BODY VIEWED FROM THE SPIRIT
It might perhaps appear as if the art of education described in these
lectures would lead away from practical life into some remote, purely
spiritual region: as though this art of education laid too much stress
on the purely spiritual domain. From what I have said so far in
describing the spiritual foundation of the education, this might
appear to be the case. But this is only in appearance. For in reality
the art of education which arises from this philosophy has the most
practical objects in view. Thus it should be realised that the main
object of speaking of spiritual facts here is to answer the
educational question: how can we best develop the physical organism in
childhood and youth?
That a spiritual philosophy should consider firstly the development of
the physical organism may seem to be a fundamental contradiction. The
treatment of my theme in the next few days, however, will do more
towards dispelling this contradiction than any abstract statements I
could make at the outset. To-day, I would merely like to say that when
one speaks on educational questions at the present day one finds
oneself in a peculiar situation. For if one sees much that needs
reforming in education, it is as much as to say that one is not
satisfied with one's own education. One implies that one's own
education has been exceedingly bad. And yet, as a product of this very
bad education, of this education in which one finds so much to
criticise — for other-wise why be a reformer? — one sets up
to know the right way to educate! This is the first thing that
involves a contradiction. The second thing is one which gives one a
slight feeling of shame in face of the audience when speaking on
education, — for one realises that one is speaking of what
education ought to be and how it must be different from present day
practice. So that it amounts to saying: you are all badly educated.
And yet one is appealing to those who are badly educated to bring
about a better education. One assumes that both the speaker and the
audience know very well what good education should be in spite of the
fact that they have been exceedingly badly educated.
Now this is a contradiction, but it is one which life itself presents
us, and it can really only be solved by the view of education which is
here being described. For one can perfectly well know what is the
matter with education and in what respects it should be improved, just
as one can know that a picture is well painted without possessing the
faintest capacity for painting a picture oneself. You can consider
yourself capable of appreciating the merits of a picture by Raphael
without thinking yourself capable of painting a Raphael picture. In
fact it would be a good thing to-day if people would think like this.
But they are not content with merely knowing, where education is
concerned, they claim straightaway to know how to educate; as
though someone who is no painter and could not possibly become a
painter, should set up to show how a badly painted picture should be
painted well.
Now it is here contended that it is not enough to know what good
education is but that one must have a grasp of the technique and
detail of educational art, one must acquire practical skill. And for
this, knowledge and understanding are necessary. Hence yesterday I
tried to explain the elementary principles of guidance in this
ability, and I will now continue this review.
It is easy to say man undergoes development during his lifetime, and
that he develops in successive stages. But this is not enough.
Yesterday we saw that man is a three-fold being: that his thinking is
entirely bound up physically with the nerve-senses-system of his
organism, his feeling is bound up with the rhythmic system,
particularly the breathing and circulation system, and that his will
is bound up with the system of movement and metabolism.
The development of these three systems in man is not alike. Throughout
the different epochs of life they develop in different ways. During
the first epoch which extends to the change of teeth — as I have
repeatedly stated — the child is entirely sense organ, entirely
head, and all its development proceeds from the nerve-senses system.
The nerve-senses system permeates the whole organism; and all
impressions of the outside world affect the whole organism, work right
through it, just as, later in life, light acts upon the eye,
In other words, in an adult light comes to a standstill in the eye,
and only sends the idea of itself, the concept of light, into the
organism. In a child it is as if every little blood corpuscle were
inwardly illumined, were transfused with light — to express it in
a somewhat exaggerated and pictorial way. The child is as yet entirely
exposed to those etheric essences, (effluvia), which in later life we
arrest at the surface of our bodies, in the sense organs, — while
we develop inwardly something of an entirely different nature. Thus a
child is exposed to sense impressions in a far greater degree than is
the adult.
