The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. Why Anthroposophical Education? II

[ 1 ] Last night I tried to show how the deep chasm between our intellectual life—which has become entirely theoretical—and the practice of daily life prevents people today from accessing a true art of education. People generally do not take the things associated with this contemporary phenomenon seriously enough, because they do not actually reveal themselves to the intellect, but rather reveal themselves to the soul in the course of life. Our age, however, is so inclined to always silence the expressions of the human soul and human feelings in the face of the demands of the intellect.

[ 2 ] Everything that compels people today so strongly to recognize contemporary science—which is actually only a natural science, not a science of the soul or Spiritual Science—as an unlimited, infallible authority, consists in the fact that people today constantly use their intellect as a judge against everything else that arises from the fullness of humanity. The teacher, however—who, after all, also grows out of all that contemporary education can offer regarding spiritual life, and who must therefore, in all his sensibilities and feelings, act within the school setting based on the school life he himself has experienced—already senses in his soul, when he is with his students, just how strongly and intensely the abyss hinted at last night is at work.

[ 3 ] The teacher first absorbed various insights about the human soul and the way in which the human soul functions. His own feelings, indeed his impulses of will, took shape accordingly. In particular, however, the entire spirit with which he assumes his teaching position was shaped by this. And then he must act upon what has been poured into his soul today—entirely theoretically—concerning the spirit.

[ 4 ] Don’t say, “Oh, come on, theory!” When you stand in front of a class, you act from the depths of your whole human heart. — Ladies and gentlemen, that is absolutely correct in the abstract. You can also express that in words, in the abstract. But just as no one can say, “I want to go into the water and stay dry”—because that is an internal contradiction—so, too, what one experiences today in teacher-training colleges regarding the soul and the spirit cannot have such an effect on the soul that this soul gains a fresh, full access to the souls of children. For just as one must get wet when jumping into water, so one must become alien to the soul and alien to the spirit when one assimilates today’s school education.

[ 5 ] That is a fact. And for those who wish to practice the art of education, understanding this fact in its full human significance should actually be their top priority today.

[ 6 ] When the teacher leaves his own educational institutions with the sense of humanity and the will to work and act with people that he has cultivated today, and now wishes to apply this to the developing human being—to the child—he feels as if everything he has acquired in such a theoretical way, which his heart has not warmly nor made his will active in the spirit—as if all of that were merely fluttering around the child, rather than something that truly connects with the child.

[ 7 ] And so, in a sense, the teacher enters the classroom by, one might say, erecting a partition around himself; he does not penetrate through this partition to reach the children’s souls, and now, as it were, operates in the air that is outside the children, unable to follow in his soul the inhaled breath through which the air enters the children’s inner beings. He feels himself standing outside the child, as it were, splashing about in an indeterminate theoretical element outside the child.

[ 8 ] And again, when the teacher takes in everything he learns today through our excellent natural science—which introduces him in such a solid way to the external phenomena and facts of nature—and when he has absorbed all of this into his mind, into his head, then he feels that this knowledge is even less likely to help him reach the child, for it tells him something about the child’s physicality. But physicality—we do not understand it unless we penetrate through it to the spirit. In all physicality, the underlying reality is spiritual.

[ 9 ] And so it happens that anyone today who wants to reach a child through the art of education ends up experimenting externally on the body: How should one treat the body so that memory is developed in the right way? How should one treat the body so that attention is trained in the right way? —and so on. And then the teacher feels something like someone who, wanting to lead another person into the light, first puts glasses over their eyes that completely block the view. Through this natural science, human physicality itself becomes something opaque. And so, with all of natural science, the teacher feels precisely incapable of reaching the child’s natural life, which is imbued with spirit.

