The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. Reflections on the Inner Nature of the Teaching and Educating Professions II

[ 1 ] Yesterday I tried to point out to you how it is possible to enter into a living soul life by infusing our knowledge with anthroposophy. We need this vibrant inner life, especially if we want to have the strength for our teaching and our educational work. I would now like to speak to you about something that truly has an educational goal in the most eminent sense, but which actually seeks nothing other than to gather inner strength—through a particular kind of orientation in educational work—in order to kindle the heart in an educational sense.

[ 2 ] Today I would like to speak about the following question: What forces are we actually working with when we engage in educational work? The fact is that, given the prevailing cultural climate of our time, this question cannot be answered in any truly decisive sense. Certainly, we can say that the external world in which people find themselves once they become able to work demands that these people be able to do things they cannot yet do as children—and which we must teach them. It may also demand the attitude that a person must adopt as an adult—something a child cannot teach itself, but which must be imparted through education. But the answer to the question: Why do we actually educate? — remains something rather superficial in today’s educational system, superficial for the very reason that adults today do not place much value on what they have become through education and instruction; they do not see much value in it. They do not look back with deep gratitude on what they have become through instruction and education. Ask your own heart whether this gratitude is always alive. Certainly, in individual cases it may be present when we reflect; but on the whole, we do not think of our own upbringing and our own schooling with deep gratitude, because the human mind does not fully grasp what education and teaching actually entail—what forces within human nature are actually awakened through them. That is why it is so difficult today to arouse pedagogical enthusiasm in people, and fundamentally, all our methods—no matter how ingeniously designed—are of little value in this regard. Answering the question: “How does one do this, how does one do that?”—is, after all, of little value. Of the greatest value, however, is that a person has enthusiasm in their work and can fully develop this enthusiasm in their work if they are to be an educator. This enthusiasm has a contagious power; and it alone can work wonders in education. The child is happy to go along with this enthusiasm, and if the child does not go along with it, this is usually a sign that this enthusiasm is lacking.

[ 3 ] Now I would like to state—as a sort of self-evident secret—that, although much has already been said here about enthusiasm, I still see, whenever I walk through the classrooms, a certain sense of gloom and heaviness among the teaching staff. Fundamentally, however, this heaviness permeates classroom management in many, many ways. This heaviness must be eliminated, and it can also manifest itself as artificial enthusiasm. Artificial enthusiasm, however, is not what can bring about any real change; rather, it is solely the enthusiasm that is ignited by our own deep immersion in the subject matter we are dealing with in classroom management. Now, you see, it is necessary above all that all of you thoroughly understand that we, as teachers, truly need our own consciousness here. We need to work on developing this consciousness of our own. Of course, this work on our own consciousness is made immensely difficult by the considerations we are forced to take into account in the final grade—the utterly unreasonable demands placed on our children from the outside as they prepare for their high school graduation exams. This truly weighs down the management of our final grades like a leaden burden. But we must not lose sight of our true goal, and to that end it is necessary that we work on this consciousness. I would like to say that we must work on the Waldorf school teacher’s consciousness. But we can only do that, my dear friends, if we arrive at a genuine experience of the spiritual, especially in the field of education. Such an experience of the spiritual is difficult for modern humanity, and we should thoroughly recognize that this is difficult for modern humanity. We should thoroughly recognize that we truly need something very special—something that is otherwise scarcely found in the world—in order to truly accomplish the task of the Waldorf school. We should, in all humility, without pride or arrogance, become aware of this uniqueness—but truly, deeply, and wholeheartedly, not merely by uttering some kind of cliché; we should be able to become aware of it inwardly and wholeheartedly. But we can only do this if we have a clear understanding of what humanity has lost in this regard—lost only in the last three to four centuries. We must find that again.

