The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] Not in the sense that is usually meant when one speaks of continuing a line of thought, I will today pick up where I left off last Sunday. At that time, I attempted—as far as was possible in a sketchy manner and in a preliminary, formal-pedagogical way—to explore how the structure of an intellectual and educational life separate from political and economic life might be conceived; and how, when such a separation occurs, the individual so-called academic subjects would have to be used—in a different way than has been the case thus far—to shape what should emerge for teachers and educators as a kind of anthropological pedagogy, or rather, as a kind of anthropological-pedagogical practice. Even back then, I noted that teacher training—and specifically the assessment of what determines whether a person is suited to be a teacher or educator—would be of essential importance for the future.

[ 2 ] I will save the immediate continuation of the formal-pedagogical matters for later consideration. Today I would like to try, in a completely different way, to provide you with a continuation of what I discussed previously. I will attempt to suggest to you how, based on the forces of historical development, I believe we should speak today—for example, at teachers’ conferences or similar events that truly seek to serve the needs of our time. It is indeed the case in our present time that, if we wish to emerge from confusion and chaos, we must speak today about many things in a completely different way than one might imagine based on traditional ways of thinking.

[ 3 ] Today, as obvious examples might show you, people at teachers’ meetings talk about I would say, the old, well-worn track, whereas a truly free education of the future could only be initiated if educators and teachers were raised to that level at which one gains an overview of the truly great challenges of our immediate present—insofar as these great challenges can then be translated into concrete implications specifically for the fields of education and teaching. Certainly, the way I will speak to you today will not be what I would present as authoritative or even in any way exemplary. But I would like, so to speak, to point out the realm in which we should address educators today, so that these educators may receive the impetus to engage of their own accord in a free system of education. It is precisely these teachers who must be raised to meet the great, comprehensive challenges of our time; teachers must first and foremost discern what forces are actually hidden within today’s world events; which forces—originating from the past—must be eradicated; and which forces are emerging from the depths of our present existence that require special attention. A certain—I would say, in the best and most ideal sense—cultural-political perspective must be adopted today, one that could serve as the foundation for the very impulses that must be conveyed to teachers. For example, it must first and foremost be recognized that our pedagogy is infinitely impoverished at all levels of teaching and instruction, and the reasons for this impoverishment must be understood. Above all, this pedagogy has lost its direct connection to life. Today, educators speak of all sorts of methodological matters, and above all, they speak of the great benefits that state administration is supposed to bring to education. They probably continue to speak of these benefits—I would say, almost automatically—even if, in theory, they have already grasped something of the necessary threefold structure of the social organism. Never before have these—I would say—automatic patterns of thought been as strong as they are in our own time, and this automatic nature of thought patterns is particularly evident in the development of pedagogical ideas. These pedagogical ideas have suffered from something we have not yet been able to escape in recent times, but from which we must escape. Indeed, there are questions today that simply cannot be answered by saying, “Based on past experience, either this or that is possible.” Such a response would immediately give rise to hesitation in people’s hearts and souls. Today there are countless questions that must be answered by asking ourselves: “Must not one thing or another happen if we are to emerge from confusion and chaos?” And then we are dealing with questions of the will, into which the often seemingly justified, hesitant questions of the intellect—based on so-called experience—have no business intruding. For an experience has value only when it has been worked through by the will in the appropriate manner. There is much experience today—but little experience that has been worked through by the will in the appropriate manner. In the field of education in particular, much is said that, viewed purely from an intellectual standpoint, is not even particularly open to objection—and which, from that perspective, seems quite sensible. But today the task is to recognize what really matters: above all, to recognize how our pedagogy has become alienated from life.

[ 4 ] I would like to make a personal remark here as well. About twenty-three years ago, an association for higher education pedagogy was founded in Berlin. The chairman of this association was the astronomer Wilhelm Förster. I was also a member of this association. We were to give a series of lectures in this association. Most of these lectures were presented in such a way that one might have thought it was sufficient merely to recognize certain formal aspects of how the individual sciences are taught and how they are organized into faculties or the like. I tried—though I was little understood at the time—to draw attention to the fact that a university should be nothing other than a cross-section of life in general; that, above all, anyone who wishes to speak about higher education pedagogy must begin with the question: In what stage of life, from a world-historical perspective, do we currently find ourselves in all the various fields, and what impulses can we observe emerging from the most diverse areas of life that we might allow to shine into the university, so that we can make the university a cross-section of life in general? If one carries out such things not in the abstract but in concrete terms, then the most diverse perspectives emerge regarding the limits—let us say, of the time—to be devoted to one or another so-called subject; the ways in which one subject or another can be approached also become apparent. The moment one attempts to impose such limitations based solely on the methods pedagogy frequently employs today, everything fails; one transforms the educational institutions in question into nothing more than training centers for people out of touch with the real world.