Observe a concrete instance of this: take a person who has charge of
the nurture of a very young child, perhaps a tiny baby; a person with
his own world of inner experience. Let us suppose the person m charge
of the child is a heavy hearted being, one to whom life has brought
sorrow. In the mature man the physical consequences of the experiences
he has been through will not be obvious, but will leave only faint
traces. When we are sad our mouth is always a little dry. And when
sadness becomes a habitual and continuous state, the sorrowful person
goes about with dry mouth, with parched tongue, with a bitter taste in
the mouth and even a chronic catarrh. In the adult these physical
conditions are merely faint undertones of life.
The child who is growing up in the company of the adult is an
imitator; he models himself entirely on the physiognomy of the adult,
on what he perceives: — on the adult's sad manner of speaking,
his sad feelings. For there is a subtle interplay betwixt child and
adult, an interplay of imponderables. When we have an inner sadness
and all its physical consequences, the child being an imitator, takes
up these physical effects through inward gestures: through an inward
mimicry he takes up the parched tongue, the bitter taste in the mouth;
and this — as I pointed out yesterday — flows through the
whole organism. He absorbs the paleness of the long sad face of the
adult. The child cannot imitate the soul content of the sorrow, but it
imitates the physical effects of the sorrow. And the result is that,
since the spirit is still working into the child's whole organism, his
whole organism will be permeated in such a manner as to build up his
organs in accordance with the physical effects which he has taken up
into himself. Thus the very condition of the child's organism will
make a sad being of him. In later life he will have a particular
aptitude for perceiving everything that is sad or sorrowful. Such is
the fine and delicate knowledge that one must have in order to educate
in a proper way.
This is the manner of a child's life up to the changing of the teeth.
It is entirely given up to what its organism has absorbed from the
adults around it. And the inner conflict taking place here is only
perceptible to spiritual science; this struggle which goes on can only
be described as the fight between inherited characteristics and
adaptation to environment.
We are born with certain inherited characteristics. — This can be
seen by anybody who has the opportunity of observing a child during
its first weeks or years. Science has produced an extensive teaching
on this subject. — But the child has more and more to adapt
itself to the world. Little by little he must transform his inherited
characteristics until he is not merely the bearer of a heredity from
his parents and ancestors, but is open in his senses and soul and
spirit to receive what goes on at large in his environment. Otherwise
he would become an egotistic man, a man who only wants what accords
with his inherited characteristics.
Now we have to educate men to be susceptible to all that goes on in
the world: men who each time they see a new thing can bring their
judgment and their feelings to meet this new thing. We must not
educate men to be selfishly shut up within themselves, we must educate
men to meet the world with a free and open mind, and to act in
accordance with the demands of the world.
This attitude is the natural outcome of such a position as I described
yesterday.
Thus we must observe in all its details the inner struggle which takes
place during the child's early years between heredity and adaptation
to environment. Try to study with the utmost human devotion the
wonderful process that goes on where the first teeth are replaced by
the second. The first teeth are an inherited thing. They seem almost
unsuitable for the outer world. They are inherited. Gradually above
each inherited tooth another tooth is formed. In the modelling of this
tooth the form of the first tooth is made use of, but the form of the
second tooth, which is permanent, is a thing adapted to the world.
I always refer to this process of the teeth as characteristic of this
particular period of life, up to the seventh year. But it is only one
symptom. For what takes place in the case of the teeth conspicuously,
because the teeth are hard organs, is taking place throughout the
organism. When we are born into the world we bear within us an
inherited organism. In the course of the first seven years of our life
we model a new organism over it. The whole process is physical. But
while it is physical it is the deed of the spirit and soul within the
child. And we who stand at the child's side must endeavour so to guide
this soul and spirit that it goes with and not against the health of
the organism. We must therefore know what spiritual and psychic
processes have to take place for the child to be able to model a
healthy organism in the stead of the inherited organism. We must know
and do a spiritual thing in order to promote a physical thing.
