The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. Speech at the Ceremony Marking the End of the Second School Year

[ 1 ] My dear children! I must speak to you first. You have completed another school year. When you entered the classes you are in now, you were a year younger; now you are a year older. This can remind you that you are growing older all the time, and it will lead you to realize that one day you will grow from children into adults—people who must be capable in the world so that they can work and truly accomplish what the world and other people expect of them.

[ 2 ] Now think back to when you were very little. You were all once very tiny babies—remember that—who couldn’t speak. You learned to speak, and you learned many other things. Once you had already learned quite a bit, you came to us at school. Your parents sent you to our school. Think of your parents—they thought of you. When you were babies, when you were very little children, your parents worried: “What will become of my son, or what will become of my daughter?” Will they one day become capable people, so that I myself—as the father said, and as the mother said—when I am old, can look upon my children with confidence?—And look, dear children, so that you might become such people, your parents brought you here; you were the dearest thing your parents ever had. Your parents worried: “Will my child become a capable person?”—And because they believed that the Waldorf School has teachers who can help children become capable people, your parents brought you here to this Waldorf School.

[ 3 ] Remember that you must study! Your parents brought you here and entrusted you to your dear teachers. But you must bring your parents a gift home every day—and especially at the end of each year—a gift that your parents will love so much, if it is a good gift, that they can say: “My son or my daughter has learned something worthwhile.”—You should consider it a truly wonderful thing when, at the end of the school year, you can go home and say: “Father and Mother, I’ve worked really hard to learn something really good.”—Then, my dear children, you will have relieved your parents of a great worry and brought them great joy. Let’s think about that very especially today. Let’s remember that we are here at school as children so that we can fulfill for our parents what they set out to do, what they expected when they brought us here.

[ 4 ] Let us remember, then, that we grow older with each passing year, that one day we will be adults. And with that comes life—with its sorrows, its fate, and its joys—but life also brings its share of work. Life, my dear children, will demand a great deal from you. Life will place very special demands on you. Well, my dear children, one thing will always give you strength, one thing will always bring you sunshine: if you can remember what it was like here at school, how you gradually grew to love your teachers more and more. You do love your teachers very much, don’t you? [Yes!—the children reply.] If later on you can look back and think: “There I learned something,” “That was a wonderful day,” “The teacher spoke kindly to me,” “I truly enjoyed being at school”—then you will truly have a ray of sunshine that shines into your lives. When you’re very old one day and have gray hair, you’ll be able to look back on how you learned something wonderful. If you remember clearly what it was like to be at school, you’ll see: it gives you strength—something that stays with you until the day you die.

[ 5 ] There’s something that makes memories unpleasant, that clouds them, when we have to think: “Oh, I was such a lazybones back then!” - That’s not good later in life, when you have to think about how lazy you were; it has a very negative effect on your life when you have to remember that you didn’t love your teacher, that you didn’t love the subject or what was on the board, what was said, and what was read aloud. It’s always wonderful when, later on, you can remember how hardworking you were, how much you loved your teacher. It’s painful when you have to tell yourself: “Back then, I was a lazy boy.” If I hadn’t been a lazy boy, I’d be a capable person now. - Laziness may have given you pleasure; later, you will bitterly regret it if you were lazy. Likewise, you will understand nothing of life if you were inattentive; your whole life will then be like a sun obscured by a yellow cloud that covers the whole world with hail. That is how it will be when you have to remember: You did not love your teachers or what was taught to you. When you reflect on this, it will be a good thought to remember diligence, attentiveness, and love.

[ 6 ] That is why you are here. You are here to become capable, powerful people in life; you can only become that if you remember your childhood in such a way that you can say to yourselves: I made an effort to be attentive and loving toward my subjects and my teachers. - That is what you should feel in every moment. When you come into school in the morning, when you recite the morning prayer, you should remember: “I am here to become a capable person.” - When you go home from school, you should think: Every minute I haven’t been diligent, attentive, and loving is a minute lost, because I’m causing my parents great worry. - The best thing you can bring home to your parents is for them, when they see you return, to say to themselves: “I can tell by the look on my child’s face that they’ve brought something worthwhile home from school today.” - Remember that when you come home from school to your parents, they should say to themselves: “These will one day be capable people.” - This is what I want to say to you, my dear children, because every school year makes us older, and we remember how we are growing older.