[ 4 ] What has been lost is this: that, in fact, when a human being steps out of his pre-earthly existence into the world, he is—in relation to the true forces of his being—a being in need of healing. This connection between education and the healing of the human being has been lost. Certainly, throughout a certain period of the Middle Ages, it was radically believed that human beings, as earthly beings, are essentially sick, and that one must first restore their health; that human beings, as they exist on Earth today, fall short of their true potential; and that one must actually do something to make a human being truly human. This is very often understood only in a formal sense. People speak of how human beings must be developed, must be raised to a higher level; but they mean this in an abstract, not a concrete, sense. One will only mean it concretely when one truly connects the activity of education with the activity of healing. When one has a sick person before one and heals them, then one knows that one has done something: If you restore them to health, you raise them to a higher level—the level of a normal human being. In almost all ancient times, those who were knowledgeable about the mysteries of the world regarded birth as accompanied by illness, because when a person is born, they do in fact, in a certain sense, fall below their own level—they are no longer what they were in their pre-earthly life. In fact, it is something entirely abnormal in relation to higher human nature that a person carries within themselves physical elements that they must bear with a certain degree of difficulty. Today, one is no longer regarded as a reasonable person if one were to say, for example: In relation to higher human nature, it is something pathological to have to struggle constantly with the physical forces of the body until death. — But without such radical ideas, one cannot penetrate to the reality of what education means. Education must have something of healing about it. To help you understand this, I would like to present the following to your soul today.

[ 5 ] Human beings actually live within four distinct manifestations of force. One is the kind in which a person is active when walking, moving their legs and thereby propelling themselves forward through the well-known pendulum-like motion of the legs, or when using their legs to dance or perform other movements. This is a movement that takes place in the external physical world of space, which can also be illustrated by changes in position within that space. Likewise, all other forms of human mobility—the mobility of the arms, hands, head, eye muscles, and so on—are actually something that—if we disregard the inner activity of the human being—could be depicted in the same way we depict the changes in position of an ordinary lifeless body. This is the one activity in which the human being is engaged.

[ 6 ] The second is the one that a person develops when he begins to process what he takes in as physical products—in the broadest sense, everything that is part of the act of nutrition. While the human limbs serve as mediators for what humans have in common with beings that physically change their location, we have, as a different kind of activity in a certain sense, the fact that humans are compelled to continue what lies in the activity of the external objects that they take in as food. Take, for example, a piece of sugar in your mouth; it melts. This is a continuation of what the sugar does externally. It is hard and white in color. You dissolve it; it becomes liquid, slimy, and is then further transformed—the chemist would say “chemically transformed,” but that makes no sense here—it is transformed further and further. Sugar is processed and absorbed most intensively throughout the entire organism. Here you have a second type of activity. This continues into the rhythmic system, which takes over the activity of the digestive system. But what occurs there as a second human activity is already very different from human activity involving the movement of the limbs or, indeed, the movement of the entire human body in the external world. The activity of nutrition is entirely different from that which we perform when we move externally or, let’s say, lift a weight. This activity of nutrition cannot take place at all without the human astral being intervening in every single part of this nutritional process. The human astral being must permeate every single process that takes place as nutrition. In the activity I described first—the activity of walking, grasping, and so on—we are essentially dealing with the fact that the human being uses the same forces that we also observe physically; the difference is that the human being sets the etheric organism in motion, and through its mediation, what we observe as a lever-like movement when grasping or walking comes about. When we consider the activities of walking and grasping, we need only take into account what we have in the physical world as integrated into the etheric process; then we have what happens within the human being. But we never have that when we consider the process of nutrition. It can only come about when the astral body intervenes in the processes that otherwise take place in the retort. Above all, the astral forces must be at work here; and what is least often taken into account is that the physical forces must no longer play a role. This is extraordinarily interesting, because one always assumes that, for example, physical forces are involved in nutrition. As soon as a person is no longer in relation to the external world, the physical forces cease to be significant. They are no longer active, no longer effective. In the process of nutrition, we see the processing of physical substances by the astral and etheric. The physical effects that a piece of sulfur or a piece of salt has outside the body have no significance within the body; only what has astral significance is grasped by the astral, and then the etheric-astral is what is actually active in nutrition.

