The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. Zoology and Botany Classes for Grades 9–12

[ 1 ] Attempts have been made from various perspectives to highlight the importance of structuring the curriculum and formulating educational goals based on human development. In particular, I have attempted to characterize the period from approximately age 6 or 7—when the change of teeth begins—through puberty, up to ages 14 or 15, as a complete stage of life, and then to show how, within this stage, the period up to around age 9 stands out as a smaller phase. In turn, there is an important turning point in this phase of life around the age of 12. These three points in time—the ages of 9, 12, and 14 or 15 (that is, the age that roughly marks the end of schooling)—should actually be the guiding factors in the overall structure of the curriculum and in the formulation of educational goals. And one will immediately come to regard this tracking of human development as the guiding principle when one says to oneself: What truly matters in the education of a human being is that we bring out—truly bring out—all the powers that lie latent within the human being. If we look at this in the right way, we will say to ourselves: We must actually use the entire curriculum and the entire educational process to truly bring these powers, which lie hidden within the human being, to the surface. It is not a matter of using the child’s powers to absorb this or that from the details of knowledge, but rather of using precisely what we bring to the child—in a sense, as a treasure trove of knowledge—in such a way that the powers are drawn out of the child’s nature solely through the effect of this treasure trove of knowledge. We will not achieve this if we do not take into account how differently the child’s physical and psychological nature is constituted up to the age of 9, up to the age of 12, and so on. Above all, we must be aware that the actual power of discernment—that which enables a person to judge, to judge independently—does not fully emerge until puberty, and that it develops gradually beginning at the age of 12. So we can say: up to the age of 9, the tendency of human nature to develop under authority is already present; but what might be called the impulse to imitate continues to have an effect well into this ninth year. Then this impulse to imitate disappears, while the tendency toward authority remains. But then, around the age of 12—still under the guidance of authority, which continues to exert its influence—the decisive impulse to develop judgments, independent judgments, begins. If we rely too heavily on independent judgment even before the age of 12, we actually ruin the child’s psychological and physical powers; above all, we stifle the child’s ability to empathize with others through judgment.

[ 2 ] Yes, for a person who isn’t completely desensitized, it is by no means a matter of indifference to make a judgment and say yes or no to something. Depending on whether we have to say “yes” or “no” to this or that, we experience pleasure and suffering, joy and pain. But although people in the realm of selfishness may feel that what they have to judge is pleasurable or painful, people today are hardly educated to experience the whole of life and the world as pleasurable or painful. But as a result, much is lost to us as human beings. Moreover, this inability to experience the world also influences our entire social will. Therefore, special emphasis should be placed not only on the development of correct concepts in the curriculum, but also on the development of a correct sense of the world—a correct way of positioning oneself within it.

