The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] Today I would like to speak about some ways of adapting the material covered in class to the life of the child. There is no doubt that teaching and education that are not based on a genuine understanding of the human being cannot possibly achieve this adaptation of the subject matter to the reality of human life. Today, the spiritual aspect of the human being is, in essence, practically not recognized; people are really only aware that the human being has a physical body. Perhaps they still admit that something soul-related—which, however, remains a very vague concept in their minds—directs this physical body, but they do not conceive of the soul and spirit as having any real inner concreteness. This is precisely what anthroposophy is intended to contribute to our understanding of human beings. Only then will it be possible to consciously adapt teaching and education to the processes of human life.

[ 2 ] Just consider, for a moment, what might occur to you upon a little reflection: suppose the child hears a story from you, or sees something you show him on the blackboard, or through a physics experiment you demonstrate for his sake, or perhaps you find yourself in a position to play a piece of music for the child or something similar. At first, all of this relates to the external physical reality of the child in question. But what you are instilling in the child—by way of physical reality, through the eye, through the ear, through the intellect that comprehends what you are teaching—that which is instilled in the child very soon takes on an entirely different form of existence. The child leaves school and goes to sleep; during sleep, its I and its astral body are outside the physical body and the etheric body. What you have accomplished with the child through the physical body—and, for my sake, the etheric body as well—continues in the astral body and in the I. These latter two, however, are in a completely different environment during sleep. They go through something that they experience only during sleep, and what you have taught the child plays a part in this process; it participates precisely in those effects that have remained in the astral body and the “I.” You must remember that what you teach the child indirectly through the physical body is channeled into the astral body and the “I”; and that through this you exert an influence on the way the child lives from the moment of falling asleep until waking up; and that the next day, the child brings back to you what it has experienced between falling asleep and waking up.

[ 3 ] You can understand this through a simple example. Take the case of a child doing eurythmy or singing. Here, the child’s physical body itself is in action, and this physical body and the etheric body, which are in action, impose upon the astral body and the “I” whatever is involved in their activity. The astral body and the “I” must participate in whatever constitutes the activity of the physical body and the etheric body. Furthermore, the astral body and the “I” actually resist this participation; they actually possess other forces within themselves. These forces must be overcome in a certain way. They resist, but they must adapt to what is imposed on them from the outside through their own physical nature—in eurythmy, more through the physical body; when listening to instrumental music, through the etheric body. Now the I and the astral body enter the world that the human being experiences between falling asleep and waking up; there, everything that has been imposed upon the astral body and the I continues to resonate. In the manner just experienced by the astral body and the I—that is, in a much more expansive and spiritualized way—the astral body and the I reenact what they have just experienced through eurythmy and subsequently through music; they reenact it all. What they have experienced between falling asleep and waking up, the children bring with them again in the morning when they come to school; they have carried it into their physical and etheric bodies, and we must take this into account.

[ 4 ] When we consider the human being in his or her entirety, he or she appears to us as an extraordinarily complex entity that we must come to terms with in our teaching and educational work. Now, if we go into more detail, we might say, for example: Take a child practicing eurythmy—the physical body is in motion, and the movements of the physical body are transmitted to the etheric body. At first, the astral body and the “I” resist, and in a certain way, what takes place in the activity of the physical body and the etheric body is imprinted upon them. They then go out during sleep and connect what has been imprinted upon them with entirely different spiritual forces. In the morning, they carry it back into the physical body and the etheric body. And there is then a remarkable harmony between what has been absorbed from the spiritual realm between falling asleep and waking up and what the physical body and the etheric body have experienced during eurythmy. The effect manifests in such a way that the spiritual experiences undergone between falling asleep and waking up align with what was prepared and experienced the previous day. And it is only through this integration that a particularly health-promoting force inherent in eurythmy becomes apparent. In fact, I would say that a kind of spiritual substance is carried into the person upon their next awakening when eurythmy is practiced in this way. And it is quite similar, for example, with singing. When we practice singing with a child, the essential activity that unfolds is an activity of the etheric body. The astral body must adapt strongly to it. At first it resists, then carries it out into the spiritual world. It returns again, and there a health-promoting force manifests itself once more. We can say: In eurythmy, a force that truly heals the child’s physical well-being is expressed; in singing, a force is expressed that acts more on the human musculoskeletal system and thereby, through movement, in turn has a beneficial effect on the health of the physical body.

