The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday I took the liberty of speaking about the teacher who stands before the children. Today I will first attempt to characterize the child in the process of becoming, as the child stands before the teacher. Upon closer observation of all the forces relevant to human development during childhood, one can initially distinguish three clearly distinct stages of life at the beginning of one’s earthly existence. And only when one practices understanding human nature by looking closely at the distinctive characteristics of each of these stages is teaching and education truly possible in an appropriate—or rather, in a human—way.

[ 2 ] The first stage of a child’s life ends with the change of teeth. Now, I certainly do not deny that current views take into account the transformation of the child’s body and soul even at this age, but not in such a profound way that one would thereby gain insight into everything that is taking place within the human being at this tender age—and which must absolutely be grasped and understood if one wishes to educate the human being. The eruption of the teeth—which are no longer the inherited teeth of the early years—is, after all, merely the most outward symptom of a complete transformation of the entire human being. Much, very much is taking place within the organism—even if not outwardly visible—which finds its most radical expression precisely in the eruption of the second set of teeth.

[ 3 ] When one looks at these things, one must be clearly aware that contemporary physiology and psychology are not at all capable of looking deeply into the human being, for the reason that they have developed their methods—which are excellent in their own right—specifically for observing what lies only on the outer, physical level and what manifests from the soul within this body. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science has, above all, the task—as I already said yesterday—of looking into the whole of human development in terms of body, soul, and spirit. However, right from the start, a prejudice must be dispelled—one that, I do not deny, inevitably trips up all those who approach Waldorf school pedagogy and didactics without a thorough engagement with anthroposophy. Do not think for a moment that I would claim we simply brush aside the objections that can be raised against this Waldorf school pedagogy. That is by no means the case. On the contrary, anyone who stands on a spiritual foundation such as that of anthroposophy cannot be a one-sided fanatic in any respect; such a person will thoroughly weigh all the objections that can be raised against their views. And therefore it also seems entirely understandable to them when, time and again, objections are raised against what is said in pedagogy based on anthroposophical foundations: “Yes, you must first prove that.”

[ 4 ] You see, this “proving”—as it is so often called—is frequently used without associating a clear, precise concept with what one actually means by it. I certainly cannot give a detailed lecture here on the methodology of proof in the various spheres of life and knowledge, but I would like to clarify it with the following comparison. What do people mean today when they say that something should be proven? Well, the entire intellectual development of humanity since the fourteenth century has been aimed at justifying all insights on the basis of appearances—that is, on the basis of sensory perception. Before this period—before the fourteenth century—things were quite different. Yet people today no longer consider how their ancestors adopted different perspectives regarding the entire structure of the world. For in a certain sense, people today are arrogant in their awareness of the education achieved over the past few centuries, and they easily look down upon what, for example, in the “dark Middle Ages”—which they do not actually know at all but still call “dark”—people were driven to do in a childish manner, as they believe. One should simply consider what our descendants, if they were to think just as arrogantly, will say about us! From such a perspective, they will find us just as childish as we today wish to regard medieval people as childish.

[ 5 ] In the era preceding the fourteenth century, people perceived the world of the senses and also comprehended it through reason. And the intellect—which is so often underestimated today, yet which reigned supreme in the medieval monastic schools—was, in its inner essence as intellect and as conceptual faculty, far more highly developed than the chaotic conceptual faculty that is led by the hand by natural phenomena and often presents itself today to those who consider these things objectively and impartially. Back then, everything that reason and the senses perceived in the world had to be justified on the basis of the divine-spiritual world order. Sensory perception must be justified on the basis of divine-spiritual revelation: this was not merely an abstract principle back then, but a universal human feeling and sensibility. Only then can something be considered valid in the sensory world if it has been recognized in such a way that it can be proven and demonstrated on the basis of the divine-spiritual world order.

