The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Rudolf Steiner's Speech at the Opening of the Free Waldorf School

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! From Mr. Molt’s words, you will have gathered the spirit that inspired him to take the initiative in founding this Waldorf School of his. You will have heard from his words that this founding did not arise from some ordinary, everyday intention, but from the call that resounds so clearly from the development of humanity, especially in our time—and yet is so rarely heard. While much of what resounds from this development of humanity can be framed within the context of the social shaping of human destiny and social reconstruction, there is also something in this call that must not be overlooked: above all, it concerns the question of education. And one can be certain that only those who trace its implications all the way to the question of education will truly hear the call for social renewal amid the confusing chaos of contemporary demands. But if this social call is heard in such a way that one seeks to halt all possible social endeavors at the threshold of the question of education—and then seeks to reshape the institutions of education and instruction themselves in accordance with arbitrary social principles that have not sprung from a renewal of the very source of education and instruction—then one will most certainly be on the wrong path.

[ 2 ] For me, my esteemed audience, it was a sacred duty to take up the intentions of our friend, Mr. Molt, regarding the founding of the Waldorf School in such a way that this school could be shaped according to what we may believe has been gained through Spiritual Science in the present. This school is truly to be grounded in what is required of human development, both in our present time and for the near future. And indeed: everything that ultimately flows from such premises into the field of education and instruction presents itself as a threefold sacred duty.

[ 3 ] After all, what would all feeling, knowing, and acting within the human community amount to if it could not unite in the sacred obligation that the teacher and educator imposes upon themselves by establishing—within their special social community with the developing, growing human being, with the child—a form of community service that can be called such in the highest sense! Everything we can ultimately know about humanity and the world only becomes truly fruitful when we can bring it to life in those who will shape the social world once we are no longer able to be present through our physical labor.

[ 4 ] Everything we are capable of achieving artistically only becomes truly sublime when we can integrate it into the greatest art—the art in which we are not given dead artistic materials such as clay and paint, but rather the living human being, unfinished, whom we are to shape, to a certain extent, artistically and educationally, into a complete human being.

[ 5 ] And is it not, after all, a supreme, sacred, religious duty to nurture the divine-spiritual—which, after all, appears anew and reveals itself in every human being who is born—through education? Is this educational service not religious worship in the highest sense of the word? Must not all our most sacred human impulses—those dedicated precisely to religious feeling—converge in the service at the altar that we perform as we strive to develop the divine-spiritual nature of the human being, which manifests itself as an innate disposition in the child as it grows?

Science Comes to Life!
Art Comes to Life!
Religion Comes to Life!

[ 6 ] After all, that is education; after all, that is teaching. — If one understands teaching and education in this sense, then one is not inclined to lightly criticize what others put forward as principles, intentions, and guidelines for the art of education. Yet it does not seem to me that anyone can truly grasp what contemporary culture imposes on the art of education, the art of teaching, unless they realize how necessary a complete spiritual renewal is in our time, and unless they can perceive with penetrating clarity how, in the future, what we do as teachers and educators must incorporate something entirely different from what can flourish in the sphere of what is today called “scientific education.” After all, today the teacher—who is to shape future generations—is indoctrinated into the mindset and way of thinking of contemporary science. It has never occurred to me to disparage this contemporary science in a derogatory manner. I am filled with deep appreciation for all that contemporary science—with its scientific mindset and methodology grounded specifically in the knowledge of nature—has achieved in terms of triumphs for human development, and for what it will yet achieve in the future. But precisely for this reason, it seems to me, what flows from the current scientific and intellectual mindset will not be able to bear fruit in the art of education and teaching, because the greatness of the current scientific and intellectual mindset lies in something other than the treatment of human beings and insight into the human heart and the human soul. One can make magnificent technical advances with what springs from the current intellectual mindset; one can also use it to develop a free, humanistic outlook in social relations, but one cannot—as grotesque as this may still sound to the majority of people today—with a scientific mindset that, on the one hand, has gradually come to the conviction that the human heart is a pump and the human physical body is a mechanistic machine, one cannot, through the feelings and sensations that flow from this science, enliven oneself to the extent that one can be an artistic educator of the developing human being. It is impossible to develop the living art of education precisely from that which makes our age so great in its mastery of dead technology.