[ 5 ] But what are the innermost reasons, the deeply rooted reasons, for why all of this has turned out this way? Just as the magnificent development of scientifically oriented thinking has emerged in recent times, so too has this scientific thinking—which, on the one hand, has achieved in a magnificent way the understanding of human beings purely as natural beings—fundamentally cut off any real understanding of humanity; that understanding of human beings which we spoke of recently as being absolutely essential, especially for the true educator; that understanding which perceives the living human being in the entirety of his existence—not as is so often depicted today in a merely formal way, but according to his inner essence, namely, according to his developmental nature. There is a symptom—one I have mentioned here on several occasions—of this immense alienation from humanity inherent in the modern educational system. If one says such things today, one might be accused of paradox. But they must be spoken today, for they are the very most essential. From the loss of a truly living understanding of human nature has arisen that desolate, barren pursuit that today asserts itself as a branch of so-called experimental psychology—against which I have nothing as such. The so-called testing of aptitude—a truly horrifying spectacle of what is truly fruitful in the field of education. I may have already described to you on several occasions how, through external experimental procedures, memory, even intellect, and other human faculties are to be tested, so that one can determine, by means of external observation, whether someone has a good or bad memory, a good or bad intellect. In a purely mechanical manner—by presenting sentences and having them completed, or by proceeding in some other similar way—one attempts to gain a picture of the abilities a developing human being possesses. This is a symptom of the fact that, in cultural life, we have forgotten all direct human-to-human relationships, which alone can be fruitful. It is a symptom of something disheartening that has been allowed to develop—and which is today marveled at as a special advancement—this testing of abilities that has sprung up from the so-called psychological laboratories of modern universities. Until we realize how we must return to an intuitive understanding of the human being—namely, the developing human being—derived directly from within the human being itself, and until we overcome this disheartening creation of a chasm between human beings in this realm as well, we will not be able to understand at all what it means to create a life-affirming pedagogy for a free spiritual life. Everything in our educational institutions that seeks to experiment on human beings in order to arrive at some pedagogical conclusion must be swept out. I consider experimental psychology to be worthless as a foundation for a sound psychology; just as it has crept into pedagogy today—and even into courtrooms—it spells ruin for what must develop as something healthy: fully developed human beings who are not separated from other fully developed human beings by a gulf. We have reached a point where we have excluded everything human from our cultural endeavors. We must work to include this human element once again. And we must summon the courage to take a firm stand against many things that have gradually come to be regarded in recent times as great achievements; otherwise, we will never make any progress. That is why those who today leave universities as teachers—to then educate others—are often equipped with the most distorted views of human nature, because they have not been given genuine insights; instead, genuine insights have been replaced by something as externalized as this experimental assessment of abilities. This should be recognized as a symptom of decline. We must seek within ourselves the ability to assess a person’s abilities, because that person is human and we ourselves are human. And we must realize that any other method is harmful because it, in a sense, extinguishes the fulfillment that comes from the immediate, living understanding of what it means to be human—an understanding that is so necessary if we wish to move forward in a wholesome way.

[ 6 ] These things are still not recognized at all today. Above all, they must be recognized if we are to make progress. How often have these matters been discussed here as well? People have sometimes smiled at these absurdities. But people did not always realize that these things were discussed precisely so that they might truly become an integral part of today’s spiritual life. Yet what matters today is not that one listens to something like a feature article; what matters today is that one learns to distinguish between what is merely—I would say—an insight or reflection, and what may contain the seeds of action. All the striving of so-called anthroposophy, as practiced here, ultimately culminates in building up the idea of the human being and providing insight into humanity. We need this. We need it because, in response to the demands of our time, we must overcome a threefold predicament. Three kinds of compulsion have been left over from ancient times. First, the most ancient compulsion, which in the present is merely masked in various ways as clerical compulsion. One would make greater progress in assessing the current situation if one were to recognize this disguise in the state-sponsored ideas and impulses of Europe, America, and also Asia—which, while now defunct in terms of external realities, unfortunately still persist in human thought—as the modern disguise of the old priestly compulsion.

