The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] The discussion so far should not merely result in a theory about the necessity of a new approach to education, but rather something like a philosophy of education should emerge from what has been said. In the preceding lectures, I sought to speak less to the intellect than to the human heart. And this is precisely what is most important, what is most essential, for the educator and the teacher. For, as we have seen, the art of education must be based on a profound understanding of human nature.

[ 2 ] For a long time now, whenever the art of education is discussed, one has heard that one should do this or that with a child. Such precepts—theoretical commands, so to speak—very often contain pedagogical instructions on what one should do with a child.

[ 3 ] However, this approach would never foster the teacher’s and educator’s full dedication to their profession; rather, it is achieved solely by giving the teacher and educator the opportunity to truly penetrate the whole human being—body, soul, and spirit.

[ 4 ] For anyone who has such vivid ideas about human beings, these ideas become an immediate will the moment he is faced with his profession. Hour by hour, he learns to answer a weighty question in a practical way.

[ 5 ] Who asks this question? The child asks it himself. And so the most important thing is to learn to read within the child. And a genuine, practical understanding of human nature—one oriented toward body, soul, and spirit—guides us to truly learn to read within the child.

[ 6 ] That is why it is so difficult to talk about so-called Waldorf education. For Waldorf education is not really something that can be learned or discussed; rather, it is purely a matter of practice, and one can really only describe, by way of example, how this practice is carried out in this or that case, to meet this or that need. The practice itself arises entirely from direct experience. For this is always the prerequisite: that the corresponding understanding of human nature is present when one proceeds from this mindset. But then, in a certain sense, pedagogy and didactics are already a very general social issue; for the education of the child must, after all, begin immediately after birth. This means nothing other than that education is a matter for all of humanity, every family, and every human community. But it is precisely this that the understanding of the child’s very nature teaches us most intensely—before the change of teeth occurs around the age of seven. A German writer, Jean Paul (Friedrich Richter), spoke a wonderful truth when he said: “In the first three years of life, a person learns far more for life than in all—at that time there were only three—than in all three years of academic study.”

[ 7 ] In fact, the first three years of life in particular—but also the years up to the age of seven—are the most crucial for a person’s overall development, because during this time the child, as a human being, is something entirely different from what he or she will be later on. In the early years, the child is essentially nothing but a sensory organ. Yet people generally do not grasp the full scope of this idea—that the child is, in the early years, nothing but a sensory organ—with sufficient intensity. One must resort to quite drastic statements if one truly wishes to reveal this whole truth.

[ 8 ] Later in life, a person experiences the taste of the food they eat in their mouth, on their palate, and on their tongue. Taste is, so to speak, localized in the head. In children, especially during the first years of life, this is not the case; rather, taste affects the entire organism. The child tastes its mother’s milk and its first foods right down into its limbs. What takes place on the tongue in later life takes place throughout the child’s entire organism. The child lives, so to speak, by tasting everything it takes in. In this regard, there is something strongly animalistic at work. But we must never create a mental image of the animal nature present in the child as being the same as the animal nature present in an animal. In the child, the animal nature is always, so to speak, elevated to a higher level. A human being is never an animal—never, not even as an embryo, least of all then. But one can, so to speak, make these ideas clear by framing them in this way, by comparing them to something.

[ 9 ] Anyone who has ever observed a herd—with a true appreciation for the workings of nature—as it grazes on a meadow or in a field and then lies there—let’s say a herd of cows in the grass, each individual cow surrendered in a wondrous way to the whole world as it carries out the process of digestion—that person gains an impression of what is actually taking place within the animal. A whole world, a complete distillation of cosmic events, is unfolding within the animal, and as it digests, the animal experiences the most wondrous visions. The process of digestion is the most important cognitive process in animals. And while the animal is digesting, it is surrendered to the whole world in a dreamlike, imaginative way.

