The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. The Education of Adults and the Living Conditions of Teachers

[ 1 ] Yesterday I took the liberty of hinting at the stage in the education of young people that is reached when boys and girls, at the age of 14 or 15, have reached sexual maturity. This presents great difficulties for the educator who feels the weight of his or her responsibility. And these phenomena become particularly evident in a school or educational institution where education is based on the nature of the human being. But the goal cannot be to suppress these difficulties through any kind of unnatural educational measures. For if one suppresses them at this stage of life, they will resurface later in life in all sorts of ways, in a disguised form. It is far better to face the difficulties that arise with clear eyes and to prepare oneself to deal with them in the proper way—as something that must be present in human life. It is precisely in a school like the Waldorf School, where boys and girls are side by side and interact freely with one another, that these very difficulties arise most prominently.

[ 2 ] We have already pointed out the difference that emerges between boys and girls around the age of 10. At that point, girls begin to grow more rapidly, particularly in height. Boys lag slightly behind in growth until they reach puberty. At that point, the boys once again outgrow the girls.

[ 3 ] For those who observe from a genuine understanding of the human being—one that encompasses spirit, soul, and body in their intimate interplay—this means a great deal; for in growth, particularly in the overcoming of Earth’s gravity through growth, there is something fundamental inherent in human nature. And yet, on the other hand, there is also something fundamental involved in whether certain phenomena occur in a person’s life during one stage or another. It is therefore the case that certain cosmic, extra-human influences exerted on the human being by the external world affect the female organism more intensely between the ages of 10 and 14 than they do the male organism. In a sense, between the ages of 10 and 14, the female organism immerses itself physically into a supersensible world.

[ 4 ] I ask you to regard this as something particularly important. Between the ages of 10 and 12, 13, and 14, the female organism develops into something spiritual. It becomes imbued with spirit during this time. Thus, during this period, girls experience something very special in connection with the development of their blood. One might say that during these years of life, the blood circulation faces the entire world. It must, so to speak, regulate itself in relation to the whole world, to the universe. And even simple observations using external instruments—which might, for example, determine how the relationship between heartbeats and breaths changes between the ages of 10 and 14—would reveal something entirely different for girls than for boys.

[ 5 ] Around the ages of 13 or 14, the boy begins to display a different nature than he did before, and that is also when he starts to outgrow the girl in stature. He outgrows her. He is making up for what he previously missed, but he is doing so in a state in which a person faces the world quite differently than he did in earlier years of life. Therefore, the boy’s nervous system is now more actively engaged than his circulatory system. And so it is easily the case with the boy that his nervous system becomes overstimulated precisely during these years if the impressions of the school system are not presented to him in the right way. For during these years, what is contained in the language or languages he has learned exerts an immense influence on the boy. The human mental images embodied in the language or languages—as the body grows more slowly, so to speak—penetrate the boy. And so, beginning at this age, the world begins to stir within the boy, to rage inwardly—but it is the world that constitutes his earthly surroundings.

[ 6 ] One might say: something of the entire cosmos, of the universe, is instilled in the girl a little earlier; in the boy, the environment on Earth is instilled indirectly through language. You can perceive this externally through the fact that the boy’s voice changes. An immense amount is taking place within the boy’s entire organism through this roundabout process of voice development. In the female organism, this change in voice manifests only subtly. Internally, however, something has been preparing within the organism that is connected precisely to this rapid growth—something that, I would say, pours the supernatural world into the girl. It is precisely the advances in the materialistic understanding of the world that take precedence over a spiritual perspective.

[ 7 ] You see, when there’s talk of spiritual perspectives or spiritual values being represented somewhere, it’s easy to say: well, those are just a bunch of oddballs who are floating far away from the earth, who want to despise the material world. And then the natural scientist comes along and highlights the great advances in purely material knowledge that have been made over the last few centuries. And then people believe that those who speak of something so out of touch with the world—I don’t mean that anthroposophy is out of touch with the world, but the world is out of touch with anthroposophy—when something so out of touch with the world as anthroposophy appears, people believe it doesn’t care about the material world or the practical world. It is precisely anthroposophy that takes in the great advances in scientific knowledge—takes them in with immense love—and then imbues them with what can be recognized from the spiritual world. So that one will in fact find a correct assessment of materialism precisely among the adherents of a spiritual philosophy—a correct assessment of materialism. A spiritualist may be a materialist. But the mere materialist loses, along with the spirit, the understanding of matter as well, for he has nothing left before him but the outward appearance of matter. It is precisely the materialist who loses all insight into material events. This is what I would like to emphasize as something particularly significant.