[ 7 ] The second form of coercion—which emerged somewhat later in the course of human history and already manifests itself today in various guises—is political coercion.

[ 8 ] And third, we have economic coercion, which is the one that emerged relatively latest.

[ 9 ] Humanity must free itself from these three compulsive impulses; that is its immediate task in the present. It can only do so if, above all, it clearly sees where the residues, the remnants, of what lives among us today in various guises—the masks of these three compulsive impulses of humanity—are to be found.

[ 10 ] Above all, educators today must raise their gaze to that level where such matters can be discussed, where the insights gained from them can be used to shed light on contemporary developments, and where one can see everywhere how one or another form of coercion is embedded in one or another contemporary reality. Only then will we muster the courage to say to ourselves today: Because pedagogy has isolated itself—has, in a sense, retreated into the school—it has come to the point where it puts forward such eccentric ideas—which are merely a symptom—such as testing human abilities through experimentation. But wherever people speak today of general or specialized pedagogical methods, we see the consequence of this withdrawal into the school alone—into which the state has forced pedagogy—and this detachment from life. Never can one of the most fundamental branches of life— the intellectual, the legal or political, and the economic—fully develop in the present—I say explicitly in the present, and particularly in our region—if these three branches are not placed on their own ground. For the far west, America, and for the far east, the situation is different, but precisely because it is different, this matter must be understood here. We must finally come to think concretely, no longer abstractly; otherwise, with regard to spatial matters, we will arrive at a theory that promises happiness for all of humanity across the entire Earth—which is nonsense—or at a sort of millennial kingdom in terms of historical development—which is also nonsense. Thinking concretely in this area means thinking within a specific geographical space and for a specific period of time. We will have more to say about this later today.

[ 11 ] The educator’s gaze must be directed toward these great world phenomena; it must be able to take in what is present in contemporary spiritual life, and what in this contemporary life must change as a result of educating the developing human being in a way that is entirely different from what has been practiced in recent times. What has been fostered in recent times has led, particularly in the field of education, to a terrible degree of specialization among those who are then expected to work in education. One very often encounters praise for specialization, particularly in ceremonial speeches and at gatherings of natural scientists and other scholarly assemblies. Of course, I would be a fool if I could not recognize the necessity underlying this specialization, even in the realm of science; but it needs to be balanced; otherwise, we create chasms between people, and no longer face one another with understanding as human beings, but stand opposite one another, helpless as specialist against specialist, with no other basis for trusting the specialist than the fact that he is in some way certified by the existing institutions. But we were on the path to introducing this specialization into life through the school system as well. Whether the turmoil of the present will spare us the misfortune of having psychologists—in addition to all manner of other experts—summoned into the courtroom, as some would have it, to conduct their experiments on criminals—just as experiments are conducted on young people—remains to be seen. I am not so much objecting to the matters themselves as to the way in which they have established themselves in the present.

[ 12 ] This is how things stand in the fields of education, schooling, and government.

[ 13 ] Yes, after the brief period during which this was discussed—whether the content itself was debatable or not—regarding the intrinsically grounded human right (which was called “natural law” at the time)—after this relatively short period, an era began in which people started to feel embarrassed to speak of this natural law. One was, of course, considered an amateur if one spoke of this natural law—that is, if one assumed that the very existence of a human being as an individual in and of itself constitutes something that, as such, establishes the right; one was thus an amateur, and it was considered expert only to speak of historical law—that is, of what has historically developed into law. People lacked the courage to address true law; therefore, they limited themselves to examining so-called historical law alone. But this is something educators in particular should know today. Educators should be thoroughly instructed—particularly at teachers’ conferences—on the course of the nineteenth century: how the concept of natural law was lost, or how it survives, at best, in disguised forms within today’s law, and how a certain hesitation, an inner hesitancy among people, has clung to the merely historical. Anyone familiar with the situation knows that the main impulse—which is no longer noticed in its outermost ramifications, where it creeps into pedagogy—still moves today in the direction of historical law; that people strive—to use Goethe’s words—not to speak of the right with which we are born. I have often pointed out in the lectures I have given here that today we must make the big reckoning, not the small one, openly and honestly. Therefore, we must not shy away from correctly characterizing that which must be eradicated, for nothing new can ever be built unless we have a clear understanding of what has corrupted human habits of thought and feeling.

