The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] I believe that one can clearly see, particularly in the characteristics I have described regarding natural history, botany, and zoology instruction, how the Waldorf school principle seeks to adapt the curriculum entirely to the developmental principles and forces of the child at different stages of life.

[ 2 ] We must be clear that between the ages of nine and ten, the child goes through precisely that important life transition that I have described from various perspectives. Today I would like to note in particular that at this age, between the ages of nine and ten, the child is actually just beginning to distinguish itself from the world—that is to say, before this, in its mental images and feelings, it makes no distinction between the things of the world and itself. That is why it is necessary, up until the age of nine, to speak about the things of the world—about plants, animals, mountains, and rivers—in a way that is fairy-tale-like, that appeals primarily to the imagination; so that plants, mountains, and springs “speak,” so that the very same nature that the child first recognizes within itself also, as it were, resonates with the child from the outside world.

[ 3 ] If you then consider the way in which one is supposed to move on from this section on botany and zoology, you will see that this particular approach—examining the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom—is precisely about properly introducing the child to these subjects in order to help them develop an appropriate relationship to the things of the world.

[ 4 ] The plant becomes known to the child in relation to the earth: thus, the plants truly reach out to the child. The earth becomes a living being that brings forth plants from within itself—only more alive, only more richly formed—just as the human head, through a vital principle, brings forth hair from within itself.

[ 5 ] This places the child, from the very beginning, in a relationship with the plant world and the entire Earth that fosters the child’s inner life, the life of the soul, and also the life of the sensory body.

[ 6 ] And if we then teach zoology in such a way that we see, as it were, in human beings the synthesis of the animals that are spread out across the Earth in distinct groups, then human beings come to see themselves in the proper relationship to the other living beings that are subordinate to them.

[ 7 ] By teaching natural history in this way up to a certain point in life—somewhere between the ages of eleven and twelve—we are, in doing so, consistently focusing on the relationship between human beings and the world.

[ 8 ] Now comes the stage of life when the child is actually allowed to observe what happens in the outside world without it having anything to do with human beings. Therefore, it is only between the ages of eleven and twelve that it becomes possible to teach the mineral realm—the rock-like qualities—in the classroom. Anyone who teaches the child about the rock-like and mineral realms before this time—other than insofar as they are related to the plant realm, which grows out of the earth, and thus out of the rock—completely spoils the inner flexibility of the child’s soul life. That which has no relation to human beings is mineral. We should begin with this only after the child has properly settled into the world by incorporating into its mental image—and especially into its feelings, as well as into its will through the study of animals—those things closest to it: the plant and animal realms.

[ 9 ] And what applies to the mineral realm also applies to the concepts of physics and chemistry, and it also applies to the so-called objective relationships in history and geography—to all those relationships that must be considered separately from human beings. The major historical contexts—which cannot be viewed in the way I described yesterday with regard to human beings—must be postponed in the curriculum until the period between the eleventh and twelfth years of age. Only then can one begin with what, at first, actually has little to do with human beings.

[ 10 ] We should not enroll a child in school until the age of seven, when the child’s baby teeth have been replaced; before that, the child does not really belong in school. If we have to admit the child earlier, we must, of course, make all sorts of compromises. But I want to explain the principle here. When we admit the child to school, we structure the instruction in such a way that the child does not yet make distinctions between itself and the world. When the child reaches the characteristic age between nine and ten, we introduce it to subjects that pertain to the intellect—but to the flexible, living intellect: botany; and to subjects that strengthen the will: zoology. With the actual mineral-based instruction—that is, instruction in physics and chemistry—we can only appeal to the intellect. As I will discuss tomorrow, we then need art instruction to balance this out. But we find that, starting at the age of eleven or twelve, the child is mature enough to grasp through the intellect what must be worked out according to the relationships of cause and effect. And this must, of course, take place in physics and chemistry. These processes—which must then also lead into astronomical considerations—must therefore not be introduced to the child any earlier. If we describe simple physical processes, such as combustion, or chemical processes beforehand, this should be a purely pictorial description; the imaginative element should play a special role in it, not the logical connection between cause and effect.

[ 11 ] Essentially, the child should not begin to learn about the relationship between cause and effect until a time between the eleventh and twelfth years. And the less we speak to the child about so-called causality beforehand, the better it is; for the person becomes stronger, more vigorous, and also more deeply connected to their soul, whereas they wither spiritually and absorb dead concepts and even dead feelings when we introduce causality to them before this age.