[ 3 ] Today, humanity is dominated almost exclusively by a single perspective on social relations. They tell themselves: The world must be organized in such a way that it represents a kind of earthly paradise for all people. After all, what else do the extreme, radical socialists of Eastern Europe want other than to shape social life—based on whatever theories they have—in such a way that a kind of earthly paradise emerges—even if, in reality, that paradise then turns into hell; that, of course, is a matter for another discussion. Where does this come from? One need only substitute a different judgment for this one, and one will see what is wrong with this very judgment—that of transforming all earthly life into a kind of paradise through various social coercive measures. I am not saying the following to promote Nietzscheanism here before you, but rather to illustrate a point. Nietzsche wrote his first treatise under the title: “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.” Among the manifold, highly stimulating ideas—against which, however, one can argue at great length—in this work is also the notion that the Greek people were not that eternally cheerful, smiling people as they are portrayed by some, but that at the very core of their lives the Greek people experienced tragedy, a sorrow of life, and that it was precisely the Greeks who sensed that our life between birth and death—the life we live here on earth—cannot be entirely happy, and that humanity’s purpose lies beyond this earthly existence. Nietzsche believed that the Greeks felt this particularly keenly and also needed a powerful consolation for the disharmonies of earthly life, which they found in art. Nietzsche views the very origin of art in such a way that he says to himself: Art has been a source of comfort—especially for the Greeks—in the face of earthly disharmonies, and in music in particular, Nietzsche sees something that is meant to lead beyond earthly disharmony. The fact is that there is, in a sense, a contrast between our dry, sober, calculating thinking and what a person experiences when engaging with music. Here, too, opposites intersect in a very peculiar way. Just consider that one can calculate tones and tonal relationships in numbers—that is the realm of sound physics and acoustics! But for those who surrender themselves to the musical world of tones, what can be calculated there is completely hidden. The intellectual is completely veiled in music. The intellectual sleeps within music. This is something Nietzsche felt particularly keenly. He called this the “tragic” aspect of music, through which a person feels surrendered to that which he would otherwise have to experience in the world. Well, Nietzsche was simply a person who, due to his unique constitution, truly sensed what 19th-century materialism had brought into humanity. Truly, this educator, who dreamed of educational institutions that might spring from an idea such as the one I have just characterized as his own—institutions that could be the sources of genuine solace in life—truly, this Nietzsche revealed through his own life much of what the 19th century needed. He simply collapsed under the very experience of the disharmonies of the nineteenth century. And if one reads, so to speak, between the lines of this man—who was, as it were, destined to experience deep within himself what others in the 19th century passed by more or less in a state of spiritual slumber—then one sees how he always points to what was lacking in his own education, and specifically in the education he should have received through formal instruction. With Nietzsche in particular, one gets the feeling that the powers within him remained buried, deep down. They were never brought to the surface. Naturally, such a brilliant person found this far more tragic than anyone else would. It is easy to say that attention has been drawn here and there to the three stages in a child’s life, particularly between the ages of 6 or 7 and 14 or 15. But these stages of life have never truly been put to use in the service of pedagogy, and that is what must happen above all else.

[ 4 ] At the age of 9, the child truly experiences a complete transformation of its being, which points to a significant transformation of its inner life and of its physical experience. From that point on, the human being begins to feel separate from its surroundings. It learns to distinguish between the world and the self. If we know how to observe correctly, we must say: up to this turning point in human consciousness, the world and the “I” more or less merge together. From the age of nine onward—of course, this is all approximate—the child distinguishes between themselves and the world. This must be taken into account when selecting the educational content and shaping the child’s upbringing from the age of nine onward. We would do well, until then, not to confuse the child too much with descriptions or characterizations of things that are separate from the human being or viewed in isolation from the human being. When we tell a child a fable, when we tell children fairy tales, we speak of animals—and perhaps of plants—in the same way we might speak of a human being; animals and plants are personified, as we might say. They are rightly personified because the child does not yet distinguish between the “I” and the world; for this reason, the child should see the world as similar to what it experiences within itself. We must be clear that what I am describing here is not an impoverishment of the child’s life at age 9, but rather an enrichment.

[ 5 ] It will seem quite paradoxical to you that I am saying this very last sentence. Yet this last sentence, spoken as I have just spoken it, does indeed sound paradoxical. But what is often said about a child’s life is meant to convey that, in fact, a child’s life does not gradually become richer, but rather becomes impoverished. Consider what people often say today when a child hurts itself on the corner of a table and, in a fit of anger, hits the table. People then say that the child has something in its soul called animism. The child animates the table, so to speak, projecting its soul into the table. This, however, is an impossible theory. Why? Because the child does not regard itself as a directly living being that projects itself into the table, personifying the table of its own accord, but rather because the child does not conceive of itself as any more alive than the table. The child looks at the table, and has not yet experienced more within itself than it experiences externally in the table. It is not that the child personifies the table, but—if I may put it this way—it “tables” its own personality; it does not make its personality any richer than the table is. Therefore, when you tell the child fairy tales or fables, you are speaking to it about as much as the child can grasp from the external world. This must take place by the age of nine. From then on, you can begin to expect that the child will learn to distinguish between the “I” and the world. That is to say, only from then on can we begin to talk to the child about plants and animals from a natural history perspective.

[ 6 ] I have really gone to great lengths to study the effect of premature exposure to natural history on children. Premature exposure to natural history does, in fact, make the child dry later on—so dry, in fact, that a keen observer can notice it, I would say, in the tendency toward yellowing of the skin in humans when concepts of natural history are introduced to the child too early.

