The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] This morning I attempted to illustrate how human understanding must transform itself from a mere understanding of nature into, so to speak, higher forms of understanding, if the whole human being—that is, including the developing human being, the child—is to be understood in such a way that this understanding can transition into an artistic approach to education and instruction. I can well imagine that the question might arise: Yes, is it even a matter of whether such things—such as understanding the physical body through mere observation and intellectualization, understanding the human etheric body through sculptural practice, understanding the astral body through musical understanding, and understanding the organization of the “I” through insight into the nature of language—whether such insight into the human being, when present in the teacher and educator, can somehow be put into practice? — Yes, if one is to characterize the whole essence of education and teaching as it has been done here in these lectures on Waldorf school pedagogy, then one must say: It is, in fact, the very most important thing that must be present in the teacher and educator: the outlook on life, the worldview; not what is commonly understood today as a worldview—for that is something thoroughly theoretical—but rather something that can permeate the entire active being of the human being, and thus also the educator, like a soul force. One might say: If the teacher or educator wishes to adopt educational principles based on the latest recognized insights into human nature, they must first draw the enthusiasm they will need as a teacher or educator from elsewhere. Hence the constant instructions regarding educational ideals, which ultimately remain ineffective because they sound like mere abstractions, no matter how well-founded they may seem. In contrast, a genuine insight that penetrates the very essence of the world and of human beings will, through its very existence, burst forth as enthusiasm in the human heart and place the educator and teacher so firmly within their vocation that they can draw enthusiasm themselves from what they feel in their relationship to the world and to themselves—just as an artist does when the work of art flows through their very being. He does not need to draw his enthusiasm from something else first; he draws it directly from the subject matter itself. And that enthusiasm, which arises in the teacher and educator from a worldview experienced inwardly and to be experienced anew again and again—that inner enthusiasm—will be transmitted to the state of mind of the children entrusted to the teacher. This enthusiasm will live on in everything the teacher can do educationally at school. Thus, it will never occur to someone who looks so deeply into the nature of the human being—seeing how, especially at the elementary school age, that is, the age between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, the musical and the sculptural harmonize within the human being— to choose the wrong methods for teaching reading and writing in the proper way to the child, to the developing human being. He will have a vivid sense of this: writing—especially when practiced as described here—engages the whole person; it extends into the use of the arms and hands in particular, imbues the arms and hands with spirit, and is an exercise for the whole person.

[ 2 ] It is precisely this aspect of human nature that is keenly felt when one proceeds from a worldview such as the one I described this morning. And in the same way, one will then realize how reading practice is a one-sided mental activity that makes a person one-sided, and one will feel: A child is only ready for such one-sidedness once it has first been engaged in relation to its totality, in relation to its entire human being. Therefore, a teacher who connects with human insight in this way will take care to develop writing from drawing-as-painting and painting-as-drawing, as I have indicated, until the child is ready to write down what it inwardly perceives as a word or a sentence.

[ 3 ] The child has now reached a certain stage of development. It speaks, and it can put what it says down in writing. Only then has the time come to move on to reading exercises, to begin teaching reading. And reading will be easy to teach if writing has first been developed to a stage that is, in a certain sense, truly complete. Then, when the child has first internalized the content of what is written and read—within itself, within its human being, within its motor system, within its system of movement—when it has been inwardly involved in the creation of what is then to be read, then it is ready to be taught to read; then the mind can be engaged—without any danger to human development—to transform what one has first learned to fix through writing into reading.

[ 4 ] You see, what matters is this: that, week after week, month after month, the developing human being is truly engaged in activities appropriate to the needs of the human organism as it develops. It is therefore essential to discern, from the way the human being seeks to develop, what should be done with the child at each stage of life. It is certainly not possible, however, to work with timetables that allocate one hour or three-quarters of an hour to one activity, then immediately jump to another, then to a third, and so on. For this reason, Waldorf schools have introduced a teaching method in which the same subject is covered for a certain period of time—a few weeks—during the first hours of the morning, so that the student can fully immerse themselves in the subject and is not immediately torn away from it once they have begun. This so-called “epoch teaching” is the method practiced in Waldorf schools.

