The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] During the transition from early childhood—through the process of tooth replacement around the age of seven—into school-age, it is particularly important to bear in mind that, up until the age of seven, a human being is, in essence, a sculptor at heart. The formative forces emanate from the human head and organize the whole person. What a person observes in their surroundings—including the moral character of what is observed—is imparted to the structure of the vascular system, blood circulation, respiration, and so on, so that the human being, as a physical organism, carries within themselves throughout their entire earthly life what they have imitated up until the change of teeth. Not that they are entirely dependent on this physical structure. They can certainly later, through moral strength and spiritual intensity, correct certain aspects of their physical body from within. But we must bear in mind what a wonderful legacy we give a person to carry along life’s path when we make their organism a suitable vessel for the spiritual and moral by supporting the inner sculptor within the person up to the age of seven in such a way that we bring only moral influences and those that make one capable of life into their vicinity, so that they may imitate them. I spoke about the finer details yesterday, and much more will be discussed in due course.

[ 2 ] Once the child has passed the age of seven and reaches school age, these formative forces become psychological, and the teacher must pay attention to them. The child wants to engage with vivid images: this must be the very first educational principle for the beginning of school age.

[ 3 ] The system that develops most notably in a child from the time of tooth replacement until sexual maturity, according to the head system, is the rhythmic system—primarily the respiratory system, the circulatory system, and everything associated with the regular rhythm of nutrition. And while one has the plastic-visual aspect of the child’s inner life before one’s mind’s eye, as a teacher and educator in school, one also has the rhythmic system directly before one’s eyes in an organic-physical sense. This means that in everything one does with the child—and in what the child is to do—the pictorial aspect must prevail. And in everything that takes place between the teacher and the child, musicality must prevail; rhythm, meter, and even melody must become pedagogical principles. This requires that the teacher possess a kind of musicality within themselves, that their entire life be imbued with musicality.

[ 4 ] It is, therefore, the rhythmic system that is organically present in school-age children and organically predominates; the point is that the entire lesson should be oriented rhythmically, that the teacher himself should be, one might say, a person with a musical disposition, so that rhythm and tempo truly prevail in the classroom. This is something that must, in a certain sense, live instinctively within the instructor, within the teacher.

[ 5 ] When we consider all of this, we must be clear that, especially at the beginning of school age, teaching can only be based entirely on an artistic element. And if teaching today leaves much to be desired, it is because modern civilization, as such, fundamentally fails to develop enough artistic sensibility in adults. A sound pedagogy cannot emerge from the individual arts, but rather from the overall artistic character of civilization. This is extraordinarily important.

[ 6 ] The point is that when we organize instruction artistically, we are, above all, appealing to the human rhythmic system. It is indeed true: the child breathes healthily when we organize instruction artistically. The child’s blood circulation functions healthily when we organize instruction artistically. But we must also be clear that, on the one hand, we must introduce the child to life—that is, we must develop the child’s capacity for judgment so that the child will possess sound judgment throughout their later life. We must therefore guide the child toward the use of their intellect during their school years. We must not force the intellect upon them, but we must guide them toward it. On the other hand, we must raise physically healthy people; that is, we must organize personal hygiene and physical exercises in such a way that the person can become healthy for their entire life, at least to the extent that this is destined for them. We can only achieve all this if we, in turn, look a little more deeply into the entire human being.

[ 7 ] One-third of human life consists of a period that our civilization—which focuses solely on the external and material—does not take into account at all: the life of sleep. There is a regular rhythm between sleeping and waking in human existence on Earth. This regular rhythm plays the most significant role imaginable in human life on Earth, and one must not believe that a person is inactive when sleeping. The person is inactive in the eyes of external, material civilization; but for their own being, for their health—and especially for the health of the soul and the health of the spirit—sleep is indeed of the utmost importance. And what a person does while awake—this is especially true in the case of children—is continually carried over into their sleep life. And through proper upbringing, we can ensure a healthy sleep life.