[ 7 ] There, my esteemed audience, a new spirit must intervene in the development of humanity—the very spirit we seek through our Spiritual Science. A spirit that leads us away from viewing the living human being as merely the bearer of pumping and suction mechanisms—a mechanism that can be understood only through the methods of natural science. The conviction must take root in humanity’s spiritual consciousness that spirit lives in all of nature, and that this spirit can be recognized. And so, in the course that preceded our Waldorf endeavor—and which was intended for teachers—we have sought to establish an anthropology and a science of education that can become an art of education, a study of humanity, capable of reawakening the living within the human being from what is dead. The dead—and this is the secret of our present, dying culture—the dead: it makes a person knowledgeable; it makes a person discerning when they accept it as a law of nature; but it weakens their spirit, from which enthusiasm is to spring forth, especially in education. It weakens the will. It does not place the person harmoniously within the whole, entire social existence. We are seeking a science that is not merely science, that is life and feeling itself, and that, at the very moment it flows into the human soul as knowledge, simultaneously develops the power to live within it as love, so that it may radiate outward as active will, as work steeped in the warmth of the soul; as work that is directed, in particular, toward the living, toward the developing human being. We need a new scientific mindset. We need a new spirit, first and foremost, for all forms of education and for the art of teaching.

[ 8 ] Ladies and gentlemen, anyone who thinks this way about contemporary education and its necessities does not lightly criticize what has been undertaken with the best of intentions, driven by all manner of worthy impulses from the present and the recent past. What beautiful motivations underlie the desire to move the educational system out of the chaos and stifling atmosphere of city life and into the countryside, into rural boarding schools. One must acknowledge all the goodwill that prevails in this regard. But, my esteemed audience, if this living spirit—which makes one human being understandable to another, which instructs people on how to treat the developing human being—does not permeate these rural boarding schools, and if this living spirit does not permeate all the other initiatives being established today, then what is dead in the cities will remain dead in the countryside as well.

[ 9 ] People are considering how to structure the school system so that the teacher’s authority no longer exerts a stifling influence. But if one cannot infuse those schools, which are structured according to this new approach, with the truly living spirit that makes a person truly human, then—despite all social pedagogy—schools and educational institutions will remain something lifeless, something that cannot properly guide the present generation toward the future.

[ 10 ] The conviction that the call resounding from the evolution of humanity demands a new spirit for our present time, and that we must, above all, bring this new spirit into the field of education—it is this conviction that underlies the aspirations of this Waldorf school, which is intended to serve as a model in this direction. And an effort has been made to listen to what lies unconsciously within the demands of the very best minds who, in the recent past, have striven to bring about a revitalization and regeneration of the art of education and teaching. I am reminded of such expositions as those, for example, by the certainly very thoughtful Herbartian scholar Theodor Vogt or his successor Rein, the Jena educator, for they seem to me to spring from a deeper sense of what is lacking in our present system of education and teaching. Vogt and Rein intuitively recognized this, though they did not state it explicitly: In order to teach and educate properly, one would very much like to understand how a child actually develops in the early years, from infancy until the time, around the age of seven, when the child enters school; how it develops then, particularly during elementary school—from the age of six or seven until that time which so profoundly shapes the entire development of the growing human being—up to the age of fourteen or fifteen. This leads the discerning teacher of pedagogy to ask: Can we even understand the forces at work in human nature, which, almost every month—and certainly every year—reveals a different spiritual, emotional, and physical aspect to us? As long as we have no true historical science—so these educators say—we cannot know how the individual human being develops. For the individual human being embodies, in concentrated form, what all of humanity represents in the course of its historical development.

