The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] If you yourself possess a well-developed understanding of the nature of the developing human being—one that is imbued with your will and your spirit—then you will also teach and educate well. Through a pedagogical instinct that will awaken within you, you will apply to the various fields of study what arises from this conscious understanding of the developing child. But this understanding must also be a very real one—that is, it must be based on genuine knowledge of the world of facts.

[ 2 ] Now, in order to arrive at a true understanding of the human being, we have attempted to view this human being first from a psychological perspective and then from a spiritual one. Let us bear in mind that a spiritual understanding of the human being requires us to reflect on the various states of consciousness, to recognize that—at least initially—what matters is that our life unfolds spiritually through waking, dreaming, and sleeping, and that the individual manifestations of life are to be characterized in such a way that they are regarded as either fully awake, dreamlike, or sleeping states of life. Now we will attempt, step by step, to descend from the spirit through the soul to the body, so that we may have the whole human being before us and, ultimately, allow these reflections to lead to a certain hygiene for the developing child.

[ 3 ] As you know, the stage of life that is relevant to us in terms of instruction and education as a whole is the one that encompasses the first two decades of life. We also know that the child’s entire life, with regard to these first two decades of a young person’s life, is divided into three parts. Until the child’s teeth begin to fall out, the child possesses a very specific character, which is expressed in particular by the fact that the child wants to be an imitative being; the child wants to imitate everything it sees in its surroundings. From the age of seven until puberty, we are dealing with a child who, in response to authority, seeks to absorb what they are supposed to know, feel, and will; and it is only with the onset of puberty that a person’s longing begins to relate to the world based on their own judgment. Therefore, we must constantly bear in mind that, when we are dealing with children of elementary school age, we are developing human beings who, in a sense, strive for authority from the very depths of their nature. We will fail in our educational efforts if we are not able to maintain authority precisely at this stage of life.

[ 4 ] The point, however, is that we can also gain an overview of the totality of human life activity from a spiritual perspective. As we have described from a wide variety of viewpoints, this totality of human life activity encompasses cognitive thinking on the one hand and volition on the other; feeling lies in between. Now, as an earthly human being between birth and death, a person must gradually imbue what manifests as cognitive thinking with logic—with everything that enables them to think logically. However, you yourself will have to keep what you know about logic as a teacher and educator in the background. For logic is, of course, something distinctly scientific; one should initially approach the child with this in mind simply through one’s entire demeanor. But as a teacher, one must nevertheless carry the most important aspects of logic within oneself.

[ 5 ] When we engage in logical activity—that is, in thinking and cognition—there are always three elements involved in this process. First, our thinking and cognition constantly include what we call conclusions. In everyday life, thinking is expressed through language. If you examine the structure of language, you will find that as you speak, you are constantly forming inferences. This activity of inference is the most conscious one in human beings. A person would not be able to express themselves through language if they were not constantly speaking inferences; they would not be able to understand what another person says to them if they were not constantly able to take in inferences. School logic usually dissects inferences; in doing so, it already distorts them, insofar as inferences occur in everyday life. School logic does not take into account that we are already drawing an inference when we focus our attention on a single thing. Imagine you go to a menagerie and see a lion there. What is the very first thing you do when you perceive the lion? First of all, you bring to consciousness what you see in the lion, and it is only through this act of bringing it to consciousness that you come to terms with your perceptions of the lion. You have learned in life, before you entered the menagerie, that creatures which behave as the lion you now see does are “animals.” What you have learned from life, you already bring with you into the menagerie. Then you look at the lion and realize: the lion is doing exactly what you have come to recognize in animals. You connect this with what you have brought with you from your life experience, and then form the judgment: The lion is an animal. — Only after you have formed this judgment do you understand the individual concept of “lion.” The first thing you do is draw a conclusion; the second thing you do is form a judgment; and the final thing you arrive at in life is a concept. Of course, you are not aware that you are constantly carrying out this process; but if you did not carry it out, you would not lead a conscious life that enables you to communicate with other human beings through language. It is commonly believed that human beings arrive at concepts first. That is not true. The first thing in life is inferences. And we can say: If, when we go to the menagerie, we do not isolate our perception of the lion from the rest of our life experience, but rather place it within the context of our entire life experience, then the first thing we do in the menagerie is to draw a conclusion. - We must be clear about this: the fact that we enter the menagerie and see the lion is merely a single act and is part of our entire life. We did not begin to live when we entered the menagerie and fixed our gaze on the lion. This follows on from our previous life, and that previous life plays a role here; in turn, what we take away from the menagerie is carried out into the rest of our lives. - But if we now consider the entire process, what is the lion first and foremost? It is first and foremost a conclusion. We can certainly say: The lion is a conclusion. A little later: The lion is a judgment. And again a little later: The lion is a concept.