[ 6 ] This changed—slowly at first—as one view gave way to another. But by the present day, things have reached the point where virtually everything—even within the divine-spiritual order of the worlds—is supposed to be valid only if it can be proven from the sensory world, if experiments and sensory observations can be conducted in such a way as to substantiate the things said about the spiritual realm. What is someone actually asking today when they say, “Prove to me something that concerns the spiritual”? — They are asking the following: Have you conducted an experiment, have you made a sensory observation that proves it? — Why do they ask this? They ask this because they have lost faith in human beings’ own inner activity—in the ability for insights to well up from within the person themselves—as opposed to what one obtains by looking at external life, at sensory appearances, and at intellectual knowledge. One might say: Humanity has grown weak within; it no longer feels the strong support of an inwardly productive life. And what I have just said profoundly influences all practical activities, above all the work of education. Proving something in this sense—through external sensory appearances, through observation, or through experiment—can be compared to pointing out to someone an object that falls if it is not supported; the Earth’s gravity pulls it down; it must be supported until it rests on solid ground. Now, if someone comes along and says: “Yes, you’re telling us that the Earth and the other celestial bodies float freely in outer space; I don’t understand that; surely every object must be supported so that it doesn’t fall down”—then one must say: “But the Earth doesn’t fall down, nor does the Sun, nor do the other celestial bodies. One must completely change one’s way of thinking when moving from Earthly conditions out into cosmic space. One must say: There, the celestial bodies support one another; there, the laws that apply to the Earth’s immediate surroundings cease to apply.”

[ 7 ] So it is with spiritual truths. If one makes any claim about the sensory aspects of plants, animals, minerals, or the physical human being, one must prove it through experimentation and sensory observation. In this case, that means one must provide evidence for the claim. When one enters the free realm of the spirit, the truths must support one another. There, one can find proof of things only through the fact that the truths support one another. Therefore, the presentation of the spiritual involves placing a particular insight clearly within the entire context, just as the Earth or another celestial body is freely situated in outer space. There, the truths must support one another. Thus, the one who strives for insights into the spiritual world must first seek out how truths come from other directions—truths that, as it were, through the free gravitational forces of proof, hold a single truth just as freely in the cosmos without support, just as a celestial body is held freely in cosmic space by mutually acting gravitational forces. This must become a profound inner disposition—the ability to think in this way about the spiritual—otherwise, one will be able to grasp, nurture, and instruct the soul within a human being, but not the spirit, which lives and exists within them just as much as the soul does.

[ 8 ] When a human being enters the physical-sensory world, the physical body is, after all, entrusted to him by his parents and ancestors. Today, although not yet complete—they will only be perfected much later—there is already, in a certain sense, a comprehensible understanding of nature regarding this. For Spiritual Science, this constitutes one part of the human being. For the other part of the human being, which unites with what comes from the father and mother, descends as a spiritual-soul being from the spiritual-soul world. Between its previous earthly life and the present one, it has spent a long period of time between death and a new birth. It has had experiences in the spiritual realm during this course of life between death and a new birth, just as we have our experiences on earth—mediated physically through our senses, our intellect, our feelings, and our will—between birth and death. This being, with the experiences it has undergone in the spiritual realm, descends and initially connects in a loose manner with the human physical body during the embryonic period; and it remains present—essentially still in a loose manner, so to speak, hovering around the human being externally as an aura—during the early childhood years between birth and the change of teeth. And one may say: Because what descends from the spiritual world as a spiritual-soul being—and is just as real as what we see with our eyes emerging from the mother’s body—is connected even more loosely to the physical body than is later the case with human beings; therefore, the child lives much more outside its body than the adult does later on.

[ 9 ] And this is simply another way of expressing what I said yesterday: In this early stage, the child is, in the very highest degree and in its entire being, a sensory being. It is like a sensory organ. Impressions from the environment trickle through the entire organism, resonating and reverberating, because the child is not yet as intimately connected to its body as a human being will be later on, but rather lives in the environment with a more loosely integrated spiritual-soul aspect. Therefore, it absorbs all the impressions that come from this environment.

