LECTURE III
GREEK
EDUCATION AND THE
MIDDLE
AGES
7th
August, 1923.
When I
attempted to bring before you the Greek ideal of education, it was
with the object that this ideal should stimulate ideas which ought to
prevail in our modern system of education. For at the present stage
of human life it is, of course, impossible to adopt the same
educational methods as the Greeks. In spite of this, however, an
all-embracing truth in regard to education can be learned from the
Greek ideal, and this we will now-consider.
Up to the
seventh year of life, the Greek child was brought up at home. Public
education was not concerned with children under the age of seven.
They were brought up at home, where the women lived in seclusion,
apart from the ordinary pursuits of social life, which were an affair
of the men. This in itself is the reinforcement of a truth of
education, without knowledge of which one cannot really educate or
teach, for the seventh year of life marks an all-important stage of
childhood.
The main
phenomenon characteristic of the seventh year of human life is the
change of teeth. This is an event to which far too little importance
is attached nowadays. For think of it, the nature of the human
organism is such that it brings the first teeth with it as an
inheritance, or, rather, it brings with it the force to produce these
first teeth which are discarded at the seventh year. It is incorrect
to imagine that the force which pushes up the second teeth at about
the seventh year unfolds for the first time at this age. It is
developing slowly from birth onwards, and simply reaches its
culmination at about the seventh year of life. Then it brings forth
the second teeth from the totality of force in the human
organization. This event is of the most extraordinary importance in
the course of human life as a whole, because it does not occur again.
The forces present between birth and the seventh year reach their
culmination with the appearance of the second teeth, and they do not
act again within the entire course of earthly life. Now this fact
should be properly understood, but it can only be understood by
an unprejudiced observation of other processes that are being
enacted in the human being at about this seventh year of life Up to
the seventh year the human being grows and develops according to
Nature-principles, as it were. The Nature-forces of growth, the being
of soul and the spiritual functions have not yet separated from one
another in the child's organization; they form a unity up to the
seventh year. While the human being is developing his organs, his
nervous system and his blood circulation, this development betokens
the evolution of his soul and spirit. The human being is provided
with the strong inner impulsive force which brings forth the second
teeth because everything in this period of life is still interwoven.
With the coming of the second teeth, this impelling force weakens. It
withdraws somewhat; it does not work so strongly from out of the
inner being. Why is this? Now suppose new teeth were to appear every
seven years. (I will take an extreme illustration for the sake of
clarity.) If the same organic forces which we bear within us up to
the seventh year, if this unity formed of body, soul and spirit were
to continue through the whole of life, new teeth would appear
approximately every seven years! The old teeth would fall out and be
replaced by new ones, but throughout our whole life we should remain
children as we are up to the seventh year. We should not unfold the
life of soul and spirit that is separated off from the Nature-life.
The fact that the physical force decreases in the seventh year and
the bodily pressure and impulses to a certain extent grow less
— for the body now produces more delicate forces from itself
— makes it possible for the subtler forces of soul life to
develop. The body grows weaker, the soul stronger, as it were.
A similar
process also takes place at puberty, in the fourteenth or fifteenth
year. The element of soul now weakens to a certain extent and the
spiritual functions make their appearance. So that if we take the
course of the first three life-periods: up till the seventh year man
is pre-eminently a being of body-soul-spirit in one, from the seventh
to the fourteenth years he is a being of body-soul with a separate
nature of soul and spirit, and from puberty onwards he is a threefold
being, a physical being, a being of soul and a being of spirit.
This truth
opens up deep vistas into the whole evolution of the human being.
Indeed, without knowledge of it we really ought not to venture upon
the education of children. For unless we realise the far-reaching
consequences of this truth, all education must necessarily be more or
less a dilettante affair.
The Greek
— and this is the amazing thing — knew of this truth. To
the Greek, it was an irrevocable law that when a boy had reached his
seventh year he must be taken away from his parents' house, from the
mere Nature-principles, the elementary necessities of
upbringing. This knowledge was so deeply rooted in the Greeks that we
do well to remind ourselves of it to-day. Later on, in the Middle
Ages, traces of this all-important principle of education still
existed.
