The Rudolf Steiner Archive

7. Education and Instruction Based on a True Understanding of Human Nature

[ 1 ] Abstract ^{1Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture under this title in Prague on April 4, 1924. The author’s summary presented here appears to be a text drafted for members of the press to facilitate their reporting on this lecture. Rudolf Steiner prefaced it with the following remark: “This is merely an outline of what I will have to say; a spiritual researcher cannot really do such things; in a lecture, he draws from the spirit, not from memory, and is therefore misled if he is to write down his lecture word for word. Please excuse this.”} Prague, April 4, 1924

[ 2 ] I would like to speak about a form of education and instruction that strives to develop the whole, complete human being—body, soul, and spirit—in a balanced way. Such an education can only be achieved if the educator is aware of how the physical aspect is formed in the course of development from the soul and spirit. For one can only contribute to the formation of a being if one understands the laws governing this formation.

[ 3 ] Anthroposophy leads to such an understanding of the human being. It does not focus one-sidedly on the physical aspect, as is the case in the scientific worldview. It rises to a spiritual vision and thereby observes, at every stage of human life, the way in which the spirit works within the human body and how the soul lives within the body.

[ 4 ] From this perspective, distinctly different stages emerge in the developing individual.

[ 5 ] The first stage extends from birth until the teeth are replaced, around the age of seven. The eruption of the permanent teeth is not merely a localized process within the human organism. When the first teeth fall out and the second set appears, something is taking place throughout the entire organism. Development up to this point is such that the spiritual-soul aspect is intensively involved in the formation of the body. Body, soul, and spirit are still, to a high degree, a unity during this period of human development.

[ 6 ] The whole human being is therefore like a comprehensive sensory organ. What later becomes concentrated solely in the sensory system is, at this stage, still active throughout the whole human being. The human being is therefore, like a sensory organ, entirely devoted to the activities and goings-on of the environment. In the truest sense, the human being is an imitative being. The human will reacts, as if by reflex, to everything that takes place in the environment.

[ 7 ] At this age, therefore, the only way to educate a child is for the educator to behave in such a way that the child can imitate everything the educator does. This must be understood in the broadest sense. There are intangible forces at work between the child and the educator. The child not only gains impressions from what it perceives in its surroundings through its external senses, but also senses, through the behavior of other people, their disposition, their character, and their good or evil intentions. As an educator in the child’s environment, one should therefore strive for purity of life—even in one’s thoughts and feelings—so that the child can become like oneself.

[ 8 ] But one should also be aware that one’s behavior affects not only the soul but also the body. What the child absorbs and reflexively allows to flow into its will continues to resonate within the child’s physical constitution. A short-tempered educator causes the child’s physical constitution to become, so to speak, brittle, so that later in life it is easily susceptible to disease-causing influences. How one educates in this regard will become evident later in life in the person’s state of health.

[ 9 ] Anthroposophical pedagogy does not focus on the spiritual-soul aspect of education merely because it seeks to develop this aspect in a one-sided manner, but because it knows that the physical aspect can only be developed properly if the spiritual aspect—which shapes the body—is developed in the right way.

[ 10 ] With the change of teeth, a complete metamorphosis takes place in the child. What was previously immersed in the physical organization and active within it becomes an independent spiritual being, and the physical aspect is left more to its own devices.

[ 11 ] One must therefore approach the child’s soul at the age when the child is to receive a formal school education and instruction in such a way that one encounters within it the forces that were previously the formative forces in the body. One can only educate and instruct effectively if one keeps this in mind. At this age, the child does not yet take things in with an abstract intellect; it wants to experience images, just as it has worked with images through its own body up to this stage of life. This is achieved only when the educator and teacher relates to the child in an artistic manner through the heart. He cannot assume that the child already understands what he is communicating. He should act in such a way that the child, out of love, immerses itself in the images he unfolds artistically. He should be the natural authority figure for the child. The child cannot yet take in the true, the good, and the beautiful simply because it understands them; rather, something must be true, good, and beautiful for the child because the beloved teacher or educator presents it as such in the image before the child.

[ 12 ] Everything in teaching and education must be drawn from pictorial vividness. All instruction must be structured artistically. One cannot begin with reading, nor with the shapes of letters, which in their present form are alien to the inner experience of human beings. One must begin with a kind of pictorial drawing. The child must paint and draw forms that resemble certain processes and things as closely as the symbols in the pictographic writing of ancient peoples did. The image must first be what the child uses to capture the things and processes of the world. Then one should move from the image to letter forms, just as pictographic writing developed into abstract symbolic writing.

[ 13 ] Only when the child has progressed in this way from drawing to writing should one move on to reading. For reading engages only one part of the human being: the process of comprehension linked to the mental organization. In freehand drawing and writing, a more comprehensive part of the human organism is also engaged. In this way, one educates the whole person, not just the intellectual system in a one-sided manner.

[ 14 ] All education should be guided by this same attitude up to the second decisive stage in a child’s development. This stage occurs with the onset of sexual maturity. Here, too, it is not merely a specific part of the human organism that undergoes a metamorphosis, but the human being as a whole. Only then does that relationship to the human environment unfold which manifests itself in more abstract conceptualization. Only from this point onward should one expect the adolescent to engage in free, rational comprehension. Before that, everything should be presented in pictorial form, relying on the child’s love of images to grasp it.

[ 15 ] An educational system like this takes into account the whole of a person’s life, not just childhood. For it is quite different to engage the child in a pictorial manner—so that what the child has taken in in this way is only understood later—than to use so-called “visual instruction”—which is not truly visual because it lacks artistic quality—to develop only the intellectual faculties one-sidedly at an early age. What is instilled in childhood only manifests its effects later in life. A child who has passed through the pictorial stage at the appropriate age will become an adult who can remain fresh and full of vitality even in old age; a child who is led one-sidedly to understand what is often believed to be appropriate for childhood will become an adult who ages prematurely and is susceptible to unhealthy living conditions.