[ 10 ] This is not yet being discussed rationally in mainstream civilization today. Where today is anyone speaking, as I have just spoken, about the alienation with which we treat children—lacking a true understanding of human nature, yet possessing an excellent understanding of nature—where is anyone speaking this way? And because no one speaks this way, everything that could be expressed in words is instead channeled into feelings and emotions. And the teacher leaves his classroom almost every hour carrying a tiny bit of unfulfilled feeling. And these tiny bits of unfulfilled feeling harden him; they not only make him alien to children but also alien to the world; they cause his own spirit to grow cold and sober.

[ 11 ] Thus we see how freshness, vitality, and agility are fading precisely from that intimate interaction between human beings, which is revealed in the relationship between the adult teacher and educator and the child being raised—the growing child. One must also understand these things with the heart, because today the intellect—trained only in the external phenomena of nature—is, I would say, still too coarse to grasp these intimate matters in all their subtlety.

[ 12 ] And so we see that old demands are repeated over and over again whenever the art of education is discussed. You know, of course, how pedagogy is derived, on the one hand, from psychology—the study of the soul—and you know how, on the other hand, pedagogy is derived from ethics—the understanding of moral human duties. Wherever the art of education is discussed today, one hears how it is to be founded on these two pillars: the study of the soul and the study of morality. But we really have only what lies between the two. People succumb to a nearly boundless illusion when they believe that a true study of the soul exists today. We must repeatedly recall the phrase that was coined as early as the 19th century: “psychology without a soul,” because people simply no longer penetrate to the spiritual realm. What, then, is our psychology today? It will sound paradoxical when I express what our psychology actually is today. Out of primal instincts—out of a clairvoyant understanding of history that was widespread among all humanity in primeval times, which was primitively pictorial and mythical, but which, despite its primitiveness and mythical character, penetrated right into the soul—people once possessed a science of the soul; they felt and sensed what the soul is. And in those ancient times, words were coined that refer to the soul: thinking, feeling, and willing. But today we no longer have that inner life that truly brings these words—thinking, feeling, and willing—to life.

[ 13 ] What does anthroposophy reveal to us about thinking? Well, thinking is precisely what endows us, as human beings, with thoughts. But the thoughts we have in everyday life today within our present civilization—these thoughts appear to us as if, when we encounter a person, we were not looking directly into their face, but rather as if we were looking at them only from behind. It is, after all, only the reverse side of what lives in thinking when we speak of thoughts in the way we do today within our cultural civilization. Why?

[ 14 ] When you have a person standing before you and you look at them from behind, you see a certain appearance. But you do not come to recognize them from the side where they display their true physiognomic expression. You do not come to recognize them from the side where they outwardly reveal their inner life. If you come to know thoughts in the way that is possible in today’s age of natural science, you come to know the inner human being from behind. If you look at thoughts from the other side, then the thoughts retain their life; then the thoughts are forces.

[ 15 ] And what, then, are these thoughts? They are the very forces that constitute the human being’s powers of growth. Outwardly, thoughts are abstract; inwardly, toward the human being, they are the very forces through which a very small child grows larger, through which it transforms its undefined limbs into defined ones—the powers of thought. Outwardly, we see only dead thoughts—such as what a person projects backward—which do not reveal their living essence. We must, so to speak, turn to the other side of the life of thought; then, within that life of thought, what is revealed to us is that which works from the inside out day by day—as the child increasingly transforms its indeterminate facial expression into an expression of its soul—and which flows into the gaze, making the gaze warm and fiery, what flows into the shaping of the nose—a process still unfolding in life—but also transforms the child’s entire range of disordered movements into ordered ones, what lives and stirs inwardly, what acts and lives throughout the entire period of a person’s growth.

[ 16 ] And when one begins to view the life of thought from an anthroposophical perspective, it is truly as if one were now beginning to look at a person from the front, having previously known them only from behind. Everything that was dead comes to life; the entire life of thought comes to life when one begins to look at it from within.

[ 17 ] Although people in the past did not recognize this in the same way that anthroposophy makes it possible today, they did sense it and expressed it mythically. Today we can recognize it. That is why we can also put it into practice in our daily lives. That is why we can turn it into an art when dealing with a child, when we truly immerse ourselves in these things with a living sense of them.

