The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] What needs to be achieved in school is actually embedded in the entire development of culture and civilization. It is either more directly evident—in that one can easily see how a civilization expresses itself through its pedagogical art—or it remains unnoticed. After all, civilization is always a reflection of what goes on in schools; it’s just that sometimes we don’t notice it. We’ll be able to characterize this shortly in our lecture series. But let’s first consider Oriental culture.

[ 2 ] In truth, we know very little about ancient Eastern culture and what remains of it. Eastern culture has no intellectual element at all; it springs from the whole person, just as he is as an Eastern person, and it seeks to bind person to person. It hardly ever goes beyond the principle of authority. Everything that is formed arises more from love, in a natural way. Therefore, in the Orient, one cannot speak of a separate educator and a separate pupil, as we do. There, one does not have a teacher or educator, but rather a Data. The Data demonstrates; through his personality, he embodies what the growing person is to embrace. The data is the one who shows everything; he does not teach at all. Teaching would make no sense in Eastern culture. There is a very famous educator in Europe—Herbart—who was particularly influential in Central Europe with regard to educational matters. The saying originates from him: “I cannot conceive of an education without instruction.” — For him, everything was meticulously calculated around how to teach. An Eastern thinker would have said: “I cannot conceive of an education with instruction”—because in the act of educating, in setting an example and living it out, what is to emerge in the pupil is already inherent within the process. This extends all the way to the initiate, the guru, and the chela, the disciple, who is not taught but shown by example.

[ 3 ] If one can address such matters, it becomes easier to understand what it means when we say: Through Waldorf education, we want to reorient all education toward the whole person. We do not want to separate spiritual and physical education; rather, when we educate the body—because we educate it based on spiritual principles, yet in a very practical way—we want to extend that education all the way to matters of health. We want to allow the spirit to work within the body; thus, in the Waldorf school, physical education is not neglected, but it is structured in such a way that one recognizes: the human being is soul and spirit. And our educational approach certainly includes everything necessary for physical education.

[ 4 ] Then we must learn once again to understand what the Greeks understood. Greek education was based on gymnastics. The teacher was a gymnast; that is to say, he knew what movement means for a human being. To the Greeks of earlier times, it would have sounded quite incomprehensible if someone had said to them: “We should teach children logical thinking.” For the Greeks knew what effect it had when a child was taught—somewhat more gently among the Athenians, somewhat more rigorously among the Spartans—sound physical education. He was clear on this: If I know how to move my fingers in a particular movement so that I become skillful rather than clumsy, this extends to my entire being, and I learn to think properly through the skillful use of my limbs; and I learn to speak properly when I move correctly through gymnastics. — Everything in human beings that is so-called intellectual and spiritual education, which tends toward abstraction, arises only in an unnatural way from direct instruction. Education should arise from the way one is able to move one’s body. That is why our civilization has become so abstract. There are men today who cannot knit a sock, who cannot even sew a button back on a pair of pants if it has come off. Here at the Waldorf School, boys and girls sit together, and the boys develop a genuine enthusiasm for knitting and crocheting; they do it—and in the process they learn to manage their thoughts. It’s no wonder that a person, no matter how well trained in logic, cannot think properly if they don’t know how to knit. At the same time, we notice in our day how much more flexible and agile women’s thought processes are. One need only look at the admission of women to universities to see how much more flexible women’s mental and emotional lives are than those of men, whose minds have become rigid and abstract through abstract, detached activity. And this is most evident in commercial activity. When you watch a businessman making his business decisions, you feel like climbing the walls.