[ 12 ] On the one hand, the Waldorf school principle certainly aims to create the curriculum itself based on the human being. As you can see, we pay close attention to the stages of life and incorporate into classroom instruction for any given age group what can be discerned from the human being itself. On the other hand, however, we also have the very clear goal of ensuring that, through their school years, the individual is introduced into social life in the right way—that they are, in fact, introduced into the world in the right way. This is achieved by transforming physics and chemistry instruction into practical lessons once the child reaches the age of fourteen or fifteen.

[ 13 ] That is why we have included in the curriculum of our Waldorf school for these age groups activities that gently introduce children to practical life: spinning and weaving, along with learning the corresponding techniques. The student should know how to spin—including industrial spinning—and how to weave. They should also become familiar with the basics of chemical technology, such as dye preparation and the like.

[ 14 ] He should also gain a thoroughly practical understanding of what constantly surrounds us in life—something that, even today, remains completely incomprehensible and elusive to many people because schools fail to find the right moment to transition from the human to the life-affirming and worldly. For certain aspects of life, this is not possible without causing harm to a person’s entire spiritual development.

[ 15 ] Just consider that human beings are, biologically speaking, extremely sensitive when, say, there is some substance in the air that they cannot assimilate, that they cannot take into their bodies—when there is something in the air that does not agree with them.

[ 16 ] Well, in social life, in the life of the world, things are different, however. There we must experience all sorts of things that may not be entirely to our liking; but they will become acceptable to us if we develop a relationship with them by being introduced to them in the right way at the right age.

[ 17 ] Just think about how many people today get on a streetcar without knowing how it’s set in motion or how the mechanism works. Yes, there are people who see trains passing by every day and have no idea how a locomotive works. But that means people stand there in the world, surrounded by all sorts of things that come from the human spirit—things that the human spirit has created—yet they do not participate in that human spirit.

[ 18 ] This is where an antisocial way of life begins—when we allow the products of the human mind to exist in our environment without having an appropriate, at least general, understanding of them.

[ 19 ] And so, in accordance with the Waldorf school principle, we want to incorporate instruction in the teaching and practical application of thoroughly practical life skills into the curriculum around the ages of fourteen and fifteen. And this is, of course, the very age at which a person goes through puberty. Today, puberty is viewed in an extremely one-sided way. In truth, it means that a person is opening up to the world at all. Whereas up until then they lived more within themselves, they now open up to the world and are predisposed to gain an understanding of the things of the world—of other people and of the world around them. Therefore, we are certainly acting in accordance with human nature when we have previously turned our attention to what connects human beings to nature.

[ 20 ] Now, however, beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth years, we vigorously set out to connect the students—both boys and girls—with all that the human spirit has created in the broadest sense. In this way, we guide them into social life with understanding.

[ 21 ] Ladies and gentlemen, if such an educational principle had been envisaged perhaps sixty or seventy years ago, what we today call the social movement would have taken on a very different form in modern Europe and America than it has. Humanity’s technical capabilities and commercial capabilities have grown tremendously. What have we all gone through in the last sixty to seventy years! We have experienced great technological advances; we have undergone the transition from national trade to global trade; and, most recently, we have undergone the transition from a national economy to a global economy.

[ 22 ] External social conditions have become completely different from what they were sixty to seventy years ago. Yet we have conducted our lessons as if none of this had happened. We have consistently failed to introduce children to the practical aspects of life at precisely the right age—fourteen or fifteen.

[ 23 ] We certainly do not wish to be philistines when it comes to the Waldorf school principle, nor do we intend to completely eliminate the gymnasium education, which is indeed beneficial in many respects; we also prepare our students—whose parents desire this, or who wish it themselves—for the gymnasium track and for the gymnasium graduation exam. But we do not overlook the fact that our times demand an understanding of the present. While the Greeks, who sought to serve life with all their education, certainly did not study Egyptian—that is, something that has long since belonged to the past—we are in fact introducing our boys—and today the girls are following suit—to a world that is not at all the world of the present. No wonder people in the present world know so little about how to live.