[ 6 ] When you open a book on logic—especially one of the older kind—you will usually find, among the examples of syllogisms, the one that has indeed become famous: All humans are mortal; Cajus is a human; therefore, Cajus is mortal. — Cajus is, after all, the most famous figure in logic. Well, this dissection of the three judgments—“All humans are mortal,” “Cajus is a human,” “therefore, Cajus is mortal”—actually takes place only in logic classes. In life, these three judgments are interwoven; they are one, for life unfolds continuously through thinking and cognition. You always form all three judgments simultaneously when you approach a person named “Cajus.” The three judgments are already contained within what you think about him. That is to say, the conclusion comes first; only then do you form the judgment that appears here in the conclusio: “therefore, Cajus is mortal.” And the final thing you arrive at is the individualized concept: “The mortal Cajus.”

[ 7 ] Now, these three things—conclusion, judgment, and concept—have their existence in cognition, that is, in the living spirit of the human being. How do they relate to one another in the living spirit of the human being?

[ 8 ] A conclusion can only exist within the living spirit of a human being; only there does it lead a healthy life; that is to say, a conclusion is only truly healthy when it unfolds within a fully awakened life. This is very important, as we shall see.

[ 9 ] Therefore, you ruin the child’s soul if you work toward having ready-made conclusions committed to memory. What I am now saying about teaching—which we still need to elaborate on in detail—is of fundamental importance. At the Waldorf school, you will encounter children of all ages who have already been through previous instruction. Work will have been done with these children—you will already find the results of that work reflected in their conclusions, judgments, and concepts. You will, of course, have to draw this knowledge out of the children again, for you cannot start from scratch with every child. After all, our unique situation is that we cannot build the school from the ground up, but must begin immediately with eight grades. You will therefore encounter children whose souls have already been shaped, and in the very early stages of your teaching, you will need to take this into account so that you burden the children as little as possible by making them retrieve ready-made conclusions from memory. If these preformed conclusions are too deeply ingrained in the children’s minds, it is better to leave them alone and strive to let the child’s present life unfold through their own reasoning.

[ 10 ] Judgment, of course, initially develops in fully waking life. But judgment can already descend into the depths of the human soul, where the soul dreams. The conclusion should not even descend into the dreaming soul; rather, only judgment can descend into the dreaming soul. Thus, everything we form as a judgment about the world descends into the dreaming soul.

[ 11 ] Yes, what exactly is this dreaming soul? As we have learned, it is more of an emotional state. So when we have made judgments in life and then move beyond those judgments and carry on with life, we carry our judgments through the world; but we carry them through the world in our feelings. This also means that judging becomes a kind of habit within us. You shape the child’s soul habits through the way you teach children to judge. You must be fully aware of this. For the expression of judgment in life is the sentence, and with every sentence you speak to the child, you add an atom to the child’s soul habits. Therefore, the teacher, who does indeed possess authority, should always be aware that what he says will become ingrained in the child’s soul habits.