The modern
age of rationalism and intellectualism has forgotten all these
things, and, indeed, even takes pride in showing that it places no
value on such truths, for the child is usually required to go to
school at an earlier age, before the end of the seventh year. We may
say, indeed, this departure from such eternal principles of human
evolution is typical of the chaos obtaining in our modern system of
education. We must rise out of this chaos. The Greek placed so high a
value on this truth that he based all education upon it. For all that
I described yesterday was carried out in order to ground education
upon this same truth.
What did
the Greek see in the little child from birth to the time of the
change of teeth? A being sent down to earth from spiritual heights!
He saw in man a being who had lived in a spiritual world before
earthly life. And as he observed the child he tried to discover
whether its body was rightly expressing the divine life or
pre-earthly existence. It was of importance for the Greek that in the
child up to the seventh year he should recognize that a physical body
is here enclosing a spiritual being who has descended. There was a
terribly barbaric custom in certain regions of Greece to expose and
thus kill the child who was instinctively believed to be only a
sheath, and not expressing a true spiritual being in its physical
nature; this was the outcome of rigid regard to the thought that the
physical human being in the first seven years of life is the vesture
of a divine-spiritual being.
Now when
the child passes its seventh year — and this, too, was known in
Greece — it descends a second stage lower. During the first
seven years the child is released from the heavens, still bearing its
own inherited sheaths, which are laid aside at the seventh year, for
not only the first teeth but the whole body is cast off every seven
years — cast off for the first time, that is to say, in the
seventh year. In the first seven years of life the bodily sheaths
revealed to the Greek what the forces of pre-earthly life had made
out of the child. The child was thought to bear its earthly
sheaths proper, its first earthly sheaths, only from about the
seventh to the fourteenth years onwards.
I am
trying now to express these things as they were conceived of by
the highest type of Greek. He thought to himself: I reverence the
Divine in the little child, hence there is no need to concern myself
with it in the first seven years of life. It can grow up in the
family in which the Gods have placed it. Supersensible forces
from pre-earthly life are still working in it. When the seventh year
is reached it behoves man himself to become responsible for the
development of these forces. What must man do, then, when he knows
how to pay true reverence to the Divine in the human being? What must
he do as regards education? He must develop to the highest extent the
human faculties that have unfolded in the child up to the seventh
year. The Divine power, the way in which the spiritual expresses
itself in the body — this must be developed to the greatest
possible extent. Thus the Gymnast had perforce to be convinced of the
necessity to understand the Divine power in the human body and to
develop it in the body. The same healing, life-sustaining forces
which the child possesses from pre-earthly existence, and which have
been fostered in an elementary way up to the change of teeth —
these must be preserved from the seventh to the fourteenth year by
human insight, by human art. Further education must then proceed
wholly in accordance with Nature. And so all education was
‘gymnastic’ because the divine education of the human
being was seen as a ‘gymnastic.’ Man must continue the
‘divine gymnastic’ by means of education.
This was
more or less the attitude of the Greek to the child. He said to himself:
If through my intuition I am able to preserve in freshness and health the
forces of growth which have developed in the child up to the seventh year,
then I am educating in the very best way; I am enabling the forces which
are there by nature up to the seventh year to remain throughout the
whole of earthly life, right up to death. To see that the
“child” in the human being was not lost till death
— this was the great and far-reaching maxim of Greek education.
The Greek teacher thought: I must see to it that these forces between
the seventh and fourteenth years — the forces of childhood
— remain living throughout the whole of his earthly life, right
up to death. A far-reaching and deeply significant principle of
education! And all gymnastic exercises were based on the perception
that the forces present up to the seventh year have in no way
disappeared, but are merely slumbering within the human being and
must be awakened from day to day. To waken the slumbering forces
between the seventh and the fourteenth years, to draw forth from the
human being in this second period of life what was there by nature in
the first period — this constituted Greek gymnastic education.
The very glory of his culture and civilization arose from the fact
that the Greek, by a right education, was at pains to preserve the
‘child’ in the human being right up to death. And when we
wonder at the ‘glory that was Greece,’ we must ask
ourselves: Can we imitate this ideal? We cannot, for it rests upon
three factors, without which it is unthinkable.