[ 5 ] The task now is to find, in everything that needs to be taught to the child between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, a method for deriving what is to be taught from the demands of human nature itself. Above all, if one wishes to gradually introduce the child to a relationship with itself and with the world, it is necessary that the teacher and educator themselves have such a relationship with the world. Now, however, in our present civilization, it is actually impossible—no matter how learned a person may have become—to attain an inwardly animated, meaningful relationship with the world and with oneself within the confines of this civilization. Yet another radical statement. But today we must not shy away from genuine insights into what must gradually be incorporated into civilization. Above all, it is necessary that teachers and educators themselves do not merely pursue, so to speak, a “cosmic parochialism” in their own education, but that they look beyond the merely earthly and recognize how, as human beings, they are dependent not only on the food in their immediate surroundings but on the entire universe. Certainly, in this regard, there is even a great difficulty today in speaking impartially. For when people today try to look beyond their dependence on the merely earthly, there is little in contemporary thought to provide guidance for such a perspective. Consequently, old teachings—which stem from ancient instinctive insights—are often carried over into the present without being understood. This is how superstition arises. And in truth, within our currently accepted civilization, we have nothing but a parochial, narrow-minded view of the cosmos, because this civilization has not yet yielded insights that extend from Earth into outer space. All we have are calculations or, at most, spectral analysis, which inform us about the motion and position of the stars, and inform us—or at least supposedly inform us—about the substance of the stars and the like. But the kind of intimate understanding we gain by forming close relationships with earthly beings—we simply cannot attain such understanding regarding the extraterrestrial-cosmic realm from within our current civilization. Isn’t it true that, when it comes to cabbage, spinach, and game, human beings have insights quite different from those gained through abstract, intellectual science, for they eat these things, and when eating, mere abstract thought plays no role. After all, one does not eat merely to experience within oneself what modern science has to say about the hare; rather, one experiences something much more concrete—and, I would say, much more intimate—about the hare through its taste and the way it is digested. But our knowledge of the extraterrestrial cosmos is such that we lack these more intimate connections entirely. For if we knew about the hare only what astronomy and spectral analysis tell us about the outer universe—and if we could only arrive at the mathematical results we have regarding the relative positioning of the hare’s bones and the ratios of the substances found within it—if we were to enter into such a relationship with the hare, we would never be able to find our way into the human relationship we have with the hare. We would never be able to experience a genuine human relationship with the hare. People simply do not realize today that such intimate relationships also existed with the outer universe in an older, instinctive wisdom. If one looks at that ancient wisdom in the right way, one immediately receives the impulse to seek, from our more advanced state of soul development, a new wisdom in these areas—a wisdom that can then be brought to us in a way just as human as the science of the natural objects that surround us on Earth.

[ 6 ] I would like to illustrate this with an example that shows just how crucial it is for the teacher to truly develop a living relationship with the world, so that he or she can draw from it the enthusiasm needed to translate what must live as something distinct within the educator’s soul into simple, vivid images for the child. But if the teacher is himself initiated into his relationship with the world, this transforms itself, in the sight of the child and the child’s activities, into that world of images that is necessary to truly advance the child in the way that human development requires. You see, we are surrounded by the plant world. It actually contains quite a few mysteries for meaningful observation. Such mysteries caught Goethe’s attention. He traced the developing forms of plants through their various metamorphoses and, in observing how the plant grows, arrived at a remarkable formula that, I would say, infuses the understanding of plants with life. He arrived at the formula, stating: Let us first look at the seed that we plant in the earth, from which the plant grows. There, the plant’s life is outwardly and physically compressed into a single point. Then we see how the seed unfolds, how life spreads out more and more, until it is finally fully extended in the first cotyledons. Then it contracts again, remains within the confines of the stem, extends to the base of the next leaf, spreads out once more, only to contract again and remain within the stem, and then spread out again at the base of the next leaf, and so on, until the final contraction occurs when, in the formation of a new seed, the entire life of the plant is once more gathered into a single physical point. This is how Goethe described how this plant growth, in its development, alternates between expansion and contraction, expansion and contraction.