[ 7 ] At the age of 9, the time has come when we may begin to introduce the child to concepts of natural history—but only concepts that are still alive; if possible, we should still avoid exposing the child to mineral or inanimate objects at this stage. Living things—the non-human living world—appear before us in two realms, two spheres: the animal realm and the plant realm. But if we take what humans have achieved in the description of animals—in the scientific characterization of animals—and in the scientific description and characterization of plants, and if we attempt to present this in popular, concise books for children, trying to discuss it in a superficially accessible way, we still fail to truly reach the child. It can be observed in almost all of our natural history textbooks that they are, in fact, nothing more than a filtered form of scientific erudition, and that is terrible. Of course, on the other hand, attempts have been made to build upon visual instruction in the natural sciences. Yet there, too, we find methodological textbooks. But these suffer from the opposite flaw: they contain a great deal of triviality. They may seek to discuss with the child nothing other than what the child already knows, and strive, as they say, to draw quite vividly only from the child’s own nature. In doing so, they fall into triviality. And some of the methodological handbooks that exist—the methodological guides—are actually exasperating because they are so terribly trivial. One senses that if such things were to take effect in school, all the harmful aspects of triviality would be instilled in people. And the triviality with which one deals during childhood manifests itself later—just like many other things I have already mentioned—in a desolation of human life; at the very least, in a way of life that makes it impossible for a person to look back on their childhood with complete joy. But that is actually something a person needs. It is essential that, throughout our entire lives, we be able to look back on our school days as something paradisiacal. Not because we experienced only joy there. It does not even matter all that much whether we experienced only joy during that time. Some may have gone hungry as children; some may have been beaten by their teachers out of ignorance, or treated unkindly—of course, nothing other than the intention to combat all these things in the best possible way must ever become a pedagogical principle— but such things may have happened, and yet the recollection of childhood can be a source of vitality if, at least from one direction or another, we were given the opportunity in childhood to develop a relationship with the world. We must develop a relationship with the world precisely by presenting the subject matter of natural history to the child in the right way. It does no good at all if we describe to the child the successive classes of animals or the successive classes and species and so on of plants, and then—in a sense, to avoid becoming too dry—take the children for a walk once in a while to show them the plants outdoors; that actually doesn’t help much at all. Certainly, depending on their instinctive disposition, one teacher will have a greater impact than another. A teacher will be able to inspire quite a lot in the children through a certain inclination toward nature that is unique to him or her. But what can flow from Spiritual Science into human beings and into their souls is something entirely different; it gives us a sense of the living interconnectedness of human beings with the rest of the world.

[ 8 ] Today we laugh at the fact that, in the first third of the 19th century, many people still felt that the entire animal kingdom was essentially a human being spread out in all directions. We have various classes of animals. One class of animals is developed in one direction, another class in the opposite direction. We can gain an overview of the various animal classes, genera, species, and so on. Human beings contain within themselves all the powers and inner structure that are distributed among the animals. The scientific view of the time, let’s say, was still based on Oken’s ideas. Oken used fire as a symbol of this. People looked for lower animals out in nature. Today, materialistic natural science claims that these lower animals existed in primeval times, that they gradually became more perfected, and that modern humans—a perfected physical being—emerged from them. We need not go into the details here, since we are dealing not with ordinary science but with pedagogy. But can’t one see how the human head—with its bony shell on the outside and soft tissues on the inside—resembles certain lower animals? Take snails; take mollusks; they resemble the human head. And if you consider our more or less developed birds, you will have to admit: In adaptation to the air, in adaptation to the entire rest of their way of life, that which in humans recedes into the background—such as the internal structure of the lungs and the like—is particularly well-developed. If you imagine away what flows into the limbs in humans, if you imagine the entire organism held more inwardly and adapted to the conditions of life in the air, then you get the structure of the bird. Compare the organization of the lion or the cat with that of the cow, and you will see everywhere that in one animal species one part of the organization is more highly developed, while in another animal species a different part of the organization is more highly developed. Each animal species is organized specifically for one purpose. Of the snail we can say: it is almost entirely head; it has nothing but a head. Only it is a simple, primitive head. The human head is more complex. Of the bird we can say: it is, in a sense, entirely lung, correspondingly transformed, because everything else has atrophied. We can say of the lion: it is, in a sense, entirely blood circulation and heart. We can say of the cow: it is entirely stomach. And so, out in nature, we can characterize the various genera and species by looking at the individual organs. What I am saying now can certainly also be expressed in a very simple, primitive way. And then, when one surveys the animal kingdom and all that is spread out there like a vast fan of beings, and compares this with the human organism—how everything in the human being is well-rounded, how no single system of organization imposes itself, but each is adapted to the next—we find: Yes, in animals, the organ systems are always adapted to the external world; in humans, it is not the organ systems that are adapted to the external world, but rather one to the other. The human being is a self-contained totality, a self-contained whole, which I can only sketch out for you here in broad strokes.