[ 5 ] These are the things one must come to understand again. One must realize that a boy, no matter how much I draw on the blackboard, learns to distinguish between acute and obtuse angles much better one must know that one learns to understand the world much better than through any attempt at explanation by getting children into the habit of holding a pencil between their big toe and the next toe and still managing to produce reasonably well-formed letters—that is to say, when the human spirit flows from the whole body. In Greek culture, attention was paid to how a child learns to move, how it learns to endure heat and cold, and how it learns to fit into the physical world, because there was a sense of how the spiritual and soul aspects also develop properly from a properly developed physicality. The Greeks, educated as gymnasts, embraced the whole human being and allowed the other abilities to develop from that. Today, through our abstract science, we know a very important truth, but we know it only in the abstract: When children learn to write easily with their right hand, we now know that this is related to the fact that the speech center in humans is located in the left hemisphere of the brain; thus, learning to speak and to write are intrinsically connected in this way. We recognize the connection between hand gestures and speech; likewise, if we go further, we can also come to understand, through physiology, the connection between movement and thought. So today we already have some abstract understanding of how thought and speech arise from the human capacity for movement; the Greeks, however, knew this in the most comprehensive sense. That is why the gymnast said: A person will learn to think properly if only he learns to walk and jump properly; if he learns to throw the discus properly. —And if he learns to throw beyond the target, he will also learn the “tortoise’s conclusion” and arrive at all those remarkable logical concepts that were enumerated in Greece. And through this, one learns to place oneself within reality. Today, we usually think like this: Here is a lawyer, there is a client; the lawyer knows the facts, the other does not. — But because in Greece people were accustomed to throwing beyond the target, they knew: What happens when a legal expert has a student in the study of law, and this student is taught so well by him that he is bound to win every case? But then a lawsuit unfolds between him and his teacher, and the truth comes to light: You will win the case under all circumstances and lose it under all circumstances. — You know the conclusion: it hangs in the air. Thus, all thought and speech developed from gymnastic education; it encompassed the whole person.

[ 6 ] Let us now turn to Romanism. The whole human being recedes into the background there; he remains frozen in a pose. For the Greeks, what still lives in movement is elemental and natural. A Roman in a toga looked quite different from a Greek; he also moved differently, for he had become a pose. In contrast, education shifted its focus to a specific aspect of human nature: speech, and the art of speaking beautifully. This was still a significant endeavor, for the entire upper body is engaged in speech, right down to the diaphragm and the gut. A great deal of the human being is involved when one learns to speak beautifully. And it all came down to reaching the human being through education, to shaping the human being into something. This remained even as culture entered the Middle Ages. In Greece, the most important educator was the gymnast, who focused on the whole person; in Roman culture, the most important educator became the rhetorician. The entire cultural and worldview in Greece was oriented toward the beautiful human being in his or her entirety. One cannot understand a single piece of Greek poetry or a single Greek sculpture without realizing that the entire worldview is centered on the human being in motion. When one sees a Greek statue, one is immediately tempted to infer from the movement of the mouth: what is the stance of the feet, and so on? This changes in Roman culture. There, the rhetorician takes the place of the gymnast; the entire culture becomes one of oratory. The entire education system is geared toward speaking rhetorically, speaking beautifully, and developing eloquence. This continues into the Middle Ages, when people were still being shaped as human beings. You can see this if you ask yourself: What was present in medieval education that was intended to shape people to a certain degree of refinement? There were, for example, the so-called seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy or astrology, and music. The aim was to educate the human being as a human being and to help them progress as a human being. Arithmetic, for example, was not taught in the same way as it is today; rather, the focus was on the ability to introduce students to the handling of forms and numbers. And in music, for example, one immersed oneself in it as part of one’s entire life. And astronomy: there, people were introduced to thinking cosmically. In everything, the approach was centered on the individual. The so-called “real-world subjects” of today played hardly any role in instruction. Little value was placed on people absorbing knowledge as “science”; far greater value was placed on their ability to move, speak, think, and calculate properly. But the idea that people should absorb any pre-established truths was of lesser importance. Consequently, the entire perspective on culture and civilization developed through people’s demeanor, actions, and self-expression. People took pride in having individuals who could speak eloquently and who could truly represent humanity.

[ 7 ] The cultural movement that has persisted into later times—and, to a certain extent, even to this day—is the Jesuit educational system, which, when it was established and still throughout the 18th century and even into the first half of the 19th century, aimed to, one might almost say, “train” people into individuals of strong will and, as such, send them out into life. That was, in fact, the aim of Jesuit culture. And it was not until the course of the 19th century that the Jesuits, so as not to fall too far behind others, introduced the real world into their teaching. This is how the Jesuits developed energetic, strong characters; so that today, even if one is an opponent of Jesuitism, one is compelled to say: If only we could produce people with such a sense of purpose—and produce them for good—as the Jesuits did in the face of humanity’s decadence!

[ 8 ] This development of humanity is still evident in Roman culture, when the gymnast became the rhetorician. We can therefore see the immense value placed in a civilization founded on rhetorical education—a value that extends to everything in life that takes on global significance through rhetoric. Just try for a moment to view the entire life of the Middle Ages through this lens: everything reveals that life was viewed in the same way one views speech—when it is to be rhetorical—how a person should behave, how they should greet others, and so on. None of this is a matter of course; rather, it is all shaped according to a concept of beauty, just as language is appreciated in rhetoric according to a concept of beauty. There you see the full global significance of rhetorical pedagogy emerge; whereas the global significance of Greek pedagogy lies in what is visibly expressed in human movement.