These
three factors must be remembered by the modern educationalist when he
looks back to Greece. The first thing to remember is the following:
— These principles of education were only applied to a small
portion of mankind, to a higher class, and they presuppose the
existence of slavery. Without slavery it would not have been possible
to educate a small class of mankind in this way. For in order to
educate thus, part of man's work on the earth fell to the lot of
those who were left to their elemental human destiny, without
education in the true Greek sense. Greek civilization and Greek
education are alike unthinkable without the existence of slavery. And
so the delight of those who look back with inner satisfaction on what
Greece accomplished in the evolutionary history of mankind is
tempered with the tragic realization that it was achieved at the cost
of slavery. That is one factor.
The second
factor is that of the whole position of woman in Greek social life.
The women lived a life withdrawn from the direct impulses at the root
of Greek civilization, and it was this secluded life that alone made
it possible for the child to be left, up to the seventh year, to the
care of the home influences, which were thereby given full scope.
Without any actual knowledge, but merely out of human instincts, the
child was led on by the elemental forces of growth to the time of the
change of teeth. One may say it was necessary that the child's life
up to this point, should, despite its different nature, proceed just
as unconsciously in the wider environment of the family,
detached from the mother's body, as when the embryonic life had
proceeded through the forces of Nature. This was the second factor.
The third
is really a paradox to modern man, but he must, none the less, grow
to understand it. The second point — the position of women in
Greece — is easier to understand, for we know from a
superficial observation of modern life that between the Greek age and
our own time women have sought to take their share in social life.
This is a result of what took place during the Middle Ages. And if we
still wanted to be as Greek as the Greeks were, with the interest in
conscious education confined exclusively to men, I wonder how small
this audience would be if it were only made up of the men who were
allowed to concern themselves with education!
The third
factor lies deeper down, and its nature makes it difficult for modern
civilization to acknowledge that we have to attain our spiritual life
by human effort, by work. Anyone who observes the spiritual
activities of civilized life will be obliged to admit that as regards
the most important domain of civilized life, we must count upon what
we shall achieve in the future by effort. Observing all the human
effort which has to be spent on the attainment of a spiritual life in
present-day civilization, we look with some astonishment at the
spiritual life of the ancient Greeks and especially of the ancient
Orientals. For this spiritual life actually existed. A truth such as
that of the part played in human life by the seventh year, a truth
which modern man simply does not realise, was deeply rooted in
Greece. (Outer symptoms indicate its significance but modern culture
is very far from understanding it.) It was one of the mighty truths
that flowed through ancient spiritual life. And we stand in wonder
before this spiritual life when we learn to know what wisdom, what
spiritual knowledge was once possessed by man.
If,
without being confused by modern naturalistic and materialistic
prejudices, we go back to early civilization, we find, at the
beginning of historical life a universal, penetrating wisdom
according to which man directed his life. It was not an acquired
wisdom, but it flowed to mankind through revelation, through a kind
of inspiration. And it is this that modern civilization will not
acknowledge. It will not recognize that a primal wisdom was bestowed
spiritually upon man, and that he evolved it in such a way that, for
instance, even in Greece, care was still taken to preserve the
‘child’ in man until the time of earthly death. Now this
revelation of primeval wisdom is no more to be found — a fact
deeply connected with the whole evolution of man. Part of man's
progress consists in the fact that the primal wisdom no longer comes
to him without activity on his part but that he must attain to wisdom
through his own efforts. This is connected in an inner sense
with the growth of the impulse of human freedom which is at present
in its strongest phase. The progress of humanity does not ascend, as
is readily imagined, in a straight line from one stage to another.
What man has to attain from out of his own being in the present age,
he has to attain at the cost of losing revelation from without,
revelation which locked within itself the deepest of all wisdom.
The loss
of primeval wisdom, the necessity to attain wisdom by man's own
labours, this is related to the third factor in Greek education. Thus
we may say: Greek education may fill us with admiration but it cannot
be dissociated from these three factors • ancient slavery, the
ancient position of woman, and the ancient relationship of spiritual
wisdom to spiritual life. None of the three exist to-day nor would
they now be considered worthy of true human existence. We are living
at a time when the following question arises: How ought we to
educate, realizing as we do that these three a priori conditions
have been swept away by human progress? We must therefore observe the
signs of the times if we desire to discover the true impulse
for our modern education from inner depths.
