The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. From What Spirit Can a Contemporary Approach to Education Develop?

[ 1 ] Eight days ago, I attempted to outline the principles underlying the founding of the Waldorf School. I have already pointed out that, of course, this foundation is not built on a whim, but must take into account the reality of contemporary school education, so that what corresponds to our goals and our insights can only be incorporated into the development of today’s schools. I have highlighted the difficulties that a true art of education faces in our time. And today I would like—though I can, of course, only do so in broad strokes—to point out a few things from which you will be able to see what the spirit must be like from which an art of education can develop at the present time. It is certainly the case that, arising from the most diverse backgrounds and extending across the widest circles, there is a vague—or even more or less clear—sense that something must change in our educational system. And the true, proper shaping of humanity’s social future actually depends on the development of a true art of education—an art of education that is truly equal to the cultural tasks of our present and the near future.

[ 2 ] Above all, the key issue here is having the right teachers for education and instruction, especially for young children. What teachers bring to the children—the impulses from which they draw as they practice their craft—is among the very, very most essential things. And precisely when one considers these aspects, one will find that there is much in the present that stands in the way of a proper understanding of this perspective. It is, of course, natural that teachers and educators first pass through educational institutions that have been developed out of the more or less scientific consciousness of the present. But this scientific consciousness of the present is such that it offers no perspective from which to truly recognize the developing human being. And it is precisely on this point that we began the work we had to undertake to establish the Waldorf School. As I already mentioned in my last lecture here, the future teaching staff of the Waldorf School is already united, and pedagogical and didactic training is underway. The aim here is, above all, for the teachers to arrive at the correct perspectives: first, for recognizing the developing human nature as it reveals itself in childhood; and second, for them to be able to practice the art of education based on an understanding of this developing human nature. In particular, it is necessary at the present time to first develop a completely new understanding of human nature—one that is new to the outside world.

[ 3 ] Our scientific mindset takes pride in its empirical and observational methods. And these empirical and observational methods have, after all, led to great triumphs in the natural sciences. However, when it comes down to it, quite a few people today—especially those closely involved in education—have already sensed that this method of experimentation and observation does not provide insights relevant to education. Such people, who are open-minded from a certain perspective, have asked themselves: What do we do during the successive stages of a child’s life to make proper use of the developmental forces that emerge in these successive stages? One need only point to a few examples to see that this longing to truly understand the child in accordance with its development is, in fact, already present among educators; yet, due to the prevailing scientific mindset, these educators are, in a sense, at a loss as to how to address such questions. I need only point out that, for example, as early as 1887, the educator Sallwürk drew attention to the following. He reasoned: Natural science has discovered, for example, that a certain law governs the development of organisms, which the recently deceased Ernst Haeckel described as the “biogenetic law.” According to this biogenetic law, during embryonic life the individual human being develops in such a way that he or she follows the phylogenetic progression of the animal kingdom. During embryonic development, the human being resembles a lower animal in the first few weeks and then progresses until he or she develops into a human being. Individual development is a brief repetition of a long evolutionary process in the outside world. Educators have now asked themselves: Can something similar also apply to the development of the individual child in terms of the spiritual and psychological aspects? And can the science of education find any support in a law modeled after this biogenetic law?