[ 5 ] These things can be put to exceptionally good use in education. If, for example, we could organize things in such a way—I am, of course, speaking of an ideal here, but the teaching staff can certainly come close to this ideal—if we could organize things so that, for instance, we do eurythmy one afternoon and allow that eurythmy to live on spiritually through the night; the next day we do more gymnastics with the child in the sense I mentioned yesterday: then it penetrates the body in such a way that the gymnastics has, so to speak, a healing effect, so that one could achieve a great deal through this alternation of eurythmy and gymnastics. And again, a great deal could be achieved, for example, by being able—thanks to all the right conditions being in place—to have the children sing one day. They then carry what they have experienced through singing into the spiritual world as they sleep. The next day, one engages them in instrumental music; that is, one focuses more on listening than on active participation. Then, what was done the previous day manifests itself in an extraordinarily healthy way through the consolidation that takes place as a result of listening to instrumental music. You see, if all ideal requirements could be met through the presence of the right conditions, then through this structure of instruction—which adapts to the conditions of life—one could have an immeasurably healing effect on the child. We want to go much further in these matters.

[ 6 ] Let’s take physics class, for example. We conduct experiments with the child. You need only recall what I said yesterday: that human beings actually create mental images only with their heads; that it is the rhythmic human being who judges; and that it is the human being of limb metabolism who draws conclusions—namely, that conclusions are drawn with the legs and feet. If you keep this in mind, and if you consider the act of perception as such, then you will say to yourself: the volitional aspect—that which one does of one’s own accord—of perceiving is very deeply connected to drawing conclusions, not to mere mental images. When I see my own body, the body itself is a conclusion. The mental image exists only insofar as I direct my eyes toward the body, but by carrying out a certain semi-conscious, subconscious procedure, I judiciously piece together the elements that allow me to experience the whole, summarizing them in the sentence: “So this is a body.” — But that is already the perception of a conclusion. By perceiving—by perceiving intelligently—I form a series of conclusions. The whole human being is contained within these conclusions. And this is the case when I experiment; for I am constantly engaged in a process of perception involving the whole human being. Conclusions are constantly incorporated into this process of perception. Judgments are usually not perceived at all; they lie deep within, so that we can say: the whole person is engaged as long as we are experimenting.

[ 7 ] Well, from an educational standpoint, we’re not actually doing the children any great favor by having them experiment. The child may indeed be interested in experimenting, but human beings, as such, are too weak in their normal constitution to be constantly strained as whole human beings. That simply isn’t possible. It’s always a bit too much when I let a person be strained as a whole human being. A person always becomes too overwhelmed when I conduct experiments for them or direct their attention to the external world. What is truly significant in teaching and education is that one genuinely takes into account the three members of the threefold human being, allows each to come into its own, and also allows them to interact with one another in the appropriate way.

[ 8 ] Now imagine this: I start by experimenting. I engage the whole person. That’s a lot to take in at first. Now I divert the children’s attention away from the equipment that’s there—the equipment I’ve been experimenting with—and I go through the whole process again. By appealing to their memory of what they’ve just experienced, I go through the whole process again. When one goes through something like this—when one recapitulates it, so to speak, and reviews it without the visual image being present—the human being’s rhythmic system in particular is enlivened. After I have engaged the whole person, I engage their rhythmic system and their mental system; for, of course, I also activate the mental system when I recapitulate this. In this way, I can bring the lesson to a close. I have first engaged the whole person, then primarily their rhythmic system, and now I let them go home. Now they are asleep. As they sleep, what I first engaged in the whole person and then in the rhythmic system continues to live on in the limbs, while the astral body and the “I” are outside the body.

[ 9 ] Let us now turn our attention to what remains in bed, what continues to resonate—what I have gone through with the child. Then, in a sense, the whole of what has developed within the entire human being—and what has developed within the rhythmic system—flows up into the head. From this, images form in the head. The child finds these images there when he wakes up the next morning and goes to school. It is indeed the case that when the children come to school the next day, without realizing it, they have in their minds images of what I experimented with yesterday and what I then repeated—repeated quite vividly—so that everything is there as an image in their minds. The next morning, I find the children arriving with photographs in their minds of what I experimented with yesterday; that is how the children come.