[ 24 ] The fate of the world has become too much for people to handle, precisely because education has failed to keep pace with social transformations. In the Waldorf school principle, we seek to follow precisely this approach: to find a way to fully develop the individual as a human being and to properly integrate that individual into humanity.

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[ 25 ] Above all, in accordance with the Waldorf school principle, we strive to educate people in such a way that they can properly bring to light, on the one hand, what is inherent in the whole person, and, on the other hand, what truly grounds them in the world. This should be pursued above all through the way we incorporate language instruction into our curriculum.

[ 26 ] Of course, instruction in the mother tongue is provided in a manner appropriate to the child’s age, just as I have described for the other subjects; but what makes the Waldorf School unique is that we begin immediately upon the child’s entry into school—that is, at the age of six or seven—with instruction in two foreign languages: French and English.

[ 27 ] In this way, we are indeed striving to equip children for the future with precisely what human beings will need more and more as that future unfolds. When teaching language—if one wishes to approach it in a truly human way—one must, above all, take into account that language is deeply rooted in the entire human being. The language that a person acquires as their mother tongue takes root very deeply in the respiratory system, in the circulatory system, and in the structure of the vascular system, so that the person is shaped—not only in mind and soul, but in mind, soul, and body—by the way in which their mother tongue manifests itself within them. But we must be absolutely clear that the various languages of the world—this is vividly evident in primitive languages, and though it is often hidden in civilized languages, it is still there—penetrate human beings in a completely different way and reveal what it means to be human.

[ 28 ] Among the European languages, there is one that arises entirely from the emotional element; over time, it has taken on a very strong character of intellectualization of the emotional element, but it does arise from the emotional element, so that the intellectual and volitional elements in this language are less implanted in the human being through the language itself. These other aspects of the human being must then be developed through the learning of other languages.

[ 29 ] Thus, we have a language that has developed specifically from the elements of visual imagination, which, so to speak, paints things through sound formation. This allows the child to tap into a natural, visual-creative power in language learning.

[ 30 ] Within civilized Europe, we have another language that is primarily oriented toward the element of will; a language in which one can literally hear, in its intonation, its vocalization, and the articulation of its consonants, that it is entirely directed toward the element of will—that as a person speaks, they constantly behave as if they were trying to drive back ocean waves with the air they exhale. There, the element of will lives within the language. — There are other languages that emerge from the human being in such a way that they draw upon the emotional, musical, and imaginative aspects of the person. Every language has a special relationship to the human being.

[ 31 ] Now you will say that I should name the individual languages I have characterized. I will certainly refrain from doing so; for we have not yet reached the point in the civilized world where we can face one another with the kind of objectivity required to tolerate such a completely objective approach.

[ 32 ] However, what I have said regarding the characteristics of languages makes it absolutely necessary—if we wish to provide people today with a purely human, rather than a specialized, ethnically based, education and development—that, in linguistic terms, we actually balance out, through one language, that which arises from the linguistic genius of one language and affects human nature.

[ 33 ] From a purely pedagogical and didactic standpoint, this is precisely why we begin teaching three languages to the youngest children in Waldorf schools as early as age three; and we even provide language instruction on a fairly extensive scale.

[ 34 ] It is indeed very beneficial to begin foreign language instruction at such an early age, because up until the period between the ages of nine and ten—when a child enters school age—the child still retains some of what I have described as particularly characteristic of the first stage of human life, from birth until the teeth begin to fall out. During this time, human beings are primarily imitative creatures. After all, a person learns their mother tongue entirely according to the principle of imitation. Without making heavy demands on the intellect, the child learns to internally replicate what it hears as language. And at the same time as the child hears the external sounds and tonal qualities of language, it also hears the inner, soulful, musical element of language. And the first language the child acquires, it acquires as—if I may put it this way—a more refined habit. It all penetrates deeply into the whole person.

[ 35 ] Then, when the child enters school during the period of tooth replacement, our language instruction also begins to focus more on the purely spiritual aspects and less on the physical. But the child still brings enough imaginative capacity for imitation into school up to the age of nine or ten, so that we can guide language instruction in such a way that language is absorbed by the whole person, not merely by the soul and mind.

[ 36 ] That is why it is of such immense and far-reaching importance not to miss out on teaching foreign languages in the first, second, and third grades of elementary school. It is therefore solely on the basis of a didactic, pedagogical, and humane principle that the Waldorf School has adopted the practice of beginning foreign language instruction when the child enters elementary school.