[ 18 ] If one knows thinking only from its backward, dead side, then one can only understand the child; if one comes to know thinking from its forward, living side, then one can relate to the child in such a way that one not only understands it, but also experiences all its emotions firsthand, pouring love into everything the child lives through.

[ 19 ] Nothing alive has remained of all this. Our civilization today has only the word “thought,” but no longer the thing itself. We no longer speak of the content of the science of the soul; we have simply grown accustomed to continuing to use the old words, and the words have lost their meaning.

[ 20 ] But even more than in the realm of thought, language in our time has lost its meaning for the emotional—or even for the volitional. Emotions well up from the human subconscious. People live within them. But they do not look down into these subconscious depths; or if they do, they look down in a psychoanalytical, amateurish way. When they experience feelings, they are unaware of what lives there in the depths of the soul. For feelings, too, only words remain—and even more so for the will.

[ 21 ] Today, if we wanted to describe what we know about these things, we really shouldn’t speak of “will” at all, because “will” is merely a word in today’s civilization; we would have to say, when we see a person begin to move his hand, his hand take up the pen, the pen glide across the paper: we would have to describe the external facts of the movement. That is still the case today. What lies within as “will” is no longer experienced; it is merely a word.

[ 22 ] To rediscover, within these words—which today constitute what is called the science of the soul—the essence of the matter and the underlying processes: that is the task of anthroposophy. Therefore, anthroposophy can provide a true understanding of the human being, whereas today, for our present civilization, what is experienced only in words spreads like a veil over the actual reality of psychology. And it is interesting that Fritz Mauthner, who has just passed away, wrote a “Critique of Language,” because he found that when people today speak of spiritual matters, they have nothing but words. Fritz Mauthner’s only mistake was that he merely pointed out: People today have only words, they have no realities, when they speak of the soul; and he failed to point out that these realities must be rediscovered, since only the words exist.

[ 23 ] Of course, Mauthner’s “Critique of Language” is nonsense when it comes to the natural sciences, because I’d like to know—if someone were to grab a hot iron—whether he couldn’t distinguish the fact from the word! If he merely says, “The iron is hot,” it doesn’t burn; if he touches it, then it burns. When it comes to everything related to the natural sciences, people know—though perhaps not if they’ve been ruined by theories—but if they’re living life to the fullest, they know how to distinguish things from words.

[ 24 ] For psychology, that has come to an end. People have only words left. And someone like Fritz Mauthner, who now wants to approach this subject honestly, says: Let’s banish the word “soul” altogether. We see that something emerges from within, which then manifests itself externally. So let us not speak of the “soul”; rather, as Fritz Mauthner suggests, let us speak—just as one speaks of “conscience” or “siblings”—of “Geseel,” so that the misconception is no longer given rise to that one is dealing with something real when speaking of the soul.

[ 25 ] Mauthner is entirely correct when it comes to modern civilization. But what we need is to reenter into the essence of the soul, so that words may once again have meaning.

[ 26 ] It is disheartening to see how people ramble on about these insights into the soul—if one can even call them insights—that exist only in words; how they fail to touch the soul; and how, as a result, people rack their brains over the question: Does the soul affect the body? Does the body affect the soul? Or do these two phenomena simply run parallel to one another? There is no real understanding of such matters today, which is why the discussion remains entirely superficial.

[ 27 ] But if one gets into the habit of discussing things in such a superficial way, then one loses the heartfelt spirit, the enthusiastic disposition that one, as an educational artist, is meant to bring into the school—indeed, that one should already possess, drawn from the vitality of civilization, when facing one’s own growing child as a parent.