[ 14 ] It can certainly be said that our Central European culture, in particular, clearly demonstrates how a truly positive concept of the state first collapsed. Attempts were made to establish it as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century; it perished under the influence of historical structures that asserted their dominance. And without those involved even realizing it—while they believed they were pursuing unbiased science—it came to pass that what was being pursued was done solely in the service of the state or the economic system. What has come about through the influence of the state has permeated not only the administration of science but also the content of science—and particularly everything that has become practical science. That is why we have virtually no political economy today, because free, independent thinking could not develop. That is why, particularly with regard to the most important laws of economic life, we find ourselves in a situation today where people do not understand at all when one speaks of genuine economic laws. And this is particularly evident in the way pedagogy has fallen into disarray—pedagogy on a grand scale, which is not rooted in life but has withdrawn from life into the classroom. A truly vital view of anything can never come about if one merely points to what is to be experienced externally—and not to how it is to be experienced. What has been cultivated in modern times alone—the worship of mere external experience—leads only to confusion, especially when it is carried out conscientiously. What we need is to be able to cultivate the inner impulses that lead us to the right point of experience.

[ 15 ] You will recall that last Friday I drew attention—albeit only briefly, as was possible within the scope of these lectures—to how a study of European economic conditions at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries could shed light on how the cooperatives of the future—which are to be formed out of impulses toward production and consumption—should be structured. But one is drawn to this perspective—which is fundamental to all of European life and stems from what can be so clearly learned from the great turning point of modern times in all areas at the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth—only when one derives the major insights from a fundamental anthroposophical perspective. This does not distort the facts, but it does direct our attention to those points in development where significant symptoms reveal what otherwise remains hidden beneath the superficial current of development—and what must be regarded as the actual driving force. Consequently, the inner scientific and methodological guidelines were hidden from modern pedagogy and scientific didactics; pedagogy and didactics were more or less at the mercy of chance; chance directed them toward this or that field. What we need is to receive inner guidelines that direct us toward the truths that are truly important: the guidelines that can be derived from Goethe’s worldview, through which much, much can be understood. This must not be contrived; it must not be sought through the intellect alone; it must be sought from a human being’s inner interwoven connection with the world—a connection we have entirely lost, as is evident precisely in the fact that we seek to fathom the individual human being in such an external manner, as has occurred through the pedagogical offshoot of experimental psychology.

[ 16 ] Above all, those who are raising children today need to be enlightened about the fundamental driving force behind modern-day development. And when we reach a point where the main direction of life must be changed, what is needed above all is an understanding of what has emerged thus far in human development. First, the elemental impulse toward a state life free of economic considerations was lost; then, in the last third of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century, we—especially in Central Europe—trampled our spiritual life underfoot, reducing it to a mere parasite of existence. How much has flowed into this spiritual life—the one we wish to be part of today—from, for example, the great impulse of Goetheanism? Nothing, practically nothing! Outwardly, people talk endlessly about Goethe; yet nothing of the immense significance inherent in Goethe’s way of viewing the world has found its way into the general consciousness. Unscrupulous enough—as I have often recounted—was the Weimar Goethe Society to consider placing at its head not someone who understood anything about Goethe, but a dismissed Prussian finance minister. I have often mentioned that one could view this choice with a sense of humor, given that his first name is Kreuzwendedich.

[ 17 ] Thus we have drifted into a state of disregarding our intellectual past. Nowhere in our present consciousness is there any trace of what gave German intellectual life its characteristic stamp, particularly from the Goethean perspective. All of that has been eradicated, turned into a parasite. Edition after edition of Goethe’s works has been published—yet nowhere has Goethe’s spirit found its way in. Anyone who sees through these things must say today: The situation is bad in the economic sphere, it is bad in the political sphere, but it is worst of all in the spiritual sphere. Thus we first ruined our political consciousness; thus we subsequently ruined our connection to our own spiritual life. I say this not out of pessimism, but because an understanding of what has happened must lead to an understanding of what must happen.