* * *
The whole
of the so-called mediaeval development of man which followed the
civilization of Greece and has indeed come right down to modern
times, proved by its very nature that in regard to education and
methods of teaching, different paths had to be struck from those of
Greece, which were so well-fitted to that earlier age. The nature of
man had, indeed, changed. The efficacy and reliability of Greek
education were an outcome of the fact that it was based upon
‘habit’ — upon that which can be built into the
very structure of the human body.
Up to the
change of teeth in the seventh year, the development of man's
being is inwardly connected with the body. The development of the
bodily functions, however, proceeds as though unconsciously. Indeed
it is only when the faculties work unconsciously that they are right;
they are reliable only when what I have to do is implanted into the
dexterity of my hands and is accomplished of itself, without need for
further reflection.
When
practice has become habit, then I have achieved securely what I have
to achieve through my body. The real aim of Greek life was to make
the whole earthly existence of man a matter of ‘habit’ in
this sense. From his education onwards until his death, all man's
actions were to become habitual, so habitual that it should be
impossible to leave them off. For when education is based on such a
principle as this, the forces which are natural to the child up to
the change of teeth, up to the seventh year, can be maintained; the
child forces can be maintained until earthly life ends with death.
Now what
happened when through historical circumstances new peoples pouring
over from the East to the West founded a new civilization during the
Middle Ages, and established themselves in Middle Europe and in
the West, even in America? These peoples assimilated the qualities
natural to the Southern regions but their coming brought quite
different habits of life to mankind. What was the result of this? It
set up the conditions for a totally different kind of
development, a development of the individual. In this time, for
example, men came to the conscious realization that slavery ought not
to be; to the realization that women must be respected. At this time
it also became apparent as regards the evolution of the individual,
in the period between the seventh and fourteenth year, when
development is no longer of a purely bodily nature but when the soul
is to a certain degree emancipated from the body that the child in
this period was not now susceptible of being treated as in earlier
times. In effect, the conservation of the forces of early childhood
in the boy between the ages of seven and fourteen that had been
practised hitherto was no longer possible.
This is
the most significant phenomenon of the Middle Ages and right up to
modern times so far as this second period of life is concerned. And
only now for the first time do we see the powerful forces of revolt
which belong to the period when the fourteenth and fifteenth years
have been passed, the period during which human nature rises up most
strongly in revolt, when indeed it bears within itself the forces of
revolt.
How did
this revolt in human nature express itself? The old primeval wisdom
which flowed down naturally to the Greeks came to be in Roman and
Mediaeval tradition something that was only preserved through books,
through writing. Indeed it was only believed on the authority of
tradition. The concept of Faith as it developed during the Middle
Ages did not exist in very ancient civilizations, nor even in the
culture of the Greeks. It would have been nonsense in those times.
The concept of Faith only arose when the primeval wisdom no longer
flowed directly into man, but was merely preserved. This still
applies fundamentally to the greater part of humanity to-day.
Everything of a spiritual, super-sensible nature is tradition.
It is ‘believed,’ it is no longer immediate and actual.
Nature and the perception of Nature this is an actuality, but all
that refers to the super-sensible, to super-sensible life, is
tradition. Since the Middle Ages man has given himself up to this
kind of tradition, thinking
at times it is true that he does in fact experience these things. But
the truth is that direct spiritual knowledge and revelation came to
be preserved in written form, living from generation to generation as
a heritage merely on the authority of tradition. This was the outer
aspect. And what of the inner aspect? Let us now look back once again
to Greece. In Greece, faculties of soul developed as of themselves
because the whole human being acquired habits of life whereby the
‘child’ was preserved in man till death. Music proceeded
from the breathing and blood circulation, intellect from gymnastic.
Without being cultivated, a marvellous memory evolved in the Greeks
as a result of the development of the habits of the body. We in our
age have no longer any idea of the kind of memory that arose, even
among the Greeks, without being cultivated in any way, and in the
ancient East this was even more significant. The body was nurtured,
habits formed, and then the memory arose from the body itself. A
marvellous memory was the outcome of a right culture of the body.