[ 4 ] As you can see, the effort is already there—not simply to educate indiscriminately, but to find a perspective on the development of the growing human being. It was natural, for example, to say: Well, all of humanity went through the era of primal culture; then such cultures followed, as we have historically handed them down in the ancient Eastern cultures; then came Greek civilization, Roman civilization, then the development of the Middle Ages, and so on up to modern times. Can we say of each individual human being that, as a child in childhood, they repeated the primordial human culture and then further stages of human development? And can we, by tracing history according to its laws, gain anything from this for the development of the individual child? As early as 1887, in his book *Gesinnungsunterricht und Kulturgeschichte* (*Moral Education and Cultural History*), Sallwürk categorically disputed the notion that one could derive any guidance for the art of education from such underlying principles. Indeed, even earlier, the educator Theodor Vogt—who emerged from Herbart’s school of thought—had pointed out that we are currently powerless to answer such questions from a pedagogical perspective. As early as 1884, he said: If there were a comparative historical science, just as there is a comparative linguistics, then perhaps one could find, through such a comparative historical science, just as many points of reference for the education of the child as one has found in the comparative phylogeny of the animal kingdom for the fundamental biogenetic law just described. But he admitted to himself that there is simply no such thing as a comparative historical science from which such laws can be derived. And the Jena pedagogue Rein echoed this view in 1887, and this remains the state of affairs in external pedagogy and the external art of education even today. You are quite right to say, in response to such endeavors and in the discussion of them: “Yes, shouldn’t educators rather adopt the standpoint of sound human intuition, rather than having to be dictated to by an abstract science regarding what is necessary for the development of the growing child?” And you are right to raise such an objection. For this objection also arises when one considers the matter a little more deeply and thoroughly. It arises because, in fact, if one has nothing but the science based on the methods of contemporary natural science, nothing can be gained for the development of the human spirit and the human soul from the abstractions derived through it. One strives in vain when seeking such things. But neither can one truly become a master of education based solely on undeveloped human reason and human feeling. One needs something that provides a perspective. And it is precisely here that the necessity arises to establish a new science of humanity as the foundation for a true art of education for the future. Conventional science lacks the very foundations for such a study of humanity. These must be gained through an understanding of the human spirit and also of the development of the human spirit within the history of humanity. One must have perspectives that go far beyond those currently held by science, which is oriented toward the natural sciences.

[ 5 ] When we observe the developing child, we first notice—as I have pointed out on several occasions—that there is a longer period of development between birth and the change of teeth around the age of seven. If we compare what is active in the child’s soul during this time with everything that unfolds from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, we find a significant difference. This difference lies in the fact that, in the first years of life up to the change of teeth, the child is oriented toward imitating what it sees, hears, and perceives in its surroundings. The child is an imitator during this time. From the age of seven to fifteen—from the change of teeth to puberty—the child is oriented toward being influenced by the authority of its surroundings. At this stage, the child no longer merely imitates but wants to hear from adults what is right and what is good. It wants to be able to trust the judgment of adults; instinctively, it seeks authority. And it can only flourish if it is able to develop this trust.

[ 6 ] But if we look more closely, we see that there are also distinct turning points within these major life stages. For example, we see a distinct turning point during the period from birth to the loss of baby teeth—around the age of three—when the child enters a stage of development in which it develops a distinct sense of self for the first time. This marks the beginning of the period of life that one will recall in later years, while earlier experiences fade into the slumber of childhood. And many other developments occur around this time in the child’s growth, so that one can say: although the child is essentially an imitator during the first seven years of life, there is an important phase around the middle of these first seven years that must be taken into account in early education. But then there are again two important phases in the period from the change of teeth to puberty—that is, precisely during the stage of childhood when elementary school education is supposed to take place. As the child approaches about the age of nine, one will be able to observe a major turning point in the child’s development. What occurs in human life is, after all, clearly evident from one perspective. Yet one phase flows seamlessly into the next. During the first seven years of life, the child is an imitator; but even after the change of teeth, when the child already tends toward a sense of authority, a remnant of the longing to imitate from earlier years remains, so that up until the age of nine, the child continually experiences a mixture of the urge to imitate their surroundings and the desire to allow authority to influence them. If one observes which forces emerge from the innermost depths of human nature during childhood, one finds—as I said, I can only hint at these things today—through further reflection and observation that, during this period up to the age of nine, the very forces that emerge must be utilized to teach the child what constitutes the very first foundations of reading and writing. And one should use these foundational elements in reading and writing instruction in such a way that precisely what I would call a harmony between the impulse to imitate and the impulse toward authority is drawn upon. If one is oneself a master educator and can work, on the one hand, with the subject matter, and on the other hand with the emerging drive for authority and the drive to imitate—which is in the process of being tempered—if one works with all of this in such a way that it resonates together, then one develops something in the child that constitutes enduring strengths for the entirety of a person’s life, right up until death. One cultivates something that cannot be made up for later, because every stage of life develops its own strengths.