[ 10 ] How, then, does what a person receives physically through pure heredity from their father and mother relate to their entire being? If one observes human development with a gaze that seeks to depict—rather than merely to prove in the sense I have just described—if one observes it with a gaze that seeks to perceive the spiritual, then one will find that everything in the organism is based on hereditary forces just as much as the first teeth, the so-called baby teeth. One need only look—but with a truly precise eye—at how differently the second set of teeth is formed compared to the first, and how it is, I might say, plain to see what actually happens to a human being from birth until the teeth are replaced. For from birth until the change of teeth, the entire human being—with hereditary forces at work in his physical body—is like a kind of model on which the spiritual-soul aspect works, as a purely imitative being, in response to impressions from the environment. And when one puts oneself in the child’s mind with regard to its relationship to the environment—how the child views every stirring of the soul in relation to its whole being, how the child, in every movement of the hand, in every facial expression, in every glance of the eye, the child senses the spiritual essence of the adult behind them and allows it to trickle into itself—when one observes all of this, one discovers precisely how, based on the model handed down to the human being through heredity, another model now takes shape over the course of the first seven years of life. As human beings, we truly receive from the earthly world, through the forces of heredity, a model according to which we develop the second human being—who is actually only born with the change of teeth. Just as the little tooth—the baby tooth—that sits in the body is pushed out by what seeks to take its place—as we see something belonging to the human individuality pushing its way forward and repelling what is inherited—so it is with the entire human organism. During the first seven years of life, the human being was the exemplary result of the forces of the Earth. He is cast off, just as we cast off the outer tendrils of our body—trimming our fingernails, cutting our hair, and so on. Just as the outer layer is continually cast off, the human being is renewed with the change of teeth. However, this second human being—who completely replaces the first, which we receive through physical heredity—is now formed under the influence of those forces that the human being brings with them from their pre-earthly life. And so, in the period of life between birth and the change of teeth, the hereditary forces belonging to the physical current of human development actually struggle with the forces that each individual brings down from their pre-earthly life as the results of their earlier individual earthly lives.

[ 11 ] The point is not merely to grasp such a fact with the theoretical intellect, as most people do according to today’s habits of thought, but rather to grasp it with the whole inner human being—to grasp it from the child’s perspective and from the educator’s perspective. When we perceive what is happening from the child’s perspective, we find that the child, with its inner soul being—with what it has brought down from its pre-earthly life, from the spiritual-soul world—is entirely devoted to the physical effects of the other people surrounding it. And this relationship, when brought down into the natural realm and projected outward, is a relationship that we can describe as nothing other than religious. We need only agree on the precise meaning of such terms. Of course, when we speak today of a religious relationship, we are referring to the consciously developed religious sensibility of the adult. The essential point is that, in religious life, the spiritual-soul aspect of the adult merges into the spirituality of the world and surrenders itself to this spirituality of the world. The religious relationship is a surrender, a surrender to the world in supplication for grace, but in the adult it is thoroughly immersed in the spiritual. The soul and the spirit are devoted to the surroundings. Therefore, it seems as if one were turning a thing on its head when one speaks of the way a child’s body lives in devotion to its surroundings as a religious experience. But it is a natural, religious relationship. The child is surrendered to its surroundings; it lives in the external world like the eye, which separates itself from the rest of the organism and is surrendered to its surroundings in reverence, in supplication for grace; it is a religious relationship brought down to the level of the natural. And if we wish, so to speak, to have a sensory image of what takes place in the adult on a spiritual-soul level when he or she has a religious experience, then we need only truly perceive the child’s body—up to the time of tooth replacement—with the eye of the soul. The child lives religiously, but in a natural, instinctive way. It is not the soul that is devoted, but the circulation of its blood, its breathing process, and the way it nourishes itself through the food it consumes. All these things are devoted to the surroundings. Blood circulation, breathing, and the process of nourishment all worship the surroundings.

[ 12 ] Of course, such an expression sounds paradoxical, but it is precisely in its paradox that it represents the truth. If we grasp it not with our theoretical intellect, but with our entire humanity, and observe the struggle that the child before us is waging within this religious, natural mood—the struggle between the hereditary forces and that which, for a second human being, constitutes the individual forces through the power that has been carried down from pre-earthly life—then we, as educators, also fall into a religious mood. But I would like to say: While the child, with its physical body, enters into the religious mood of the believer, the one who is to educate—by observing what unfolds in such a wondrous way between birth and the loss of baby teeth—enters into the religious disposition of the priest. And the task of the educator becomes a priestly service, like a kind of ritual performed at the altar of human life—not with a sacrifice leading to death, but with the sacrifice of humanity itself, which is to be awakened to life. For we must entrust to earthly life what has come to us from the divine-spiritual world in the child, who, through his own powers, forms a second human organism out of a being that has come to us as a gift of divine-spiritual life.