[ 12 ] And when we move from judgment to concept, we must admit to ourselves: what we develop as a concept descends into the deepest depths of the human being—spiritually speaking—it descends into the sleeping soul. The concept descends into the sleeping soul, and this is the soul that works continuously on the body. The waking soul does not work on the body. The dreaming soul works on the body to a small extent; it produces what lies in a person’s habitual gestures. But the sleeping soul works right down into the forms of the body. By forming concepts—that is, by identifying the results of judgments in people—you influence the sleeping soul or, in other words, the human body itself. Now, the human being is, to a high degree, fully formed physically by the time of birth, and the soul has only the ability to refine what is passed down to the human being through the stream of heredity. But it does refine it. We walk through the world and observe people. These people approach us with very specific facial features. What is contained in these facial features? Among other things, they contain the result of all the concepts that teachers and educators have instilled in people during childhood. From the face of a mature person, what was poured into the child’s soul in the form of concepts radiates back to us, for the sleeping soul has shaped the person’s physiognomy, among other things, according to these fixed concepts. Here we see the power of our educational and instructional influence on the human being. Through the formation of concepts, the human being receives this imprint deep into their very being.

[ 13 ] Today, the most striking phenomenon in the world is that we find people with such indistinct facial features. Hermann Bahr once wittily recounted an anecdote from his life experiences during a lecture in Berlin. He remarked that if one were to visit the Rhine or the Essen area—even as far back as the 1890s—and walk through the streets, encountering people coming out of the factories, one would quietly have the feeling: Yes, no one differs from the others; it’s actually just a single person you encounter there, appearing as if through a duplicating machine; you really can’t tell the people apart at all. — A very important observation! And Hermann Bahr cited another observation that is also quite important. He said: If you were invited to dinner somewhere in Berlin in the 1890s, you’d have your dinner companions on your right and left; you couldn’t really tell them apart, but at least there was one difference: one was on the right, the other on the left. Then, when you were invited somewhere else, it could happen that you couldn’t tell: is this the lady from yesterday, or is it the one from the day before?

[ 14 ] In short, a certain uniformity has taken hold of humanity. But this is proof that nothing was instilled in people during the preceding period. From such things we must learn what is necessary with regard to the transformation of our educational system, for education has a profound impact on the whole of cultural life. Therefore, we can say: When a person goes through life and is not confronted with a specific fact, their concepts live in the unconscious.

[ 15 ] Concepts can thus exist in the unconscious. Judgments can exist only as habits of judgment in the semi-conscious, dreamlike state, and conclusions should really prevail only in the fully conscious, waking state. This means one should take great care to discuss everything related to conclusions with the children and not let them simply retain ready-made conclusions, but rather allow them to retain only what matures into a concept. But what is necessary for this?

[ 16 ] Imagine that you form concepts, and these concepts are dead. Then you instill conceptual corpses into people. You instill conceptual corpses into people right down into their very bodies when you instill dead concepts in them. What must the concept be like that we teach people? It must be alive if a person is to be able to live with it. A person must live, so the concept must be able to live along with them. If you instill concepts in a child at the age of nine or ten that are intended to remain with them unchanged into their thirties or forties, then you are instilling “conceptual corpses” in them, for the concept will not live along with the person as they develop. You must teach the child concepts that can transform over the course of the child’s future life. The educator must be careful to convey to the child concepts that the person will no longer hold in later life exactly as they were first received, but rather concepts that transform on their own in later life. If you do this, then you are instilling living concepts in the child. And when do you instill dead concepts in them? When you constantly give the child definitions—when you say, “A lion is…” and so on—and make them memorize these, then you are instilling dead concepts in them; then you can expect that when the child is thirty years old, they will still hold these concepts exactly as you once taught them. In other words: excessive defining is the death of living education. So what must we do? We should not define in our lessons; we should try to characterize. We characterize when we examine things from as many perspectives as possible. If, in natural history, we simply teach the child what is written about animals in today’s natural history books, for example, then we are actually only defining the animal for them. We must try, in every part of the lesson, to characterize the animal from different angles—for example, by exploring how people gradually came to know this animal, to make use of its labor, and so on. But even a rationally structured lesson in and of itself has a characterizing effect if you do not simply—when the relevant stage of the lesson comes up—describe the octopus from a natural history perspective, then the mouse when it is its turn, and then humans when it is their turn, but rather if you place the octopus, the mouse, and humans side by side and relate them to one another. Then these relationships are so multifaceted that the result is not a definition, but a characterization. A proper lesson therefore does not aim for a definition from the outset, but rather for a characterization.