[ 10 ] This may seem exaggerated, but the strange thing is that it is not exaggerated at all—it is entirely true. And if we take this a step further, we arrive at the child’s experience of his or her physical functions. Taste accompanies all physical functions. Just as taste accompanies all physical functions, so too is something that is otherwise localized only in the eye and ear present throughout the child’s entire organism.

[ 11 ] Imagine the wonder of the eye—how it takes in the colors formed on the outside, creates an image within, and through this we see. This is localized; it is separate from our overall experience. And we then grasp what the eye forms in such a wondrous way with the mind, in a shadow image created by the mind.

[ 12 ] Equally marvelous are the processes that are localized in the ear of an adult. But what is localized in the senses in adults is spread throughout the entire organism in children. Therefore, in children there is no separation between mind, soul, and body; rather, everything that acts from the outside is reproduced internally. The child imitates and reproduces its entire environment.

[ 13 ] And now that we have gained this perspective, we must examine how children acquire three skills in their early years that are crucial for their entire lives: walking, speaking, and thinking. These three skills, which are crucial for their entire lives, are acquired by children in their early years.

[ 14 ] Walking—yes, that is, I would say, an abbreviation, a condensed expression for something much more comprehensive. Because what stands out most is that we learn to walk, we say: the child learns to walk. But this process of learning to walk is, after all, connected with finding a state of balance in relation to the entire spatial world. As children, we seek an upright position; we seek to position our legs in such a way relative to gravity that we maintain balance. But we also try to do the same with our arms and hands. The entire organism is oriented. Learning to walk means finding the spatial directions of the world and positioning one’s own organism within those spatial directions.

[ 15 ] The point here is that we must look closely at how the child is an imitative, sensory being. For in the first years of life, everything must be learned through imitation and absorbed from the environment through imitation.

[ 16 ] Now, surely everyone will notice how the organism generates orienting forces from within itself, how the human organism is thereby predisposed to assume a vertical position—rather than remaining in a horizontal position as when crawling—and to use the arms in a way that maintains balance in relation to the spatial world. All of this is an innate disposition of the child; it arises, so to speak, from the organism’s own impulses.

[ 17 ] If, as educators, we begin to exert even the slightest coercion on what human nature itself desires, if we fail to understand how to leave human nature to its own devices and merely act as facilitators, then we will corrupt the human organism for the entirety of earthly life.

[ 18 ] Therefore, if we improperly encourage the child to walk through external manipulation—if we do not merely help the child, but instead seek to force the child to walk and stand—then we ruin the child’s life right up to the point of death. In particular, we ruin the child’s later years. For true education is always about looking not merely at the child’s present, but at the whole of human life, right up to death. We must realize that the entire course of human life on earth lies in embryonic form within childhood.

[ 19 ] Now, because the child is an extraordinarily finely organized sensory organ, it is receptive not only to the physical influences of its environment, but also to moral influences—namely, intellectual influences. As paradoxical as this may seem to today’s materialistically minded people, the child senses what we are thinking in its environment. And it is not only important that, as parents or educators, we refrain from doing things that are outwardly inappropriate in the child’s presence; we must also ensure that our thoughts and feelings—which the child senses and absorbs—are inwardly true and imbued with morality. For the child shapes its character not merely according to our words or our actions, but according to our disposition, our mindset, and our emotional attitude. And during the early years of a child’s upbringing, up to the age of seven, the most important factor is the nature of the child’s environment.

[ 20 ] This raises the question: What can we incorporate into what we provide as guidance and assistance when learning to walk and find one’s bearings? The point here is that a spiritual science allows us to grasp the interconnections of life, whereas a lifeless, non-spiritual science does not.

[ 21 ] Let us take a child who, through all sorts of external coercive measures—because this was considered the right thing to do—was encouraged to walk and orient themselves in space, and now let us consider this child again in their fiftieth year of life, between the ages of fifty and sixty, and we may well find—provided nothing else in life has counteracted this—that by the time this child has reached the age of fifty or sixty, they are afflicted with all manner of metabolic disorders beyond their control, such as rheumatism, symptoms of gout, and so on.