[ 8 ] And, you see, someone who now approaches children in the same way as a Waldorf teacher does—that person judges a human being who has reached sexual maturity, who has thus moved beyond, in their life development, what took place during the stage of life I have just alluded to—that person judges this human being in a completely different way than if one knew nothing of all this, especially if one does not understand it from a spiritual perspective.

[ 9 ] In the boy, around the age of 14 or 15, one encounters a person within whom the external environment is stirring. I would say: the words, with their meaningful content, have unconsciously seeped into his nervous system; they are stirring within his nerves. The boy doesn’t know what to make of himself. He has, after all, absorbed something within himself that begins to seem foreign to him precisely at the age of 14 or 15. He enters a state of wonder, of self-criticism, and skepticism toward himself; he enters a state of instability in relation to himself. And anyone who understands human nature knows that this strange two-legged being that walks the earth—the one we call Anthropos—has never been such a great mystery to any philosopher as it often is to the fifteen-year-old boy; for this mystery encompasses all the powers of the human soul. For that which lies farthest from ordinary consciousness—the will—is precisely what literally assaults the boy’s nervous system in his 14th and 15th years.

[ 10 ] The situation is different for girls. And precisely if one wishes to strive for what is rightly being sought today—and what must come to pass in the future—namely, complete equality and equal rights for both sexes throughout the world—then one must have a clear, unbiased perspective on the differences. Equality can be realized only by having a clear, unbiased view of these differences. And in the same sense that the boy becomes a mystery to himself—something he marvels at—the outside world becomes a mystery to the girl, especially during these years. The girl has taken in something supernatural within herself. The entire human being takes shape unconsciously within the girl. Then one has before one a human being around the age of 14 or 15 who now marvels at the world, who finds mysteries in the world, and who, above all else, wishes to find the realization of values in the world.

[ 11 ] And so, for the girl, it is precisely during this stage of life that certain aspects of the outside world begin to become incomprehensible. For the boy, much becomes incomprehensible in his inner world. For the girl, much becomes incomprehensible in the outside world.

[ 12 ] One must have a sense of it, a feeling that by the age of 14 or 15, one is dealing with entirely new human beings, not the same ones one had before. And for both the one and the other individual, the transformation takes place relatively quickly, so that it may be the case that the teacher—who is asleep and has no sense of the transformation that the people entrusted to him are undergoing right beside him—simply sleeps through this transformation, failing to see how he often suddenly finds himself standing before a new human being.

[ 13 ] You see, this is precisely what must be instilled above all in the teachers and educators of the Waldorf School themselves, and it is something into which these teachers have, for reasons I will explain later, adapted relatively quickly: An open-minded attitude toward change in human nature. The Waldorf teacher—if I may put it somewhat paradoxically—is always prepared, under certain circumstances, to find that tomorrow is completely different from yesterday. That is, in essence, the secret of their educational approach. One might say that people usually think in the evening: “Tomorrow the sun will rise again; it will be just as it was today,” and so on. — Well, it is, of course, a somewhat paradoxical way of putting it, but nevertheless, to express the matter in a sort of symptomatic way, I would like to say: The Waldorf teacher must be prepared for the possibility that a day might come when the sun does not rise. —For only when one views human nature in this way—without being driven to prejudices by the past—can one truly understand human nature as it develops. For out there in the cosmos, we can, in a certain sense, take comfort in the fact that things remain somewhat conservative. But when human nature progresses from early childhood through the ages of 14, 15, and 16—there, ladies and gentlemen, sometimes the sun that used to rise no longer does; such a great change has taken place with regard to this enigmatic microcosm that is the “human being” that we must, in fact, approach humanity with just as much impartiality as we would approach a nature that, from a certain day onward, casts darkness over the world, so that we could no longer use our eyes. This open-mindedness, this placing oneself within the world in order to receive new wisdom with each passing day, and the constant willingness to face the new with a mind completely open—that is precisely what keeps a person healthy, fresh, and full of vitality. And this open-mindedness toward change in life and this freshness—which one gains through the experience of change—is what should constitute the innermost being and the innermost disposition of the Waldorf teacher.