[ 10 ] Well, the next day, I can take more time to reflect and contemplate what I experienced the previous day and repeated purely as a narrative—repeating it more for the sake of the imagination. I now indulge in reflections on this. In doing so, I help the images—which are meant to become conscious—to come to consciousness. So I teach a physics lesson; I conduct experiments; I reenact before the children what has happened; the next day, I offer the reflections that lead the child to understand the laws underlying what took place. I guide them more toward the conceptual, imaginative aspect of the matter, and I do not force the children to let these images—these “photographs”—that they bring to me lead an insubstantial existence. Just think: if I first receive the children with these photographs in their minds—about which they know nothing—and then proceed to experiment with them without providing nourishment through the reflections I offer, I am once again straining the whole person. This strain disrupts the whole person, disrupts these images, and I introduce a kind of chaos into their minds. Under all circumstances, I must first consolidate what is already there. I must nourish it. In this way, I come to organize such a lesson. I structure it so that it then adapts to the processes of life.

[ 11 ] Let’s suppose I’m teaching a history class. When I teach history, I must not simply present the facts to the child in a superficial way; all of that, so to speak, falls by the wayside. I must artificially arrange things so that the adaptation now takes place in relation to the processes of life. I can achieve this in the following way: First, today I tell the children the bare facts—the facts that unfold externally in space and time. This, in turn, engages the whole person, just as an experiment engages the whole person, because the person is compelled to create a mental image of space. One should ensure that the child creates a spatial mental image, that he or she, so to speak, continuously sees in the mind’s eye what I am telling them; they should also create a temporal mental image. Once I have done this, I try to build on it by saying a little about the people who appeared, or about the events that took place—but not by actually telling the story, rather by beginning to characterize them; that is, by directing their attention to what I first presented, but now characterizing it somewhat. After completing these two stages, I have first engaged the whole person, and by characterizing, I have specifically engaged the rhythmic person. Now I dismiss the child. Tomorrow I will welcome them back. Then it brings back to my mind the mental photographs of what was experienced the previous day. I meet the child halfway when I continue in such a way that I now offer more reflections on the subject—for example, on whether Mithradates or Alcibiades was a decent person or not—that is, more material for contemplation. In doing so, I must present the more objective characterization on one day and the judgmental, reflective aspect on another; then I work toward ensuring that the three members of the threefold human being actually fit together in the right way.

[ 12 ] These are the kinds of things that show you what can actually be achieved when you structure the entire curriculum—that is, when you truly adapt it to real-life circumstances. Of course, this can never be done properly unless the curriculum is designed the way ours is, so that the same subject is covered over an extended period of time. I’d like to know how one is supposed to handle it when physics is the first period one day and religion the next. I’d like to know how one should take into account what has been retained from the previous lesson. Of course, it is very difficult to structure the entire curriculum in this way, but at least one can move toward such an approach to teaching. And if you examine our curriculum carefully, you will find everywhere that this approach has at least been attempted.

[ 13 ] Now, it is indeed necessary to truly grasp all the connections quite well. If you recall what I said yesterday—that the whole person is, in fact, the logician, not just the head—then you will learn to appreciate the significance of purely manual tasks in the appropriate way. It was by no means just a whim when the idea arose that our boys should also knit and so on. It is through this activity of the hands that what actually enhances the power of judgment in a fundamental way is expressed and developed. This power of judgment is least developed in a person when they are made to do logical exercises. These logical exercises are actually not at all suited to developing a person’s power of judgment. If one has them connect subjects and predicates—that is, engage in logical exercises in this way—one contributes nothing at all to their ability to judge. At best, one contributes to their ability to judge becoming rigid. They become the kind of person who, in later life, can really only judge according to a set pattern. If one does too many of these mental exercises, one trains the person to become a schematic thinker. Furthermore, this practice of judgment has no other consequence than that too much salt is deposited in the body, and the person becomes oversalted. They then tend all too easily to sweat, which we can observe all too clearly when we overtax children’s capacity for judgment. Then they sweat excessively at night. This is generally the case: if we want to be truly intellectual without realizing that the physical body is the pure expression of the spiritual, if we strive too one-sidedly for intellectual development, we usually end up mistreating the body—and usually in the wrong way. Pedagogical approaches, such as Herbart’s, which focus primarily on developing the imagination, ultimately have the effect of ruining the human body. And as educators and teachers, we must be fully aware of this.