And now, if we follow up what I said to you to-day in the introduction
we come to something else. Suppose that as a teacher or educator we
enter a classroom. Now we must never think that we are the most
intelligent of human beings, men at the summit of human intelligence
— that, indeed, would mean that we were very bad teachers. We
really should think ourselves only comparatively intelligent. This is
a sounder state of mind than the other. Now with this state of
consciousness we enter the classroom. But as we go in we must say to
ourselves: there may be among the children a very intelligent being,
one who in later life will be far more intelligent than we. Now if we,
who are only comparatively intelligent, should bring him up to be only
as intelligent as ourselves, we should be making him a copy of
ourselves. That would be quite wrong. For the right thing would be so
to educate this very intelligent individual that he may grow up to be
far more intelligent than we are ourselves or ever could be. Now this
means that there is something in a man which we may not touch,
something we must regard with sensitive reverence if we are to
exercise the art of education rightly. And this is part of the answer
to the question I asked.
Often, in earlier life, we know exceedingly well what we ought to do
— only we cannot carry it out. We feel unequal to it. What it is
that prevents us from doing what we ought to do is generally very
obscure. It is always some condition of the physical organism, —
for example, an imitated disposition to sadness such as I spoke of.
The organism has incorporated this, it has become habitual. We want to
do some-thing which does not suit an organism with a bent to sadness.
Yet such is our organism. In us we have the effects of the parched
tongue and bitter taste from our childhood, now we want to do
something quite different and we feel difficulty.
If we realise the full import of this we shall say to our-selves: the
main task of the teacher or educator is to bring up the body to be as
healthy as it possibly can be; this means, to use every spiritual
measure to ensure that in later life a man's body shall give the least
possible hindrance to the will of his spirit. If we make this our
purpose in school we can develop the powers which lead to an education
for freedom.
The extent to which spiritual education works healthily upon the
physical organism, and thus upon man as a whole, can be seen
particularly well when the great range of facts provided by our
magnificent modern natural science is brought together and
co-ordinated in a manner only possible to spiritual science. It then
becomes apparent how one can work in the spirit for the healing of
man. To take a single instance. The English doctor, Dr. Clifford
Albert, has said a very significant thing about the influence of
grieving and sadness in human beings upon the development of their
digestive organs, and — in particular — upon the kidneys.
People who have a lot of trouble and grief in life show signs after a
time of malformation of the kidneys, deformed kidneys. This has been
very finely demonstrated by the physician Dr. Clifford Albert. That is
a finding of natural science.
The important thing is that one should know how to use a scientific
discovery like this in educational practice. One must know, as a
teacher or educator, that if one lets the child imitate one's own
sorrow and grief, then through one's sorrowful bearing one is damaging
the child's digestive system to the utmost degree. In so far as we let
our sorrow overflow into the child we damage its digestive system. You
see, this is the tragedy of this materialistic age, that it discovers
many physical facts, — if you take the external aspect, but it
lacks the connections between them; — it is this very
materialistic science which fails to perceive the significance of the
physical and material. What spiritual science can do is to show, on
all hands, how spirit and what is spiritual work within the physical
realm. Then instead of yearning in dreamy mysticism for castles in the
clouds, one will be able to follow up the spirit in all its details
and singular workings. For one is a spiritual being only when one
recognises spirit as that which creates, as that which everywhere
works upon and shapes the material: — not when one worships some
abstract spirit in the clouds like a mystic, and for the rest, holds
matter to be merely the concern of the material world.
Hence it is actually a matter of coming to realise how in a young
child, up to the seventh year, nerve-senses activity, rhythmic
breathing and circulation activity, and the activity of movement and
metabolism are everywhere interplaying: — only the nerve-senses
activity predominates, it has the upper hand; and thus the
nerve-senses activity in a child always affects his breathing. If a
child has to look at a face that is furrowed with grief, this affects
his senses to begin with; but it reacts upon the manner of his
breathing, and hence in turn, upon his whole movement and metabolic
system.
If we take a child after the change of teeth, that is after about the
seventh year, we find the nerve-senses system no longer
preponderating; this has now become more separate, more turned towards
the outer world. In a child between the change of teeth and puberty it
is the rhythmic system which preponderates, which has the upper hand.