[ 7 ] Well, Goethe thus cast a profound gaze into the inner nature of the plant—the form that springs forth from the plant’s own life. However, because the time had not yet come, he was not yet able to apply this plant life—for which he had found the formula—to the entire world. For the entire world, with all its forces, is always involved in the way a being lives and develops. With the help of today’s Spiritual Science—anthroposophical Spiritual Science, as you can follow it in the literature on Spiritual Science—I would like merely to hint at these things—one can, however, go far beyond this formula. And then one will discover how, in the expansion of the plant being, that which comes from the sun lives. For in the sun lives not merely that which is recorded by astronomy and spectral analysis; spiritual forces weave and flow down toward the earth with the sun’s rays, and in this inner animation of sunlight lives that which, for example, determines the expansion in plant growth. It therefore does not matter that this expansion occurs only when the sun shines on the plants; rather, the plant’s growth force is sustained in its solar nature even beyond the time when the sun is actually shining on it. In contrast, everything that contracts—where the entire plant growth, in turn, contracts into a point at the transition from one leaf axil to another, during seed formation—is under the influence of the lunar forces. And just as we see the rhythmic alternation of sunlight and moonlight in the cosmos, so too do we see the reflection of what is revealed to us from the heavens in the rhythmic alternation of sunlight and moonlight in the sprouting plant, which counters the Sun’s effect with expansion into the breadth of its leaves, and we see the forces of the Moon in the plant’s contraction. Expansion and contraction are the reflection in the plant of that which acts down upon the Earth from the vastness of the worlds, from the distant ether, through the forces of the sun and moon in their alternation.

[ 8 ] Now our gaze is already expanding outward from the Earth into the vastness of the cosmos, into the distant reaches of the ether. We gain an impression of how the Earth, in a sense, draws its fertility and growth forces from what flows into it from the cosmos. We gain a sense of how, through the plant, we grow together with the spirit of the sun and the moon. Now, what is otherwise merely calculated or tracked through spectral analysis is already being brought close to the human being. If enthusiasm is needed to convey something about the human relationship to the world to the developing human being, then it cannot flow from the merely abstract observation of whether a leaf has serrated or smooth edges, or whether the leaves are shaped one way or another. That does not inspire enthusiasm. But enthusiasm arises when we see the reflection of the sun and moon in the growth of this or that plant. How wonderfully the contemplation of the surrounding nature unfolds when, for my sake, one observes any plant that grows regularly, such as the buttercup: one finds in it something that the earth sends forth, as it surrenders itself in a—I would say—loving manner to the solar and lunar aspects of the cosmos, paying homage to both in the same way. We turn our gaze to a plant such as the cactus, which expands what is its stem: What do we see there? In the contraction that the stem otherwise exhibits, we see the lunar forces; when this stem itself seeks to expand, we see the struggle between solar and lunar influences. We can see from the form of every plant how the sun and moon interact within it. In every plant we see a small world, a reflection of the great world. I would say that just as we otherwise see our own image in a mirror, so too do we see in the mirror of earthly growth what is happening out there in the universe.

[ 9 ] Such things were known and present in ancient instinctive wisdom. The following serves as proof of this: People observed that the plant life sprouting from the earth in spring reflects, from the cosmos, the relationship between the forces of the sun and the moon. That is why spring was celebrated with Easter, the timing of which was derived from the relationship between the sun and the moon. Easter is the festival that falls on the first Sunday after the spring full moon. Thus, the timing of Easter is taken from the cosmos, specifically from the relationship between the sun and the moon. What was the intention behind this? The intention was to say: Let us observe how plants sprout in spring. We are faced with a mystery here: why they sometimes appear earlier and sometimes later. But we gain insight into this mystery when, in the given year, we observe how the timing of the spring full moon is embedded in all sprouting and growth. — Well, certainly there are other factors that influence this, but in general one will notice that what actually unfolds in spring—when plants emerge earlier one year and later the next—reflects what takes place between the Sun and the Moon. But what will people say if they merely adhere to the narrow-minded scientific view of dependence on the Earth? They’ll say: Well, in a year when plants emerge earlier, it’s because it snowed for a shorter time, because the snow melted earlier; and in a year when plants emerge later, it’s simply because it snowed for longer. — Certainly, an explanation that seems very obvious, but which actually explains nothing at all. One only gains true insight when one can say, based on observation, how plant growth depends on the effects of the forces of the sun and moon, and when one can go further from this observation and say: The fact that snow lasts longer or shorter in the year also depends on the constellation of the sun and moon. The very same forces that determine when plants sprout also determine the duration of the snow. Thus, the climatic and meteorological conditions of a year are in this way also subject to cosmic influences.