[ 7 ] If we continue now, we come to the activities that take place in the rhythmic processes—the blood rhythm and the respiratory rhythm. In terms of their inner constitution, they are similar to the forces at work in the digestive system. They occur through the interaction of the etheric with the astral, except that in the digestive process the astral is, in a certain sense, even weaker than the etheric, whereas in rhythmic activity the astral becomes stronger than the etheric. The etheric recedes more into the background during activity in the rhythmic system; but actually only the etheric present within the human being, whereas in the activity carried out in the human rhythmic system, the etheric outside the human being begins to participate again, so that in the act of breathing we actually have: the force of the inner human etheric body, the force of the outer ether of the world, and the astral activity of the human being. This is evident, for example, in the act of breathing. Now imagine for a moment that we are studying this very area; we are studying what is actually happening when a human being breathes. The physical activity of carbon and oxygen and so on is completely suppressed, but the relationship between the outer etheric, the inner etheric, and the astral plays a major role. That plays a major role. But these are the forces one must understand regarding any substance if one wishes to speak of the substance’s healing effect. One cannot understand to what extent a substance is a remedy unless one knows how the substance, once introduced into the body, is affected by these three systems of forces. The entire therapeutic approach in medicine is based on knowing these three forces in relation to the substances. That is what therapy is all about: knowing the healing effect in the outer and inner ether and in the astral. What does it mean, for example, to use antimony as a remedy? It means nothing other than this: when antimony is introduced into the body in any preparation, it is acted upon in a certain way by the inner etheric forces, by the outer forces that enter through respiration, and by the astral forces within the human being. This means knowing to what extent antimony is a remedy when one understands the effects of these three systems of forces on any substance within the human being. |

[ 8 ] As we ascend to rhythmic activity, we thus come to understand a much more subtle way of happening than, for example, that which is still present in the activity of nutrition. We must essentially draw upon this rhythmic activity if we wish to understand its healing effects. No one who does not know how a given substance affects the rhythms of respiration or circulation can speak to the extent to which that substance is a remedy.