[ 14 ] You can observe this in connection with other aspects of life. Isn’t it true that, according to a certain view—which certainly has its deep justification—every decent person must listen to a sermon? What one usually hears in a sermon, however, is something very, very abstract, and the aim is even to distract people from life itself and transport them to higher realms as they listen. The sermon is delivered in such a way that people are supposed to be edified, and so on. All of this certainly has its justification, of course, but one must understand what actually happens in reality through today’s sermons—especially those that are quite abstract, delivered by people who have learned nothing about natural connections, so that there is nothing of natural connections behind their thoughts, by people who do not even take joy in natural phenomena. Let’s suppose people attend such sermons, which are quite detached from life. Today, many such sermons are delivered that are completely detached from life. People listen to them, and this actually induces an illness in them that is at first not at all noticeable outwardly. Physically, people become ill to a certain subtle degree that is not outwardly noticeable. The effect of most sermons is that minor illnesses are bred, so that a few hours after the sermon, a person undergoes a process of illness. This process of illness causes pain that does not quite rise above the threshold of consciousness, but is nevertheless experienced by the person in a semi-conscious or quarter-conscious state. But this leads to the person feeling all too acutely the misery of their body. Yet that cannot be—after all, the sermon has elevated them to more spiritual realms. It cannot be that, through the sermon, they feel the misery of their sick body. Then they interpret this feeling of misery and become contrite, truly feeling like sinners. This is the interpretation of the illness that follows the sermon. It is even something that may well be intentional, with a certain unconscious sophistication, for one naturally achieves the effect that people feel like sinners.

[ 15 ] Well, I mention this as a phenomenon that is quite common in today’s life; it is connected to all the other signs of decline. I mention this so that you may see that a misguided approach to spiritual matters does not affect the spiritual realm, but rather the physical realm—and does so in a very concrete way; and so that you may also see from this that we should raise and educate our children only in such a way that we always understand the true harmony between the spiritual and the physical.

[ 16 ] You see, sometimes strange things happen; they go unnoticed, and yet they are among the most important aspects of cultural history. There was a time—in the last third of the 19th century—when geography instruction was actually somewhat sidelined in the curricula compared to history instruction. Geography was always tacked onto something else in the teacher certification exams. It was given less consideration. Either it was tacked onto the history teacher’s responsibilities, or in certain regions it was tacked onto natural history classes. Geography was indeed sidelined for a while. Now consider what I’ve drawn for you on the board using that little stick figure. When we look at the person who thinks—the person who is actively engaged—and see how they are situated within the whole world, not detaching themselves from the world through their mind, when we visualize this person, they are actually inconceivable without space. Space is an integral part of this person. He is a link in the spatial world insofar as he is a being with legs and feet. And when we consider this spatially, then in a certain sense, teaching geography to a child is like our astral body finding its footing. The astral body actually becomes more powerful and denser at the bottom. We engage in spatial activities, and in doing so we densify the human being’s spiritual-soul aspect toward the ground. In other words: We help the child achieve a certain inner stability precisely by teaching geography in a very vivid way—but we teach it in such a way that we always evoke the awareness that Niagara Falls is not located on the Elbe River, but rather that we always evoke the awareness of just how much space lies between the Elbe and Niagara Falls.

[ 17 ] If we really put this into practice in a vivid way, then we place the individual within the space; in particular, we cultivate within them that which instills in them an interest in the world, and this will manifest itself in a wide variety of ways. A person with whom we engage in geography in a thoughtful way treats his fellow human beings with more compassion than one who has not learned to coexist in space. He learns to stand alongside other people; he takes others into consideration. These things have a strong bearing on moral education, and the suppression of geography means nothing other than an aversion to love for one’s neighbor, which in our age has had to be increasingly suppressed. One does not notice such connections, but they exist. For a certain subconscious reason—or unreason—is always at work in the phenomena of civilized life.