[ 10 ] Yes, by continuing to do such things over and over again, one gains insight into the life of the Earth—the life that guides this Earth on its journey through the cosmos. We say: A person can thrive when there are many cows in his barn and he gets plenty of milk—because we can point to a well-known dependence of human beings on their immediate earthly environment. Let us trace the human diet by looking into this relationship. It is only when we see the relationship to its environment—the processing of what it receives from that environment—that something appears alive to us. When we watch the Earth journey through outer space, absorbing what comes from the Sun, the Moon, and the other stars, we see it living within the cosmos. We do not construct a dead geology and geognosy; rather, we elevate what dead geology and geognosy have to offer into a description of the Earth’s life in the cosmos beyond. The Earth becomes a living being before our spiritual gaze. When we now see plants sprouting from the Earth, we see how the Earth passes on the life it receives from the cosmos to what is within it, and the Earth and plant growth become one for us. And we realize: It is nonsense to pull a plant out of the ground and then examine it in isolation—from root to flower—and believe that this is reality. This is no more a reality than a human hair that has been plucked out; it belongs to the whole organism and can only be understood as part of the whole organism. And plucking out a hair and examining it in isolation is just as nonsensical as plucking out a plant and examining it in isolation. The hair exists in connection with the human organism; the plant exists in connection with the entire living earth.

[ 11 ] In this way, one interweaves one’s own being with the living Earth, so that one does not merely feel as though one is walking upon it, subject to the forces that arise from it, but one also perceives in the surroundings that which acts upon us from the distant realms of the ether. One gains a vivid perception and sensation of how forces are at work everywhere from the cosmos—forces which, as I said, pull the etheric body outward, just as the physical body is drawn toward the Earth. And one thus gains a natural sense of the ether’s pull toward the vast expanses, just as, with regard to the physical body, one gains a sense of the gravity that draws one toward the Earth. In this way, the human being’s perspective expands more and more, so that their knowledge becomes an inner life, and through their knowledge they truly attain something. In the past, they believed the Earth to be a lifeless object in the cosmos. Through knowledge, they bring it to life. We must return to such living knowledge, the aftereffects of which we still see in seasonal observances such as Easter. But we must arrive at cosmic insights once again through developed, thoughtful knowledge—not through instinct, as was the case in ancient times. These cosmic insights will live within us in such a way that we can shape them into the artistic images we need. A person who sees the sun and moon at work in all plant growth, who feels the enthusiasm for the universe that can arise from such living insight, conveys what plants are in a truly different way than someone who absorbs and processes the abstract concepts found in today’s botany textbooks. Then everything falls into place so that the concept can be conveyed—rich in feeling and artistically—to the developing human being, to the child. And the child becomes ready for what the educator can then do with such a far-reaching insight, around the age of ten. And if one conveys to the child, through vivid and lively images, how the entire Earth is a living being—how it bears plants in a more complex way than a human bears hair—and if one creates, in the child’s perception, a unity—but a living unity—between the living being that is the Earth and this or that area of growing plants, then something opens up like a sense of expansiveness in the child’s soul. It is as if, in the child’s soul, when one presents something about plant beings to them, one is meeting them where they are—like someone who is in stale air and to whom one now supplies fresh air—so that their breath expands in the fresh air. This expansion of the soul is what occurs through such knowledge, which is truly commensurate with the mysteries of the cosmos.

[ 12 ] Do not say that the child is not ready for such ideas. The person who holds them—whose worldview forms the backdrop—knows how to shape them into forms for which the child is indeed ready, so that the child is swept along with their whole being. Simplifying things in a vivid way comes naturally once you have grasped the matter. And everything that the teacher and educator conveys to the child must flow from such a foundation. Then a genuine relationship between the developing human being and the world is truly established. And then one is led, as it were, quite naturally to express everything in vivid images, for what I have just presented to you about the plant world cannot be explained abstractly; it can only be conveyed to the child by developing it through vivid images, by appealing not merely to the intellectual capacity for knowledge, but to the whole person. And you will see how, when grasping such a concept that has been brought to life in an image, the child strangely opens up. It is then no longer the case that the child will merely respond verbally with a concept it cannot yet fully grasp, but rather it will want to tell a story and will use its arms and hands to help, it will do all sorts of things that spring from the whole person, and above all, in this doing and pointing, it will reveal the inner experience it has of how difficult it is to grasp a concept. And the most beautiful and noble thing one can achieve in learning is to have the feeling, the sense, that it is difficult and laborious to grasp a concept. — Anyone who believes that they can always grasp the essence of a thing solely through clever words, to the extent that it is necessary, has no reverence whatsoever for the things of the world; and reverence for the things of the world is what belongs to the whole, complete human being, to the extent that a human being can become complete and whole within earthly existence. To sense, even a little, how helpless one is when attempting to grasp the essence of things—how one must bring together everything one possesses as a whole human being—this is what truly defines a person’s relationship to the world. One can convey this to a child only if one possesses it oneself. A methodology of teaching must be alive; it cannot merely be practiced. Teaching methodology must blossom from the living conditions of education. And it can blossom from the living conditions of education when it arises from a living sense of self on the part of the teacher and educator within the entire universe.