[ 14 ] The significance of entering this stage of life—as characterized above—for the boys and girls in their relationship with the teaching staff was made very clear by an incident that occurred just recently during the last school year at the Waldorf School. One day, when I was once again at the Waldorf School to oversee the teaching and education—as best I can—on an occasional basis, a girl from the highest grade approached me between classes in what I would describe as a subdued yet aggressive state. She was very agitated, but speaking with tremendous inner conviction, she said: “May we—it’s very important—may we, the whole class (it was, after all, the highest grade), speak with you today? But we only want to if you yourself want to.” — So a leader of this sort had placed herself at the head of the class and wanted to speak with me in the presence of the entire class. What was the reason? The reason was precisely that the boys and girls had come to feel for themselves: they can no longer quite cope with the teaching staff; they are finding it difficult to deal with the teaching staff and to establish the proper standing.

[ 15 ] This did not stem from any resentment toward the teaching staff, for it is simply the nature of the Waldorf School that there is no resentment; rather, the children have in fact already developed a deep love for their teachers in the short time since the Waldorf School was founded. But these students in the highest grade—these fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys and girls—were gripped by a hellish fear: that something in the entirely new relationship that had developed between students and teachers might cause them to lose that love, or that it might grow weaker. They were gripped by an extraordinary fear. And in such a situation, I did not do what might have been done in the old days—namely, when children brought up such concerns, to put them in their place—but rather I gathered the class around me and spoke to them. And I spoke in such a way that I let the children feel—yes, at this age one must already speak of young ladies and gentlemen, mustn’t one, as I have often said—that I let the children feel that I now want to form a judgment about what has happened together with them. Let’s talk to one another completely openly, let’s form the judgment first, and let’s see what comes of it.

[ 16 ] And you see, that is precisely what emerged—what I have just described; there was a fear that the teachers might no longer be loved in the same way as before. For there was an immense sense of wonder, an immense curiosity about certain things in the world among the children. And since Waldorf education is something that develops from day to day, these phenomena must first be carefully studied, and the necessary measures are developed out of life itself.

[ 17 ] Well, the children said all sorts of things that, strictly speaking, weren’t very significant, but which played an immensely important role in their perceptions and feelings. I then talked to them about all sorts of things—you know, how life just brings this or that—which the children were extremely eager to discuss, and all I had to do was make a small adjustment to the teaching staff for the next school year. When we then began the next school year, I handed over the language classes to another teacher; I made some changes among the teachers. Furthermore, we in the faculty came to realize that, just as is the case elsewhere in the school, we must work according to this method—reaching a judgment through collaboration. But in order to have—I would say—the right attitude, so that young men and women at this stage of life will now stand alongside the teacher who was once an authority figure to them and maintain the proper relationship with that teacher, one must, as is the case with Waldorf teachers, have an open perspective on the world as a whole and stand within the world as a global citizen; in German, one says, to have a worldview—not merely to have drilled in teaching methods, but to answer questions for oneself about the goals of humanity, about the content of the individual epochs of human history, about the meaning of life in the present, and so on. And one must not merely mull these questions over in one’s head, but carry them in one’s heart; then one will truly experience them in one’s heart together with the young people. For we have, after all—though most people do not realize it—been immersed in intellectualism within Western civilization for three, four, or even five centuries now. Intellectualism, however, only truly becomes something that corresponds to human nature in later life. By nature, a child is actually quite averse to intellectualism. But everything we think today is colored by intellectualism. The only people who are truly free of intellectualism are those over in Asia and in Russia, all the way to Moscow. But everywhere west of Moscow, all the way to America, people think in an intellectualistic way. People are not aware of this, but as a result—especially if they belong to the so-called educated classes—they speak a language of thought that children no longer understand. That is why there is indeed a gulf between adults and children today. With a teaching staff such as the Waldorf teaching staff, this gulf must be bridged once again.

[ 18 ] One can only fill it out by looking deep within human nature. That is why you must allow me to say something physiological here—something that is not usually taken into account, but which one truly appreciates only when one sees it as a fact before one’s eyes, based on spiritual science and spiritual insight. You see, people believe that something special has been accomplished when a concept is formed, when an idea exists—a mental image of some thing. But only those who judge people by their intellect believe this. Sometimes truths are terribly paradoxical—when one delves into the unconscious, when one delves into the nature of the human heart, into the nature of the human soul, then actually all concepts, all ideas, are something linked to a faint feeling of antipathy in every human being, even in the philosopher—a faint feeling of antipathy. There is always a certain revulsion in the formulation of ideas; whether one brings it to consciousness or not, there is always a certain revulsion. That is why it is so incredibly important to know that one must not, under any circumstances, override this hidden, subconscious revulsion in children by overfeeding them with concepts. It stems from this: you see, when a person has really thought deeply—thought about difficult things—I can unfortunately only describe this to you in terms of the results; I would have to give many lectures if I were to explain it from a physiological perspective, but I can only present the results—when a person has thought so deeply, their brain has become a rather peculiar structure on the inside. It is then permeated throughout with deposits, namely phosphorus compounds, which lie scattered throughout the brain. These have been secreted during the process of thinking. Precisely when one thinks independently and forms ideas on one’s own, the brain—forgive the harsh word—is full of refuse, full of secretions, namely phosphoric acid compounds; which then spread throughout the brain. These byproducts, these secretions, must first be removed from the organism through sleep, which is the rest a person has.