[ 7 ] Of course, you might say that many people have instinctively followed such laws. That is also true. But it will not be enough in the future. In the future, such things will have to be raised to the level of consciousness. And around the age of nine, everything begins to develop in the child that enables it to move beyond the human being and to grasp nature from the perspective of the human being. Before this point, the child is not very well equipped to grasp nature as such. One might say: Up until the age of nine, the child is very well suited to viewing the world through a moralizing lens. The educator, the teacher, must accommodate this moralizing impulse in the child without becoming pedantic.

[ 8 ] Certainly, there was already something instinctive pointing in this direction. But when one reviews the didactic and methodological guidelines provided today—which call for approaching all instructional material by grounding it in the human condition itself—one might be driven to despair. There is a certain sound instinct there; but the guidelines provided for this age group are almost entirely permeated by a philistinism and banality that do terrible harm to the developing human being. At this age, it is indeed beneficial to view, say, animals or even plants in such a way that a certain moralizing quality shines through the observation—for example, when teaching fables to a child so that the child learns to recognize the animal world through the fable. But one must be very careful not to present such banal material to children in so-called “visual instruction,” as is very often done. Above all, however, one must be careful not to tell a fable to a child in such a way that one first tells the story and then adds all sorts of explanations to it. Everything you hope to achieve by telling this fable is destroyed by the subsequent interpretation. The child wants to take in what is contained in the fable with genuine feeling. And deep down, without even realizing it, the child is deeply moved when it is then forced to accept the often quite banal explanations.

[ 9 ] So what will someone do who doesn’t want to delve right away into the actual subtleties of the art of storytelling in light of such an insight? He will say: Well then, let’s leave out the explanations afterward and just tell the child the fable. Well, fine. But then the child won’t understand the fable, and if it doesn’t understand it, it certainly won’t enjoy it. If you want to speak Chinese to someone, you have to teach them Chinese first; otherwise, they won’t be able to grasp the true meaning of what you’re communicating to them in Chinese. So it’s not enough to simply say, “Let’s leave out the explanations afterward.” You have to try to provide first what is very often attempted through an explanation afterward. If you intend to teach a child a fable—a reading passage such as, say, “The Wolf and the Lamb” (we could also apply this to plant life)—then first talk to the child about the wolf, its characteristics, and about the lamb, drawing as many parallels to human beings as possible. Gather together everything that you feel will give the child images and sensations that will then resonate when you read the fable or story aloud to them. If you incorporate what you later intend to explain into a stimulating preliminary discussion, you will not stifle those sensations—as you might do with an explanation given afterward—but rather you will bring them to life. If the child has heard beforehand what the teacher says about the wolf and the lamb, then their feelings become more vivid, and they take greater joy in the fable. Everything that needs to happen to facilitate understanding should happen beforehand. The child must not hear the fable or the reading passage beforehand. If they do hear it, they must be brought to the right level in their soul to understand it. Then the session must be concluded by reading the passage aloud and sharing the fable, but doing nothing more than allowing the feelings that have been stirred to run their course within the child. The child must be allowed to take these feelings home with them.

[ 10 ] It is necessary to structure instruction in such a way that everything is grounded in the human experience until the age of nine. And anyone with the insight to observe the transition that takes place around the age of nine will know that it is only then that the child begins to develop the receptivity to venture further into the natural world—but to do so starting from the human perspective. Even after the age of nine, a child still does not understand nature in and of itself when it is described to them without any relation to human beings. One is simply mistaken if one believes that the child already has an understanding of the descriptions as they are so frequently presented in today’s guidelines for visual instruction. Although natural history instruction must begin after the age of nine, it must always be related to the human being. Especially in natural history instruction, one should not start with non-human natural beings, but always with the human being itself; one should always place the human being at the center.