[ 9 ] And now comes the modern era with the 16th century; in fact, it had already begun to take shape in the 15th century. Once again, the rhetorical—which still plays a major role in human nature—is being pushed aside. Just as the rhetorical had already supplanted the gymnastic, the rhetorical is now being pushed aside even further, and we are now focusing on an even smaller aspect: that which increasingly tends toward intellectuality. And whereas the Roman educator was the rhetorician, our educator is the doctor. Whereas the gymnast was still a whole human being, and the rhetorician was someone who, at least when he appeared in public, still sought to represent the human being: our doctor has ceased to be a human being. He already denies the human being and grows into pure abstractions; he is now nothing more than a skeleton of civilization. That is why, in more recent times, at least the “doctor” has taken on the peculiar habit of dressing in a worldly manner; he no longer likes to wear the beret before the bench; he dresses in such a way that one cannot immediately tell from his appearance what kind of skeleton of civilization he is. But our entire educational system has been geared toward the “doctor” since the 16th century. And those who educate in the spirit of this worldly significance no longer bring human formation and human development into the school; rather, they impart knowledge to the child. The child is supposed to absorb something; it is not to be shaped or developed—it is to know something, to be taught. Certainly, progressive education rails against this “doctor” principle, but it does not go beyond it after all. — Anyone who sees through these things—and, in particular, has a clear mental image of how a Greek child was educated—and now looks into the modern school, where, even during physical education, the development and shaping of the human being are completely overlooked, and where outlines and excerpts from the sciences are presented to the youngest children, must say to themselves: Not only do teachers become such skeletons of civilization—or already are, or, if they are not yet, regard it as an ideal—but in one way or another they will eventually become so, or at least feel the need to be so; not only are the teachers like this, but these little children look like tiny “doctors.” - And if one were to express what distinguishes a Greek child from a modern child, one might say: A Greek child is a human being; a modern child easily becomes a “little doctor.”

[ 10 ] This is the transformation of the world through the shaping of culture. We no longer focus on the human being, but on what the human being is to be taught, what he is to know and carry within himself. Thus, Western civilization has developed in such a way that it has descended from the gymnast, through the rhetorician, to the doctor. It must rise again. The most important concept for modern pedagogy in recent times is: the overcoming of the doctor. We must regain our perspective on the whole human being.

[ 11 ] Imagine how this is reflected in the global significance of pedagogy. There was a university in Central Europe that, until quite recently, had a professorship in eloquence. If we go back to the first half of the 19th century, we find such professorships in eloquence—the art of speaking well, or what remains of rhetoric—at universities everywhere. Now, there was a rather prominent man at that university who held the position of professor of eloquence. But he would never have had any students if that were all he were; for no one felt a need to hear eloquence anymore—he lectured only on Greek archaeology. The university directory listed him as “Professor of Eloquence,” but one could hear only Greek archaeology from him; he had to teach something that leads to knowledge, not to skill. And this, after all, has become the ideal of modern education. This then leads to a life in which people know an immense amount. It is truly hardly an earthly world anymore in which we live today, where people know so much. They know so much, but they can do nothing at all; for there is no bridge from knowledge to skill. If, for example, someone is trained to be a doctor, they must certainly pass their final exam, but it is even officially acknowledged that they cannot do anything yet; they must first complete their years of practical training. But it is nonsense if, right from the very first years, one is not taught in such a way that one can actually do something right away. What does it matter if a child knows what addition is—as long as they can add? What does it matter if a child knows what a city is—as long as they have a concrete understanding of the city? In every case, what matters is that one enters into life. And the doctor leads people out of life, not into it.