[ 9 ] Now, however, the peculiar thing is that while the physician activates the therapeutic forces in the subconscious, in the rhythmic system of blood circulation or respiration, we as teachers or educators must activate the next higher level: that which is connected with activity in the nerves and the senses. This is the next metamorphosis of the remedies. What we do as teachers and educators means, for the physical human being, to handle the substances he takes in in such a way that they are now subject to etheric activity and to external physical activity—namely, in perception, when something is perceived and grasped— and to inner physical activity—that is, what is mechanically brought about in the human being as an internal shift in position through movement. If we have the outer and inner etheric and the astral within the remedy, then we have outer physical activity—gymnastics—and inner physical activity within the pedagogical effects. For when a person tilts their head, their entire dynamic system is actually altered; the center of gravity shifts, and so on. We find external physical activity in its most refined form when we study the effects of light on the eye. It is also external physical activity—and nothing other than external physical activity—when we apply any pressure to a tactile organ. We thus have: External physical aspects, internal physical aspects—that is, physical changes in the nervous system, degradation within the nervous system, genuine physical processes as they actually exist only in the human nervous system—and etheric activity. These are essentially the three systems we deal with when, as educators, we work with the child; it is the higher metamorphosis of what we do in healing. What kinds of activity occur in the human being? The movement of walking and grasping, the movement of the limbs, external spatial changes; the nourishing activity—I have shown you what is involved in this—the rhythmic activity, which is, however, a healing activity through and through; and the perceptive activity, when viewed from the outside. The educational, instructive activity, when viewed from the inside, is entirely a perceptive activity. Now you will gain a deeper insight into human nature. You will be able to say to yourselves: if the factors at work in the rhythmic system are in fact the healing factors, then there is indeed a doctor constantly at work within the human being. The entire rhythmic system is a doctor. But a doctor must heal something, and if something is to be healed, something must be sick. But then walking, grasping, and eating are a constant state of illness, and breathing and blood circulation are a constant process of healing. That is indeed the case. It is just that in today’s science, where everything is treated with a one-size-fits-all approach, people fail to realize that human beings are constantly becoming ill. Eating and drinking, in particular, are things that constantly make us ill. We cannot even avoid constantly harming our health through eating and drinking. Those who do so in excess harm themselves too much; but we always inflict a small degree of harm upon ourselves. We constantly heal our state of illness through the rhythmic system. Human life on Earth is a process of becoming ill and constant healing. This process of falling ill, however, is a genuine physical illness. But what a person does in interaction with the outside world—which is the continuation of walking and grasping—is an even more intense, less noticed form of illness, and we must counteract this through the higher healing process, through the educational process, which is the metamorphosis of healing. Educational forces are the metamorphosis of medical forces; they are the transformed medical forces. Therefore, all our educational thinking must ultimately aim to transform this thinking in the same way that thinking must transform itself when it ascends fruitfully from physical thinking to spiritual thinking. In physical thinking, after all, we have the two categories that cause such a terribly dry enthusiasm—one that has such a dreadful effect—in all those who belong to the age of the doctor: the two concepts and ideas of right and wrong, true and false. True and false is the highest ideal of those who, in the age of the doctor, have dedicated their entire lives to the world. But there is actually so terribly little reality in this true and false. It is something formal. One establishes it through mere logic, which actually does nothing more than combine and resolve. This true and false is something terribly dry, sober, and formal. The moment we rise up to the truths of the spiritual world, we can no longer speak of truth and falsehood; there, truth and falsehood become just as nonsensical as if someone were to say: “Drinking wine to such an extent every day is wrong.”—When one says “wrong,” one means something formally external. One is only speaking of something real when one demonstrates that it is harmful to health. “Right” or “wrong” is something external and formal when it refers to the physical realm. In fact, we must set aside these concepts of “true” and “false” in everything that concerns the spiritual world. We must come to replace these concepts of “true” and “false”—as soon as we ascend into the spiritual world—with “healthy” and “sick,” so that, in a lecture such as the one I gave here last night, it actually means nothing at all if someone tells me, “That is right.” Things are “right” in the physical world; in the spiritual world, nothing is “wrong” or “right”—there, things are reality. Is a hunchback “right” or “wrong”? One can no longer speak of “right” or “wrong” in that context. A drawing may be “wrong” or “right,” but a plant cannot be “right” or “wrong”—it can only be healthy or sick. And so it is with things in the spiritual world: healthy or sick, fruitful or barren. Reality must be present in what one does. If someone considers a lecture like the one I gave yesterday to be healthy, they are on the right track; if they merely consider it correct, they are only showing that they cannot rise to the level where reality lies. The question of healthy or sick arises whenever we draw upon spiritual truths at all. This is precisely what we must learn with regard to our pedagogical work. We must learn to regard something as healthy—or as unhealthy or harmful—in its educational application based on our inner attitude toward it. This is of particular importance if one wishes to develop a proper sense of self as an educator. One could even say that the cultivation of the right consciousness begins with the transition from logical true and false to the real healthy or unhealthy. But then one has already come very close to the concept of the healing principle. One can work through this in great detail; but one must, in fact, allow oneself to be inspired by a comprehensive understanding of human nature, namely an understanding of human beings in relation to the surrounding world.