[ 28 ] And so we say: The art of education should be founded on a single column—psychology, the study of the soul. But we have no such study of the soul in our present civilization. And what is worst of all is that, because we are gasping for breath under the authority of mere natural science, we are not honest enough to admit this to ourselves. We talk constantly about the soul, yet we no longer possess it. We carry this lie of life into the most intimate human pursuits. On the other hand, we must fully acknowledge the good will of all those who speak today of ideals in education and teaching, who so generously provide the world with reformist ideas in this field. But we lack the great courage to admit to ourselves that we must first advance to a genuine understanding of the human soul before we can open our mouths today to speak of educational reforms or the art of education. For we lack—and we must first recognize this—the very foundation of a genuine insight into the life of the soul. We have the words describing the life of the soul, coined in ancient times, but we no longer have any experience of the living soul.

[ 29 ] And the other fundamental pillar is the sum of moral precepts. But if, on the one hand, one has a psychology expressed in words—a psychology without a soul—then, on the other hand, one has a moral doctrine without divine spirituality. Certainly, the old religious teachings have been preserved in many cases through tradition. But what the old religious teachings contain lives on in people today just as the study of the soul—which has become dead in words—lives on. People profess what is given to them as dogmas or other religious and spiritual content because it corresponds to old habits, because, in the course of humanity’s historical development, they have grown into what is thus presented to them. But the living content is missing.

[ 30 ] And so we have a psychology without a soul; we have an ethics without divine-spiritual obligation. People still speak—when they speak theoretically, or when they wish to satisfy their emotional needs—in the words that have remained from those ancient moral teachings through which human beings sought to carry out the intentions of the gods by leading a moral life on earth; people still speak in words that were coined in those times when human beings knew: What they bring about in their moral lives are forces akin to the forces of nature, and it is the divine-spiritual beings who give reality to these ethical impulses, these moral forces. People still say this in many ways today, living habitually within the words handed down to them by earlier religions, yet no longer able to look up to the living, divine spirituality that gives these moral impulses their reality.

[ 31 ] Oh, my dear friends, if a person is honest today, does he still understand what is contained, for example, in the letters of Paul, where it is said that a person needs the living Christ to be awakened within him so that he does not die? Can a person today feel, in the fullest sense of the word, that immorality—having no inner spiritual connection to moral duties—has just as much to do with the death and life of the soul as health and illness have to do with the death and life of the body? Do people today still understand spiritually that the soul acquires not life in the Spirit but death in the Spirit if it does not integrate itself into the forces of moral life? Is this still a living word when Paul says: “If you do not have the knowledge, the understanding of Christ’s resurrection, then your faith—your soul—is dead. And as you pass through the death of the physical, your soul is infected by the dying of the physical and begins itself to die in the spiritual?”—Is there an understanding of this, an inner, living understanding?

[ 32 ] And what is even worse—once again, our civilization lacks the courage to admit this lack of inner, living understanding. It is content with a natural science that can speak only of death, that cannot speak of the life of the soul, and out of mere habit upholds that which relates to the immortality of the soul and to the resurrection of Christ on earth. And has not this materialistic spirit even crept into theology itself?

[ 33 ] Let us consider the most modern form of theology. What people need to understand is that the Christ event is so deeply embedded in earthly world history that a spiritual reality must be judged spiritually; that the Resurrection cannot be understood in the sense of natural science, but only in the sense of Spiritual Science. People have lost this insight, and so have the theologians; they speak only of the man Jesus and can no longer arrive at a living understanding of the living, risen Christ, and essentially fall prey to Paul’s verdict: “If you do not know that Christ has been raised, your faith is dead.”—Even the faith of the most modern theology is dead, according to Paul’s own words.