[ 8 ] We need only understand the following: the rhythmic system that underlies all art never tires. The heart’s activity and the act of breathing continue tirelessly from birth to death. A person can only become tired through their intellectual system and their volitional system. Thinking causes fatigue; physical movement causes fatigue. But since thinking and physical movement are, of course, part of everything in life, everything in life causes fatigue. However, in the case of a child, care must be taken to ensure that fatigue occurs to the least possible extent.

[ 9 ] It occurs to the least extent when we initially orient instruction toward the arts during this important school-age period; for in doing so, we appeal to the child’s sense of rhythm, and thus we tire the child the least.

[ 10 ] What happens when we appeal to the intellectual system? When we appeal to the intellectual system—when we simply prompt the child, through an inner resolution, to think, to think as such— then the forces within the organism that strengthen the human being from within come into play—namely, the salt-depositing forces, the calcium-depositing forces, the bone-forming forces, the tendon-forming forces, the cartilage-forming forces—all that which makes the human being strong. This is what is developed in the organism through thinking, through compulsive thinking. And the human being is inwardly engaged in this process of strengthening while awake. Thus, we place too great a burden of internal strengthening on waking life when we pursue it with an excessive emphasis on intellectual activity. If we let a child think too much, we instill in the organism a predisposition to early sclerosis, to early arteriosclerosis. The solidifying element—that is what is accomplished through compulsive thinking, and it is particularly called upon. The point here is that through genuine observation of human behavior, one also develops a sense, an instinct for how much one can reasonably expect of a child.

[ 11 ] However, there is a very important fundamental principle at play here. If I let the child think, I teach the child, for example, to write purely intellectually, by telling myself: the letters are there, the child must learn these letters; then I engage this child in an intellectualistic way, and I foster sclerosis within the child—or at least a tendency toward it—because there is no inner connection between the human being and these now-developed letters. They are little demons for human nature. One must first find the bridge, the transition to them.

[ 12 ] This bridge, this transition, is found when one first allows the child to engage in artistic activity—to paint and draw with an artistic sensibility—so that the lines and colors that spring from the child’s innermost nature flow naturally from the child onto the paper. Then, whenever the child is allowed to engage in artistic activity, a feeling arises within—and this feeling is what matters—that through artistic activity, one is too rich as a human being. Through the intellect, one becomes spiritually impoverished; through the intellect, one becomes inwardly barren; through artistic expression, one becomes inwardly rich, and one feels the need to temper this richness somewhat. And then the pictorial-artistic experience one has naturally turns toward simpler concepts and lines of thought. Then an inner need arises to simplify the artistic, to intellectualize it. And when, after having artistically grasped the child, one allows the intellectual to emerge from the artistic, then this artistic element has the right measure to act upon the body in such a way that it is not strengthened too much, but just enough.

[ 13 ] You even hinder a child’s development if you over-intellectualize it. On the other hand, you foster the child’s development when you first guide everything from the artistic realm into the intellectual realm.

[ 14 ] This is why, in Waldorf schools—especially at the very beginning of school age—such high value is placed on the artistic rather than the intellectual; why, at first, the pictorial and the non-intellectual dominate the classroom, and why the teacher’s interaction with the child is permeated throughout with musical elements—specifically, rhythm and meter—so that precisely the degree of intellectuality is fostered that the child then needs for itself, and so that spiritual education simultaneously becomes the best physical education.

[ 15 ] Our age shows us everywhere, in the adult human being, how deeply entrenched they are internally, how they drag their bodies around with them through life, as it were, like a wooden machine. Of course, this is not something that can be detected by casual observation, but rather by more subtle observation. But this is the peculiarity of our civilization: that people carry their bodies around as a burden, whereas a proper education—one that draws upon the arts—trains people in such a way that every step brings them joy, and that every hand movement they will later have to perform in the service of humanity becomes a source of inner satisfaction and joy. We separate the soul from the body by educating people in an intellectualistic manner.