[ 9 ] Just imagine: we use everything we can—the school’s natural history collection, every walk we take with the children, everything the child has experienced—we use it all to vividly illustrate how the whole human being is, so to speak, a compendium of the animal world; how everything within him is harmoniously structured, well-rounded; how animals represent one-sided forms of development and therefore none can possess full animation; and how the human being represents the adaptation of one organ system to another and, precisely through this, gains the ability to be a fully animated being. If we ourselves are fully convinced and imbued with this understanding of humanity’s relationship to the animal world, then we can rise to the task of vividly depicting this relationship, so that the portrayal is entirely objective, yet at the same time allows humanity to feel its connection to the world. Just think, what value is there in telling people today, in this materialistic age, that they are the crown of earthly creation? They do not understand it in detail. They look at themselves. They look at the individual animal. They do not observe each individual animal in such a way as to try to recognize how this organ system is developed in one way in this animal class and in another way in that animal class. Nor do they consider the unifying aspect within human beings. When we do this, our understanding immediately becomes a feeling, a sense of our place in the world; then we cease to feel selfishly only within ourselves, and our feeling reaches out into the world.

[ 10 ] Just try teaching in this way once, and you will see how valuable such teaching is for the child’s mind. Such understanding is truly transformed into feeling. Under the influence of such understanding, a person gradually becomes more humble. The subject matter is truly used as a means of education. What good is it, after all, if we keep saying that we shouldn’t just teach in a dry manner, that we shouldn’t merely impart factual knowledge to the child, if we have no way of transforming that knowledge so that it directly becomes a means of education? Sometimes, when it is repeatedly emphasized that the excessive amount of knowledge we impart to the child hinders the child’s proper development, one is tempted to say: “Yes, but if teaching is meaningless, why don’t you then throw the entire curriculum out of school?” Of course, that cannot be done. The curriculum must simply be transformed into an educational tool. Natural history instruction, with regard to the animal kingdom, achieves this through an approach in the sense described and by not introducing it to the child until after the child has passed the age of 9.

[ 11 ] When it comes to the plant world, we are not in a position to present individual plant species or genera in a one-sided manner and then, for example, see everything that is summarized there reflected in human beings. The approach that is so fruitful for animals—which provides us with such a good foundation for an artistically vivid portrayal of the zoological being—fails when applied to the plant kingdom. We cannot view it that way; it simply does not work: we must resort to something entirely different. We must regard the entire plant being as belonging vitally to the earth, to the whole earth.

[ 12 ] Our materialism has led us to view the Earth as a sphere of stones, consisting of minerals, with plants, as it were, stuck inside it. We must not apply the same principle, say, to the human head and its hair. We will regard hair growth as something that belongs to the human head. Thus, we must regard the Earth, with its plant life, as something that belongs to the organism that is the Earth. We create an abstraction when we consider the Earth as merely a mass of rock, possessing at most the force of gravity. We speak of the real Earth when we regard the Earth as an organism in such a way that plants belong to it, just as the hair on our heads belongs to us. But when we view it this way, as we look at the Earth, the plants grow together with it, and we develop the right instinct to truly take in the Earth in connection with its plant world. We do this when we observe the Earth over the course of time, through the cycle of the year. When we actually teach the natural history of plants to children, we must not simply list class after class or species after species. Rather, we must make use of everything we have—the natural history collection, the walks, everything the child remembers, everything we can bring into the classroom in the form of fresh plants—and then describe to the child: Spring conjures up this or that plant from the earth, conjures up this or that from the plants—it looks like this—then we move further into May, and the earth becomes like this; then we move further into summer, and the earth becomes like this.