[ 17 ] It is of the utmost importance to always be aware that we must not stifle anything in the developing human being, but rather educate and instruct them in such a way that they remain alive, that they do not wither away or become rigid. You will therefore have to carefully distinguish between flexible concepts that you teach the child and those—for there are such concepts as well—that do not actually need to be subject to change. These concepts will provide the child with a kind of skeleton for his or her soul. At the same time, you must also be mindful that you need to give the child something that will remain with him or her for the rest of his or her life. - You must not give the child dead concepts about the details of life—concepts that are not meant to endure; you must give the child living concepts about the details of life and the world, concepts that develop organically alongside the child. But you must relate everything to the human being. Ultimately, everything must converge in the child’s understanding into the idea of the human being. This idea of the human being must endure. Everything you impart to the child—whether you tell a fable and apply it to human beings, whether you relate the octopus and the mouse in natural history to human beings, or whether you evoke a sense of wonder at the Morse telegraph as it transmits through the earth’s conduction—all these are things that connect the entire world, in all its details, to human beings. That is something that can endure. But the concept of humanity is built up only gradually; one cannot teach a child a fully formed concept of humanity. Once it has been built up, however, it may remain. It is, in fact, the most beautiful thing one can give a child from school to carry into later life: the idea—the most multifaceted, most comprehensive idea possible—of humanity.

[ 18 ] That which lives within a person has a tendency to truly transform itself into something alive in the course of life. Help the child to develop a sense of awe, of reverence, mental images of all that we might call, in a broader sense, the spirit of prayer—then such a mental image, imbued with the spirit of prayer, remains alive in the child, lasting into old age and transforming itself in old age into the ability to bless, to share the fruits of the spirit of prayer with others. I once put it this way: No elderly man or woman will truly be able to bless well in old age if they did not pray properly as a child. If one prayed properly as a child, then as an elderly man or woman one can bless properly—that is, with the greatest power. Thus, teaching such concepts—which are connected to the most intimate aspects of the human being—means equipping people with living concepts; and what is alive undergoes metamorphoses, transforms itself; it transforms along with the life of the human being itself.

[ 19 ] Let us now consider this threefold division of adolescence from a slightly different perspective. Until the teeth are replaced, a person wants to imitate; until sexual maturity, they want to be under authority; then they want to apply their own judgment to the world.

[ 20 ] One can also put it another way. When a human being steps out of the spiritual-soul world and takes on a physical body, what does he actually want? He wants to bring to life in the physical world what he has experienced in the spiritual realm. Before losing their baby teeth, children are, in a sense, still entirely attuned to the past. They are still filled with the devotion they developed in the spiritual world. That is why they also give themselves over to their surroundings by imitating others. What, then, is the fundamental impulse, the still entirely unconscious basic disposition of the child up until the change of teeth? This basic disposition is actually a very beautiful one, and it must be nurtured. It is the one that arises from the assumption, from the unconscious presumption: The whole world is moral. This is not universally the case with souls today; but it is inherent in human beings when they enter the world—by virtue of becoming physical beings—to proceed from the unconscious assumption that the world is moral. Therefore, it is beneficial for the entire process of upbringing up until the change of teeth and even beyond to take this unconscious assumption into account: that the world is moral. I took this into account by presenting two reading passages to you, for which I first demonstrated the preparation, and this preparation was based entirely on the assumption that one characterizes morally. In the passage about the shepherd’s puppy, the butcher’s puppy, and the upholsterer’s puppy, I attempted to show how human morality can be reflected in the animal kingdom. And I also attempted, in the poem about the violet by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, to introduce morality into children’s lives—even beyond the age of seven—without pedantry, so as to accommodate this assumption that the world is moral. That is, after all, what is so uplifting and magnificent about the sight of children: that children are a race of people who believe in the morality of the world and therefore believe that one may imitate the world. — The child thus lives in the past and is often a revealer of the prenatal past—not the physical past, but the spiritual and emotional one.