[ 18 ] Then, then came what is called the World War. Following the collapse of the political order—which, though already fractured, had been artificially propped up—and following the inner collapse of spiritual life came the economic collapse, the magnitude and severity of which people today still cannot even begin to imagine, because they believe we are at the end or in the middle of this collapse, whereas we are only at the beginning. This economic collapse—you can study it everywhere in what has emerged as the global catastrophe. If one were to study it properly today—I mean, what took place in the so-called Baghdad Railway issue before the World War—one would see the most unfortunate intertwining of political and economic life. If one traces the individual stages of the Baghdad Railway negotiations—with which the ill-fated Helfferich is particularly associated—one sees, time and again, on the one hand, economic capitalism forming one combination after another, and on the other hand, the intervention of national-political, chauvinistic machinations; machinations that differ depending on whether they originate in the East or the West. In Germany, one observes a loss of the sense of purpose, since intellectual life has been lost; a loss of the sense of purpose, since political life has been lost; and a restriction to mere economic life. From the West, economic-political aspirations are at play everywhere, masquerading as chauvinism or nationalism, which in turn masquerades as economic-political forces; from the East, spiritual-political forces, which in turn disguise themselves in the most varied ways. All of this is tangled together in what must then lose itself in absurdity, in impossibility—the Baghdad Railway problem. In this problem, in its entire course, lies the simple proof of the impossibility of further development of the old imperialism, of the impossibility of further development of the old political system.

[ 19 ] What is evident, I would say, in the determination to build this railway—a major issue in world politics—is also evident in the details during the war. People simply never looked at things in such a way that they turned their attention, guided by appropriate principles, to the point where external events can reveal internal connections. You see, Kapp was squawking, Bethmann Hollweg was ranting, and Germany’s intellectual leaders remained silent. Such was the situation at one time. Kapp, the representative of agriculture, was squawking because he was at a loss regarding the war economy’s impact on agriculture. Bethmann Hollweg, the most apolitical of minds, ranted because he didn’t know what sensible thing to say about the matter. And Germany’s intellectual leaders remained silent because they had withdrawn entirely into formal, academic rigors and knew nothing of life, had no idea how the affairs of life must be handled.

[ 20 ] I don’t know how many of you remember these things. What I’m telling you isn’t exaggerated in any way; that was truly the situation at the time: Kapp was squealing, Bethmann Hollweg was ranting in the Reichstag about the terrible exploitation the poor had suffered, and those who should have known something about these matters either remained silent or spoke words that were tantamount to silence—words far removed from reality. Economic development could, in fact, only be reduced to absurdity by a major, noticeable global event. And many people did not notice how far we had fallen in terms of the state. After all, they had the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs, and Tsarism. The fact that within Tsarism, the Hohenzollern Empire, and the Habsburg Empire, the seed of dissolution was already present in the most decisive sense—because the impossible was intertwined with them—could be concealed, because an unnatural framework held together what was already in complete dissolution, since there was no longer any state impulse within it.

[ 21 ] Today, socialists often emphasize that the state must come to an end. No one has done more to bring about the end of a rational state than the dynasties of nineteenth-century Europe. As for intellectual life, we were able to ignore—through illusions and all manner of numbing—the fact that we had trampled it underfoot, insofar as it was the achievement of the nineteenth century. With economic life, that was not possible. You see, when the state is in dire straits, it consoles itself by taking delight in festivals at which paper flowers are offered to the dynasts. It is no fairy tale, but a demonstrably true fact, that, for example, elegantly dressed women on the bridges of Hamburg threw themselves with genuine fury at the cigarette butts that Wilhelm I had discarded so he could keep them as souvenirs. But it is also no fairy tale that Wilhelm II did not turn away in disgust from such sycophancy, but rather found that it flattered his vanity greatly; he revelled in it.

[ 22 ] Yes, we have recently witnessed this strange phenomenon in the realm of economic life, which could not be characterized any other way than to say that agriculture was squeaking, politics was clamouring, industry was rubbing its belly with contentment, and the workers—insofar as they had already received a small share from industry—joined in at first, until they went to the front and learned a different tune there, and then also spread different views when they returned home. Anyone who says today that the so-called “homeland” was the source of the collapse is, of course, lying. The collapse originated at the front, because people there could no longer bear it.