[ 19 ] For thinking has, as its parallel process in the brain, not a process of growth, not a process of digestion, but a process of secretion. And when I first form a judgmental thought with someone—once they have matured to the point of being 14, 15, or 16 years old—then I carry out this process of separation together with them. It comes down to separation. Then they feel their inner self within this process of separation.

[ 20 ] But if I simply dictate concepts to him—if I dogmatically present him with ready-made concepts—then I am making a strange demand of him. For these ready-made concepts do not penetrate human nature; they bump against it, push their way in, cannot enter the brain, but they strike against the brain, and in this way they cause the brain, through its neural activity, to reuse the old byproducts that are already lying around.

[ 21 ] This is precisely what all fully formed intellectualism evokes: the feeling that one must compulsively reuse everything one has already set aside—everything that is still lying around. One experiences this with a subtle sense of revulsion that does not rise to the surface of consciousness but all the more profoundly influences one’s entire state of being. You see, until one knows these things, one does not truly appreciate them, for people do not realize that thinking is a process of separation, and that thinking in mere ideas requires a person to make makeshift use once again of what he has already separated—to knead through all his phosphoric acid salts once more.

[ 22 ] You see, this is what is so incredibly important in moral education: when we teach children ready-made commandments that are already concepts, we expect them to absorb morality in the form of ideas, and that is where the aversion arises; the human inner organism resists moral precepts that are formulated abstractly and puts up a fight against them. If I encourage the child to first formulate moral sentiment on their own—drawing from life, from their own feelings, from examples, from all of these things—and then allow them to distill these into principles, so that the child forms the precepts themselves, formulating moral precepts autonomously and freely, then I am engaging them in an activity that demands their whole being. That is why I turn children off to morality with moral commandments, and this plays an immensely significant role in our present social life. One has no idea how much of humanity’s most beautiful, most magnificent, and most majestic moral impulses have been turned off because they were presented to humanity in an intellectualistic way—in the form of commandments, in the form of intellectualistic ideas. These, you see, are the things into which the Waldorf teacher grows precisely through spiritual science. It is precisely through this that the teacher comes to understand this material activity. I must say it once more: materialism only gains its proper place in life through the spiritual perspective. Only then can one see what is actually going on inside this human being. It is only through this that one becomes a true educator in the physical, practical sense—by being able to adopt the spiritual standpoint.

[ 23 ] However, this is only possible if the teacher or educator truly has a worldview, if he approaches the world in such a way that the question of humanity and the world holds deep meaning for him personally.

[ 24 ] Here I must say something abstract once again, though in reality it is actually very concrete. It is only seemingly abstract. You see, human beings are faced with the mysteries of the world, and they seek a solution to these mysteries. But today people think: the solution to the riddle of the universe must be able to be written down in a book, must be able to be contained within it along with whatever ideas one expresses. Just think for a moment that there are people—I have met such people—who have an extraordinary fear of such a solution to the riddle of the universe. For they say: For heaven’s sake, if someone were actually to succeed in solving the mystery of the universe and writing it down in a book, what would all those who come after be left to do? — It would be incredibly boring. Everything one has ever strived for in solving the mystery of the universe is already there; one need only learn it. People have this mental image of it being incredibly boring. I can’t say these people are entirely wrong; it would be about as boring in the world if someone had actually written a proper book in which the mystery of the universe is solved, and then you read the book, and then—well, what else is there to do in the world, right!