[ 13 ] And once one has grasped the other aspect I spoke of this morning—once one has grasped the reality of the human astral body through an understanding of music, and has viewed the human being as an inner, wonderfully organized musical instrument—once one has grasped this in relation to the human astral body, then this in turn leads to a deeper understanding of the human being’s entire relationship to the world. Of course, one cannot convey this directly to a child in the form in which I am about to express it again, but one can certainly convey it through images. But let the teacher now look at this himself with his understanding of the human astral body—an understanding that resounds inwardly in musical forms—let him look at the human being, let him look at the various animal forms spread throughout the world. Then one will discover how there was, after all, a deep meaning in the ancient instinctive wisdom of creating a mental image of the human being as a synthetic convergence of four beings—three lower and one higher: the lion, the bull, the eagle, and the angel—the human being. For what the bull represents is the one-sided development of the lowest forces of human nature. If one considers that all the forces a human possesses in their digestive and limb systems have no counterbalance or opposing forces in the head system or the rhythmic system—if one envisions this one-sided emphasis resting on the metabolic-limb system—then one arrives at the one-sided formation that confronts us in the form of the ox. So one can form a mental image of what would happen if this cow were tempered by a human head system. What is within it would develop in the same way as the human being itself. But if the rhythmic system—the system of the middle human—is developed one-sidedly through a shortening of the intestinal system and a lagging of the head system, then one indeed obtains a one-sided picture of this in the nature of the lion. And if the head system is developed one-sidedly, so that the forces otherwise present internally in our head shoot outward into the feathers, then one obtains the bird- or eagle-like nature. And if one conceives of the forces that harmonize these three into a unity in such a way that they can also manifest themselves externally as a unity—by creating a mental image of the angelic Fourth—then one obtains the synthetic unity of the three: the human being. This is presented as a mental image, but it offers insight into the way in which the human being relates to his animal environment; and he relates in this way not merely to the bull, the eagle, and the lion, but to the entire range of animal forms spread across the earth. And in every single animal form, we can find a one-sided development of a certain organ system in the human being. Such insights were part of the ancient instinctive wisdom.

[ 14 ] Traditions of this kind still existed in later times. People expressed this in paradoxical sayings because they themselves no longer had any direct experience of it and therefore processed the old concepts in an intellectualistic way. Oken, for example, uttered the grotesque statement: If one looks at the human tongue and assumes that it is developed one-sidedly—that is, if that which is moderated within it by the powers of the head and by the fact that the tongue serves the stomach and so on, which is far removed from it, were developed one-sidedly—if a being were initially nothing but a tongue and everything else merely an appendage to it, what would the tongue be? A squid. The tongue is an octopus. — Well, it is certainly a grotesque expression, but it is something that, in a modern, intellectualistic way, points back to an ancient, essential view of nature. What is said in this way was, of course, nonsense, but it sprang from what once had a deep meaning. It is possible to rediscover what lay at the foundation of ancient knowledge as a state of the soul; it is possible to rediscover how, in a certain sense, one can conceive of human beings as divided into all the various animal forms and figures found on Earth. And when one brings them together so that one is harmonized by the other, then one obtains the human being.

[ 15 ] Thus, one can understand a person’s relationship to the external world in terms of their astral body by vividly developing their relationship to the animal world. And it must be a musical understanding that relates to the astral body. I look inward into the human being; I look outward at the vast and varied forms of the animal world: it is as if I were perceiving a symphony in which all the tones blend together into a wonderfully harmonious and melodious whole, and then, through a process of gradual development, I would separate one tone from another and place one tone beside another from this symphony. I look out into the animal world: these are the individual notes. I look into the human astral body and into what the human astral body forms in the physical and etheric bodies: I see the symphony. And if one does not remain stuck in a philistine manner at the intellectualistic grasp of the world, but has enough freedom of spirit to rise to artistic perception, then one arrives at a heartfelt reverence, imbued with religious fervor, for that invisible Being, that wondrous composer of the worlds, who first arranged the tones within the various animal forms in order to compose the human being symphonically in relation to that which reveals his animality. One must carry this in one’s soul; this is how one must understand one’s relationship to the world. Then what one must describe as the animal forms will be imbued not only with abstract concepts and natural laws, but also with true fervor toward the creation and forms of the world. And then, in every word—in the very way one speaks it—something of religious fervor will live throughout the entire lesson.