[ 7 ] After speaking to the children, I would like to say a few words over the children’s heads to their dear parents. What unites us here at the school as teachers is the realization that a divine-spiritual element permeates all human activity, that human beings can surrender themselves to this divine-spiritual element—and must do so especially in a task such as that which falls to the teacher. Our teachers must always be aware that their task is to summon the spirit of the world into the school, and they must live with this awareness. This awareness, my esteemed guests, best establishes that necessary relationship between our teaching staff and the parents of the schoolchildren. This relationship should be such that we, as teachers, truly think in unison with the parents and feel in harmony with them, so that what we seek in the school is precisely what the parents themselves—with their embodied ideals and their beloved children—seek. This, in particular, hammers our teachers’ worldview into their hearts and souls every morning. By looking into the souls of the children, our teachers learn to recognize the value of the human soul in the child. That is why they understand what you have given them by bringing your children—and thereby carrying that gift into the school—so that the spirit may be instilled in human souls. It is with this deep, grateful, and benevolent feeling that our teachers receive what you bring into the school as your most cherished possession. From this springs the teachers’ aspiration to give back to you, to the best of their ability and with gratitude and love, what you yourselves have given—in the souls you see once again when your children come home to you, or when they are to be sent out into life. In this belief in human development, our teachers receive a gift from you. They wish to offer a gift in return by helping your children become good people. This requires full agreement with you. Therefore, the esteemed guests here may be assured that if you, as parents, strive for this agreement—if you express it in the right way, with harmonious empathy, as has recently been the case—then our teachers will feel that, no matter what opposition or hostility may otherwise be at work, they have solid ground beneath their feet. In this harmony with the parents, may the teachers seek the impulse to act.

[ 8 ] I would like to address a third message to you, my dear teachers. You are united by the spirit of a spiritual worldview. To the best of your abilities, rooted within you—not in the sense of a particular school of thought, but in the sense of permeating the entire educational system with a spiritually-inspired attitude—you strive to recognize the souls of the developing human beings and to work with these souls. In doing so, my dear friends, you come to understand two things best.

[ 9 ] The first is that which springs forth from within, out of creative power, through human freedom. We are gradually learning to recognize how we ourselves must continually learn from the children what is good for them. We are learning to recognize that only what we create out of freedom—what emerges as our very best in our interaction with the children—has a profound effect on the child’s soul. Our creative power can, in the best sense of the word, develop us toward this very end; we regard this as our very best in all our work.

[ 10 ] The other point is that, precisely because of our worldview, we have formed a deeper connection to the idea of destiny. We work artistically with the children’s souls. What we work on artistically is not like an external work of art in marble or wood; it is something that is fatefully connected to us. When we stand before our children each day, when we try to instill in them, to breathe life into them, to imbue them with that which lies in the background as true insight, we bind ourselves fatefully to these souls for all eternity, so that in the realm of eternity, what we have shaped through various metamorphoses the way we have done it will confront us. From the sense of freedom and destiny springs, in a worldview such as we have here, the true responsibility of the teacher. It was in the spirit of this responsibility as teachers that our friends spoke earlier; they spoke to the children and, over the children’s heads, to the parents. I simply wanted to summarize these words.

[ 11 ] Once again, let this be said to you, children: Come to school next year with the same love and the same eagerness to learn; learn to love your teachers even more than you have until now; remember that your teachers’ thoughts are focused day and night on making you capable people. Your teachers love you by shaping your souls, your minds, and your bodies to make you capable people. Let’s take this to heart as we leave this school year behind. Let’s start the next school year off on the right foot with the necessary determination. Make it your resolution: I will be diligent and attentive; I will treat the subjects and my teachers with love. — It will work out; it will go even better than it did this year.