[ 11 ] Let us suppose we want to help a child over the age of nine understand the difference between lower animals, higher animals, and humans; in that case, we start with humans. Compare the lower animals with what is found in humans; compare the higher animals with what is found in humans. Once we have described human beings in terms of their physical form and their life activities, we can apply what we have found in human beings to lower and higher animals. The child understands this. We should not, out of philistinism or banality, always worry that we are speaking beyond the child’s horizon. Today people sometimes speak beyond the horizon of adults; but one would not be speaking beyond the child’s horizon if, for example, one were to teach the child—first, of course, with inner enthusiasm, and second, with a genuine understanding of the matter—“Look at the lower animals!”—and give the child the opportunity, say, to get to know an octopus. Then, always using the appropriate terms, one should go on to show: to which parts of the perfect human being is the octopus most closely related? The child can then already understand that the octopus is most closely related to the human head. For the reality is that, while lower animals are indeed simply structured, the structure found in their simplicity is repeated in the human head. The human head is simply more complex in its structure than that of the lower animals. And what is found in higher animals—for example, in mammals—can only be compared to what is found in the human trunk. We must not compare higher animals to the human head, but rather to the human trunk. And when we turn to the life of the limbs in humans, we must say: Take a look at the life of the human limbs; as it is structured, it is unique to humans alone. Just as the human arm and hands are structured as appendages of the body in which the spiritual-soul life moves freely, there is no such pair of limbs in the entire animal kingdom. When we speak of a monkey having four hands, this is merely a figurative expression, for by their very nature they serve to grasp and to propel the body forward. But in humans, we see feet and hands, arms and legs, differentiated in a remarkable way.

[ 12 ] What actually makes a human being human? Surely not the head; it is merely a more perfect development of what is already found in lower animals. What is found in lower animals is further developed in the human head. But what makes a human being human—what sets them apart from the animal world—is their system of limbs. Of course, you cannot present what I have just shown you here to the children in this form. But you can convey it in such a way that the child gradually learns to sense such things through direct observation. Then, through your education, you will eliminate an immense amount of what, from very mysterious underlying sources, is corrupting our present moral culture. Our current moral culture is corrupted in many ways by the fact that human beings are so infinitely proud and arrogant about their heads—but they would not be so if what can serve as a foundation were further developed—while they could be proud and arrogant precisely about their limb system, which serves for work and for establishing themselves in the world of social order.

[ 13 ] Science education concerning the animal world can, in an unconscious way, instill in human nature a true sense of who we are and of the social order. This will show you that educational issues indeed have much deeper roots than is commonly believed today, and that they are connected to broad, overarching cultural questions. This sheds light on how science education should be structured after the ninth grade. Everything can be approached in relation to the human being, but in such a way that nature now appears everywhere alongside the human being, and the human being appears as a grand synthesis of nature. This would give the child a great deal if these perspectives were maintained until around the twelfth year.

[ 14 ] For around the twelfth year there is another important turning point in a child’s development. Already in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth years—it varies from child to child—what will later manifest after puberty begins to play a role: the capacity for judgment, the act of judging. But the exercise of judgment still plays such a role that it must continue to interact with what arises solely from the urge for authority. At this stage of a person’s life, the skilled educator must address the urge for authority and the power of judgment in harmony with one another. And the curriculum must be taught accordingly.

[ 15 ] That is when the time begins when we may start to introduce to human beings those facts of natural history—and specifically physics—that are entirely separate from human beings: the refraction of light and the like. But that is also when the understanding begins, conversely, to apply nature back to human beings. Up to the age of twelve, the child, driven by an inner impulse, seeks to understand nature from the perspective of the human being—no longer in a moralizing way, but as I have just explained to you. After the age of twelve, the child is already inclined to consider phenomena separate from the human being, but to trace them back to the human being. And you develop something that the child will not lose again if, for example, you explain the refraction of light through a lens to the child and then apply it to the human being: the refraction of light in the eye, the entire internal structure of the eye. You can teach this to the child at this age.