[ 22 ] It goes so far that everything soul-spiritual that we do with the child—for it is indeed a soul-spiritual act when we force the child into an upright position or into walking, even if we do so with an indifferent heart—it goes so far that the spiritual in the child works into the physical. And the forces remain. The forces we generate through measures of a highly questionable nature—these forces remain throughout a person’s entire life, and later, if they were not proper, they manifest as physical illnesses.

[ 23 ] All education—especially in the case of a child—is also physical education. You cannot educate a child physically in isolation, because all emotional and spiritual education—all education—has a simultaneous effect on the child’s physical being; it is physical education. When you observe a child—whose organism is orienting itself toward standing upright and walking—when you look with deep love upon this wondrous mystery of the human organism, which can transition from a horizontal to a vertical position, when you have the religious feeling to stand in reverent awe before the creative divine forces that guide the child into space, if, in other words, you stand as the helper in walking and in learning to orient oneself—as the one who deeply loves human nature in the child, following every expression of this human nature with love as the helper: then you will generate healing forces within the child that manifest precisely in a healthy metabolism even between the ages of fifty and sixty, when it is necessary to control this metabolism.

[ 24 ] For this is the secret of human development: What is spiritual and emotional at a certain stage of life later becomes physical, manifests itself physically; years later, it manifests itself physically. So much for learning to walk. A child guided with love as they learn to walk is raised to become a healthy person. And applying love while teaching a child to walk is a significant part of the child’s physical and health-related upbringing.

[ 25 ] Speech, after all, develops out of spatial orientation. Modern physiological science does not know much about this; but it does know a fair amount. It knows that, while we perform our daily tasks with our right hand, a certain convolute on the left side of the brain serves as the motor for speech. This physiological science already demonstrates a correspondence between the movement of the right hand and the so-called Broca’s area in the left hemisphere of the brain. How the hand moves, how it makes gestures, how force is channeled into the hand—all of this is transmitted to the brain and forms the motor for speech. This is just a small part of what is scientifically known about the matter. For the truth is this: Speech does not arise solely from the movement of the right hand, which corresponds to the left frontal lobe, but rather from the entire motor system of the human being. Just as a child learns to walk, learns to orient itself in space, and learns to transform the first fidgety, indeterminate movements of the arms into purposeful movements connected to the outside world—all of this is transmitted through the mysterious inner organization of the human being to the organization of the head. This becomes evident in speech.

[ 26 ] Anyone who can properly assess these things knows how every sound—especially every palatal sound—sounds different in a child who shuffles their feet while walking than in a child who steps firmly. The entire range of nuances in speech is rooted in the body’s motor functions. Life is first and foremost gesture, and gesture is internally transformed into the motor aspects of speech. Thus, speech is a result of walking—that is, of orienting oneself in space. And much will depend on how lovingly we encourage the child to walk, in terms of how well the child will eventually master language.

[ 27 ] These are the subtler connections that provide a true understanding of human nature. It was certainly not in vain that I discussed this bringing of the spirit into the human organism at such length in the preceding days. This is how the spirit is brought into the body. For the body follows the spirit at every step when the spirit is brought in the right way.

[ 28 ] Once again, the child first learns to speak through its entire organism. If you look at the matter this way, we first have the external movement—the movement of the legs—which gives rise to strong contours; and the articulation with arms and hands, which gives rise to the inflection and shaping of words. We see how, internally within the child, external movement is transformed into the movement of speech.

[ 29 ] And if, as guides helping a child learn to walk, we are to infuse every instruction we give with love, then it is also necessary that we be completely truthful within ourselves when teaching speech—in the assistance we provide as the child learns to speak. The greatest untruths in life arise during a child’s process of learning to speak; for it is then that the truthfulness of speech is absorbed by the physical organism, by the physical constitution.