[ 11 ] People such as those mentioned feel that, fundamentally, modern science fails when it comes to saying anything about those great laws that govern history, and when we are called upon at the present moment to grasp what emerges for us from these great, all-encompassing historical laws of human development. If one were to attempt to understand the individual human being based on the nature of the food he consumes from his first breath until death, one would be pursuing something utterly foolish; yet in history, in the understanding of the entire development of humanity, this is essentially the approach taken today. When it comes to human beings, one must know, for example, how a physiological process such as the change of teeth intervenes in development. One must know all the mysterious physical processes taking place there, stemming from an entirely new physiology that current science does not yet possess. But one must also know what accompanies this transformation on the soul level. One must understand the metamorphoses of human nature. There, in the case of the individual human being, one will at least not deny—even if one is powerless to recognize it—that human beings experience metamorphoses and transformations from within their innermost being. In the historical development of humanity as a whole, however, such a thing is not acknowledged. The same methods are applied to antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times. People refuse to accept that great leaps occur in the historical development of humanity. When we look back at historical development, we find a final leap in the 15th century. Everything that has become humanity’s feeling, mental image, and will in modern times, as we now know it, has only assumed its intimate character in civilized humanity since the 15th century. And this civilized humanity differs from that of the 10th or 8th century in much the same way that a twelve-year-old child differs from a child who has not yet reached the age of seven. And what took place as a radical transformation in the 15th century emerged from the very core of the human being, just as the natural development of tooth replacement arises from the innermost nature of the human being. And all of this—as we live today in the 20th century—that striving for individuality, that striving for social organization, that striving to shape one’s personality—is merely a consequence of what the inner forces of history have brought about since the point in time indicated.

[ 12 ] We can only understand how human beings seek to position themselves within the present if we understand the course that human development has taken in the manner described. People like Vogt and Rein, who have thought deeply about pedagogy and have also engaged with these matters in practice, recognize the powerlessness of contemporary educational practice as stemming from the powerlessness of contemporary historical insight. Just as one cannot educate human beings with that kind of natural science that reduces the heart to a pump, so too can a teacher not engage in the work of education with a historical understanding that does not draw from the living spirit of humanity and perceive the metamorphoses that have taken place from the Middle Ages into modern times. We are still living with the consequences of what began then.

[ 13 ] The teacher must—one may scoff at the idea of prophecy in our time, but nevertheless it must be said: the teacher must, in a certain sense, be a prophet. For he is dealing with what is meant to live on in the future generation, not in the present.

[ 14 ] If one examines such matters from the perspective of true, actual historical events, then, ladies and gentlemen, they certainly appear somewhat different than they often do to the contemporary observer. In many respects, the modern observer grasps what should become the essence of educational science and the art of education in a very superficial way. Today, there is a debate over the question: Should we educate people more in accordance with what human nature itself demands—that is, foster a more humanistic education—or should we provide an education that prepares them for their future profession, for the structure of the state, and the like? - For those who wish to see things in their depth, such discussions are merely superficial verbal dialectics. Why? Anyone who truly understands the rising generation gains a clear sense of this: People have emerged from the bosom of history through what they do, what they think and feel, and even what they aspire to as adults in the future. And what we call professions today, what constitutes the structure of the state today, where people can position themselves today—all of this has sprung from these people themselves! It is not merely an external attribute attached to them! One cannot even ask: Should we educate people more for their humanity or more for their external profession? For, when viewed correctly, both are ultimately one and the same!

[ 15 ] If we can develop a living understanding today of what professions and people are out there, then we will also develop an understanding of what previous generations—who are still alive today and have professions—have carried from the womb of humanity right up to the present.