[ 16 ] You see, the true curriculum develops out of an understanding of the stages of human development. If we are truly able to observe the child, the child itself tells us what it wants to learn at a particular stage of life. However, these are perspectives that do not emerge from modern science. If you consider only the natural facts, you simply cannot arrive at these perspectives, which reveal to you the immeasurable importance of that pivotal stage of life around the age of nine and the other pivotal stage around the age of twelve. These things must be drawn from the entirety of human nature. And this entire human nature encompasses body, soul, and spirit; whereas contemporary natural science, even if it believes it can say something about the soul and spirit, is in fact limited to the physical alone. Such matters, as they are often discussed today—whether one should focus more on the formal or moral aspects of education, whether one should focus more on developing the individual according to their aptitudes, or more on imparting the knowledge necessary for their future profession so that the individual may fulfill their role —these questions seem childish once one becomes acquainted with the deeper foundations upon which education must be based. How the individual human being is connected to the development of humanity as a whole is, of course, something that external natural science does not grasp. But a spiritually understood history of human development does grasp this.

[ 17 ] Let us consider the following law, which is just as much a law as the laws of natural science, but which is not understood through current scientific methods: If we go back—I can only describe this now; in my writings you will find all these things developed from the ground up—to the ancient times of humanity, we find that human beings remained capable of development well into old age, as capable of development as we are only during our earliest childhood. If we go back to the dawn of human history, we find that people used to say to themselves: When I am thirty-five years old—or, in even earlier times, when I am forty-two years old—I will go through certain developmental stages linked to my physical development that will transform me into a different person. Just as one goes through a process linked to physical development—such as the change of teeth—that transforms one into a different person, and just as one goes through a process linked to physical development—such as sexual maturity—that transforms one into a different person, so too did people in ancient times go through such processes well into much later stages of life. This has been lost in the course of human development. Today we cannot, to the same extent as was the case in humanity’s earliest times, look at an elderly person during childhood and say: “I look forward to growing that old one day, for this person has experienced something that is not yet possible for me due to my physical development.” The progress in human development lies in the fact that we carry physical development into ever fewer stages of life. Anyone who has the opportunity to observe such things knows that, for example, even in Greek times, people could clearly perceive—well into their thirties—what we perceive today in our youth: things not connected to the outer, physical realm. Today, people perceive this at most until the age of twenty-seven. And in the future, this age will decrease even further. This is the meaning of human development: that natural, elemental development persists into ever younger ages. This is a fundamental law.

[ 18 ] And our cultural development is linked to this fundamental law: that reading and writing emerge at a certain age, whereas they did not exist in primeval times. This is connected to the fact that humanity is dependent on ever-younger stages of natural development. Anyone who then goes on to understand these clues to human cultural development—which can only be gleaned from comprehensive insights—will know where the longing of a Theodor Vogt, a Rein, or a Sallwürk can be satisfied. Today’s scientifically oriented scholarship, after all, has no way of coming to understand something like this: human life, which, according to its natural development, is continually being pushed down into younger stages of development. It therefore also has no way of establishing a truly comparative historical science that could provide a point of reference for recognizing how human beings are situated within cultural development. But anyone who looks deeper into this knows that human beings, from the moment they are born, already possess predispositions that fit precisely into their own era—that they are a link in this comprehensive development of humanity. If one develops in a person what they already possess as a predisposition—simply because they are a link in the development of humanity—then one is also, in a formal sense, developing what is meant to be developed within them. Once one recognizes reality, much of the effort expended today on debating “whether things should be done this way or that” becomes nothing more than abstract drivel. This either-or dichotomy dissolves into a true, genuine understanding of both-and.