[ 16 ] If we apply intellectualism too strongly, people will later go through life saying: “Oh, the physical realm—that is merely earthly; it has no value; it must be overcome. One must devote oneself, as a mystic, to the purely soul-spiritual life; the spirit alone has value.”

[ 17 ] If one educates in the right way, then one also approaches the Spirit in the right way—namely, the Spirit that creates the physical world. Nor did God create the world by saying, “Matter is evil; one must withdraw from it.” No world would have come into being if the gods had thought that way. Solely because they thought: “The Spirit must become active; the Spirit must become manifest and take on form in matter”—it is through this that the world came into being from the divine side. And if a person realizes that the best human life in every respect is one in which he or she follows the gods, then he or she must choose an education that does not turn a person into a being detached from the world, but rather into a soul-spiritual being through whom soul and spirit can carry themselves into the physical realm throughout one’s entire life. Nor is one a good thinker who must constantly cast off his body whenever he wishes to devote himself to thinking.

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[ 18 ] Thus, what we can do in a healthy way through the artistic foundation and the development of the intellectual from that foundation relates to a person’s waking life. Everything we can do with regard to the actual physical care of a child has a certain relationship to the life of sleep. And the question must always be asked, if one wants to know what healthy physical care and exercise should be like: How do physical exercise and physical activity affect the life of sleep?

[ 19 ] Human physical activity arises psychologically and spiritually from the will; it is an outflow of the will impulse into the human motor system. Even when a person is engaged only in mental activity, this is still an act of the will that flows into the limbs. When we sit somewhere in an office and devise the decisions of the will that others then carry out, it is still the inflow of our impulses of the will into our limbs that we are merely holding back. We remain still; but what we command, even in silence and calm, is an inflow of the will into our limbs.

[ 20 ] It is therefore necessary to recognize what is most important in the unfolding of the will through physical activity, so that this unfolding of the will may influence the life of sleep in the proper way.

[ 21 ] The following comes into consideration here: Everything that is translated into action by the human will constitutes a kind of combustion process within the organism. When I think, I fortify the organism; I deposit solid products within it. When I will, I burn something within my organism. However, one must not create a mental image of the combustion taking place internally in the same way one creates a mental image of combustion externally, or as it occurs in chemistry or physics. When a candle burns, that is an external combustion process. But what is called “burning” within the human being is viewed by materialistic thinkers in exactly the same way as the burning of a candle. Just as the external natural process in the whole human being is permeated by the spirit, is imbued with the soul—just as the substances that act externally in nature are active in a completely different way within the human being (they are already so in plants)—so, too, is the combustion process within the human being, of course, something entirely different from the externally observed process of a candle burning. But it is a kind of combustion process that always takes place in the organism when we will—even when the act of willing manifests itself in a person’s state of rest. However, by generating this combustion process, we bring about something in our organism that only sleep can compensate for. We would, so to speak, burn up entirely as an organism if sleep did not at all times dampen this combustion process—not in the sense of crude natural science, but intimately and subtly—to the extent that it must be dampened. Sleep balances out this inner combustion process. It balances it out specifically by transferring it to the entire organism, whereas otherwise the combustion is distributed only through the organs of movement.

[ 22 ] Now, we can perform our physical movements in two ways. Let us consider how often, especially in the case of children, the impetus for physical movement arises. People imagine—and materialistic civilization imagines everything, even though it believes it is dealing with facts—that the child must perform this or that movement in play, gymnastics, and so on, because only in this way can the child become a civilized human being. As a rule, one tends to like best those movements to which adults have also become accustomed; and since one holds the ideal that the child must become just like oneself as an adult—that it must do its gymnastics exactly as one does as an adult—one inevitably teaches the child, in a playful manner, what one as an adult considers to be correct. In other words, one has a certain mental image: this is what is proper for a decent, respectable person, and one must therefore encourage the child to do the same.