[ 16 ] If we are to act as teachers and educators, it is not enough to separate the education of the human being from vocational training. There must be something alive within us that is not visible on the outside—not in a profession, not in a state structure, nowhere in the external world. There must live within us that which future generations will bring into the outer realm of life. There must live within us a prophetic, organic connection with the coming development of humanity. The educational and artistic feeling, thinking, and willing of the teaching profession stand or fall with this sense of interconnectedness. A living pedagogy and didactics of the present must strive to ensure that what can be known about the developing human being can flow into the teaching profession—like a spiritual and soulful lifeblood that, without first being mere knowledge, becomes art. And it is from this living didactics alone that what is to enter the child’s heart, the child’s soul, and the child’s intellect can emerge.

[ 17 ] I cannot go into detail today about our educational principles. I simply wanted to show how what is to be the art of education and teaching in the present and future should be integrated into a living, spiritual understanding of the entire nature of the world and humanity.

[ 18 ] Today, we talk a lot about the need for a socially shaped future for humanity. Why does everything we try to do to bring about such a future become so difficult?—Yes, it becomes so difficult because, especially in our time, social aspirations are opposed by the most antisocial drives and instincts in human development.

[ 19 ] When we look back on patriarchal times—times when humanity lived more instinctively than in our modern age of civilization—we may find many reasons to take pride in the achievements of the present; yet more social instincts were present in earlier times. Antisocial impulses dominate us. Above all, however, antisocial impulses must be eradicated from the art of education and instruction. Anyone who observes more closely can see how the system of education and instruction has gradually taken on an antisocial character. Only that art of education and teaching, however, can be fruitful through which the teacher, from the moment he enters the classroom, influences the child as if from a unified sense of feeling. There must be a subconscious, mysterious bond between the child’s soul and the teacher’s soul, passing from the teacher’s spirit into the child’s spirit. This is what gives the school its social character. To achieve this, the teacher must be able to truly put themselves in the child’s place. What do we often do today? Yes, we strive to shape our thinking in such a way that we can explain something to the child. We might say to the child: “Look, here is a caterpillar; a butterfly will emerge from it.” We might show the child the butterfly and the chrysalis, and perhaps also how one develops from the other. Then we might go on to say: “Your immortal soul rests within your body just as the butterfly rests within the chrysalis. And just as the butterfly leaves the chrysalis, so will your immortal soul one day leave your body when you pass through the gate of death.” - One has devised a natural image to make something clear to the child through this image; but one is aware that one has merely used a comparison, that one actually understands the whole matter in a different way. One has made an effort to adapt something for the child. But there is a mysterious law according to which, if one arranges things in this way, one cannot truly achieve anything in teaching. For one can truly impart to the child only what one believes in from the depths of one’s own soul. Only when one has brought oneself to realize that the image of the doll and the butterfly is not a superficially cobbled-together comparison, but one presented to us by the divine spiritual nature itself presents to us—at the very moment we can believe in the truth of the image, just as the child is meant to believe in it—only then do we succeed in imparting living spirit to the child. We must speak; we must be able to act out of the spirit of truth. We must never act out of what plays such a major role in cultural development today: out of the spirit of empty rhetoric. We can do this only if we are connected—deeply and intimately connected—with all that is human; if we can lose ourselves, even when we have already grown the whitest of white hair, in what the developing human being is by its very nature. Deep within, we must be able to understand the developing human being. Can we still do that today? No, otherwise we would not be sitting in laboratories and engaging in experimental psychology to establish rules about how the human mind and human memory work. The teacher who regards these external methods as the essential means of getting to know the human being stifles within himself the living, intuitive relationship—the living, intuitive connection—to the human being. I know in what sense experimental pedagogy and experimental psychology are useful to him. But I also know that, for the very purpose for which they are considered most useful today, they are merely a symptom of the fact that we have lost the direct spiritual path from human being to human being and are seeking to rediscover it through external observation in the laboratory. We have become estranged from what is human within ourselves and are therefore seeking this humanity through external means. But if we are to become true educators and teachers, we must once again become inwardly united with what is human. We must develop the whole human being within ourselves; then this whole human being will be attuned to what we are called upon to shape in the child through educational and artistic means. What we as educators gain from experimental science and observation—which is often regarded today as the foundation of educational science—is akin to striving to learn how to eat and drink by studying nutrition and its application to human beings. We do not need knowledge of how to eat and drink; we need a healthy development of taste and healthy organs—then we can eat and drink properly. We do not need a pedagogy based on experimental psychology; as educators, we need to awaken living human nature, which re-experiences the whole child within itself by entering into a spiritual relationship with the child.