[ 13 ] We try to view the flowers of plants in the same way a child views the Earth’s development over the course of the year. We tell the child how, in the fall, the seeds return to the earth, and how the cycle begins anew. We view the Earth as an organism and observe this living process of the plants sprouting and then withering away. We tell the child the name—which is, of course, a matter of convention—only after we have guided them to it: “Look, there’s this little plant: it’s such-and-such—under trees or away from trees. There stands this little plant because in May these little plants thrive in such-and-such a way; it has five little leaves. Remember... there it is: the one with five yellowish little leaves is connected to the whole life of the earth in May; that is the buttercup!” and so on, so that the entire natural history of the plant world appears as the annual life of the earth. And then one moves on to those somewhat more hidden aspects, such as how certain plants bloom at Christmas time, how other plants endure, and how some endure for a long time. One moves from the life of a single herb that adorns the earth over the course of the year and then fades away, to the growth of the tree, and so on. One never simply considers one plant next to another, but rather the Earth with its plant growth, and the plant growth emerging from the living Earth.

[ 14 ] You have thus established two magnificent poles within the realm of natural history. With the animal kingdom, you have something that points everywhere toward the human being. Human beings feel as if they themselves have been synthesized out of the one-sided aspects of the animal kingdom. We cannot look at any animal species without pointing to that aspect in human beings which that particular animal species has developed in a particularly one-sided way. The animal kingdom becomes for us a fully laid-out human kingdom, a human kingdom spread out like a fan. As I said, people today laugh at such things. Admittedly, the first third of the 19th century sometimes took this to grotesque extremes. People like Oken uttered such a grotesque statement—and I do not mean to defend it: “The tongue is an octopus.” Of course, Oken had the right principle in mind. He took the human tongue and sought something corresponding to it in every single species within the animal classes. He then compared these to the human organ, and in the octopus he found the greatest resemblance to the tongue: the tongue is an octopus. The stomach is a ruminant, and so on. As I said, this was, once again, an aberration—the radical extreme. There’s no need to go that far. Even back then, people couldn’t yet identify things correctly; but today—today, however, we can indeed describe the entire animal kingdom as spread out like a fan within the human being, presenting the human being as the synthesis of the entire animal world. We bring everything that is then observed in the animal kingdom in relation to children back to the human being. We have the opportunity, as the child turns its eyes outward, to present the elements of its humanity before its eyes, so to speak.

[ 15 ] In the plant kingdom, we have exactly the opposite. There, we set aside the human being entirely and view the plant kingdom as growing entirely out of the earth itself, out of the planet on which we walk. In one instance, we place the animal kingdom in the closest possible relationship to human beings; in the other, we place the plant kingdom in the closest possible relationship to what is non-human and objective. In other words: on the one hand, we evoke a sensitive understanding of the animal kingdom and of human beings themselves through the observation of the animal kingdom; on the other hand, we teach human beings to view the Earth in its objectivity—as an organism upon which they walk and from which they live—and upon which what they see in the growth of plants, in the annual life of plants, in the particular survival of this year’s plants, and so on, is separate from them. Through this dual approach, we instill an immense amount of what might be called a balance between the intellectual and the emotional into the human soul. This leads to the mere intellectualism—which has such a pedantic and drying-up effect—taking a back seat. When one comprehends the annual plant—the herbaceous plant sprouting from the earth, with its root in the soil, its leaves and stem emerging, the green leaves rising all the way up to flowering and seed formation—when one feels this vividly in connection with the earth, and this is made even more vivid by experiencing it within the annual cycle; that one experiences how the flower is brought forth when the sunlight, I would say, unites in love with that which springs forth from the earth—when this is fully felt as a sensed insight, as a perceiving sensation; when one thus feels, from spring through to fall, the process of becoming from the root through the leaf to the flower and the seed—when one feels all of this, then something else arises within one. You see, there is the earth, there is the plant, the annual plant. The annual plant takes root deep within the earth. Now let us consider the tree; here it is lignified, there are the branches. What appears there in the course of a year is perceived in much the same way as the annual plant; it is attached to the tree in much the same way as the annual plant is rooted in the earth. In a sense, the earth and what constitutes the wood of the tree become a unity, and one is struck by the incredibly powerful mental image: as the tree grows upward with its wood, the earth itself and what lies beneath it rise up; where no trees grow, but only annual plants, the force that otherwise wells up into the tree trunk remains within the earth itself. One gets a vivid sense of seeking the sap flow of the tree trunk beneath the earth’s surface. And just as the sap flow of the tree trunk now brings forth the flower of the year, so the sap flow below—which we know to be identical to that of the tree trunk—brings forth the annual plant. I would like to say: the perception of the tree trunk merges with the perception of the earth. One enters into the living world.