[ 30 ] A child to whom, as an educator or teacher, one always expresses oneself authentically as a human being—such a child, by imitating those around them, will learn language in such a way that the subtle activity within them—which must continually take place in the organism as we inhale and exhale—becomes firmly established.

[ 31 ] Of course, these things should not be created in broad mental images, but in more subtle ways. Yet they exist in these subtle forms and manifest themselves throughout our entire lives. We inhale oxygen; we exhale carbon dioxide. Within our organism, oxygen must be transformed into carbon dioxide through the process of respiration. The world gives us oxygen; it takes carbon dioxide from us. Whether we transform the oxygen within ourselves into carbon dioxide in the proper way—in the finer, more intimate human life—depends on whether we are treated truthfully or untruthfully by those around us as we learn to speak. The spiritual is thus entirely transformed into the physical.

[ 32 ] And one of the fallacies is that, in the child’s environment, we very often believe we are doing the child a favor when we lower ourselves to the child’s level in our speech. But deep down, the child does not want to hear language that has been simplified for children; rather, the child wants to hear the authentic language of adults. We should therefore speak to the child the way we are accustomed to speaking in everyday life, and we should not use a specially adapted “childish” language.

[ 33 ] At first, because of its inability, the child will babble after what is said to it; but we ourselves must not start babbling. For that is the greatest imperfection. And if we believe we must imitate the child’s babbling—the child’s imperfect speech—we will damage the child’s digestive organs. For everything spiritual becomes physical; it enters the physical organism and shapes it. And everything we do spiritually with the child—because the child is nothing in and of itself—is also a form of physical training. Many digestive disorders in later life stem from learning to speak incorrectly.

[ 34 ] Just as speech arises from walking, from grasping, and from human movement, so, in turn, thinking arises from speech. And just as we must infuse everything with love when providing the assistance required for walking; just as we must—because the child internally replicates what is taking place in its surroundings—strive for the utmost truthfulness when teaching it to speak, so too must we ensure clarity in our own thinking within the child’s environment, so that the child—which is entirely a sensory being and also physically replicates the spiritual within itself—may derive correct thinking from speech.

[ 35 ] The worst thing we can do to a child is to give an instruction in the child’s presence, then take it back afterward or say something else, thereby causing confusion. Causing confusion through our thoughts in the child’s presence—that is the true source of what we call “nervousness” in today’s civilization.

[ 36 ] Why are so many people nervous in our time? Simply because people have not thought clearly and precisely about their surroundings, whereas a child, after learning to speak, also learns to think.

[ 37 ] The next generation, when it is in the process of revealing its major flaws, is simply a faithful reflection of the preceding generation in its physical behavior. And when you observe your own children later in life as they exhibit certain vices, observing these vices should actually serve as a bit of a prompt for self-awareness. For it is a very intimate process—how everything that happens in the child’s environment finds expression in the child’s physical constitution. During childhood, love becomes part of the child’s physical constitution as they learn to walk; truthfulness, as they learn to speak; and clarity and decisiveness in the environment, as the child learns to think. Thus, the blood vessels and organs develop in accordance with how love, truthfulness, and clarity unfold in the child’s environment.

[ 38 ] Metabolic disorders result from an unfavorable learning process. Digestive disorders can result from improper treatment while the child is learning to speak. Nervousness in a child’s life stems from confused thinking in the child’s environment.

[ 39 ] When one considers the nervousness that prevails today, in the third decade of the 20th century, one must conclude that there must have been a great deal of confusion among educators around the turn of the century. For all that confusion in behavior stemming from thought is the nervousness of today. And the nervousness, in turn, that people experienced at the turn of the century is nothing other than a reflection of the confusion that prevailed around 1870. These matters can indeed be viewed in such a way that it is not simply a matter of physiology, hygiene, and psychological pedagogy—where the teacher is required at every opportunity to call a doctor whenever a health-related issue arises—but rather these matters can be treated in such a way that physiological pedagogy and school hygiene, and school physiology form a unified whole, so that the teacher also incorporates into his mission and duties that aspect of intellectual activity which takes place within the physical-sensory organism.