[ 13 ] When we consider these circumstances, something akin to a priestly sense of education awakens within us. And as long as this priestly sense of education for the early years of life is not incorporated into everything that is called education, education has not found its conditions for life. Seeking to control with the intellect what is necessary for education, shaping pedagogies with the intellect based on an external observation of the child’s nature—this yields, at best, incomplete pedagogies. Entire educational systems must not be written from the intellect alone; they must also be the outflow of the whole of human nature—not merely the human nature that observes outwardly through the intellect, but the whole of human nature that deeply experiences the mysteries of the universe from within. There is little that can have such a wondrous effect on the human spirit as when we see how, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, during the earliest years of a child’s life, the inner spiritual and soul life bursts forth—from the chaotic movements of the limbs, from the gaze fixed on the external world, from the play of facial expressions—from which we sense it does not yet quite belong to the child’s individuality—all of this develops and comes to expression on the surface of the human form: that which comes from the center, from the very heart of the human being, where that which descends from pre-earthly life as a divine-spiritual being unfolds in its activity. Can we understand this in such a way that, with reverence and devotion, we say to ourselves: Here the divinity is revealed, the divinity that has guided the human being right up to birth, further in the formation of the human organism; there we see the active divinity; there we sense how God looks upon us”—if one can make this divine service of education a matter of the heart, then this is what, arising from our own individuality as teachers—not through learned methods, but through an inner, springing-forth, living methodology—can guide all education and teaching.

[ 14 ] We need this attitude toward the developing human being as an integral part of any educational methodology. Without this state of mind, without this—to put it in a broader sense—priestly quality in the educator, education cannot be carried out at all. Therefore, any effort to transform educational methodology must consist precisely in bringing back—what has become too intellectual, too rational since the fourteenth century—to the emotional realm, to that which springs from the whole of human nature, not merely from the head. For this is what we learn from the nature of the child, when we are able to observe it with an open mind.

[ 15 ] For what course has our civilized life actually taken since the fourteenth century? During the great cultural transition—the cultural upheaval—that took place in the fourteenth century, people were initially able to observe only what was driving them away from inner life—I would say—toward outwardness. This fixation on the external has become so much a matter of course for humanity today that people are no longer even aware that things could be any different in this regard. People regard the state they have reached in historical development as absolutely correct, not merely as one that belongs to the conditions of contemporary culture. Just as people felt before the fourteenth or fifteenth century, so it was simply no longer possible to feel that way. Back then, people viewed the spiritual in just as one-sided a way as we view the natural in a one-sided way today. But at some point, the consideration of the purely natural had to be added to what earlier humanity possessed in its devotion to the non-natural spiritual-soul aspect. This materialization, this shift, was necessary. But one must recognize that at the present moment, if the people of the civilized world do not wish to sink into barbarism, a new shift—a turning toward the spiritual and soul-life—is necessary. The essence of all such endeavors—of which Waldorf education is one—actually lies in the awareness of this fact. Such an endeavor seeks to take root in what, upon deeper observation of human development in our time, reveals itself as necessary. We must return once more to the spiritual and soul-life. To do so, we must first have a clear awareness of how we strayed from it. Many people today simply do not have this awareness yet. Therefore, they regard that which seeks to lead us back to the spiritual as—well, one might say—not entirely sensible.