[ 37 ] I need not mention that this instruction is, in the most eminent sense, once again adapted to the different stages of life. In our time, people have, in fact, fallen into a state of intellectual chaos with regard to all of reality. They imagine they are deeply immersed in reality because they have become materialistic; but in reality, people today are much more theoretical. The most dedicated practitioners—that is, those who consider themselves to be such—are, in fact, theorists in the truest sense of the word. They imagine that something is correct—yet it is not the case that what they have accepted as correct has actually been shaped out of practical life experience. And so, particularly in pedagogical and didactic matters, once one has seen on the one hand that something is not correct, one impossible radicalism after another has emerged at the other extreme.

[ 38 ] People have observed that in the past, language instruction—particularly in Latin and Greek—was based entirely on grammar and linguistic rules, and that this made teaching superficial and mechanical. Now, however, the opposite principle has emerged, simply because people are unable to look at things consistently. And when they notice that a problem exists, they fall into the other extreme, believing that this will allow them to avoid the problem. And so the principle arose of no longer teaching anything grammatical at all.

[ 39 ] That, in turn, is nonsense. For in a specific area, that would mean nothing less than this: one should allow people to remain only at the level of consciousness and not allow them to attain self-consciousness. It is precisely between the ages of nine and ten that a person moves from consciousness to self-consciousness. He distinguishes himself from the world.

[ 40 ] That is also the point at which one can—albeit in a subtle way—move on to grammatical and syntactic rules; for that is when a person begins not only to think about the world, but also to reflect on themselves. In the context of language, reflecting on oneself means not merely speaking instinctively, but being able to organize language into rational rules. So, once again: learning a language entirely without grammar is an absurdity. One cannot instill in a person the inner strength they need for life if one disregards all rules.

[ 41 ] But what must be taken into account above all else is that it is only during that stage of life between the ages of nine and ten that a person begins to move from mere consciousness toward self-consciousness; therefore, any instruction in grammar prior to that is absurd.

[ 42 ] One must identify this transition between the ages of nine and ten in order to gradually and sensibly transition from language instruction—which has been based entirely on instinct and drawn directly from the subject matter—to grammatical instruction.

[ 43 ] The same must be true for the native language. One completely ruins a child’s inner life by forcing grammatical or syntactic rules upon the child before this crucial stage of development. Until then, speech should occur instinctively and habitually, as it does solely through imitation. Self-awareness should initiate speech—and, as a rule, self-awareness always emerges alongside grammar and syntax—between the ages of nine and ten. If you take this into account, you will see how the Waldorf school principle specifically uses the two or three years preceding this stage of life to place language instruction in the proper stage of life according to human development. And so you see, step by step, that Waldorf pedagogy aims to teach the teacher to read—but not from a book, not from a pedagogical system, but from the human being.

[ 44 ] The Waldorf teacher is to learn to read from this most wonderful document in the world: the human being. What this reading gives the teacher translates into a deep enthusiasm for teaching and educating. What can truly be read in such a way that it immediately calls upon the human being—in body, soul, and spirit—to engage in the all-encompassing activity that a teacher alone requires is contained solely in the book of the world. And all other learning, all other books, all other reading should serve precisely to give the educator the ability to read from the great Book of the World. If he can do this, then he will become a teacher with the necessary enthusiasm, and from that enthusiasm alone can emerge the power, the strength of the impulse, capable of enlivening a school class.

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[ 45 ] This universal human element in teaching and education—which I had to characterize for a wide variety of subject areas—must find particular expression in the Waldorf school principle precisely because the Waldorf school is not, in any sense, a school based on religious or philosophical convictions, nor is it a school based on a specific worldview. And in this regard, it was of course necessary—especially for an educational system that has developed out of anthroposophy—to work toward ensuring that this Waldorf school is far, far removed from becoming, say, an anthroposophical school or being an anthroposophical school. It certainly must not be that. One might say: every day anew, we strive to avoid—not through a teacher’s overzealousness, nor through the sincere conviction that naturally exists among Waldorf teachers regarding anthroposophy, since they are anthroposophists—falling into a one-sided anthroposophical perspective. The individual—not the individual as a proponent of a particular worldview—must be the sole criterion for the Waldorf school principle in didactic and pedagogical terms.