And it is most important that this should be borne in mind in the
primary school. For in the primary school we have children between the
change of teeth and puberty. Hence we must know here: the essential
thing is to work with the child's rhythmic system, and everything
which works upon some-thing other than the rhythmic system is wrong.
But now what is it that works upon the rhythmic system? It is
art that works upon the rhythmic system, everything that is
conveyed in artistic form.
Consider how much everything to do with music is connected with the
rhythmic system. Music is nothing else but rhythm carried over into
the rhythmic system of the human being himself. The inner man himself
becomes a lyre, the inner man becomes a violin. His whole rhythmic
system reproduces what the violin has played, what has sounded from
the piano. And as in the case of music, so it is also, in a finer,
more delicate way, in the case of plastic art, and of painting. Colour
harmonies and colour melodies also are reproduced and revived as inner
rhythmic processes in the inner man. If our instruction is to be truly
educational we must know that throughout this period everything that
the child is taught must be conveyed in an artistic form. According to
Waldorf School principles the first consideration in the elementary
school period is to compose all lessons in a way that appeals to the
child's rhythmic system.
How little this is regarded to-day can be seen from the number of
excellent scientific observations which are continuously being
accumulated and which sin directly against this appeal to the rhythmic
system. Research is carried on in experimental psychology to find out
how soon a child will tire in one activity or another; and the
instruction must take account of this fatigue. This is all very fine,
splendid, as long as one does not think spiritually. But if one thinks
spiritually the matter appears in a very different light. The
experiments can still be made. They are very good. Nothing is said
here against the excellence of natural science. But one says: if the
child shows a certain degree of fatigue in the period between its
change of teeth and puberty, you have not been appealing, as you
should do, to the rhythmic system, but to some other system. For
throughout life the rhythmic system never tires. Throughout the whole
of life the heart beats night and day. It is in his intellectual
system and in his metabolic system that a man becomes tired. When we
know that we have to appeal to his rhythmic system we know that what
we have to do is to work artistically (Manuscript defective.); and the
experiments on fatigue show where we have gone wrong, where we have
paid too little attention to the rhythmic system. When we find a child
has got overtired we must say to ourselves: How can you contrive to
plan your lesson so that the child shall not get tired? It is not that
one sets up to condemn the modern age and says: natural science is
bad, we must oppose it. The spiritual man has no such intention. He
says rather: we need the higher outlook because it is just this that
makes it possible to apply the results of natural science to life.
If we now turn to the moral aspect, the question is how we can best
get the child to develop moral impulses. And here we are dealing with
the most important of all educational questions. Now we do not endow a
child with moral impulses by giving him commands, by saying: you must
do this, this has to be done, this is good, — by wanting to prove
to him that a thing is good, and must be done. Or by saying: That is
bad, that is wicked, you must not do that, — and by wanting to
prove that a certain thing is bad. A child has not as yet the
intellectual attitude of an adult towards good and evil, towards the
whole world of morality, — he has to grow up to it. And this he
will only do on reaching puberty, when the rhythmic system has
accomplished its essential task and the intellectual powers are ripe
for complete development. Then the human being may experience the
satisfaction of forming moral judgment in contact with life itself. We
must not engraft moral judgment onto the child. We must so lay the
foundation for moral judgment that when the child awakens at puberty
he can form his own moral judgment from observation of life.