[ 34 ] But if we do not succeed, between approximately the ages of seven and fourteen, in awakening the living Christ within the human being through the pedagogy spoken of in anthroposophy, then the person enters later life without being able to acquire an understanding of this living Christ. Then they must either become a denier of Christ or someone who is not entirely true within, in that they hold fast to Christ out of tradition but actually lack the inner spiritual resources to comprehend how, through Christ’s resurrection—as the individual experiences it, as the educator experiences it together with the child—the living Christ is awakened in the heart and in the soul. There he can be awakened, and through this, immortality can be granted to the soul through its union with Christ. But first one must have a spiritual understanding of immortality. One must first reach the point where one can say to oneself: Yes, if we look only at nature, we arrive at the laws of nature that teach us how our Earth will one day succumb to heat death, how everything on Earth will one day perish. But if we lack insight into the living divine spirituality, then we must believe that our moral ideals will perish along with the Earth’s heat death, that everything will be transformed into one great graveyard. If we have insight into the living spirituality, then we know that what springs forth from our soul as moral impulses is received by the divine spirituality. Just as we take in the oxygen in the air to sustain our lives, so too are our moral deeds absorbed by the divine spirituality living in the world, and our soul itself is carried beyond the Earth’s demise into other worlds.

[ 35 ] But one must be able to take this in vividly—into one’s perception, into one’s entire inner life—just as one today takes in the science of X-rays, the science of telephony, the science of magnetism and electricity; one believes in these because one lives with them inwardly and vividly through the external senses. In order to have the right, living relationship to these things, one must also live vividly within them; otherwise, one is like an artist who knows what is beautiful, who has gathered together in dry, abstract intellectual concepts everything that is supposed to make a work of art beautiful, but who cannot handle colors, who can never knead clay, and so on. If we wish to approach the living human being, we must seek the powers for this approach within living spirituality itself. Our present civilization, however, lacks spirituality. This is to be the second column of the art of education.

[ 36 ] And so today, as educational artists, we stand before people with a purely scientific mindset. On the one hand, the world of the soul has been reduced for us to a mere sum of words; on the other hand, the spiritual world and the moral world have likewise been reduced to a mere sum of words, existing at most as a collection of ceremonies. We wish to base educational art on the science of the soul and ethics, yet all we have is a science of the soul without a soul, an ethics without divine-spiritual obligation. We wish to speak of Christ, and yet, precisely in order to speak correctly of Christ, we must possess a spiritual dimension; we must, in order to speak correctly of him, possess a divine-spiritual dimension. For if we lack both, we speak only of the man Jesus—that is, of the one who walked among people in a physical body, just as other people walk among them.

[ 37 ] If one wishes to recognize the Christ, if one wishes to work in the school as well from the power of the Christ, then one does not need a psychology of the soul expressed in words, nor an ethics expressed in words; rather, one needs a living insight into the life and workings of the soul, then one needs a living insight into the interweaving and working of ethical forces in the same sense that natural forces work—as realities, not merely as conventional precepts to which one conforms out of habit, but as forces in which one wishes to live, because one knows that one dies in the spirit if one does not live within them, just as one dies in the body when one’s blood congeals.

[ 38 ] These insights, in all their vitality, must become the very lifeblood of the art of education. As something that enlivens, that stirs the soul, that transforms what is dead into something alive, they must permeate everything the teacher carries within his heart when he seeks to educate and teach.

[ 39 ] Today, whether we are educated or uneducated, we speak of the soul in dead words; that is to say, we do not live in the life of the soul—we merely babble around the child because we have no access to its soul. Today, when we speak of the spirit, we live in dead words. We seek to penetrate the child’s body by every possible experimental means. It remains dark and silent to us, because behind everything physical lies the spiritual. But we must grasp the spiritual in its living reality if we are to translate it into art, if it is not to be captured merely in abstract thoughts that have no power to act.

[ 40 ] Just as it is widely acknowledged that the art of education must be built upon two fundamental pillars—ethics on the one hand and the study of the soul on the other—so, too, do we often hear serious doubts expressed today about how a child should actually be raised. It is pointed out that in earlier times, children were raised in such a way that adults saw the adult human being already within the child. This is true. How did the Greeks raise their children? They did not really take much account of how the children—since they were still children—actually behaved. If it became apparent that they could not become proper adult Greeks, they were even abandoned in earlier times. The child as such had no significance whatsoever; only the adult had significance. And in raising the child, the aim was to take only the adult into account—to do everything with the child that took only the adult into account.