[ 19 ] That, you see, is what we would like to achieve with the teaching profession in order to lay the groundwork for the future in one particular area: that teachers truly understand human beings and the connection between human beings and contemporary culture; and that this knowledge and this understanding inspire the will to work together with the child. Then true artists of education will emerge. For education is never a science, but an art. One must lose oneself in it and can use what one knows only as a foundation for the art of education.

[ 20 ] But one shouldn’t go on and on about how one must have very specific aptitudes to be a teacher. These aptitudes are more widespread than one might think; they’re just not being developed at present. One need only draw out these abilities in the teacher in the right way through a robust Spiritual Science, and then one will find that, in fact, a gift for education is much more widespread than one thinks.

[ 21 ] You see, this is connected to something else. Although there have been many theoretical warnings today against making instruction too abstract, people still instinctively do just that. And anyone who sees through these things will, when considering the reform plans and ideas that are currently flying around, feel concerned that the abstraction of teaching will become, through these reform plans—which do, of course, contain all sorts of fine points—even much worse than it is now. If one properly studies the stages of development—first the major stages—up to the change of teeth, up to sexual maturity, and beyond—and then the minor ones—up to the development of the sense of self, up to the development of a sense of the external natural world separate from the human being—if one properly studies these stages, and in such a way that one does not define them in a trivial manner, but rather holds them before one’s mind in an artistic-intuitive vision—only then will one realize how much harm is done to the developing human being by steering intellectual education in the wrong direction. It is true that one must always emphasize that the human being must be educated as a unified being. But a human being can only be educated as a unified being if one knows its various aspects—including the soul and spirit—and understands how to harmonize them into a unity. One will never educate a human being as a unified whole if, in the educational process, one allows thinking, feeling, and willing to interact in a chaotic jumble; rather, this is possible only when one intuitively knows the nature of thinking, feeling, and willing, and allows these three human forces to interact with one another in the proper way on a soul-spiritual level. People are very prone, when discussing such matters, to immediately fall into extremes. When someone realizes that the intellectual has come too strongly to the fore—that people have been overly intellectualized—they are immediately eager to eradicate this element and declare: “What matters most is the education of the will and the feelings.” No, what matters is educating all three elements—intellect, feeling, and will—in the right way within the human being, so that one knows how to put oneself in a position to allow these three elements of life to interact in the right way.

[ 22 ] If one educates the intellectual element correctly, then one must give the child—especially during elementary school—something that can grow with them and develop as a whole. Please understand me correctly on this point; it is an important one. Suppose you develop in the child, up to the age of fourteen, those concepts that you have finely defined—concepts that the child knows how to think about—then, precisely through that “better” definition that you believe you have given the child, you have often given the child concepts that are very rigid, concepts that do not grow along with the person. A person must grow from the age of fourteen to twenty, from twenty to twenty-five, and so on, and as they grow, their concepts must grow with them. They must be able to develop alongside the person. If you define them too rigidly, with sharp contours, the person will indeed grow, but their concepts will not grow with them. You will then steer their intellectual development down entirely the wrong path. In cultural life, they will then be able to do nothing but recall the concepts you have painstakingly taught them. But that is not what they should do; rather, these concepts should have grown alongside their own development, so that what was taught to them at age twelve is, by age thirty-five, as different from the way it was taught to them at age twelve as their outer, physical being at age thirty-five is different from what it was at age twelve. This means that in intellectual development, we must not teach people something rigid and lifeless, but rather something living—something that carries life within itself and that changes. We must therefore define as little as possible. When we instill concepts in a child, we will characterize them—and specifically from many different perspectives. When asked, “What is a lion?” we will not have to say, “A lion is therefore…” and so on, but rather we will allow the child to characterize the lion from a wide variety of perspectives; we will develop living, flexible concepts that will then live on with the child. In this regard, many mistakes are made in contemporary education and teaching.