[ 23 ] These are the kinds of things that anyone who wants to educate the people today must know in particular. Furthermore, such a person must not sit in some corner, knowing nothing of life, but must understand what needs to be done. Far more important today than the formalities handed down at teachers’ conferences would be for youth educators, in particular, to discuss this cultural-historical phenomenon in depth and to shed light on what is so clearly evident in the realm of capitalist economic life.

[ 24 ] As you know, the statement “The end justifies the means” is attributed to a certain society—asserted by some and disputed by others. In economic life, which is under the influence of capitalism, another impulse has emerged during the so-called global catastrophe, namely: The end has desecrated the means. For everywhere, among the ends and goals that have been set—and this is precisely what the Baghdad Railway issue reveals once again—the means have been desecrated, or else the means have in turn desecrated the ends and goals as well.

[ 25 ] These things must be known, and they must be examined without reservation today. In this respect, I mean my reflection today to be pedagogical, in that I believe that—perhaps not in form, but from the perspective I am speaking from today—it is above all to teachers at every level that this message should be addressed. We must move beyond what has hitherto prevented the major world events from being discussed with teachers at all levels. As a result, we are now witnessing the bleak reality of the absolute political ignorance of a large portion of our population. One encounters people today—I cannot be polite in this case, for I cannot even say, “Those present are exempt,” at least not all of them— one encounters people today who do not know what has been taking place for decades, even in the most outward manifestations of, for example, the labor movement; who have no idea in what specific forms the proletariat has been struggling for decades. Well, a system of education for the people that introduces individuals to the world in such a way that they pass each other by and know nothing about one another—such a system must inevitably lead to collapse. Are there not, after all, members of the bourgeoisie today who know little more about workers than that they dress differently from them and the like, who know nothing of the aspirations that live on in labor unions, cooperatives, and political parties, who have not taken the trouble to look into what is happening all around them? Where does this come from? Because people have never learned to learn from life; because they only ever learn to know this or that. People think: I know this, I’m a specialist in this field; you know that, you’re a specialist in that field. People have grown accustomed to this, but they have never come to anything other than acquiring knowledge in their schools and regarding the acquisition of this knowledge as an ideal, whereas what really matters is learning how to learn—learning how to learn in such a way that, no matter how old one gets, one can remain a student of life right up until the year of one’s death. Today, even if people have graduated from college, they have generally stopped learning by their twenties. They can no longer learn anything from life; they merely draw on what they have absorbed up to that point. At most, they might gain a small insight here and there. Those who are different are the exceptions today. What matters is that we find a pedagogy in which one learns to learn—to learn from life throughout one’s entire life. There is nothing in life from which one cannot learn. We would be on different ground today if people had learned to learn. Why are we so socially helpless today? Because circumstances have arisen that people are not equipped to handle. They cannot learn from these circumstances because they are always forced to focus on the most superficial aspects. In the future, no educational approach will be fruitful unless we make the effort to rise to the great cultural perspectives of humanity.

[ 26 ] Anyone who looks at the world today with a few anthroposophical principles in mind—principles that have been discussed here so often—knows how to think concretely about what is there. They look to the West, they look to the East, and they can set themselves tasks based on concrete observation. They look to the West, into that Anglo-American world where great political impulses—which have become harmful to us Central Europeans, yet are generous in nature—have been at play for many decades—perhaps longer; I have only been able to follow them for decades. Yes, all those major impulses in modern political life have originated with the Anglo-American people, for they have always known how to reckon with historical forces. When I tried to explain this to some people during the war, saying, “We can only resist the forces emanating from there with similar forces drawn from historical impulses,” they laughed at me, because we have no faith in great historical impulses.

[ 27 ] Anyone who knows how to study the West—insofar as it is Anglo-American—properly will find there a sum of human instincts, of impulses that arise from historical life. All these impulses are of a political-economic nature. There are fundamental, significant impulses within Anglo-American culture that all have a political-economic character; they all think politically in such a way that politics is considered in relation to the economy. But there is a peculiarity here; namely this: You know that when we speak of economic matters, we demand that brotherhood prevail in the economy of the future—a principle that had been explicitly expelled from Western imperialist, political-economic endeavors. Brotherhood had been left out entirely; it had been eliminated. Consequently, what remained took on a strongly capitalist character.