[ 12 ] And so we can see the global significance of pedagogy: In ancient Greece, this was still very evident when one attended the Olympic Games. There, one could see what the Greeks valued; there, one knew that only the gymnast could excel in school. It was similar during the rhetorical era. And what about us? Some people want to revive the Olympic Games. They are eccentric, for there is no longer any need for them in today’s world. What they do are superficial imitations; nothing is achieved by them. But what permeates people today is something that does not lie in language, nor in the forms through which they express themselves, but rather in their thoughts. And so it has come to pass that science has ultimately acquired a downright demonic significance for the world. It has acquired this demonic significance because people believed that culture could develop at all on the basis of these contrived concepts; that life must be shaped according to these concepts. This applies, for example, to socialism in recent times; it seeks to shape life entirely according to these concepts. This is how Marxism entered the world: a few contrived, stripped-down concepts of “surplus value” and so on; life is then to be judged and shaped according to them, and one fails to see the connections. But one must grasp the connections!—Let us go to a place, even in more western Central Europe. Decades ago, a philosopher taught there who had lost all touch with life, who had reduced everything to concepts. He believed he could shape life through concepts. He expounded these ideas, had many Russian students in particular, and his philosophy was put into practice in Bolshevism. He himself was still a quite conventional, bourgeois man; he still had no idea what the seed sown in his philosophy would grow into. Then this strange plant grew out of it, which blossomed into Bolshevism. At Western universities, the seeds of Bolshevism were first sown in the minds of the young people through abstract, intellectualistic education. But just as someone who knows nothing about plants does not know what will grow from a seed, so too did these people know nothing of what would grow from this seed. They only see it when the seed sprouts, precisely because people today no longer understand the great interconnections of life.

[ 13 ] This is the global significance of modern, intellectualistic education: that it completely detaches us from life. And we see this when we simply observe external things as they are. We are, in fact, no longer imbued with what life is, in any area. We had books before the World War. Yes, what is written in these books—one knows it, one masters it—only as long as one is writing in the book or reading it. Otherwise, it sits on the library shelf. There, intellectual life is encased. And only when someone, for example, is required to complete a dissertation does he have to bring it to himself. This takes place entirely on the surface, and the person in question is glad if the content doesn’t have to penetrate any deeper into them than just into their head. But that’s how it is everywhere.

[ 14 ] But let’s now turn our attention to life itself. There we have the vibrant economic life, legal life, and spiritual life. These things are happening, but we no longer think about them. We no longer think in terms of inner realities at all; we think in terms of bank statements. What remains of our economic life—and often of our spiritual life as well—within the banking system, for example, when accounts are set up for schools? What remains are the abstract numbers in their interrelated balance sheet values. And what has this brought about in life? It has had this effect: people are no longer connected to what they do. They are gradually reaching a point where it makes no difference to them whether they become a grain merchant or a clothing merchant; for they care just as much about the pants as about anything else. They only calculate what the business will bring them; they look only at the abstract numbers to see which field is still the most profitable. The bank has taken the place of vibrant economic life. People withdraw money from the bank but otherwise let it operate in the realm of the abstract. Everything has been transformed into an abstract, external reality. Consequently, people no longer remain personally involved in the affairs of the world. When the bank was founded, it was still tied to human beings, because people were accustomed to this from their earlier involvement in the living work of existence. This was still the case in the first half of the 19th century. Back then, the person who was the bank’s head still imprinted his personal character on the bank; his will was still present within it, and he still lived in it as a personality. — I’d like to share a little story here about how the banker Rothschild behaved when a representative of the King of France wanted to take out a loan from him. When the envoy of the King of France arrived, Rothschild was in the middle of a meeting with a leather merchant. The envoy, who had come regarding a government loan, sent word that he was there. Rothschild, who still had to negotiate with the leather merchant, had him told to wait. The minister could not understand why he, the envoy of the King of France, should be made to wait, and he sent word again. Rothschild replied: “I am currently negotiating matters of leather, not matters of state.” - At that, the minister became so furious that, no longer willing to wait, he flung open the door to Rothschild’s room, stormed in, and said, “I am the envoy of the King of France!” - Rothschild replied, “Please, have a seat!” — The envoy thought he hadn’t heard correctly and repeated: “I am the envoy of the King of France!”—for he could not comprehend that anyone would offer him a chair in such a situation. To which Rothschild replied: “Take two chairs!”