[ 23 ] Human beings must live through their earthly existence, and the concepts that we often instill in them and teach them—which die and remain within them as spiritual corpses—cannot live. However, we cannot approach these matters with the crude concepts that contemporary pedagogy cultivates. A completely different spiritual impulse must permeate this pedagogy. This is something that is strived for in the Waldorf school. Therefore, we seek to place pedagogy on a new foundation in which we take such things into account psychologically. We are fully convinced that the science of human nature cannot spring from the old foundations; therefore, these are not foundations for pedagogy, which is, after all, supposed to be based on psychology. But this psychology of the developing human being cannot be cultivated using the methods that are common today.

[ 24 ] You see, if one is truly able to view such things correctly, then light is also shed on certain sub-concepts that are considered very important today—concepts that resolve themselves once one has grasped the main concepts. Take, for example, the nonsense being perpetrated today regarding the integration of play into the classroom and into children’s upbringing. In this approach to play, the most important factor is very often overlooked: if play is strictly regulated and the child is forced to direct their play in a specific direction, it is no longer play. The essence of play lies in its freedom. But if you truly make play into play—as is necessary for teaching and for education—then you will no longer fall into the silly cliché that teaching, too, should be mere play. Rather, you will seek the essential in the rhythm that is brought into the child’s life by alternating between play and work.

[ 25 ] The education of the soul, the education of the emotions, is of such a nature that it requires special consideration of the child’s individual character. As teachers, we must be able to structure our lessons so that the child does not merely acquire intellectual knowledge in class, but also derives aesthetic pleasure from the lesson. We cannot achieve this by merely developing concepts for the child’s intellect. We can only do so if, as teachers, we establish such an interactive relationship with the child’s emotional life that we consistently meet the child’s expectations—which we first cultivate through our preparation and then fulfill by arousing hopes that are realized in both small and large ways —so that, in this way, we always first develop in the child that receptiveness which must play a role in the aesthetic perception of the environment. You can meet the child’s aesthetic needs by establishing the right relationship with their emotional world, by not promoting visual instruction in a philistine and often banal manner, as is common today: “Look, there’s a mouse.” “The mouse is running. Wasn’t there once a mouse in a room at your parents’ house? Haven’t you seen a mouse hole before?”—Not with such radical lack of taste, but in a similar vein, instructions for visual instruction are often given today. People have no idea how greatly they sin against good taste—that is, against the child’s aesthetic experience—by providing much of what is today called “visual instruction.” It is precisely in this regard—by directing the child’s interest toward broad, comprehensive perspectives—that their sense of taste must be developed. For good taste must prevail in the classroom and in the educational system, for the proper development of the mind and the emotions. Then one will also develop a certain instinct for the facts that are important for education.

[ 26 ] The intellect is, at first, the most spiritual aspect within us; but if we develop it one-sidedly, without developing our feelings and will alongside it, then we will always develop a tendency to think materialistically. While the intellect is the most spiritual aspect within us during our physical life on Earth, this intellect within us has an urge toward materialism. In particular, we must not believe that by developing the intellect, we are also developing the spiritual aspect of the human being. As paradoxical as it sounds, it is nevertheless true: by developing a person’s intellect, we are merely developing their capacity to comprehend the material world. Only by developing a person’s mind and emotional life in a tasteful, aesthetic way do we direct the human intellect toward the soul. And only by training the will—even if this training is directed toward external manual dexterity—do we lay the foundation within a person for ordering the intellect in accordance with the spirit. If so few people today have a tendency to direct the intellect toward the spirit, it is because the will was so poorly trained during childhood.

[ 27 ] But how do we, as teachers, learn to educate the will in the right way? I have already pointed this out recently: We learn it by, above all, allowing the child to engage in the arts; by not only letting the child listen to and look at music, drawing, and painting as early as possible, but also, as far as possible, letting the child participate. In addition to mere reading and writing instruction—indeed, even reading and writing instruction must develop out of the artistic, with writing emerging from drawing and the like—in addition to all of this, the cultivation of simple, elementary artistic skills must be introduced as early as possible in a child’s education; otherwise, we will end up with people who lack willpower. To this can then be added guiding the young person toward what they will need to work on in later life.