[ 41 ] Today we have reached a point in civilization where—if I may put it this way—those with experience in this area will already know—children no longer participate if they are not taken into account; they resist inwardly when there is an intention to disregard them and consider only the adults.

[ 42 ] This is why doubts arise today: Should we educate and teach in such a way that, above all, we treat the child as a child in the immediate present—looking directly at the child and providing an education and instruction that make the child feel satisfied—or should we place greater emphasis on awakening in the child what the child must one day become as an adult?

[ 43 ] Yes, you see, such questions arise when one is only capable of observing people from the outside, when it no longer occurs to one to look into the human inner world. Of course, if one educates with a mind that is either already trained in experimental psychology or simply has the mindset that leads to experimental psychology—if one educates with such a mind—well, then one simply cannot reach the child. For the child does not yet carry its soul life on the outer surface in such a way that one merely has to understand it. With adults, it is enough simply to understand them. With children, it is not enough simply to understand them. We must be able to live together with the child on an inner level. We must have absorbed what it means to be human so deeply within ourselves that we can live together with the child in a living way. Merely understanding the child is of no use at all.

[ 44 ] But if we can do that—if we can live in inner harmony with the child—then the contradiction no longer exists for us between raising the child as a child and raising the adult within the child; then we know intuitively that whatever we wish to impart to the child, we must do so in the way the child itself desires, while still nurturing the adult within the child. Does the child, in its innermost being, want to be a child? If so, it would not play with a doll to imitate how an adult relates to a child; nor would the child, with the greatest joy, work alongside the workers in its own way—that is, play along—whenever there is a workshop nearby, even though the play is, for the child, a matter of the utmost seriousness. The child simply yearns to develop, in its own way, the same abilities that adults develop—but precisely in its own way.

[ 45 ] If we understand human beings—and thereby also understand the child—then we also understand the way in which the child strives toward adulthood, except that instead of the real child, it now takes the doll. We then also know, with regard to everything we have to raise and teach, how to bring the child the greatest joy when we nurture the adult within them in the right way, but not in our sober, dry way—where we ourselves find the work distasteful, where we groan under the burden of it—but rather when we nurture the adult within the child in the right way, so that the work arises inwardly like a second person, which causes the work to flow even into the child’s serious play. If we understand this—understand it vividly from within, not in abstract terms—then we learn to no longer harbor such a doubt at all: whether we should nurture the adult within the child, or whether we should nurture the child within the child; then we see in the young child how the seed of the adult is within them. But we do not speak to this seed of the adult as we speak to an adult; rather, we speak just as we speak to a child.

[ 46 ] As a result, if we cannot get to the heart of human nature, we are confronted everywhere, on the one hand, with concepts that are really just words, and on the other hand, with other concepts that are really just words. This is precisely what anthroposophy is meant to help us transcend. You see, people today argue about materialism and spirituality. People say: Yes, we must overcome materialism; we must return to spirituality. But anthroposophy is something for which the very concept of matter—as it haunts people today—has lost all meaning. For when one truly comes to know matter, it begins, figuratively speaking, to become transparent and dissolves entirely into spirit.

[ 47 ] When one truly comes to know the spirit, it ceases to be merely the abstract, lifeless construct that the intellectualist of today carries within, and instead becomes an inner force in action. The spirit itself begins to embody the sum of the forces of growth, for example, in the developing human being. Everything becomes more inwardly active and dynamic. The spirit becomes creative, as dense as matter.

[ 48 ] If we come to truly understand matter, it transforms into spirit. If we come to truly understand spirit, it transforms before the eye of our soul into matter, which is what the spirit reveals outwardly through its creative power. And the words “matter” and “spirit,” when used in isolation, cease to have any meaning. But when we begin to speak from such a mindset, we may still speak of matter and spirit—because the words have already been established—but we speak quite differently when we utter the word “matter” or “substance,” for we imbue it with a different emotional nuance when we possess this anthroposophical insight that I have just described. The words “matter” and “substance” take on a different, secret resonance. It is this secret resonance, however, that then affects the child—not the content of the word “matter.”