[ 16 ] These are the things that can demonstrate how teaching and education must not stem from some form of learning that one then applies, but rather how teaching and education must stem from a living, profound immersion that places one in the classroom as if one were something that, in this interaction with the children, I might say, manifests itself from the front, while from behind the mysteries of the world pulsate and flow through the human being; as if one were merely the instrument through which the world can speak to the child. Then there is a genuine methodological quality in the teaching—not one that is outwardly pedantic, but one that is inwardly vibrant with life. What matters is not that enthusiasm be contrived, but that it blossom, just as a flower blossoms from the whole plant, from what the teacher carries within as his relationship to the world.

[ 17 ] When discussing teaching methods and the conditions under which children are raised, one must speak of the enthusiasm that can be inspired by a genuine understanding of the world—not by a theoretical or abstract understanding. Then, when one approaches the child in this manner between the loss of baby teeth and puberty, one guides the child in the right way toward puberty. And at the moment in life when puberty begins, the astral body develops within the human being as an independent entity. That which was first, so to speak, absorbed as the music of the world continues to develop within. What is remarkable is that what was developed in images during childhood—between the loss of baby teeth and puberty—and what became, through living images, an inner musical and plastic possession of the soul, is then grasped by the intellect. And the human being does not take in with his intellect something that is forcibly taught to him from the outside in an intellectualistic manner, but rather takes in with the intellect that which has first grown within him in a way other than through the intellect. And then the significant moment occurs: one has prepared what must lie beyond puberty in people who are developing healthily—the self-understanding of what one already possesses. Everything one has grasped in images now comes to life through one’s own inner wellspring of understanding. The human being looks within as he seeks to turn to the intellect. This is a grasping of the human being within himself by himself. Here, a fusion takes place between the astral body, which acts musically, and the etheric body, which acts plastically. Something within the human being fuses, and through this fusion, the human being becomes aware of his own being in a healthy way after puberty. And as these two aspects of their nature converge in this way, human beings, after reaching sexual maturity, come to a true inner experience of freedom through this newly emerging understanding of what they had previously only observed.

[ 18 ] The greatest thing one can prepare in the developing human being, in the child, is that at the right moment in life, through self-understanding, the child may come to experience freedom. True freedom is an inner experience, and true freedom can only be developed in a person if, as an educator and teacher, one looks at the person in this way. Then one says to oneself: I cannot give freedom to a person; they must experience it for themselves. But then I must instill something within them to which their own being—which I leave untouched—will later feel drawn, so that it becomes immersed in what has been instilled. And I have achieved the beauty of having nurtured in the individual what is to be nurtured, while leaving untouched—in reverent awe of the divine essence within each individual human being—that which must then come to understand itself. While I cultivate in the human being everything that is not his own, I wait until his own essence takes hold of what I have cultivated within him. In this way, I do not brutally intervene in the development of the human self, but rather prepare the ground for this development of the human self, which begins after sexual maturity. If I give a person an intellectualistic education before sexual maturity, if I present them with abstract concepts or fully formed observations rather than growing, life-affirming images, then I am violating them; then I am brutally interfering with their self. I will truly educate them only if I do not interfere with their self, but wait until this self can intervene on its own in what I have laid the groundwork for in their education. And so I live with the child, looking forward to that moment when I can say: Here the self is born in its freedom; I have merely prepared the ground so that it can become aware of itself. — And I see coming toward me—if I have raised the child in this way until sexual maturity—the person who says to me: “You did for me, when I was not yet a fully formed human being, what enables me now, when I am able, to make myself into a fully formed human being!” — I see coming toward me the person who reveals to me with every glance, with every emotion: You did something for me, but you did not thereby infringe upon my freedom; rather, you offered me the opportunity to grant myself this freedom at the right moment in life. You did what now makes it possible for me to appear before you, shaping myself as a human being out of my own individuality, which you left untouched out of shy reverence.

[ 19 ] This may not be explicitly stated, but it lives within a person if they have been raised and educated in the right way throughout their elementary school years. Tomorrow’s lecture will show what still needs to be done so that we can determine whether education and instruction take into account what a person faces after reaching sexual maturity.