[ 25 ] Well, you see, there must be something that makes the solution—the so-called solution—all the more compelling a reason to keep going, to keep working. The mystery of the world must not be such that one is now finished; rather, once one has the solution to the mystery of the world, one must, in a sense, be able to start all over again. But this is only the case if one approaches this mystery of the world in the right way. The world poses many questions for us. At first, we cannot even begin to grasp how many questions it poses to us. By “questions,” I mean not only those that can be answered theoretically, but also what we are to do—the exercise of the will, the exercise of the emotions, all the details of life; everything is part of the question when I say: The world presents us with many riddles. - What, then, is the true answer to these many questions? The true answer is none other than: the human being. — The world presents us with these riddles, and the human being stands there. He is a synthesis, a summary, and from the human being the solution to the world’s riddle leaps out to meet us.

[ 26 ] But we certainly do not know this man. We must start over again. This is precisely the kind of answer that brings us back to the beginning. We must get to know the man who has now emerged as the answer—Oedipus. Thus, we must once again perceive ourselves as a new enigma. Every new person is once again a riddle that we must work on.

[ 27 ] This mysterious relationship between human beings and the world must have truly taken root in one’s heart if one wishes to be a Waldorf teacher—that is, if one wishes to work from the standpoint of a genuine worldview. Certainly, it still evokes a kind of horror today when one says: “Waldorf teachers base their work on anthroposophy. It provides them with a worldview.” — Yes, but perhaps this anthroposophy is very imperfect. That may well be the case. Then let people simply create the other worldviews they wish to offer! But anyone who truly wishes to treat people as an artist needs a worldview. That is what this is all about.

[ 28 ] To what extent the anthroposophical outlook actually contains elements that can now also be put to use in teaching and education—that is what I would like to discuss in the third part of today’s reflection.

[ 29 ] When I now look back on the nine lectures, I certainly have much to criticize about them and much to declare imperfect, but what I have—one might say—the most to criticize about them is that I delivered them at all in the form in which I did. In a sense—as paradoxical as this may seem to you—I would prefer not to have to give such lectures at all. Speaking from a sense of the times—truly speaking from a sense of the times—I myself must feel that today, in our age, an incredible amount is being said about education and the school system, far too much is being said, and that people feel compelled to talk far too much about it: how should one teach, how should one educate? And when one is then expected to weigh in on these questions oneself—albeit from a different perspective—it seems all the more like too much.

[ 30 ] Yes, why is it, actually, that there is so much talk about education and teaching these days? You can hardly visit even the smallest town without seeing announcements everywhere: How should we educate and teach? — that people are talking about it everywhere, discussing it, holding conferences on the subject, and so on. Why is that? If we look back at earlier periods of human development, people certainly didn’t talk nearly as much about teaching and education back then. Back then, teaching and educating were things people did out of their naivety and instinct, and they knew what they were supposed to do.

[ 31 ] Now that I have explained how a truly wholesome education and wholesome teaching must be based on an understanding of human nature—and how, as I have shown, this understanding of human nature is to be acquired precisely by the teaching staff of the Waldorf School—one must ask: Did the people of the past, the people of earlier ages, possess infinitely more knowledge of human nature than we do? — And as strange as it may sound, the answer must be yes. Admittedly, the people of the past were not as enlightened as we are in terms of the natural sciences; but in the way these older people knew something about the world, they knew more than we do. I have already discussed this in these lectures: human beings have gradually become an endpoint for us. We look at all the other creatures in the world and say: They have evolved up to the endpoint of humanity; there we stop and speak very little about human beings. — Our physiology even seeks to gain insight into human beings through animal experimentation. We have lost the ability to place human beings in the world as genuine, self-grounded entities. We have lost most of our knowledge of humanity.

[ 32 ] You see, this is precisely what anthroposophy seeks to restore to humanity: that we have knowledge of the world, but that human beings are not excluded from it—or, at most, are placed as the final point—so that from all that can be known about the world, the power truly arises to look deeply into human beings themselves, into their soul, body, and spirit; that one can truly know what the spirit does within a human being; that one can know: the spirit, in its intellectual form, secretes all manner of substances within the human being, as I have just described. Our current view of the world does not go that far. It stops short of the human being, extending only as far as the animal; it establishes a biology and then reorganizes it into physiology; but the human being remains beyond comprehension. That is why human beings certainly still act largely on instinct today; but they are no longer loved on the basis of knowledge or insight.

[ 33 ] A teacher needs a body of knowledge that enables him to continue loving people, because he must first love his own knowledge and his own understanding. There is a deeper meaning behind the fact that, originally, people did not speak of mere knowledge as something to be attained by human beings, but rather of “philo-sophy”—the love of wisdom. This is what anthroposophy seeks to restore to humanity: to bring knowledge back to human beings.