[ 49 ] Just feel how the human spirit lives within these richly evocative words! Take a person like Fritz Mauthner, who felt that, in truth, only words remain for the spiritual realm—he wanted people to speak of “Geseel.” Well, people might laugh at that. But suppose the same method were applied to the religious-ethical, moral realm—where our actions have an effect—and a person, driven by the same mindset, coined a new word—what would come of it? “Getue!” You see, I’ve formed the word “Getue” according to the same linguistic principles as the word “Geseel.” People might laugh at the word “Geseel” at most; the word “Getue,” however, is outrageous. For if the very substance of our actions becomes mere “Getue,” it becomes something that is actually outrageous. This does not stem from the content of the word; it stems from what we intuitively experience when we hear the word. We experience something entirely different emotionally when it comes to forming words that lead into the innermost depths of the soul—such as “Geseel”—or when it comes to forming words that describe what leads human beings out into the external world, what leads them to a place where their own actions become natural phenomena. If one speaks of “Getue” in this context, then the matter becomes outrageous.

[ 50 ] But now consider how, on the one hand, the words flow so seamlessly into one another. We speak of matter, mind, and body with the same neutrality; we speak of the soul with the same neutrality; we speak of the brain, the two legs, and so on with the same neutrality. It is, so to speak, the very ideal of scientific knowledge that we speak of everything without any human input.

[ 51 ] But when we come to words that lack a human element, those words become lifeless. Abstract scientific terms become lifeless when we no longer infuse them with a human element. In physics, for example, we speak of the theory of impact. At most, we can write down a mathematical formula—but we do not understand it either if we speak of impact without those vivid sensations we experience when we ourselves collide. It is only through this that the word itself comes to life—that we, in turn, bring the human element back into our civilization.

[ 52 ] Anthroposophy seeks to bring this human element into our civilization. If one goes through life casually, indifferently, simply letting external events unfold through technology—which is a child of our so magnificently advanced natural science—then that is still acceptable. But when one enters those spheres where one is called upon to help fellow human beings—as a doctor, a teacher, or an educator—that approach no longer works. Then one feels the necessity of possessing a genuine, vividly felt, and consciously sought understanding of human nature, and of allowing this understanding to reveal itself in the art of education—there is no need to transform it.

[ 53 ] That is why we are not speaking of mere obstinacy, but rather of an inner necessity of civilization: first to arrive at an understanding of human nature, and then to speak of what is needed to meet the educational demands that are still unconscious or subconscious today.

[ 54 ] And no matter how many educational reform associations are formed, they will be of no help unless they are led by those associations, those communities of people, that in turn work toward a living understanding of humanity—that is, toward a study of the soul that involves a real soul, and toward a moral teaching grounded in a genuine divine-spiritual commitment.

[ 55 ] These associations must carry the banner forward. Then may those follow behind who, in turn, wish to build upon the two fundamental pillars—the educational associations that seek to build upon what must first be established: the foundations of a genuine science of the soul, a genuine ethics, a science of the soul that does not merely speak in words, and an ethics that knows that what a human being accomplishes morally is anchored in the divine-spiritual world. Then, as an artistic educator and teacher, he will also reach the soul through what he says, does, and even through what he does invisibly—through his mere presence as an educator and teacher. He will once again have access to the human soul. And if he wishes to educate the child ethically, he will know that he is thereby integrating the child into a divine-spiritual world order; he will draw upon what is supersensible on the one hand—a genuine science of the soul—and work toward what is supersensible on the other hand—a genuine spirituality.

[ 56 ] This, my esteemed audience, provides the true, genuine cornerstones of the art of education. These must be attained. Anthroposophy seeks to attain them. That is why we need an anthroposophical pedagogy—not out of caprice, but out of the necessity of the times.