[ 16 ] In this regard, one does indeed come across some curious examples. Just as an aside, I would like to mention one interesting example. You see, there is also a chapter—which is, incidentally, very interesting—on the anthroposophical method of viewing the world in Maurice Maeterlinck’s new book, *The Great Mystery*. In it, he discusses anthroposophy and—forgive me for getting personal—he discusses me. He has read some of my books, and he says the following—very interesting—he says: When one begins to read my books, I present myself as a thoughtful, logical, cautious mind; when one continues reading my books, in the later chapters, it seems as if I have gone mad. — You see, that may well be how it appears to Maurice Maeterlinck; he naturally has the right to that—subjectively, he has the right to that—because why shouldn’t I appear to him in the first chapters as a thoughtful, logical, scientific person, and in the later chapters as a madman? That is, of course, his good right; no one would want to deny him that. But the question is whether something like that isn’t also absurd. And it turns out to be absurd when you consider the following. Unfortunately—as you can see from the peculiar arrangement of the book table—I’ve written quite a lot in my life, and one could certainly say that as soon as I finish writing one book, I start writing a new one. When Maurice Maeterlinck reads this, he’ll find once again that in the first chapters I’m cautious, deliberative, and scientific, while in the later chapters I go mad again; then I set about writing a third book, and in the first chapters I have to be reasonable again, and so on. Now you see, I must therefore master the art of becoming—by sheer will—a perfectly reasonable person in the first chapters of the book, and of becoming—just as arbitrarily—insane, only to return immediately to reason when I set out to write the next book! So I would have to alternate between being a sane person and then going mad again. Of course, he has every right to think that, but he forgets to point out the absurdity of such a view. And so such an important figure of the present simply becomes absurd. As I said, this is just a digression.

[ 17 ] Many people are simply unaware that they do not judge from the original source of human nature, but rather from what has been instilled in external culture since the fourteenth century through an external, materialistic way of life and education. To look more deeply into the human being—that is, above all, the task of the teacher, the educator, and thus, in fact, of all people who have anything to do with children. Therefore, it is a matter of being fully aware of how everything that lives as a stimulus in the environment continues to resonate within the child. One must be clearly aware that, in this regard, as I said yesterday, intangible factors do indeed prevail. The child senses, from what we do in its environment, which thoughts underlie a hand movement or a gesture. It senses them—not, of course, by interpreting the gestures themselves, but through a much more active inner connection between the child and the adult than is later the case between one adult and another. And so it follows that we must not allow ourselves, in the child’s presence, to feel or think anything other than what can resonate within the child. In our educational approach to the child’s early years, the following principle must absolutely prevail: You must experience everything—your sensations, feelings, and thoughts—in the child’s presence in such a way that it can resonate within the child. And then, for the child’s early years, the psychologist, the observer of the soul, the person with life experience, and the physician become one. For everything that makes an impression on the child—causing the child to react emotionally—continues in the child’s blood circulation and in the way the child digests, and takes shape as the foundation of the child’s state of health in later life. By educating the child spiritually and emotionally, relying on the child’s capacity for imitation, we are at the same time educating the child physically. For this is the wondrous metamorphosis of what approaches the child spiritually and emotionally, transforming into the physical constitution, the organic condition, and the predisposition to health or illness for later life.

[ 18 ] So one could say: In Waldorf education, we do not educate in a spiritual-soul way because we want to influence the spiritual-soul realm in a one-sided manner; rather, we educate in a spiritual-soul way because we know that, in the most eminent sense, we are thereby physically educating the inner being of the human being—that which lies within the skin. This will become clear to you from the examples I presented yesterday. According to the model provided by the forces of heredity, the human being builds up his or her “second human being,” which is then present to be experienced during the second stage of life, between the change of teeth and sexual maturity. Just as in the first stage of life the human being, so to speak, struggles to forge a second body through what is present within him—uninherited from earlier earthly lives—in the purely spiritual life between death and a new birth into individuality, so too, in the second stage between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, the influences of the external world struggle against that which the human being seeks to integrate into his individuality. Now the influences of the external world become powerful. And the human being is strengthened inwardly because he no longer allows everything that exists in the external world to continue vibrating within his organism like a sensory organ. Sensory perception becomes more concentrated on the surface of the human being, on the periphery. Only now do the senses assume their independence, and the first thing that then confronts us in the human being is something that is not an intellectual relationship to the world—a relationship to the world that can only be compared to an artistic view of life. While our first view of life is a religious one, in which we, as naturally religious beings, face nature and are devoted to our surroundings, it now becomes our inner need to no longer merely accept everything that confronts us in our surroundings and allow it to vibrate passively within our physical being, but rather to transform it into images. Between the loss of baby teeth and sexual maturity, the child is an artist—albeit in a childlike way—just as in the first stage of life, up to the loss of baby teeth, the child is, by nature, a *Homo religiosus*, a religious being. Since the child now demands to receive everything in a pictorial-artistic way, the teacher and educator must approach the child as one who presents everything they offer to the child in an artistically formative manner. This is what must be demanded of educators and teachers in our contemporary culture, and what must flow into the art of education. Artistic interaction must take place between the loss of baby teeth and sexual maturity, between the teacher and educator and the growing human being. In this regard, we as teachers have many obstacles to overcome. For our civilization and culture, which initially surround us externally, have become such that they are calculated solely for the intellect and are not yet calculated for the artistic.