[ 34 ] Well, if one understands human beings—if all knowledge and insight ultimately point back to the human being—then one can answer pedagogical and didactic questions throughout one’s entire worldview. Insights—including those about the child—are embedded throughout. That is precisely what we need. Because the rest of our science can tell us absolutely nothing about education and teaching, we establish a separate field and have so much to say about teaching and education. Lectures such as the ones I have given will have achieved their goal only when they no longer need to be given—when we no longer have to address this specific topic, but when we once again have a worldview, an insight in which education is already so fully integrated that when the teacher, when the educator possesses this worldview, he or she can then, out of his or her complete naivety, will be able to practice the instinctive art of education. The fact that we talk so much about education and teaching is proof that there is so little genuine educational impulse embedded in the rest of our understanding. Here we need a reversal of what we have gradually come to in recent times.

[ 35 ] And you see, this is what, in the true sense, means that Waldorf teachers do not have a separate system of pedagogy and didactics, but rather a worldview—and this worldview continually guides them by teaching them to recognize, ultimately, that human beings have an instinctive impulse toward education and to become, in a sense, naive again when it comes to educating. And that is precisely what points to the fact that when one speaks of a Waldorf teacher, one must speak of the teacher as a whole person.

[ 36 ] But this also eliminates from Waldorf school instruction and Waldorf education that which so often dominates people today: fanaticism. The worst thing in life—and especially in education and teaching—is fanaticism, when one becomes so fixated on a particular direction that one no longer recognizes anything else and seeks to impose that single perspective, which has been reduced to certain catchphrases.

[ 37 ] Yes, anyone who looks at the world with an open mind knows this: directions and points of view are just that—they are simply points of view. If I have a tree here and take a picture of it, I’ll give you a picture. The picture is inevitably shaped by this vantage point; it looks different from here, and it looks different again from there; whereas you might say, “That’s not the same tree at all”—if you judge it solely by that one picture. So there are points of view and worldviews in the world. They are always viewed from only one side. Only those who know that one must view things from the most diverse angles will avoid becoming fanatical and instead immerse themselves in comprehensiveness, in a necessary universality.

[ 38 ] Ladies and gentlemen, when you look at what people around the world are saying, it’s usually not wrong at all, but simply one-sided. You just have to see the other side as well. If you look at things with that kind of attitude, you’ll seek out the good everywhere. That’s why it’s so strange: when people talk about Waldorf education, Person A comes along and says, “Yes, we already have that, but Person B is doing it all wrong.” Then Person B comes along and says, “We already have that, but Person A is doing it wrong.” — The Waldorf teacher says: “Person A has their merits and Person B has theirs, and we try to take what is universally present in the world.” — That is why one so often hears: “Waldorf pedagogy speaks just as we do ourselves.” — But that’s not the case; rather, we speak the way the other side speaks as well, because we know that fanatically pursuing a particular direction causes the very worst calamity in the world. And precisely what a Waldorf teacher must possess is the absence of any fanaticism, so that he has before him only the reality of the developing human being, the child.

[ 39 ] Certainly, some may say: There is an anthroposophical movement, and we have already encountered fanatics within it. - If you look more closely, you will find: Anthroposophy seeks nothing other than to make knowledge all-encompassing and to spiritualize it. As I have explained, it is of the utmost indifference to it whether it is called “anthroposophy.” It truly seeks nothing other than to restore a universalistic perspective to that which has gradually become one-sided. If, nevertheless, one finds fanaticism, even dogmatism, or an adherence to certain formulas within the anthroposophical movement, this has been brought in from the outside, not shaped from within; for a great deal is brought into the movement that does not at all correspond to the nature and essence of the movement. Therefore, when it is said that the Waldorf school principle is just another kind of sect where people engage in all sorts of eccentricities, one must simply engage with it—with the reality in which it lives—and one will then see that it is particularly well-suited to the realm of teaching and education, and that it actually wants nothing more than to realize the ideal of humanity in living human beings—not in a quirky or falsely idealistic way, not abstractly, but in practice.

[ 40 ] With this remark—that in the Waldorf school it is primarily the atmosphere of spirit that matters, the vitality that is meant to speak through the teachers—this is how I will have to conclude these lectures on education for now.

[ 41 ] On the other hand, although I have said that I must criticize the fact that they were held, I must also say that these educational lectures have been extremely dear to me, and that I am very, very grateful to the esteemed audience for the attention they have given to these lectures and for the interest they have shown in them.