[ 28 ] Brotherhood—that is what developed in the East. Anyone who studies the East in all its spiritual and psychological aspects knows that a genuine sense of brotherhood truly wells up from within the human being there. And so what was characteristic of the West was the surge of economic life amid a lack of brotherhood, thus tending toward capitalism. In the East, brotherhood without the economy; the two were kept apart by Central Europe, by us. We have the task—and this is what teachers, above all, must know—we have the task of synthetically synthesizing the brotherhood of the East with the lack of brotherhood, yet economic mindset, of the West. Then we will be socializing in the grand sense of the world if we can bring this about.

[ 29 ] And once again, we look to the East with a clear guiding principle. There, we have had a rich spiritual life since time immemorial. Only someone who does not understand Rabindranath Tagore could claim that it has already died out today. There, people lead a spiritual-political life. That is in the East. Where is its opposite? It lies, in turn, in the West. For this spiritual-political life of the East lacks something: freedom. It is a bondage that extends to the self-abnegation of the human being in Brahma or Nirvana. It is the antithesis of all freedom. The West, on the other hand, has won freedom for itself. We are caught in the middle; we must synthesize these two perspectives. We can do this only if we clearly distinguish between freedom and brotherhood in our lives, and if we also embrace what equality is. We must not understand our task merely as ensuring that everything works out for everyone. For abstract thinking is the ruin of all striving for reality. Those who believe that a uniform, abstract ideal can be established across the entire earth, or that a social order can be determined for the present that would be eternally valid, ruin all thinking grounded in reality. This is not only nonsense but a transgression against reality, for every part of space and every part of time has its own task that must be recognized. But then one must not be too lazy to point to the truly concrete human relationships. Then one must recognize one’s task by understanding how to study the facts in a meaningful way. Modern popular pedagogy has led us further and further away from such a meaningful study of the facts. It wants nothing to do with such a concrete engagement with phenomena. For this is precisely where the realm begins in which people today feel insecure. People today want to define rather than characterize. They want to absorb factual constructs rather than accept these constructs as mere symptoms of what is expressed in the deeper impulses.

[ 30 ] I am speaking today in such a way that what I say should be drawn from the perspective from which one ought to speak pedagogically today. And those people who are best able to engage in reflections on such a perspective are today the best educators and teachers—not those whom one tests to see if they know this or that in this or that subject; they can look that up in a textbook, or they can prepare for class using an encyclopedia. What they are as human beings—that is what ought to be taken into account for future assessments. Such a spiritual life, applied to education, makes it necessary in and of itself that one not merely be prepared in a certain one-sided way for cultural life, but that one truly be immersed in all three aspects of the human being—as a spiritual agent. I do not hesitate to assert that anyone who has never worked with their hands cannot see the truth in the right way, that they are never truly immersed in spiritual life. The very goal is for people to move back and forth between the three areas of the threefold social organism; for them to establish real connections with all three members of it; for them to be active—truly active—in all three. The opportunities for this—oh, they will arise. But the understanding of this must be firmly instilled in the minds of future educators in particular.

[ 31 ] Then another sense will awaken: the sense of moving beyond specialization toward what we have sought to create through what is called here “anthroposophy.” We must ensure that the thread connecting us to a universal human perspective—to an understanding of what a human being actually is—is never severed; that we never become lost in specialization, even though we may excel in our particular field. This, of course, requires a much more active life than is often preferred today.

[ 32 ] I have often had an extremely unsettling experience at all sorts of scholarly and professional gatherings. People come together with the express purpose of advancing their field. Well, yes, they do that for hours on end, sometimes very diligently, very earnestly. But then I’ve often heard a peculiar term used: “shop talk.” People just wanted to find those moments when they weren’t talking shop anymore, when they weren’t talking about—well, what their actual field is. It’s usually the silliest stuff that gets talked about then, the most boring stuff, but it’s not “talking shop”; people are asked questions, or other things are discussed—perhaps even better ones sometimes—but that’s not at all welcome—in short, people are glad when they’re done with the “talking shop.” Yes, doesn’t that prove how little one is connected to what one actually does and is supposed to do for humanity, if one is glad to be able to escape from it? And now I ask you: Will a leading class of humanity that tries to escape its fields of expertise as quickly as possible ever be able to stand up to a hard-working, manual-laboring population? When you speak smugly today about the ills that exist among the actual manual laboring population, do not ask that manual laboring population, but ask the bourgeoisie, for it is the bourgeoisie that has caused these ills; they are to be found there first and foremost. Those who are bound to a withering capitalism as manual laborers truly cannot find their place in an order where their work brings them joy if, standing above them, is the class that always wants to escape as quickly as possible from the very thing in which it is supposed to find joy. These are the ethical side effects of our educational system to date. This is what must be recognized above all else, what must change above all else. There is much in the thought patterns of educators and teachers that must be different in the future than it has been up to now.