[ 19 ] When we read about the most marvelous natural processes in our modern textbooks—say, the description of embryonic life—or when we learn about these topics in our schools—I am not criticizing this; I am merely describing it, for I know very well that it had to be this way and that it was a necessity at a certain point in human development—if we take in what is presented to us there with the power that is now seeking to awaken again, then something happens in human feeling that one is reluctant to admit, because one believes one is sinning against the maturity that the human race has attained in the course of world history. And it would be good if one were to make such a confession to oneself. Read books today on embryology, botany, or zoology: it is truly exasperating how one must immediately plunge into intellectual coldness, and how everything artistic—for there is nothing intellectual that lives in the becoming of nature—is quite deliberately and methodically driven out. When we, as teachers, pick up a modern botany textbook structured according to the exact rules of science, our task as teachers is first to set aside everything we find in that book. Of course, we must take it in, because otherwise we have no other way of learning what goes on in the plant world. We must make the sacrifice of learning about these things through today’s books. But we must set them aside as soon as we, as teachers or educators, approach the child between the loss of baby teeth and puberty. There, through ourselves, through our artistic vitality, through our artistic sensibility, everything must be transformed into something artistic and pictorial. What lives in my thoughts about nature must be transformed into that which, on the wings of human artistic enthusiasm, becomes an image and appears as such before the child’s soul. Shaping instruction artistically during the period between the change of teeth and puberty—that is the only thing that can be at stake in a metamorphosis of our fundamental pedagogical views from the present into the near future. Just as we need a priestly approach for the first stage of a child’s life, so do we need an artistic approach for the second stage of human life—the period between the loss of baby teeth and sexual maturity. For what are we actually doing when we educate a person during this stage of life? There, the individuality—arising from previous earthly lives and from the spiritual world—seeks to gradually shape a second human being and to permeate it, and we act as guides in this process of permeation, we incorporate what we do in teaching and raising the child into the forces that are to be woven into the spiritual-soul realm, in order to shape the second human being—the human being precisely in his or her own unique way. Again, it must be the awareness of this place in the world that, like an inwardly enlivening impulse, permeates what should be the teaching methodology and the living conditions of education. One cannot even reflect on what one is supposed to do there; one can only let it happen under the living impression that the child makes on the teacher and educator.

[ 20 ] For in this stage of life, one can fall into two extremes when it comes to teaching and educating. The first extreme consists in approaching the child in an overly intellectual manner, stemming from an intellectualist mindset, and demanding that the child, for example, grasp sharply defined concepts—definitions, as they say. It is, after all, so convenient to educate and teach using definitions. For the more gifted children learn to repeat the definitions, and one can then enjoy the convenience of seeing, in the following lessons, that the children have mastered what was taught to them in the previous lessons. And those who do not know it after a certain time are made to repeat the grade. This is a very convenient method. But it can be compared to the method a shoemaker would develop if he had to make shoes for a three-year-old child and then demanded that a ten-year-old still wear them; the shoes are sharply contoured, but they no longer fit the child. So it is with what the child takes in. What the child takes in at the age of seven or eight no longer fits his soul by the age of twelve; he has no more use for it than for shoes that have become too small. Only, one does not notice this when it comes to matters of the soul. The teacher who, when the child is twelve, still demands the definitions that were taught earlier is like the cobbler who still wants to put the shoes of a three-year-old on a ten-year-old child. Only the toes fit inside; the shoes no longer cover the heels. A large part of the spiritual-soul life remains outside the realm of instruction and education. What is necessary is to provide the child, through an artistically flexible approach that can grow, with such feelings, mental images, and imaginative perceptions in the form of images that can undergo metamorphoses—that can grow along with the soul simply as it grows. This, however, requires a living relationship between the teacher or educator and the child—not a lifeless one derived from dead pedagogical concepts. And that is why all instruction between the ages of approximately seven or eight and fourteen or fifteen must be imbued with this kind of imagery.