[ 23 ] Through external compulsion, one takes the material aspect—even if the matter at hand is highly concrete—out of the realm of thought and abstraction and presents it to the child; one tells the child: “You must make this movement, you must make that movement.” The entire apparatus is set up in such a way that the child must perform this or that movement, and the focus is on the physical movement for its own sake. But this triggers metabolic processes with which the human organism is no longer familiar. It can no longer reverse them. And this kind of externally imposed approach to personal hygiene and physical exercises results in restless sleep.

[ 24 ] Again, it does not manifest itself so overtly that conventional medicine can confirm it; but it takes place in the intimate, subtle workings of the human organism. If we introduce physical exercises to children in an external, purely conventional way, the children do not get the deep, restful sleep they need, and they are then unable to derive from sleep the regeneration of the organism that is necessary.

[ 25 ] If we educate the child artistically—if we present everything that school has to offer to the child in an artistic way—then, just as I could say on the one hand that artistic life is too rich and therefore longs for the impoverishment found in the intellectual realm, so that the intellectual is drawn out of the artistic in a fundamental way, then, on the other hand, when the child engages in artistic activity—and because the whole person is in action during such activity—a certain hunger for physical activity arises. Nowhere does the hunger for physical activity arise more than in artistic practice. If the child has been engaged in artistic activities in a school setting for a few hours—the duration of which must be carefully weighed—then something stirs within the organism that wants to perform very specific physical exercises. The person wants to express themselves fully through these physical movements. The artistic generates a hunger for the right physical movements.

[ 26 ] And so one must gradually allow what is done solely with the hands in painting and drawing, and what is done with the voice in singing—or even — and this should be done as early as possible — by the child playing an instrument; in other words, what takes place, so to speak, directly on and through the body—this must be allowed to gradually transition, to flow out and merge into movements in space, into spatial play: it should be a continuation of what the human being undertakes within his or her own organism in artistic instruction. Then physical education is taken out of the context of school-style instruction; it stands in the most intimate harmony with it.

[ 27 ] And if the child engages in nothing else in terms of personal hygiene and physical exercise other than what it craves as a result of its artistic activities, then the kind of sleep that the child specifically needs will result. Just as one can ensure a healthy waking life by drawing the intellectual out of the artistic, so too can one ensure a healthy sleep life—in which all metabolic processes in the organism harmonize—by drawing physical exercise entirely from the artistic. Therefore, nothing is more essential for proper education, particularly in physical terms, than the teacher’s deep immersion in the artistic. The more the teacher takes joy in all artistic forms, the more the teacher finds inner delight in all artistic aspects of music, and the more the teacher yearns to transform the abstract -prosaic word into the rhythm of poetry, the more plastic and musical qualities he possesses within himself, the more he will arrange what he has the child accomplish in space—as games, as physical exercises—in such a way that they become an artistic expression of the child.

[ 28 ] Today, in our civilization, people want everything intellectual to be so terribly convenient. People don’t want to exert too much effort when it comes to spiritual ideals. As I already said in the penultimate lecture: people all admit that they were poorly educated, but they also all admit that they instinctively know what is right regarding proper education—that is, they can say how to educate better. And so it has come to pass today that people have little inclination to reflect on these subtle processes in the human organism: how does gymnastics emerge in an artistic way from artistic activity? What does the human organism require for external movement in space? People have little inclination toward this, and little artistic sensibility permeates it. They would much rather open a book—which is, after all, the most important occupation of today’s intellectual: opening books—they would much rather open a book and look up how the Greeks did it. The “revival of the Olympic Games in a purely external manner” has become a catchphrase. And one does not study the Olympic Games in light of the demands of the human organism, as was the case with the Greeks, but rather studies them from books or from what has been handed down through documents and external appearances.

[ 29 ] However, since people today are no longer Greeks, one cannot deduce the true nature of the Olympic Games from Greek life. For if one delves into the essence of Greek culture with full spiritual insight, one realizes: Children were trained in gymnastics, as I have described, in dance, and in wrestling. But where did the Greeks learn all this? — They learned it precisely from the Olympic Games, which were not merely artistic in character but also had a religious character, arising directly from Greek civilization in an artistic-religious manner. Because the Greeks lived their Olympic Games with this devoted artistic-religious spirit, they were able, out of a direct pedagogical instinct, to apply what was artistically present there to physical training and to the gymnastics of childhood.