[ 21 ] As a child goes through the process of losing baby teeth and growing permanent ones, he or she essentially lives continuously in the present until reaching sexual maturity and is interested in what is happening right now. And this must be taken into account at all times in teaching and education: that elementary school students essentially want to live continuously in the present. How, then, does one live in the present? One lives in the present when one enjoys the world around oneself in a human, rather than an animalistic, way. In fact, the elementary school child also wants to enjoy the world during class. We must therefore not fail to teach in such a way that, not in an animalistic sense but in a higher human sense, the lesson is truly a source of enjoyment for the child—and not something that evokes antipathy or disgust. In this area, pedagogy has indeed made all sorts of good attempts. But there is a danger here. The danger lies in the fact that this principle—of making instruction a source of joy and enjoyment—can very easily be distorted into something trivial and mundane. That should not happen. However, a remedy can only be found if the teacher, the instructor, continually strives to rise above the trivial, the pedantic, and the philistine. In fact, they can do this only by never failing to keep their relationship to art truly alive. For if one wishes to enjoy the world in a human—not animal—way, one starts from a certain premise: the premise that the world is beautiful. And from this unconscious premise—that the world is beautiful—the child proceeds from the time of losing their baby teeth until sexual maturity. This unconscious assumption of the child—that the world is beautiful, and therefore that instruction, too, must be beautiful—is truly not met by adhering to the often banal rules for visual instruction, which are devised purely from a utilitarian standpoint; rather, it is met by attempting oneself to immerse in artistic experience, so that instruction may be imbued with art precisely during this period. One sometimes feels terribly sorry when reading contemporary pedagogical treatises and seeing how the good intention—to make lessons a source of joy—fails to come into its own because what the teacher discusses with his or her students makes an unaesthetic, mundane impression. It is, after all, popular today to conduct visual instruction with children according to the Socratic method. But the questions posed to the children there are of an extremely utilitarian nature, not one that lives in beauty. In that case, even presenting model examples is of no use. What matters is not that the teacher be instructed: “You must adhere to this or that approach when selecting your examples for visual instruction,” but rather that the teacher himself ensures—through his immersion in art—that the things he discusses with the children are tasteful.

[ 22 ] The first stage of childhood, up to the time of tooth replacement, proceeds on the unconscious assumption that the world is moral. The second stage of life, from tooth replacement to sexual maturity, proceeds on the unconscious premise that the world is beautiful. And it is only with sexual maturity that the predisposition to recognize this in the world truly begins: the world is true. Only then, therefore, can instruction begin to take on a “scientific” character. Before sexual maturity, it is not advisable to give instruction a merely systematic or scientific character; for a person does not acquire a true inner understanding of truth until he or she has reached sexual maturity.

[ 23 ] In this way, you will come to realize that, with the developing child, the past flows down from higher worlds into this physical world; that, once the child has completed the process of losing its baby teeth, the present unfolds in the elementary schoolchild; and that the human being then enters that stage of life where the impulses of the future take root in the soul. The past, the present, and the future—and life within them—are all contained within the developing human being.

[ 24 ] Let’s stop here and continue this discussion the day after tomorrow, when we’ll delve more and more into practical teaching.