A living
proof of the fact that we have no conception of the kind of memory
possessed by the Greeks, a memory which made it so easy for the
spiritual treasures to be handed down and become a common good, is
the fact that shorthand writers have to attend when lectures are
given which people want to remember! This would have seemed absurd in
Greek civilization, for why should one wish to keep that which
one has manifestly thrown away? It was all preserved truly in
the memory, by the proficiency of the body. The soul developed itself
out of this bodily proficiency. And because of this self-development
she stood in contrast to that which had arisen from revelation
— the primeval wisdom. And this primal spiritual wisdom
disappeared, grew to be mere tradition. It had to be carried
from generation to generation by the priesthood who preserved the
traditions. And inwardly man was forced to begin to cultivate a
faculty which the Greek never thought of as a necessity. In education
during the Middle Ages it became more and more, necessary to
cultivate the memory. The memory absorbed what had been preserved by
tradition.
Thus,
historical tradition outwardly and remembrance and memory inwardly,
had to be cultivated by education. Memory was the first soul quality
to be cultivated when the emancipation of the soul had taken place.
And those who know what importance was attached to the memory
in schools only a short while ago can form an opinion of how rigidly
this cultivation of the memory — which was the result of an
historical necessity — has been preserved.
And so
through the whole of the Middle Ages education tosses like a ship
that cannot balance itself in a storm, for the soul of man is the
most hard of access. To the body man can gain access; he can come to
terms with the spirit, but the soul is so bound up with the
individuality of man that it is the most inaccessible of all.
Whether a
man found the inner path to the authorities who preserved the
tradition for him, whether his piety was great enough to enable him
to receive the words in which the mediaeval priest-teacher inculcated
the tradition into humanity, all this was an affair of the individual
soul. And to cultivate the memory, without doing violence to another
man's individuality, this needs a fine tact. What was necessary for
the soul-culture of the Middle Ages was as much heeded by tactful men
as it was ignored by the tactless. And mediaeval education swung
between that which nourished the human soul and that which harmed it
in its deepest being. Although men do not perceive it, very much from
this mediaeval education has been preserved on into the present age.
Education
during the Middle Ages assumed this character because, in the first
place, the soul no longer wished to preserve the ‘child;’
for the soul itself was to be educated. And on account of the
conditions of the times the soul could only be educated through
tradition and memory. Between the seventh and the fourteenth years
the human being is, as it were, in a certain state of flux. But the
soul does not work in the same condition of security as is afforded
by the bodily constitution up to the seventh year and the direction
imparted by the spirit has not yet come into being. Everything is of
a very intimate character, calling for piety and delicacy.
All this
brought it about that for a long period of human evolution education
entered upon an uncertain and indefinite course in which, while
tradition and memory had to be cultivated, there were
extraordinary difficulties. To-day we are living at a time when, as a
result of the natural course of development, man desires a firm
foundation in place of the insecurity obtaining in the Middle Ages.
And this search for other foundations expresses itself in the
innumerable efforts towards educational reform in our time. It is out
of recognition of this fact that Waldorf School education has arisen.
Waldorf School education is based upon this question: How shall we
educate in a time when the revolt in the soul between the seventh and
fourteenth years of life against the conservation of
‘childhood’ is still going on? How shall we educate now
that man, in addition to that, has in the modern age lost even the
old mediaeval connection with tradition? Outwardly man has lost his
faith in tradition. Inwardly he strives to be a free being, one who
at every moment shall confront life unhampered. He does not wish to
stand on a memory foundation all his life long. Such is modern man,
who now desires to be inwardly free of tradition and of memory. And
however much certain portions of our humanity to-day would like to
preserve ancient customs, this is not possible. The very existence of
the many efforts for educational reform indicates that a great
question is facing us. It was impossible in the Middle Ages to
educate in the Greek way, and in our times education can no longer be
based on tradition and memory. We have to educate in accordance with
the immediate moment of life in which man enters upon earthly
existence, when he, as a free being, has to make his decision out of
the given factors of the moment. How, then, must we educate free
human beings? That is the question which now confronts us for the
first time.
* * *
As the
hour is getting late, I will bring these thoughts to a conclusion in
a few words and postpone until to-morrow's lecture the consideration
of the methods of education that are necessary at the present day.