[ 30 ] Abstract, prosaic, and unartistic—teaching personal hygiene and gymnastics goes against all principles of pedagogy because it runs counter to the true development of the human being. And so today, rather than—I would say—staging a sort of “Renaissance of the Olympic Games” based on a book, we should ask ourselves: How does one understand the inner nature of the human being? — And there one may then discover that inorganic physical exercises—that is, those not derived from human nature—exhaust the human being too severely. So that, if such exercises are practiced in childhood, the person later lacks sufficient muscular strength, and the muscles do not follow the soul or the spirit.

[ 31 ] In addition to a misguided, intellectualistic education for wakefulness—which stiffens the body from within and causes us to carry a burden in our bones instead of moving them with our soul in a lively manner—there is the further problem that our supple limbs are now too prone to burning out. And so we have gradually become a flighty spirit encased in a wooden organism—a human being who, on the one hand, is bound by the burden of the salts forming within him, and who, on the other hand, through a flawed process of combustion, actually always wants to run away from—or rather, fly away from—his physical organism.

[ 32 ] In order to put what combustion is into the proper relationship with salt formation, a deep understanding of human nature is necessary. Then we will balance what arises as solidification—as we transition from the artistic to the intellectual—in the proper way, as if on a scale, through the correct process of combustion, which acts into the life of sleep and produces in the child not a restless, innerly restless sleep—as physical exercises mostly do today—but rather an innerly firm, secure, and peaceful sleep. Those children who are compulsively introduced to physical hygiene fidget emotionally during sleep, and this fidgeting during sleep causes them to return to their physical bodies in the morning with their souls, thereby unsettling the body and causing it to undergo incorrect metabolic processes.

[ 33 ] From all this you can see that the essential is everywhere: a deep understanding of humanity, and expansion arising from that understanding. If, in this earthly existence, human beings are the most precious creatures of the gods, then we must ask above all else: What have the gods placed before us in human beings? How are we to develop in human beings here on Earth what the gods have entrusted to us?

[ 34 ] If, up to the age of seven, a person is above all an imitative being, then at the age of seven—with the change of teeth—he becomes a being who, above all else, seeks to shape his own inner self according to what is expressed and revealed in the broadest sense by a self-evident authority.

[ 35 ] Do not think, my esteemed audience, that I—who wrote *The Philosophy of Freedom* a very long time ago—now wish to advocate, in an unwarranted manner, for the principle of authority, for the exclusive, absolute validity of the principle of authority in social life. But what manifests itself in human life is—albeit in a spiritual way under the impulse of freedom—just as lawfully oriented as the life governed by natural law; and so we cannot decide based on what we find appealing or unappealing regarding the upbringing of children from the time of their first set of teeth to sexual maturity, but rather we must decide based on what the human organism requires. And just as the human organism, up to the change of teeth—that is, up to the age of seven—is predisposed to imitate, in every gesture, every posture, indeed in the inner pulsation of blood circulation, breathing, and the vessels—to imitate what the environment does; just as the environment serves as a model for the child up to the age of seven—so, in order for a person to develop healthily and freely, and so that they may later use that freedom in the right way, they must develop freedom under natural authority from the ages of seven to fourteen or fifteen, until sexual maturity.