[ 33 ] What was I trying to explain to you in these remarks? Well, I wanted to make it clear to you how radically we must point out today what needs to happen. How absolutely necessary it is to break free from the petty—the terribly petty—into which we have crammed our thoughts, our entire life of feeling and will. How, after all, is a will to flourish—and we need this will in the future—if it is to remain confined within the confines of these petty habits of thought and feeling, which are of the smallest caliber?

[ 34 ] What is it that we lack today that we ought to have in the future? We must have a true psychology of the people. We must know everything that is within a person as they grow up. We have shut out this understanding. Instead, we have adopted a testing method that experiments on people because it cannot intuitively address individual characteristics. All sorts of machines are supposed to reveal what abilities a person possesses. And today we do not dare to point these things out. Why? Because we cannot muster any interest in them. Because we walk through the world with a sleeping soul. Our soul must awaken. We must look closely at these things. Then we will see that much of what we revere today as great progress is, in fact, absurd. This poor elementary school teacher—he is sent out today like a tamed human rabbit, unable to see what is actually alive in the world. And he educates people who are then raised in such a way that they walk right past their fellow human beings without having the slightest idea of what lives in the souls of those fellow human beings. Now the situation is this—quite apart from the fact that many circles of the middle class naturally have no desire to address the major contemporary issues and impulses—that those who do have such a desire are of little use today because they know absolutely nothing about all that is necessary; because they have completely slept through the era in which the proletariat, I might say, has been politically educating itself, day after day, for decades now. And even today—I must say—it is extremely rare to find proletarians who, whenever the topic of discussing the great issues of our time comes up, repeatedly object that they have no time for it, that they are too busy; they make time for it. If you knock on the doors of bourgeois groups anywhere, they’re all so busy that they don’t have time to deal with contemporary issues; they’re all so busy. But that’s not the reason. The fact is, they don’t even have a clue what they’re supposed to be dealing with. They can’t even get a handle on anything because they haven’t been educated to do so.

[ 35 ] This, again, is not a pessimistic view; nor is it meant to be a tirade, but simply a statement of fact. So we have seen that wherever life itself has forced people to educate themselves, they have done so. Where people could have educated themselves based on their own impulses, this was neglected; it was completely neglected. That is why we find ourselves in this predicament today, and that is why, regarding everything that is being attempted today, we hear not only talk born of ill will—which is already abundant enough—but also all that senseless drivel that stems purely from ignorance of life: because no school has ever ensured that the art of learning is learned. Individual bits of knowledge have certainly always seeped through the walls of complacency and been imparted to people, but the way people are approached has not enabled them to face the phenomena of life with open senses.

[ 36 ] A great deal could already be seen today from the sad realities, even on those pages where people still carry on in the old way, and where it seems as if the clockwork of the brain had been wound up once and was now forced to run absurdly. Public gatherings today still proceed just as they did before this war catastrophe. Large numbers of people have learned little from these terrible events, precisely because they have not understood how to learn. Now they will have to learn through hardship what they failed to learn through horror. Some time ago, I quoted here a statement by a very modest and educated observer of life, Herman Grimm, which also appears in my work *The Key Points of the Social Question*. As early as the 1890s, this man said: If one looks at life around us today and sees where it is heading—particularly with the ceaseless arms buildup everywhere—one would be tempted to set a day for general suicide, so desolate does this life appear. Yet people wanted to live in daydreams and illusions—especially those who call themselves pragmatists. Today, however, there is a need to wake up. And those who do not wake up will not be able to participate in what is necessary today—necessary for every single person. Many do not even know where to begin.

[ 37 ] That is what I wanted to tell you—as a sort of discussion, the kind that should be held today, especially at teachers’ conferences; it is precisely before such people—those responsible for educating the youth—that such discussions should take place. For they should focus on what needs to be done. As we continue these reflections, we will again delve more deeply into specifically pedagogical and public education issues.