In Greek
education, the Gymnast must be recognized as one who preserved the
forces of childhood on into the second period of life between the
seventh and the fourteenth or fifteenth years. The
‘child’ must be preserved, so said the Greeks. The forces
of childhood must remain in the human being up to the time of earthly
death; these forces must be conserved. It was the task of the Greek
educator, the Gymnast, to develop the fundamental nature, the
inherited fundamental nature of the child in his charge, on into the
period between the seventh and the fourteenth years of life. It was
his task to understand these forces out of his spiritual wisdom and
to conserve them. Evolution in the Middle Ages went beyond
this, and, as a result, our present age developed. Only now does the
position of a modern man within the social order become a matter of
consciousness. This fact of conscious life can only come into being
after the age of puberty has been reached, after the fourteenth or
fifteenth year. Then there appears in the human being something which
I shall have repeatedly to describe in the following lectures as the
consciousness of inner freedom in the being of man. Then, indeed, man
‘comes to himself.’ And if, as it sometimes happens
to-day, human beings believe themselves to have reached this
consciousness before the fourteenth or fifteenth years, before the
age of puberty, this is only an aping of later life. It is not a
fundamental fact. It was this fundamental fact, which appears after
the age of puberty, that the Greek purposely sought to avoid in the
development of the individual man. The intensity with which he
invoked Nature, the child, into human existence, darkened and
obscured full experience of this glimpse of consciousness after
puberty. The human being passed in dimmed consciousness through this
imprisoned ‘Nature,’ this reality. The historical course
of human evolution, however, is such that this is no longer
possible. This conscious urge would burst forth with elemental,
volcanic force after the age of puberty if attempts were made to hold
it back.
During
what we call the elementary school age, that is to say, between the
seventh and fourteenth years, the Greek had to take into
consideration the earliest Nature-life of the child. We in our day
have to take account of what follows puberty, of that which will be
experienced after puberty in full human consciousness by the boy or
girl. We may no longer suppress this into a dreamlike obscurity as
did the Greeks, even the highest type of Greek, even Plato and
Aristotle, who, in consequence, accepted slavery as a self-evident
necessity. Because education was of such a kind that it obscured this
all-important phenomenon of human life after puberty, the Greek was
able to preserve the forces of early childhood into the period of
life between the seventh and fourteenth years.
We must be
prophets of future humanity if we would educate in the right way. The
Greek could rely upon instinct, for his task was to conserve the
foundations laid by Nature. We, as educationalists, must be able to
develop intuitions. We must anticipate all human qualities if we
would become true educators, true teachers. For the essential thing
in our education will be to give the child, between its seventh and
fourteenth years something which, when the consciousness
characteristic of the human being has set in, it can so remember that
with inner satisfaction and assent it looks back upon that which we
have implanted within its being. We educate in the wrong way to-day
if, later on, when the child has gone out into life, it can no longer
look back on us and say, “Yes!”
Thus there
must arise teachers with intuition, teachers who enter once again
upon the path along which the spiritual world and spiritual life can
be attained by man, who can give the child between the seventh and
fourteenth years all those things to which it can look back in later
life with satisfaction. The Greek teacher was a preserver. He said:
All that lived within the child in earlier life slumbers within him
after the seventh year, and this I must awaken. Of what nature must
our education be to enable us to implant in the age of childhood that
which later on will awaken of itself in the free human being? We have
to lead an education into the future. This makes it necessary that in
our present epoch the whole situation of education must be different
from what it was in the past. In Greece, education arose as the
result of a surrender to the facts of Nature. It was a fact of Nature
which, as it were, played into human life, but as a result of the
whole of life up to our time, it has worked itself cut of its natural
foundations.
As
teachers in schools, this is what we must realize: We must offer to
the child before us something to which it may be able to cry
“Yes!” when in later life it awakens to independent
consciousness. The child must not only love us during
schooldays, but afterwards too, finding this love for us
justified by mature judgment. Otherwise education is only a
half-education — therefore weak and ineffective. When we
are conscious of this we shall realize to what a great extent
education and instruction from being a fact of Nature that plays into
the human being must also become a moral fact.
This is
the deep inner struggle waged by those who from their innermost being
have some understanding of the form which education must assume. They
feel this, and it is expressed in the question: How can we ourselves
transform education for the free human being into a free act in the
very highest sense, that is to say, into a moral act? How can
education become out and out a moral concern of mankind? This is the
great problem before us to-day, and it must be solved if the most
praiseworthy efforts towards educational reform are to be rightly
directed on into the future.
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