[ 40 ] But since, in fact, all people are educators for the period from birth to the age of seven, we are simply faced with the social task of ensuring that a genuine understanding of human nature is absolutely necessary if humanity is to move toward progress rather than decline.

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[ 41 ] Our humane age has, quite rightly and as a matter of course, abolished a very common method of discipline from earlier times: corporal punishment, beating. But our age—and let no one accuse me of advocating corporal punishment in this lecture— our age has had the great ability to eliminate corporal punishment from the educational system precisely because this age is well attuned to outward appearances, because this age is quite capable of recognizing the harmful effects of blows on the physical body and the moral consequences that arise from this damage to the physical body caused by corporal punishment.

[ 42 ] But in the upbringing of children, especially in this age that is so heavily oriented toward the physical and the sensual and so little toward the spiritual and the soul, a terrible battle has taken hold—a battle that people cannot even form a mental image of, precisely because today’s society is far too little oriented toward the spirit.

[ 43 ] Our mothers—and sometimes our fathers as well—feel an extraordinarily strong need, for example, to give a little girl a very beautiful doll so that the little girl, now at play age, can play with the beautiful doll. This “beautiful doll,” however, is always hideous because it lacks artistic merit; but it is, as people sometimes believe, a beautiful doll that has “real” hair, is properly painted, and even has movable eyes—when you lay her down, she closes her eyes; when you pick her up, she looks at you—movable dolls have even been created; in short, toys have found their way into children’s play that are now meant to be presented to the child in a strange, unartistic, yet supposedly life-imitating manner. The doll is merely a characteristic example; after all, we gradually shape all our toys in this way out of our civilization. These toys are the most terrible internal struggle within children. And just as children behave bravely and well-mannered within the family and the community when they are beaten—as this can be brought about by convention—so, too, do children suppress, out of politeness, what is actually deeply rooted in their souls: their antipathy toward this beautiful doll. We forcefully teach the child that this should be appealing to them, but the unconscious and subconscious powers within the child are powerful, and to them, everything associated with the “beautiful doll” is deeply unappealing; for it is, as I will show in a moment, an inner struggle within the child.

[ 44 ] But if one proceeds by taking into account what the child, in its simple thinking up to the age of four or five—and indeed even up to six or seven—has already experienced internally through sitting up, standing upright, and feeling the act of walking, then one ends up with a doll formed from a handkerchief, with a head on top, perhaps a pair of ink blots for eyes—and then this doll embodies everything the child can understand and everything the child can love. The characteristics of the human form are present there in a primitive way, to the extent that the child can grasp them solely within the context of childhood.

[ 45 ] The child knows no more about human beings than that they stand upright, that they have a bottom and a top, that there is a head up there, and that there is a pair of eyes; as for the mouth—you’ll see this in children’s drawings—they sometimes draw it all the way up on the forehead. The position of the mouth isn’t even clear yet. What the child actually experiences can be seen in the doll formed from a handkerchief and adorned with a few ink blots. An inner, sculptural force is at work within the child. Everything that reaches the child from its surroundings is transformed into an inner process of formation, including the formation of organs.

[ 46 ] If the child, let’s say, has a father beside him who constantly flies into a rage—that is, if something happens in the child’s immediate external experience at every moment that causes shock, something that is unmotivated—then the child experiences this as well; the child experiences this in such a way that it is expressed in their breathing and blood circulation. But by expressing itself through breathing and blood circulation, it shapes the lungs, the heart, and the entire vascular system; and the child carries within itself, in a plastic form, throughout its entire life, what it has plastically formed within itself through witnessing the actions of a quick-tempered father.