[ 20 ] So, my esteemed guests, we would like to shape this Waldorf School in a new spirit. And you will also have noticed what this school is not meant to be. In any case, it is not meant to be a school based on a particular worldview. Anyone who were to say—and I am saying this today on the opening day—that anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science is the foundation of the Waldorf School and now intends to impose its worldview on this school—that person would not be speaking the truth. We have absolutely no desire to impart our “dogmas,” our principles, or the content of our worldview to the developing human being. We do not strive to bring about a dogmatic education. We strive to ensure that what we have been able to gain through Spiritual Science becomes a living educational reality. We strive to incorporate into our methodology and our didactics that which can emerge from living Spiritual Science as a soulful approach to human beings. Dead science can yield only knowledge; from living Spiritual Science, however, methodology, didactics, and practical skills in the spiritual-soul sense will emerge. We strive to teach and to educate. With regard to all this, we are thoroughly aware of the responsibility that our dear friend, Mr. Molt, spoke of earlier. But we will honestly abide by what we have promised: that the various religious denominations, which are to provide religious instruction on their own initiative, may bring their worldview principles into our school. We simply want to wait and see whether—just as we will not interfere in the slightest with what is to be brought into our school as a worldview—there will be no interference with what we, in the most modest way and for the time being only, wish to introduce as an art. For we know: Humanity will first have to understand that the art of education—in the pedagogical, methodological, and didactic sense—can arise from a spiritual worldview before it can gain a true understanding of worldview issues and their interrelationships. Thus, we will not establish a school based on a particular worldview. With the Waldorf School, we will strive to create a school based on the art of education.

[ 21 ] To you, the parents of the children who will be the first to attend this school, it must be said that you are not only pioneers for a personal, human purpose, but also for a cultural imperative of our time, and that you will only truly understand what is now to take place with regard to the Waldorf School if you see yourselves as such pioneers.

[ 22 ] I cannot yet speak to the children today in language as clear and understandable as I can to their parents, but let us promise these children that what we convey to their parents in words will reach them through deeds—deeds that they will truly incorporate into their lives so that they may meet the demanding challenges of future generations. These demands will be severe, and what we perceive today—especially in Central Europe—as a great hardship is only the beginning of what will be perceived as an even greater hardship. But just as the greatest of human beings have always emerged from suffering and pain, so too can true human education and teaching—based on reality—emerge from this great hardship. By seeking the foundation and source of education in the whole human being and striving to educate through the whole human being, we wish to place the educational and social question within the broader social context of our time.

[ 23 ] A unified school system—that is what our times demand! The art of education and teaching—which, as has been suggested, seeks to draw its expertise from the whole human being—will inevitably lead to nothing other than a unified school. If humanity is to live in social justice in the future, it must first educate its children in a socially sound manner. We would like to make a small contribution toward making this possible through the Waldorf School.

[ 24 ] May what we may only partially achieve—even with the best of intentions—not exhaust its power in our feeble attempt alone. May it find successors. For we are convinced that while a feeble attempt may fail due to opposition and ignorance, the very essence of this endeavor must find successors. For when a genuine art of social education and instruction takes root in the consciousness of all humanity—including both the teaching staff and the children to be educated—then the school will be properly integrated into all of social life.

[ 25 ] May the Waldorf School be able to make a small contribution toward this great goal.