[ 16 ] Is it possible, through a vivid description of the earth, the plant kingdom, the animal world, and humanity, to bring to life in the child—in a simple and fundamental way—that which is otherwise perceived only as lifeless—particularly during the period from the 9th to around the 12th —a time when the child is particularly predisposed to gradually distinguish itself from the world, yet is eager to absorb unconsciously, on the one hand, the connection between human beings and the animal kingdom, and on the other, that which sets human beings apart—namely, the earth and earthly life—then something grows within the child that also brings it into the proper relationship to the historical life of humanity on earth. Only then do the sensibilities develop that can properly grasp history. Before the ages of 10 or 11, history will naturally have been presented only in the form of storytelling or biographical accounts. In the 10th and 11th years, history should be incorporated into natural history instruction in such a way that the feelings cultivated in the child through natural history lessons are, so to speak, closely interwoven with what can now also enliven the concepts, ideas, and feelings of history lessons. It is not until the 12th year that the possibility actually arises to move on to what constitutes true judgment. We will discuss this tomorrow.

[ 17 ] You see, it is strange—the inability to view human life correctly and to compare it properly with life on Earth stems from the fact that, for centuries, people have not actually received such a natural education. People tend to be very external in their view of the world. For example, people quite understandably say: Spring is the morning of the year; summer, the day of the year; fall, the evening of the year; winter, the night of the year. But is that really the case? In reality, it is quite different. When we sleep, everything that distinguishes us from plants has withdrawn from our human constitution. When we sleep, we are actually not entitled to look the way we do. In fact, we look the way we do precisely because we are organized toward being animated and spiritualized. When we sleep, we are actually plant beings; we are on the same level as plant beings. As individual human beings, we are nothing other than what the earth is with its plant growth. But which season does it correspond to when we sleep? When we sleep, this corresponds to summer—that is, the season in which plants are present. And to which season does it correspond when we are awake? Just as plant life ceases in winter and, so to speak, withdraws into the earth’s interior, so too does plant life in human beings withdraw during the time from waking to falling asleep and is replaced by something else. If we do not rely on a vague analogy but on reality, we must say: We must compare human sleep to the summer season and human wakefulness to the Earth’s winter season. Reality is thus precisely the opposite of what we assume to be a vague analogy.

[ 18 ] What I have just told you is something that Spiritual Science must always address, and I never wish to proceed in an amateurish manner, but always in a thoroughly professional one. At this point, I must actually say something quite peculiar. I have now investigated whether anyone working in the external sciences has grasped even a trace of what I have stated here as a finding of Spiritual Science—namely, that the Earth actually wakes in winter and sleeps in summer. Well, I actually found the only small clue—which, if properly pursued, would lead to what I have just stated—in a Basel school curriculum dating from the 1940s or 1950s. This Basel school curriculum contains a treatise on human sleep, and human sleep is treated there in a manner contrary to the usual way of looking at it. In the interest of fairness, I would like to point out this Basel school curriculum. At the moment, the author’s name does not come to mind, but I hope it will occur to me so that I can add it by tomorrow.