[ 47 ] By this I simply wish to suggest how a child possesses a wonderfully effective inner creative force, how the child is constantly working on itself inwardly as a sculptor. And when you give the child the doll made from the handkerchief, the forces that rise up into the brain from the human organism in a formative, sculptural way—the forces that shape the brain, particularly those from the rhythmic system, from breathing and blood circulation—flow gently into the brain. They shape the child’s brain just as a sculptor works, shaping the sculptural material with a supple, agile, spiritually imbued, and animated hand: everything takes place through plasticity and organic development. The child looks at this handkerchief shaped into a doll, and this becomes, in the human being, formative power—true formative power—which takes shape from the rhythmic system into the brain system.

[ 48 ] If you give a child a so-called beautiful doll—a doll that can even move, that can move its eyes, that is painted, that has beautiful hair—if you hand this artistically designed, terribly hideous specter over to the child, then the forces from the rhythmic system surge upward, these formative forces—which shape the brain through the respiratory and circulatory systems—constantly like lashes of a whip: everything the child cannot yet understand is whipped up into the brain. The brain is thoroughly whipped and beaten in a terrible way. That is the secret of the beautiful doll. But it is also, in many respects, the secret of a child’s play life.

[ 49 ] If one wishes to lovingly guide a child toward play, one must be aware of just how much of the child’s inner, formative powers come to the fore. In this regard, our entire civilization has a mistaken view. Our civilization, for example, invented what is known as animism. A child who bumps into a table hits the corner of the table. In our time, people say: the child animates the table, imagines the table as if it were alive, like a living being, projects life into the table, and hits the table.

[ 50 ] That’s not true at all. The child doesn’t dream anything into the table; rather, it dreams life out of living beings—out of the creatures that truly live. It’s not that it dreams life into the table, but rather that it dreams life out of real living beings. And when the child hurts itself, it reacts out of a kind of reflex; and since everything is still inanimate to the child—it does not dream life into the table—it behaves the same way toward both animate and inanimate objects.

[ 51 ] From such completely misguided ideas, one can see how our civilization is utterly incapable of connecting with the child. And so the point is that we must be able to treat the child with genuine love, guiding what the child wants to do in a loving way. And so we should not mentally overwhelm them with beautiful dolls; rather, we should be able to live with them and help shape the doll that they themselves experience inwardly.

[ 52 ] And so with regard to the whole nature of play. Play does indeed require a genuine understanding of the child’s nature. — If we babble like a small child, if we simplify our language to the child’s level, if we do not truly speak in a way that the child must hear as coming genuinely from our very being, then we approach the child with insincerity. However, since we must not put ourselves into a state of insincerity, we must be able to place ourselves precisely at the child’s level in regard to what pertains to the will and what enters into the realm of play. Then it will become clear to us that the child, in its organic nature, possesses absolutely none of what is particularly popular in our civilization today: intellectuality. We must therefore not introduce into children’s play anything that is in any way intellectually dominated.

[ 53 ] Now, in a natural way, a child does imitate what is happening in its surroundings even while playing; but one will rarely have seen a child ever want to become, say, a philologist. It is rare to see a four-year-old child who wants to become a philologist; but under certain circumstances, the child might want to become a chauffeur, for example. Why? Because the child sees everything that is revealed in the chauffeur. The child sees this; it makes an immediate visual impression. What the philologist does makes no visual impression. It is non-visual; it passes the child by entirely. But we should bring into play only what does not pass the child by. Everything intellectual, however, still passes the child by. What, then, do we need so that we, as adults, may be able to guide children’s play in the right way? We plow, we make hats, we sew clothes, and so on. In all of this lies an orientation toward practicality, and in this orientation toward practicality lies intellectualism. Whatever one recognizes as having a purpose in life has been penetrated by intellectualism.