[ 18 ] History lessons that focus on the temporal dimension have a completely different effect, and we can only teach them properly if we give due consideration to the temporal dimension. If we essentially only present images in history lessons, we are not giving the temporal dimension enough consideration. You see, if I tell a child about Charlemagne as if he were the child’s uncle who is still alive today, I’m actually misleading the child. Whenever I talk about Charlemagne, I must always bring the passage of time into focus; I must do so by saying: Imagine you’re a little boy right now, and you’re holding your father’s hand. — That helps them create a mental image of it. Now I make it clear to them how much older the father is, and then: the father takes his father’s hand, who in turn takes his grandfather’s hand, and so on. That way, I’ve guided them back 60 years. From the grandfather, we go further; and now I tell them: Imagine 30 in a row. — I created a mental image for him and made it clear: The 30th could be Charlemagne. —- This gives him a sense of temporal distance. Don’t present things in isolation; instead, grasp this sense of distance—that’s important if you want to teach history properly.

[ 19 ] It is absolutely necessary to point out characteristic differences when discussing different historical periods so that children can gain a mental image of how these periods differ from one another. The point is that history lives primarily in the concept of time, in the perception of time. But this has a powerful effect on a person’s inner life; it stimulates their inner world. And if we teach history in such a way that it does not occupy its proper place, but instead engages the inner life in an overly self-serving manner—by repeatedly emphasizing local history while paying less attention to more distant events— in other words, if we assign history lessons a false role, if we orient them too heavily toward certain things—false patriotism and the like—I believe you can easily think of examples—then we particularly foster a stubbornness of the inner self, a capriciousness of the inner self. That is a side effect. And above all, this makes people averse to being objective toward world events. And that, after all, is the great evil of our time. The inappropriate practices in geography and the practices of a misguided history education over the course of this era have contributed greatly to what is the great illness of our time. And you will probably be able to look back on what was expected of you in history class, and you will see from that how difficult it is for you to come to terms with certain phenomena.

[ 20 ] These are examples that show how teaching and education must be conducted if they are to connect in a healthy way with the conditions of life and the impulses of life themselves. We simply cannot teach in a way that focuses solely on getting through a particular subject matter; rather, we must above all keep in mind the conditions of human life—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. To a certain extent, the human being must always be before our eyes. And they must be before our eyes in such a way that we ourselves can also view them as a whole, insofar as they are, after all, beings who are very actively involved even between falling asleep and waking up. For if we take no account at all of the fact that a person also sleeps—and today’s education does this without exception; it does not even consider that a person sleeps, except perhaps from a hygienic standpoint—and that what is done in class continues to work within the person in some way, then this has a very specific effect: by failing to take into account that something is absent from the person at night, we turn the person into an automaton.

[ 21 ] And indeed, one could say: In many respects, our education and instruction today are not an education and instruction in humanity, but rather in the most striking type of human automaton, which is defined by “assessorism.” Today, education is essentially geared toward assessorism. Assessorism essentially consists in the fact that a person is no longer a human being, but a degree, a specific existence. You have a person in front of you, and it makes no difference whether it is A or B, as long as both are assessors or trainee judges. It makes no difference whether it is A or B, X, Y, or Z.

[ 22 ] This stems from the fact that education has taken into account only the waking human being; because the spiritual realm has been denied altogether, and thus nothing is perceived between falling asleep and waking up. This has emerged so alarmingly in modern philosophy, particularly in the works of Descartes and Bergson, as these philosophers assert that the “I” is the continuous element in the human being; one should always focus solely on this, for it is in the “I” that reality is grasped. I would simply like to earnestly point out to people that they cease to exist when they begin to fall asleep, and only begin to exist again when they wake up; for the “I” is not apprehended in the time between falling asleep and waking up. It recedes into the background there, so that in fact the Cartesian and Bergsonian formula of being need not be: “I think, therefore I am”—but rather: “I thought on June 2, 1867, from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., therefore I existed during that time; then I thought the next day from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., therefore I existed during that time.” - This is how one ends up with the idea that existence becomes very complicated. One would have to omit what lies in between. But people do not think about this, because they seriously want to deal only with all sorts of ideas and abstractions and not with the realities that underlie human existence.

[ 23 ] In the classroom, one must deal with realities; only then can one truly educate people. We need not worry about whether the right institutions will come into being; rather, the people who have been educated as human beings will create them themselves. Herein lies what can lead one to a deep understanding: that spiritual life must be autonomous and independent. It can only educate people if it works solely toward the education of human beings and conceives of institutions only as a consequence of this education—which is not something the state creates first. Therefore, spiritual life cannot be an appendage of the state or the economy; rather, this spiritual life must develop entirely from within itself.