[ 36 ] It is not until the age of fourteen or fifteen that we become capable of forming our own judgments. It is not until the ages of fourteen or fifteen that a person reaches the point where a teacher can influence them by appealing to their judgment. Only then can they develop reasons for any given matter through their own thinking. But before that, we do the person a disservice and hold back their entire human development if we approach them with reasons. It is the greatest benefit for their entire future life if, between the ages of seven and fourteen—approximately, of course—we are able to accept a truth not because we already understand the reasons—our intellect is not yet mature enough for that—but because the revered authority of the teacher, in accordance with our childlike perception, considers it to be the truth. And we develop a proper sense of beauty when we perceive and feel as beautiful that which the revered authority of the teacher—the natural, not forcibly imposed authority of the teacher—reveals to us as beautiful. And we perceive goodness in the right way—so that it becomes a path of life for later years—not when we are told: “This is a commandment, this is a law; you must keep it, you must follow it,” but when, through the teacher’s warm-hearted words, we experience how he himself feels sympathy for this good deed, and antipathy toward that evil deed; when he can, through his words, warm us so much toward the good and cool us so much toward the evil that we turn toward the good once more, because the respected authority of the teacher exemplifies this for us through his own feelings.

[ 37 ] And so we do not grow up in dogmatism, but in a devoted love for what the revered teacher’s authority deems to be true, beautiful, and good. If, throughout our school years, we have learned to regard as the standard for truth, beauty, and goodness that which our beloved teacher considers true, beautiful, and good—and which he knows how to describe as true, beautiful, and good in vivid, artistic images—then the impulse toward the true, the beautiful, and the good is connected to our human being in a sufficiently deep way. For it is not the intellect that shapes what is good. And a person who has always heard only dogmatic commands—“You must do this, you must not do that”—carries within them a sense of what is good only as a cold, sober sense. But the person who, in childhood, learned through feeling to sympathize with the good and to feel aversion toward the evil—and who, out of that feeling, developed an enthusiasm for the good and a repulsion for the evil—in that person, the sense for the good and the aversion to the evil have become ingrained throughout the entire rhythmic organism. Later in life, they feel as though they literally cannot breathe under the influence of evil—how it takes their breath away, how their rhythmic system is thrown into disarray.

[ 38 ] We can achieve all of this when, in place of the principle of imitation—which must prevail throughout a child’s upbringing until the teeth are replaced—the principle of natural authority takes hold at the age of seven, the age when children begin school. This must not be imposed in a coercive manner, and that is why the approach to education that sought to establish authority through corporal punishment was so wrong.

[ 39 ] I ask for forgiveness for having spoken yesterday about corporal punishment in a way that, as I have heard, was not entirely accurate, since my words appear to have been interpreted as if I meant that corporal punishment had already been abolished everywhere. I merely said that humanity and humanitarian principles in civilization aim to abolish corporal punishment. I have been informed, in fact, that corporal punishment is still very much in use in England, and that my words did not quite convey the correct meaning. But the fact is that if we want to educate properly, we should by no means impose authority by force—especially not through punishment—but rather in a natural way through who we are. And we are the true teachers—in spirit, soul, and body—if we can develop proper observation of human nature based on a deep understanding of human nature. Proper observation of human nature sees in the developing human being a creature of the divine. In the entire vast universe, there is indeed nothing greater than to see how, in the child from birth onward, the definite emerges more and more from the indefinite physical, how the indefinite movements, the fidgeting movements, and the random movements are transformed into movements governed by the soul, how the inner self reveals itself more and more to the outside world, how the spiritual within the physical comes more and more to the surface. This human being sent down to Earth by the Divine, whom we feel revealing himself within the body—that is what can appear to us as a divine revelation in and of itself. The greatest divine revelation is the developing human being. If we come to know this evolving human being not merely externally in anatomical and physiological terms, but learn to recognize how soul and spirit shoot into and flow into the body, then every understanding of the human being is transformed into religion—into a devout, reverent awe of that which flows from the divine depths into the earthly surface. Then we gain that which sustains and upholds us as teachers—and which the child already senses, transforming itself within the child into devotion and into a natural authority. As teachers, instead of taking up the rod—not even the inner rod, as I explained yesterday, which lashes us from within— instead of arming ourselves with the rod, we should rather arm ourselves with true knowledge of human nature, true observation of human beings, which flows into a moral and religious inner experience, into a moral and religious reverence for God’s creation.