[ 46 ] This made it necessary to reach—I would say—a compromise with the religious communities, one demanded by the times, and to focus initially on nothing else for the students but the methodological aspects of a general humanistic education. Religious instruction was initially entrusted to the religious education teachers of each denomination. And so, Catholic religious education at the Waldorf School is taught by a Catholic priest, and Protestant religious education by a Protestant pastor.

[ 47 ] But there are quite a number of students at the Waldorf School who, as they say in Central Europe, are simply “dissident children”—children who simply would not take religious education classes if the only options available were Catholic and Protestant religious education. Because the Waldorf School initially emerged from the working class—it was originally the school of an industrial company, though it has long since ceased to be that; it has become a school for all social classes—it was initially attended predominantly by non-denominational children. These children would not have had any religious education at all, as is the case in many schools in Central Europe. So, specifically for these children, who otherwise would not have had any religious education at all, we introduced what is known as “free religious education.”

[ 48 ] This free religious education is also not intended to introduce theoretical anthroposophy into the Waldorf school. That would be entirely wrong. Anthroposophical conviction is, to this day, developed for adults, and we do, after all, speak about anthroposophy to adults. Therefore, all concepts and feelings are presented in a way that is appropriate for adults. Simply taking what is intended for adults in our anthroposophical literature and introducing it into the school would be a direct violation of the pedagogical and didactic principles of the Waldorf school. The point here is that for those children who are entrusted to us—voluntarily entrusted to us for free religious instruction—we must, in the strictest sense of the word, derive the religious element and what is to be given to them as religious instruction from their age.

[ 49 ] Thus, one should not form a mental image of the free religious education offered at Waldorf schools—which is even associated with a corresponding religious practice—as an anthroposophical worldview being imposed on the school. One will see, in fact, that this free religious education takes the child’s age into account to the fullest extent possible at every stage. It is not our doing that most children attend these free religious education classes at Waldorf schools, even though we make it a strict rule to admit a child to these classes only at the parents’ request. However, the pedagogical and didactic elements do play an extraordinary role here, and since our free religious education is, in the strictest sense, Christian, those parents who wish to have their children raised as Christians, but who want them to be taught and raised according to the educational principles, pedagogy, and didactics of the Waldorf School, send their children to our optional religious education classes—which are thoroughly Christian, so much so that the entire school is immersed in an atmosphere of Christianity. Holidays—such as Christmas and Easter—are experienced by our children through the free Christian religious education classes with a depth of feeling quite different from what is usually the case with these holidays today.

[ 50 ] The point is that, especially in religious education, the child’s age must be taken into account. It is particularly harmful in this context to introduce any concept to the child too early. That is why our free religious education is structured so that the child first comes to grasp the universal divine in the world.

[ 51 ] You will recall that when a child first enters school—between the ages of seven and nine or ten—we teach them by letting the plants speak, letting the clouds speak, and letting the springs speak. The entire environment surrounding the human child is animated. From there, instruction can easily be guided toward the universal divine Father principle that permeates the world. The fact that everything has its origin in the Divine can be presented to the child in an excellent way, especially when the rest of the instruction is conducted as I have described.

[ 52 ] And so we build upon what the child knows and is learning to know about nature—in a fairy-tale-like, imaginative way. We build upon this in order to guide the child, first and foremost, toward a certain gratitude for everything that happens in the world. Gratitude for everything people do for us, but also for everything nature bestows upon us—that is what sets religious sentiment on the right path. In general, fostering a sense of gratitude is something infinitely important and meaningful.

[ 53 ] Human beings should develop the ability to truly feel a certain sense of gratitude when—and this may even sound paradoxical, yet it is profoundly true—at just the right moment, when they have this or that to do, they are blessed with the appropriate weather. Being able to develop a sense of gratitude toward the universe, the cosmos—even if, I would say, this can only happen through an imaginative experience of the world—is what can deepen our entire perception of the world in a religious sense.

[ 54 ] To cultivate this gratitude, we need love for all things. And in turn, if we guide the child—as has been suggested—up to about the age of nine or ten, we can, through all the living things we present to the child, simultaneously reveal something to the child that the child must come to love. Love for every flower, love for every tree, love for sunshine and rain—this is what can, in turn, deepen the child’s sense of the world in a religious way.