[ 28 ] You can see that, especially in this day and age, there is a need to develop a new understanding of human nature so that it can serve as the foundation for a new art of education—as far as this is possible given all the constraints that exist today. Precisely because people fail to recognize the very things that shape science today, the Waldorf school aims to create something that moves in this direction.

[ 29 ] It is imperative that we not allow ourselves to be misled by much of what is said today. Eight days ago, I attempted here to characterize to some extent the significance of this phrase for contemporary intellectual life. This phrase also plays a role, in particular, in our plans for educational reform. People take credit for themselves when they repeatedly—believing themselves to be very pedagogical in doing so—admonish others that one should not “educate professional mechanisms, but human beings.” Indeed, the person uttering this sentence would first have to know what a true human being is; otherwise, the sentence, in his mouth and coming from his mouth, has only the meaning of a cliché. And especially when people often ask today: What is the purpose of educating children? The answer is: To make them useful and happy people. By this, the person saying it means a person who is useful to him, who is as happy as he has a mental image of happiness in his own way. The point is, after all, that we must first lay the foundation—the very foundation that teaches us to recognize the true human being. The true human being cannot emerge from the old premises of our worldview; he can emerge only from the new premises of a worldview. And a new art of education will not develop unless we have the courage to arrive at an entirely new scientific orientation. This is what we encounter most often today: people want all sorts of things, but they do not want what is the prerequisite for arriving at a new orientation in our understanding of the world at all. We have been seeking this new orientation for decades precisely through our anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science. If many people keep their distance from it, it is because they find it too uncomfortable, or because they lack the courage to engage with it. But what will be needed for a true art of education can only emerge from a properly grounded spiritual worldview.

[ 30 ] Just think for a moment what a significant role the teacher actually plays in the life of a child as it is growing up. We humans here on Earth must, after all, constantly learn from life if we do not want to become rigid at any stage of our lives. But one must first learn how to learn from life. And in school, the child must learn to learn from life, so that—in later life—it does not cease to learn from life because of its dead concepts and the like, and does not become rigid. This is what gnaws at people today: that school has given them too little. Anyone who sees through our social ills knows that they are often connected to what has just been described. People stand in life without any inner anchor, which can only result from school providing the right guidance at the right time. Life is literally closed off to us if school does not give us the strength to open it up.

[ 31 ] But this can only be the case if, during the elementary school years, the teacher is the very embodiment of life itself to the child. After all, the distinctive feature of adolescence is that the gulf between the human being and life still exists. This gulf must first be bridged. The youthful senses, the youthful intellect, the youthful spirit, and the youthful will are not yet developed in such a way that a person can be truly touched by life. As a child, the child is touched by life through the medium of the teacher. The teacher stands before the child just as life will later. Life must be concentrated within the teacher. The teacher must therefore be imbued with the most intense interest in life. The teacher must carry within himself the life of his own age. He must be conscious of this. From this consciousness will radiate what he must convey to his students through living education, instruction, and interaction. For something like this to begin—so that the teacher no longer has to feel miserably confined to the school environment, but instead feels supported by the entire broad culture of the present and its role in the future; so that the teacher, in particular, has the broadest possible interest—this is something that must come to pass. Just as this can be achieved today with people who bring the necessary prerequisites from their previous life circumstances, so too should it be attempted under today’s conditions and despite the current obstacles in schools. Work should not be driven by any one-sided interest or a one-sided preference for this or that; rather, it should be driven by what speaks to us—in powerful terms—as what is necessary for the present and for humanity’s future, as expressed in the developmental impulses of humanity itself. Whatever can be discerned from the course of human development as necessary for our time should permeate this new founding of the Waldorf School as a guiding force in teaching and education.