[ 21 ] In many respects, this runs counter to the outward appearance of our modern culture. Certainly, we are immersed in this modern culture. We read books; they convey meaningful content through those little symbols we call a, b, c, and so on. We don’t even think about how we were put through the wringer to learn these symbols, because they bear no relation whatsoever to our inner life. Why, after all, should an “A” or an “E” look the way it does today? There is no inner necessity. One cannot experience it when one is supposed to write down what one expresses as wonder—as an “ah!”—or even add an “h” to it. This was not present in earlier human history either. Back then, pictographic writing was used to represent external processes. When one looked at the sheet of paper or the blackboard on which such things were depicted, one saw an echo of the external process or external object. The point is that, above all, we should spare the six- or seven-year-old child from learning to form letters as they are today; the point is that we should introduce the child to what can come from the child itself—from the movement of its arms, from the movement of its fingers. The child looks with its eyes at some shiny object. When the child looks at the shiny object, it will form an impression, and we let the child capture that shine through a kind of shiny drawing. Then the child knows what it is. If the child runs its hand from top to bottom over a stick, and I then have the child make a line that goes from top to bottom, the child knows again what it is. I show the child a fish. I have the child trace the fish’s main outline. Then I have them trace the rear and front fins; these cross over the previous outline. I have them draw the main outline and then this crossing, and I say: “What you have there on the paper comes from the fish.” You’ve drawn it, after all.” — And now I guide the child into the inner experience of the word “fish.” There, within it, is the “F.” I have the child draw it this way as well: one stroke and a crossing. I draw out the sound with which the word “fish” begins from what the child is feeling. In this way, I can bring the whole of writing to life—not through abstract imitation of the symbols as they are today, but through grasping the things themselves that arise in the children’s drawing-while-painting and painting-while-drawing. In this way, I can draw writing forth from drawing-while-painting and painting-while-drawing. Then I stand within its living pictorialness.

[ 22 ] I need only point to such an artistic beginning, and one will already be able to sense how it engages the whole child—not merely the intellect, which is overemphasized at one extreme. When one moves in this way from the intellectual into the pictorial, the intellectual aspect recedes entirely in favor of childhood. If one overemphasizes the intellectual aspect—if one is unable to transition to the pictorial—then the child’s breathing process becomes disrupted in a subtle, intimate way. I would say it condenses into an exhalation process that becomes weak. You do not need to create a crude mental image of this, but rather a subtle, nuanced one. The exhalation process condenses, and the child experiences a subconscious sense of oppression if intellectualism is imposed too strongly upon them between the ages of seven and fourteen. An inner—I would say, intimate—oppression arises that remains embedded in the organism and, at a later age, leads to asthmatic conditions or all manner of illnesses associated with a sluggish breathing process.

[ 23 ] If, on the other hand, one takes the other extreme too far—entering the classroom like a little Caesar, naturally believing oneself to be a great Caesar—then it turns out that the child is constantly being impaled on the teacher’s impulsive will. Just as one compresses the exhalation through the extreme of intellectualism, one dilutes the forces that are supposed to regulate metabolism through one-sided commanding—a one-sided development of the teacher’s volitional impulses. Weaknesses in the child’s digestive organs develop, which may then manifest themselves later in life. Both are impossible in education: intellectualism on the one hand, and the teacher’s excessive exercise of will on the other. It is in maintaining the balance between the two—in what takes place in the child’s mind when the will gently transitions into the child’s own activity— and where the intellect softens so that it does not oppress the breathing process—in the formation of the soul that tends toward the image and expresses itself in that ability to float, as I have characterized it—there lies the salvation of a child’s development between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

[ 24 ] Thus, based on a true understanding of human nature, one can discern from the course of human development what needs to be accomplished with the child in terms of education and instruction from week to week, month to month, and year to year. The curriculum must be a reflection of what can be observed in human development. I will take the liberty of explaining how this works in detail in my upcoming lectures.