The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. Educational Issues from the Perspective of the Humanities

[ 1 ] Today’s lecture deals with matters that can be put into practice immediately. But in this consideration, we must always keep the entire development of humanity in mind; then we will also be able to understand the individual development of the young person and guide it. The school, with all its demands, stands at the very heart of education. We will seek to understand it from the perspective of human nature and the development of humanity. We first distinguish four members of the human being: the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral body, and the “I,” the center of the human being. But with physical birth, not all four members are yet free from external influences. Physical birth frees only the physical body; the etheric body is born at the time of tooth replacement, and the astral body at the time of sexual maturity. Just as the eyes and ears develop under the protective maternal covering before physical birth, so too do memory, temperament, and so on—which are attached to the etheric body—develop under the protective covering of the ether before tooth replacement. Jean Paul says: A world traveler who traverses all countries does not learn as much on all his journeys as a child learns from his nurse by the age of seven. — The educator must allow freedom to that which develops of its own accord through the forces of nature.

[ 2 ] Why do we even need a school when it comes to a child’s education? What grows after physical birth requires a protective shell, much like the embryo in the womb. For it is only at a certain point that a human being enters a new life. Before reaching this point, their life is a repetition of earlier stages of existence. The embryo, too, goes through a repetition of all stages of development dating back to primeval times. Thus, after birth, the child repeats earlier epochs of human history. Friedrich August Wolf characterized the stages of human development from childhood onward as follows. First epoch: the golden, gentle, and harmonious age from the first to the third year. It corresponds to the way of life of today’s Native Americans and South Sea islanders. Second epoch: it reflects the struggles in Asia, their repercussions and effects in Europe, the heroic age of the Greeks; furthermore, the era of the North American indigenous peoples, and in the individual child, the period of life up to the age of six. Third epoch: It corresponds to the Greek era from Homer to Alexander the Great and, in the individual child, extends up to the age of nine. Fourth epoch: The Roman era, extending up to the age of twelve. Fifth epoch: The Middle Ages, extending up to the age of fifteen; here, religion is meant to ennoble the child’s natural vitality. Sixth epoch: the Renaissance, extending to the age of eighteen. Seventh epoch: the Reformation era, extending to the age of twenty-one. Eighth epoch: extending to the age of twenty-four, during which the human being rises to the present day. This framework provides a sound, spiritually valuable foundation, but we must not interpret it too narrowly. We must take into account the entire lineage of humankind. Human beings do not descend from lower animals. Although they descend from beings who were physically far behind the humans living today, they were by no means at all similar to apes. Spiritual science points to the times when humankind inhabited Atlantis.

[ 3 ] The spirit and soul of the Atlanteans were of a different nature than those of people today. They did not possess what is called intellectual consciousness. They could not write or do arithmetic. Their consciousness was, in a sense, somnambulistic. They could perceive many things in the spiritual worlds. Their consciousness was similar to that of a sleeping person experiencing vivid dreams. But the images that arose in their consciousness were not chaotic; rather, they were orderly and alive. At that time, the will was still powerful enough to influence the limbs. Their degenerate descendants are today’s higher mammals, namely the apes. The ordinary Atlantean consciousness was a pictorial consciousness. Our dream consciousness is a remnant of it. Even the wildest imagination of today is, in its images, only a faint reflection of this pictorial world of the Atlanteans. And the Atlantean mastered these images. Logic and the laws of reason did not exist at that time. We see a reflection of this in the arbitrary play of children; in children’s play, the pictorial perception lives on. Life flowed to the Atlanteans from all things, just as it does today to children from their toys.

[ 4 ] During the Lemurian epoch, the human being descended into the physical body for the first time. This is repeated today at physical birth. At that time, the human being descended into the body and developed it to ever higher levels of soul and spirit. The human being repeats the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs until the age of seven.

[ 5 ] From the time of tooth replacement until sexual maturity, the developmental epoch in which great spiritual teachers appeared among humanity is repeated. The last of these were Buddha, Plato, Pythagoras, Hermes, Moses, Zarathustra, and so on. At that time, the spiritual world still exerted a greater influence on humanity. This is preserved for us in the heroic sagas. The spirit of those ancient cultural epochs must therefore form the basis of school instruction during these years.

