human being lives, we will need to recognize a connection
between what comes into existence through birth and the
essence of the individual human being from which a human
being draws its spiritual and soul nutrition.
If, for example, we realize that our tasks as teachers are con-
nected to a human soul that steps into earthly existence and,
from hour to hour and week to week, increasingly develops its
inner capacities, and if we stand before a growing human being
as before a sacred riddle to be solved, a being who has come to
us from the endless distances of the cosmos so that we can give
that being the possibility to unfold and develop, then many
new tasks, outlooks, and possibilities will arise for all of human
life. We thus see a human being entering existence through
birth and assume that, in a certain sense, that being’s essential
nature is brought into earthly existence through birth. Conven-
tional science shows us—if we ignore slogans and theories and
look instead to the facts—how spirit and soul essence of the
human being works on within the child after birth, and how
what appears to us as physical struc
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