[ 54 ] But everything that is part of life—whether it is plowing, or anything else, such as building wagons or having horses shoed—has, apart from being oriented toward a purpose, something that lives in its outward form, in the mere outward form. When one looks at a farmer guiding the plow through the furrows—quite apart from the purpose of this activity—one can feel and sense, if I may put it this way, the formative aspect of that which lives in the image, that which becomes the image. If one, as a human being, brings oneself to—and it is the aesthetic sense that leads one to do so—perceive everywhere that formative quality that is still independent of purpose, then one gains hold of that which in toys can truly reach the child. It is precisely by not focusing on that kind of beauty—which is, after all, thoroughly intellectual— which is what today’s “beautiful dolls” strive for—but rather by focusing on what is expressed in a person’s posture and overall sensibility—one is led to the primitive, truly enchanting doll, which then looks more like this (a doll carved by Waldorf students is shown), not like the so-called “beautiful” doll. But that’s for older children!

[ 55 ] The point, then, is that in order to become educators, we must be able to perceive this aesthetic aspect of work within the work itself, so that we can incorporate the aesthetic aspect of work into the creation of toys. When we incorporate the aesthetic aspect of work into the crafting of toys, we come closer to what the child truly desires from within. In our civilization, we have become almost exclusively utilitarian people—that is, intellectualistic people—and therefore we already present the child with all sorts of contrived ideas. But the point is that we should not present the child with what is merely conceived for later life, but rather with what can be felt and experienced in later life. That must be embodied in the toy. We may give a boy a plow, but the point is that we must incorporate into the toy the formative, aesthetic aspect of plowing. That is what can bring the full potential of the human being to fruition.

[ 56 ] In this regard, kindergartens—which are otherwise highly commendable in many respects—have made serious mistakes. The kindergarten, which was established by Fröbel and others with a truly deep love for children, must be clear that the child is an imitative being, but can only imitate that which is not yet intellectualized. Thus, we must not introduce all sorts of contrived children’s activities into the kindergarten. All the stick-laying, all the braiding, and the like—which often play such a major role in kindergartens—are contrived. In the kindergarten, we must focus only on what grown-ups actually do, not on what has been specifically devised. The observer of human nature is often overcome by a sense of tragedy when entering these well-intentioned kindergartens, where such beautifully contrived activities take place. For on the one hand, these kindergartens spring from such boundless goodwill, from such love for children; and on the other hand, no attention is paid to the fact that anything intellectually oriented in content—anything that is contrived in children’s work—must be excluded from the kindergarten, and that only the outward imitation of the external form of adult activity may be developed there.

[ 57 ] A child who is intellectually trained before the age of four or five carries something terrible into life; that child is being raised to be nothing less than a materialist. The more intellectually and spiritually you educate a child up to the age of four or five, the more of a materialist you will make of them in life. For, on the one hand, the brain is shaped in such a way that the spirit already lives within the forms of the brain, and inwardly the person develops the intuition that everything is merely material, because their brain has been seized so early by the intellectual-spiritual.

[ 58 ] If you wish to educate people to understand the spiritual, then you must introduce them to the so-called “outer spiritual” in its intellectualistic form as late as possible; then—even though it is of the utmost necessity, especially in today’s civilization, that people reach full awakening later in life—you must allow the child to remain as long as possible in that gentle, dreamlike, imaginative experience in which it enters life; you must keep it as long as possible in the realm of imagination, of imagery, and of non-intellectuality. For if you allow its organism to grow strong through the non-intellectual, then it will later grow into the intellectual realm necessary for today’s civilization in the right way.

[ 59 ] If you whip his brain in the manner suggested, you will ruin a person’s soul for the rest of his life. Just as you disrupt digestion through babbling, just as you disrupt metabolism for later life by teaching a child to walk incorrectly and without love, so you corrupt the soul when you whip the child from within in this way. And so it must become an ideal of our education—above all, to abolish corporal punishment—that is, the “beautiful doll”—not only in the spiritual realm but also, because the child is a wholly physical, emotional, and spiritual being, in the physical-emotional-spiritual realm—in order, above all, to bring play to the proper level.

[ 60 ] Today I would like to conclude these reflections by pointing out how one must avoid the false spiritual in order for the true spiritual—the whole human being—to emerge in later life.