[ 6 ] The period up to the twelfth century—the age of city-building—corresponds to a child’s seventh through fourteenth years. At that time, the only concepts that could be discussed were those of community and authority. Some sense of the power and splendor of the great leaders must be present for children during these years. The question of the teacher is therefore the most important aspect of the entire school system. The teacher must be a source of self-evident authority for the children, just as the power of what the great teachers had to say flowed naturally into people’s souls. It is terrible when a child doubts his or her teacher. That is very harmful. The reverence the child shows the teacher must be the greatest conceivable. This must go so far that the goodwill the teacher bestows—and it goes without saying that he does—appears to the child as a gift. What matters is not the methodological and pedagogical principles, but rather that the teacher understands psychology in the highest sense. The study of the soul is the most important element of teacher training. One should not seek to know how the soul is supposed to develop, but rather observe how human beings actually develop.

[ 7 ] And every age places different demands on people, so that universally applicable formulas are worthless. What defines a teacher is not knowledge or mastery of pedagogical methods, but a certain character, a disposition that has an effect even before the teacher has spoken. To a certain extent, the teacher must have undergone an inner development; the teacher must not only have learned, but must have been inwardly transformed. One day, exams will not test knowledge—not even pedagogical principles—but rather one’s very being. School must be life itself for the child. It should not merely reflect life; it should be life itself, for it is meant to bring an earlier stage of life to life. School should generate a life of its own; external life should not flow into it. What a person will no longer have later in life, they should have here in school. Imaginative, allegorical concepts should be richly evoked. “Everything transitory is merely a parable”: the teacher must be fully convinced of this statement. When speaking figuratively, the teacher must not think, “This is only a parable.” When the teacher fully shares in the child’s experience, power flows from the teacher’s soul into that of the child. Natural processes must be clothed in imagery, in the richness of the imagination. One must create what lies beyond the sensory realm. Our current visual instruction is therefore entirely misguided, since it points only to the outward appearance. The seed contains not only the plant, but also the power of the sun—indeed, the entire cosmos. One must awaken these allegorical forces so that the child can immerse themselves in nature. One must do arithmetic with the child not on a calculator, but using their living fingers. The living power of the spirit must be stimulated. One must not only show the child the plant and describe it, but let the child draw it. Then joyful people will emerge from school who find meaning in life. Arithmetic and natural science train the power of thought, memory, and recall. History trains the powers of feeling. Feeling a connection to all that is great and beautiful fosters love for what must be loved. The will, however, is developed only through a religious worldview. This must permeate everything. Jean Paul says: Listen to how correctly a child speaks, and then ask its father to explain it. — A child cannot understand everything it is actually capable of. And so it is with all people. Only our materialistic age expects so little of memory. First the child learns; later it understands what it has learned; and still later it comes to know the laws.

[ 8 ] Between the ages of seven and fourteen, the sense of beauty must also be developed. It is this sense that conveys to us the symbolic understanding of things. Above all, however, the child’s education should focus on life itself and, as far as possible, avoid abstract ideas. Those should come only after puberty. Only then should the child learn theories, once it has already gained a meaningful understanding of things. The spirit of nature must have spoken first—the facts themselves, which lie behind the sensory world. There is no need to fear that everything will be forgotten after school is over. What matters is that it bears fruit, that the spirit is shaped. Only what a person has felt and experienced remains. The particular passes away; the universal remains and grows. But education can never be conducted without a religious foundation. A school without religion is simply an illusion. Even Haeckel’s “Mystery of the Universe” is, after all, rooted in religion. Those who oppose religion do so either from a lofty standpoint—as Schiller says, “out of religion”—or from a very lowly standpoint. But a theory can never replace religion. The history of religion can never replace it. Those who possess a deeply religious disposition can also impart religion. The spirit that lives in the world also lives within human beings. One must feel that one stands within a spiritual world order from which one receives one’s mission. There is a saying: “One glance at the book, and two at life—that is what must give form to the spirit.” But school must be immediate life; the book itself must be life, must delight just as life itself does. Thus, we can rephrase the saying as follows:

A glimpse into a book is like a glimpse into life,
It can give the spirit its proper form.