The last way to attain this is to give finite commands to a child. We
can achieve it however if we work by examples, or by presenting
pictures to the child's imagination: for instance through biographies
or descriptions of good men or bad men; or by inventing circumstances
which present a picture, an imagination of goodness to the child's
mind. For, since the rhythmic system is particularly active in the
child during this period, pleasure and displeasure can arise in him,
not judgment as to good and evil, — but sympathy with the good
which the child beholds presented in an image, — or antipathy to
the evil which he beholds so presented. It is not a case of appealing
to the child's intellect, of saying ‘Thou shalt’ or
‘Thou shalt not,’ but of fostering aesthetic judgment, so
that the child shall begin to take pleasure in goodness, shall feel
sympathy when he sees goodness, and feel dislike and antipathy when he
beholds evil. This is a very different thing from working on the
intellect, by way of precepts formulated by the intellect. For the
child will only be awake for such precepts when it is no longer our
business to educate him, namely, when he is a man and learns from life
itself. And we should not rob the child of the satis-faction of
awakening to morality of his own accord. And we shall not do this if
we give him the right preparation during the rhythmic period of his
life; if we train him to take an aesthetic pleasure in goodness, an
aesthetic dislike of evil; that is, if also here, we work through
imagery.
Otherwise, when the child awakens after puberty he will feel an inward
bondage, He will not perhaps realise this bondage consciously, but
throughout his subsequent life he will lack the important experience:
morality has awakened within me, moral judgment has developed. We
cannot attain this inner satisfaction by means of abstract moral
instruction, it must be rightly prepared by working in this manner for
the child's morality.
Thus it is everywhere a case of ‘how’ a thing is done. And
we can see this both in that part of life which is concerned with the
external world and that part of life concerned with morality: both
when we study the realm of nature in the best way, and when we know
how best morals can be laid down in, the rhythmic system — in the
system of breathing and blood circulation. If we know how to enter
with the spirit into what is physical, and if we can come to observe
how spirit weaves continuously in the physical, we shall be able to
educate in the right way.
While a knowledge of man is sought in the erst instance for the art of
education and instruction, yet in practice the effect of such a
spiritual outlook on the teacher's or educator's state of mind is of
the greatest importance. And what this is can best be shown in
relation to the attitude of many of our contemporaries.
Every age has its shadow side, no doubt, and there is much in past
ages we have no wish to revive; nevertheless anyone who can look upon
the historical life of man with certain intuitive sense will perceive
that in this our own age many men have very little inner joy, on the
contrary they are beset by heavy doubts and questions as to destiny.
This age has less capacity than any other for deriving answers to its
problems from out of the universe, the world at large. Though I may be
very unhappy in myself, and with good reason, yet there is always a
possibility of finding something in the universe which can
counterbalance my unhappiness. But modern man has not the strength to
find consolation in a view of the universe when his personal situation
makes him downcast. Why is this? Because in his education and
development modern man has little opportunity to acquire a feeling of
gratitude: gratitude namely that we should be alive at all as human
beings within this universe. Rightly speaking all our feelings should
take their rise from a fundamental feeling of gratitude that the
cosmic world has given us birth and given us a place within itself. A
philosophy which concludes with abstract observations and does not
flow out in gratitude towards the universe is no complete philosophy.
The final chapter of every philosophy, in its effect on human feeling
at all events, should be gratitude towards the cosmic powers. This
feeling is essential in a teacher and educator, and it should be
instinctive in every person who has the nurture of a child entrusted
to him. Therefore the first thing of importance to be striven for in
spiritual knowledge is the acquiring of thankfulness that a child has
been given into our keeping by the universe.
In this respect reverence for the child, reverence and thankfulness,
are not to be sundered. There is only one attitude towards a child
which can give us the right impulse in education and nurture and that
is the religious attitude, neither more nor less. We feel religious in
regard to many things. A flower in the meadow can make us feel
religious when we can take it as the creation of the divine spiritual
order of the world. In face of lightning lashes in the clouds we feel
religious if we see them in relation to the divine spiritual order of
the world. And above all we must feel religious towards the child, for
it comes to us from the depths of the universe as the highest
manifestation of the nature of the universe, a bringer of tidings as
to what the world is. In this mood lies one of the most important
impulses of educational technique. Educational technique is of a
different nature from the technique devoted to un-spiritual things.
Educational technique essentially involves a religious moral impulse
in the teacher or educator.