[ 55 ] If we cultivate gratitude and love in a child before the age of ten, then we can also properly cultivate what we call duty. Cultivating duty too early through commandments does not lead to religious devotion. Above all, we must cultivate gratitude and love in the child; then we will help the child develop properly, both ethically and morally as well as religiously.

[ 56 ] Anyone who wishes to raise a child in the Christian sense, in the deepest sense of the word, must ensure that what stands before the world in the Mystery of Golgotha—in all that is connected to the personality and divine nature of Christ Jesus—is not presented to the child’s soul in the proper way before the ages of nine and ten. One exposes the child to great dangers if one does not introduce them to the universal divine—I would say: to the divine Father principle—before this stage of life; showing the child how the divine lives in everything in nature, how the divine lives in all human development, how the divine lives everywhere we look—in the stones, but also in the heart of another human being, in every deed that another human being performs for the child—everywhere the divine lives. We must perceive this universal divine with gratitude and teach the child to feel it with love through the natural authority of the teacher. Then we prepare ourselves to be able to take the right stance toward this Mystery of Golgotha, particularly between the ages of nine and ten.

[ 57 ] That is why it is so incredibly important to learn to understand human beings in terms of their development over time. Just try for a moment to grasp the difference that exists between teaching a child something from the New Testament in the seventh and eighth years of life, and—after first seeking to awaken a general sense of God in every natural being—introducing the New Testament between the ninth and tenth years of life, so as to develop it as such in the child only later. Then the child is properly prepared; then the child can immerse itself in the truly transcendent grandeur contained in the Gospel. If you teach it to the child beforehand, it remains merely a word; it remains a rigid, sober concept; it does not grasp the whole person; and you run the risk that the religious element in the child will harden, and the person will carry it through life as a hardened element, rather than as something alive that permeates their entire perception of the world. One prepares the child in the most beautiful way to take in the glory of Christ Jesus from the age of nine or ten onward, if one first introduces the child to the universal divinity of the entire world.

[ 58 ] And this is precisely the goal of the religious education now based on purely human elements—the free Christian religious education we provide at Waldorf schools for those children whose parents request it, a number that is actually growing compared to the others—and which we have also clothed in a certain form of worship. Every Sunday, a religious service takes place for these children who attend this free religious education. When these children are dismissed from school, this religious service undergoes a transformation. A religious service—which is very similar to the Mass but is entirely appropriate for the children’s age—is also connected to this religious life at the Waldorf School, which is grounded in free religious education.

[ 59 ] It was particularly difficult to incorporate into the religious element what we aim to cultivate in the Waldorf School: the purely human principle of development. For when it comes to religion, people today are still the least inclined to depart from their own particular beliefs. People often speak of a universal human religiosity. But for each individual, this is colored just as much by their specific religious community as by anything else. If we correctly understand humanity’s task for the future, this task will also be served in the right measure by this free religious instruction, which we have actually only just begun to implement in the Waldorf school.

[ 60 ] Anthroposophy, as it is presented to adults today, is certainly not brought into the Waldorf school; rather, what the human being yearns for: the perception of the divine—the divine in nature, the divine in human history—through the proper attunement to the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what we consider our task: to bring this into the classroom in the true sense.

[ 61 ] In this way, we are also able to give the entire lesson the character it needs. As I have already said, the teacher must ultimately come to view all teaching as a moral and religious act—so that, so to speak, he sees teaching itself as a kind of worship.

[ 62 ] We can only achieve this if we are able to properly integrate the religious and moral element into the school for those people who already desire it today. We have already attempted to do this—to the extent that social conditions currently allow—with regard to religious education in Waldorf schools. We certainly did not intend this to be a step toward some kind of blindly rationalistic Christianity, but rather toward a proper understanding of the Christ impulse within the entire earthly evolution of humanity. Our sole intention was to give people what they still need once they have become whole human beings through all other forms of education.

[ 63 ] For, my esteemed audience, one may already have become a whole human being through all other forms of education—yet even if one has already become a whole human being in every other respect, there is still one thing needed to place this whole human being back into the world in a comprehensive way, so that he or she stands within this world in accordance with his or her innate nature: religious deepening. To educate the whole person, and to deepen the religious life of this person who has been educated as a whole person—this is what we have sought to grasp as one of the most significant tasks of the Waldorf school principle.