[ 40 ] Then we will be approaching school in the right way and will also know—which is absolutely essential for all education—how to observe certain moments in human life when a person is standing at a turning point, at a metamorphosis of their entire life. One such turning point, for example, is the period between the ages of nine and ten. For some children it occurs earlier, for others a little later, but generally between the ages of nine and ten.

[ 41 ] If you are a materialist, you tend to overlook these things easily. But if you have a keen sense of observing people, you will notice that something remarkable occurs in every child between the ages of nine and ten. Outwardly, the child becomes somewhat restless. It cannot cope with the outside world. It feels as if it were becoming shy. It withdraws somewhat from the outside world. All of this happens in an intimate, subtle way in almost every child. A child in whom this does not occur is not normal. We must observe this; for between the ages of nine and ten, an extraordinarily important emotional question arises within the child. The child could not translate this question into concepts; it could not express this question in words. Everything is feeling; but the feeling is all the stronger for that, and the feeling demands all the more intense attention. What does the child want at this age? Up to that point, out of a natural impulse, it has revered the educator, the teacher. Now it feels: the teacher must show it, through something special, that he or she is worthy of reverence. The child becomes insecure, and it is precisely at the point where we notice this happening that we, as teachers, must respond to it through our behavior. Through something—it doesn’t have to be anything contrived—but through a special expression of love in our actions, through special attention and kind words directed at the child, by approaching the child in a very special way at that moment, so that the child realizes that the teacher loves them very dearly, that the teacher is responding to them, in this way, we help the child navigate a critical phase—specifically between the ages of nine and ten—provided we are even slightly attentive to it and behave accordingly. And the fact that we help them get past this is of immense importance for their entire future life. For whatever insecurity remains in the child at that time will manifest as insecurity throughout their entire future life, only without the person noticing it; it only comes to light through its expression in their character, their temperament, and their physical health.

[ 42 ] In every area, we must understand how the spirit influences the material realm—and thus our health—and how the spirit must be nurtured so that it can influence our health in the right way. The art of education, in particular, shows us how crucial it is to view the spirit and the material world not as opposites, but as existing in harmony. We must recognize what we owe to education in the face of modern civilization, which has separated everything. Today we live in a world of materialism. This is the mindset we adopt when we think of nature. And when we are not satisfied with what scientific knowledge of nature has to offer, we invent a form of spiritualism; we seek to reach the spirits through all manner of things that actually contradict the natural sciences. Therein lies a tragedy of our civilization.

[ 43 ] Materialism has come to intellectualize everything. Materialism now understands only the concepts it forms about matter. It does not penetrate into matter itself. And what about today’s spiritualism? It wants to be able to grasp spirits, to make them as tangible as possible; through tables and manifestations, spirits are to reveal themselves in their material glory. They are not to remain spirits characterized by invisibility and intangibility, simply because humans are too lazy to reach out to them.

[ 44 ] As a result, humanity has found itself caught up in a strange tragedy today. Materialism speaks only of matter, no longer of the spirit, for materialism understands nothing of matter. It speaks of matter only in distilled, spiritual terms. Spiritualism, in fact, always speaks of the material while believing it is speaking of the spirit. And so we have the peculiar phenomenon that our civilization is divided into materialism and spiritualism. Materialism understands nothing of matter; spiritualism understands nothing of the spirit. And so we have the strange phenomenon that the whole human being has disintegrated into the physical and the spiritual. Education, however, requires the harmonization of both. This cannot be emphasized enough. All education must aim toward this: that one may once again understand something of the spirit within the material world, and that one may grasp the material world with understanding from a spiritual perspective. If one understands how to grasp the material world correctly, one finds the spirit; if one understands something of the spirit within the spiritual realm, one finds not a material spirituality, but a true spiritual world.

[ 45 ] This is what we need: a true spiritual world and a material world understood with compassion—if we wish to educate humanity in the right way, not toward decline but toward ascent.