Now you will perhaps say: nowadays, although people are so terribly
objective in regard to many things — things possibly of less
vital importance — nowadays we shall yet find some who will think
it a tragic thing that they should have a religious feeling for a
child who may turn out to be a ne'er-do-well. But why must I regard it
as a tragedy to have a child who turns out a ne'er-do-well? —
To-day, as we said before, there are many parents, even in this
terribly objective age, who will own that their children are
ne'er-do-wells whereas this was not the case in former times; then
every child was good in its parents' eyes. At all events this was a
better attitude than the modern one. — Nevertheless we do get a
feeling of tragedy if we receive as a gift from spiritual worlds, and
as a manifestation of the highest, a difficult child. But we must live
through this feeling of tragedy. For this very feeling of tragedy will
help us over the rocks and crags of education. If we can feel
thankfulness even for a naughty child, and feel the tragedy of it, and
can rouse ourselves to overcome this feeling of tragedy we shall then
be in a position to feel a right gratitude to the divine world; for we
must learn to perceive how what is bad can also be a divine thing,
— though this is a very complicated matter. Gratitude must
permeate teachers and educators of children throughout the period up
to the change of teeth, it must be their fundamental mood.
Then we come to that part of a child's development which is based
principally on the rhythmic system, in which, as we have seen, we must
work artistically in education. This we shall never achieve unless we
can join to the religious attitude we have towards the child a love of
our educational activity; we must saturate our educational practice
with love. Between the Change of Teeth and Puberty nothing that is not
born of Love for the Educational Deed itself has any effect on the
child. We must say to ourselves with regard to the child: clever a
teacher or educator may be, the child reveals to us in his life
infinitely significant spiritual and divine things. But we, on our
part, must surround with love the spiritual deed we do for the child
in education. Hence there must be no pedagogy and didactics of a
purely intellectual kind, but only such guidance as can help the
teacher to carry out his education with loving enthusiasm.
In the Waldorf School what a teacher is is far more important than any
technical ability he may have acquired in an intellectual way. The
important thing is that the teacher should not only be able to love
the child but to love the method he uses, to love his whole procedure.
Only to love the children does not suffice for a teacher. To love
teaching, to love educating, and love it with objectivity — this
constitutes the spiritual foundation of spiritual, moral and physical
education. And if we can acquire this right love for education, for
teaching, we shall be able so to develop the child up to the age of
puberty that by that time we can really hand him over to freedom, to
the free use of his own intelligence.
If we have received the child in religious reverence, if we have
educated him in love up to the time of puberty, then our proper course
after this will be to leave the youth's spirit free, and to hold
intercourse with him on terms of equality. We aim, — that is not
to touch the spirit but to let it be awakened. When the child reaches
puberty we shall best attain our aim of giving the child over to free
use of his intellectual and spiritual powers if we respect the spirit
and say to ourselves: you can remove hindrances from the spirit,
physical hindrances and also, up to a point, hindrances of the soul.
What the spirit has to learn it learns because you have removed the
impediments. If we remove impediments the spirit will develop in
contact with life itself even in very early youth. Our rightful place
as educators is to be removers of hindrances.
Hence we must see to it that we do not make the children into copies
of ourselves, that we do not seek forcibly and tyrannically to
perpetuate what was in ourselves in those who in the natural course of
things develop beyond us. Each child in every age brings something new
into the world from divine regions, and it is our task as educators to
remove bodily and psychical obstacles out of its way; to remove
hindrances so that his spirit may enter in full freedom into life.
These then must be regarded as the three golden rules of the art of
education, rules which must imbue the teacher's whole attitude and all
the impulse of his work. The golden rules which must be embraced by
the teacher's whole being, not held as theory, are: reverent gratitude
to the world in the person of the child which we contemplate every
day, for the child presents a problem set us by divine worlds:
Thankfulness to the universe. Love for what we have to do with the
child. Respect for the freedom of the child — a freedom we must
not endanger; for it is to this freedom we educate the child, that he
may stand in freedom in the world at our side.
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