[ 15 ] That is how the individual still exerted influence back then, because the individual was present. Is the individual still present today? Only in exceptional cases—for example, when someone violates public order. Otherwise, where the individual used to be, there is now the corporation—the impersonal corporation. Today, one no longer stands as an individual within these affairs. If one asks, “What is a corporation?”—one might say: a company made up of people who are rich today and poor tomorrow. For things take a completely different course today than they did in the past; they accumulate today, dissolve again tomorrow, and people are thrown into and out of this course of events, while money manages itself. So it happens today that a person is happy when he finally lands a job where he can set aside some money. He buys a car, and after a while he buys a second one. Then the course of events continues in this way, and the person reaches a point where his money begins to run low; now he sells one car, and a little later he sells the other. But what really matters is that people no longer control economic and business life themselves; they are cast out of the objective course of business life. I first described this in Nuremberg in 1908, but people didn’t understand much of it. Just as I said in Vienna in the spring of 1914: Everything is rushing toward a great global catastrophe because people are moving away from the concrete and increasingly into the abstract, and because one can see how the abstract must ultimately lead into chaos. — Yet people did not want to understand this.

[ 16 ] But what must be kept in mind above all—if one has a heart for the art of education—is that one must work from the abstract back toward the concrete, that everything depends on the individual; that it is therefore not so important for the teacher to know geography and history, English or French, and so on, but rather to know people, and to base instruction and education on a genuine understanding of human nature. Then, as far as I’m concerned, he may sit down and look up the material for his lessons in advance from an encyclopedia; for someone who does this, yet as an educator is grounded in a genuine understanding of human nature, will still be a better teacher in school than one who has passed his exams with flying colors but is far removed from a genuine understanding of human nature.

[ 17 ] Then we come to the global significance of the art of education; then we understand how what happens in school is reflected in the broader culture. This was easy to see among the Greeks. The gymnast was a presence everywhere in public life. When the Greek—indifferent as he always was—stood before the Agora, one could see that he had received a gymnastic education. Among the Romans, what was alive in their schooling was at least expressed in its outward forms. But for us, what lives in the school finds expression in life only in that life is slipping further and further away from us; that we are growing out of life rather than into it; that our ledgers, in a connection we scarcely suspect, have a life of their own that eludes us, for we have no power over them. All of this writes itself; it leads an abstract, purely numerical existence.

[ 18 ] And if we take a look at people who have attained an education, at most we can still recognize them by the fact that they wear glasses—or don’t wear them—that is, by a limited, small organ. The significance of today’s pedagogy is that it is gradually undermining the significance of the world.

[ 19 ] We must bring the world—the real world—back into the school. To do this, however, teachers must be fully immersed in the world; they must have a lively interest in everything that exists in the world. Only when the male teacher becomes a man of the world—and the female teacher, of course, a “woman of the world”—can the world truly come alive within the school. And the world must be alive in the school; even if it is expressed there first in a playful way, then in an aesthetic way, and subsequently in a preparatory way—the world must be alive in the school. That is why it is already much more necessary today to emphasize this element of attitude and feeling in modern pedagogy than to keep devising new methods over and over again. Many of the methods that have been handed down from time immemorial are good. And what I wanted to say to you is certainly not meant to cast a shadow, in any way, over the outstanding educators of the 19th century, whom I fully acknowledge. I even see in the educators of the 19th century people of great genius and great capacity, but they were children of the intellectualist age; with their abilities, they contributed to the intellectualization of our age. And people today have no idea how intellectualized they are. The global significance of a new pedagogy must lie in our moving beyond this intellectualization. Then the various branches of human life will grow together again. Then people will understand what it once meant to view education as a form of healing and how this was connected to the universal significance of the human being. They had a mental image of the human being, who, upon being born into earthly existence, actually stood one level below humanity, and who must first be raised up—healed—to become a human being. Education was a form of healing; it was, in and of itself, part of medical and hygienic practice. Today, everything is separated. People want to place the school doctor alongside the teacher, physically separated. But things don’t work that way. Placing the school doctor alongside the teacher is roughly equivalent to seeking out tailors who sew the left side of one’s coat and others who sew the right side; and then you don’t know who will sew the two separate parts together. And likewise, if you take the measures of the teacher who is completely untrained in medicine—the right side of the coat—and then the measures of the doctor who is completely untrained in pedagogy—the left side of the coat—you don’t know who will sew them together. But this is what it will come down to: overcoming the “left-wing” tailor and the “right-wing” tailor and returning to the unified tailor. But such impossibilities are usually noticed only at the outermost fringes of life, not where life should truly be bubbling. That is why it is so difficult for us today even to grasp what is meant by something like the Waldorf School. It does not mean a sectarian withdrawal from life, but rather the most intense immersion into life.

[ 20 ] In such a short lecture series, of course, I can only provide a brief overview of everything. That is what I have attempted to do, but I hope I have nevertheless offered some food for thought, and I will now conclude the entire course with the final lecture.