[ 10 ] For example, when we describe the human respiratory process according to current scientific understanding, no particular emphasis is placed on what is essential—on what is truly human—in this process. It is said that air consists of oxygen and nitrogen—let’s leave out the other components. A person inhales oxygen; some nitrogen also enters the body. The person then exhales oxygen bound to carbon, along with some nitrogen. The percentages are measured, the process is described, and it is believed that this essentially captures the process. But, fundamentally, one gets very little insight into what is truly human. For what is truly human becomes clear when one reflects on the following question: There is a certain percentage of nitrogen in the air, which is said to be good for breathing, and a certain percentage of oxygen. Let’s assume that a person is placed in an atmosphere containing less nitrogen than the normal percentage—an atmosphere low in nitrogen. Let a person breathe in this nitrogen-poor air; the air gradually becomes richer in nitrogen as a result of the person’s breathing. The person exhales nitrogen from their body—nitrogen they would not otherwise exhale—in order to correct the nitrogen content of the air around them. I do not know whether this is taken into account in modern physiology. I have just pointed out repeatedly that, in an atmosphere low in nitrogen, a person corrects it; and they prefer to extract nitrogen from their own organic substances—withdrawing it from them—in order to bring the external air up to the normal nitrogen content. And they do the same with the normal oxygen content. Humans have such an intimate relationship with their environment that the moment the environment is not as it should be, they correct it; they improve it. So we can say that human beings are truly such that they not only demand certain levels of nitrogen and oxygen in the external natural world for themselves, but that they must have nitrogen and oxygen in their environment—not only just as necessary, but even much more necessary in a certain percentage—than within themselves. For human beings, their environment is more important to their subconscious forces than the composition of their own bodies. What is incredibly interesting is that, through his instinctive powers, he takes far more interest in his environment than in the composition of his own body. This is something that can be confirmed experimentally right away, if one conducts reasonable experiments. One need only carry out experiments in this field. If our research institutes were to rush from problem to problem—oh, there would be an awful lot to do! The problems are just lying there, and they are also immensely important from an educational standpoint. For only now can we ask why human beings need a specific nitrogen and oxygen environment. We know, after all, that when a human being develops their inner metabolic or, indeed, formative activity, all sorts of substance relationships are formed which then manifest themselves in a specific way when the human being becomes a corpse. It is in this dead form that the matter is studied today. Now, the peculiar thing is this: in the sphere of the human being that encompasses part of the rhythmic activity and part of the metabolic and limb activity, there is a predominant tendency to develop activity between carbon and nitrogen; and in the sphere that extends from the rhythmic sphere up to nervous-sensory activity, there is a predominant tendency for activity to unfold between carbon and oxygen. And it is indeed interesting when, with a state of mind unspoiled by dry scholarship, one observes, for example, sparkling seltzer water, where the carbon dioxide in the liquid arises from the alternating activity of carbon and oxygen; when one observes this effervescence, one immediately gains an imaginative insight into what takes place in the course of the rhythmic respiratory activity of the pulmonary system as it moves toward the head. What you perceive as effervescence and a tingling sensation in carbonated water must be playing out in an intimate, subtle way as it rises toward the human head. So that someone standing before a source of carbon dioxide should actually say: This activity of the rising carbon dioxide is actually strikingly similar—only coarser—to a continuous, intimate activity that flows upward from the lungs to the human head. Something must always be stimulated by a subtle, intimate carbon dioxide-water activity; otherwise, a person becomes dull or sluggish. If we fail to bring this effervescent carbon dioxide-water mixture up to a person’s head, then within them the carbon suddenly shows a tendency toward hydrogen rather than oxygen. And then it rises to the brain, producing marsh gas—which you are familiar with from certain underground vaults—and then the person becomes dull, sleepy, and obstinate.

[ 11 ] Yes, these things first present themselves as inner—one might be tempted to say physical—activities, only they are not physical; for the production of marsh gas or carbon dioxide becomes, in this case, an inner spiritual life. We are not entering into materialism here, but into the subtle interweaving of the spiritual within matter.

[ 12 ] Well, if, for example, we have children learn a lot of vocabulary in languages—if we guide the child through this memorization via an unconscious, mechanical process—then that is a process that resembles the production of swamp gas in the head. If we engage the child through images that are as vivid as possible, the effect is that the respiratory system causes carbon dioxide to bubble up toward the head. So we are actually entering into something that is either healing or harmful. We realize from such a phenomenon how we must draw upon a higher metamorphosis of healing forces; and it is deeply inspiring to gain insight into these secret workings of the human organism. Only then does one realize what a remarkable vaulted cellar the head is, which one fills either with marsh gas or carbon dioxide. One feels connected to the deeper driving forces of existence.

[ 13 ] In the following lecture, we will learn about another activity that must be balanced with this one. However, this can only happen if, on the one hand, we teach properly in the field of music and, on the other hand, we teach properly in what is based on external observation rather than on the field of music. Yet our teaching is constantly composed of both of these elements. This gives rise to an interest in the human being we have before us. But something else follows from this: a sense of responsibility. The Waldorf teacher must bring something into his or her consciousness by saying to himself or herself, in all humility: Today, education actually takes place by sending people off into the educational process, just as if one were to let a completely blind person go and have him paint with colors. No one knows what happens in the educational process. No wonder, then, that the blind person will not muster any particular enthusiasm for painting with colors. No wonder there is no enthusiasm for education in the world. But the moment we put ourselves in the shoes of education—it’s just always phrased a little differently; this inspiration is conveyed through our entire education—then we approach it with the right enthusiasm, because we feel we are at the driving force behind the world. But then with the right sense of responsibility. One knows that one can make people healthy or sick. This enthusiasm and, on the other hand, this sense of responsibility—they must come to the fore!