LECTURE VI
WALKING,
SPEAKING,
THINKING
August 10th,
1923.
The
previous lectures have indeed in no way attempted to formulate new
educational theories, but rather to create a true feeling for
education. My aim has been to speak to the human heart rather than to
the intellect. This is most essential for the teacher because, as we
have seen, the art of education must develop from a deeper knowledge
of man's whole being.
For a long
time now it has been usual to hear in educational circles that this
or that method should be used in teaching. Very frequently the
training of teachers consists in little besides the assimilation of
certain rules and theories as to the treatment of the child. This,
however, will never make the teacher fully aware of the greatness of
a task which he cannot approach with true devotion unless he has a
deep insight into the whole nature of man as body, soul and spirit. A
living conception of the human being develops into pure will in
the teacher when, from hour to hour, he has learned to give really
practical answers to the eager questions of the child he has to
instruct. The first essential is that he himself shall understand the
child, and this he can only do in the truest sense if he has a real
and concrete knowledge of man in body, soul and spirit.
It is for
this reason difficult to describe the education given at the Waldorf
School. It is not a thing that can be ‘learnt’ or
discussed; it is purely and simply a matter of practice, and one can
only give examples of a practical way of dealing with the needs of
particular cases. Such practice must be the outcome of actual
experience and it is always essential that the requisite knowledge of
the human being should be available. But education is a social
concern in the widest sense for it begins immediately after
birth. It is the concern of the whole of mankind, of each individual
family, of each community. This is most significantly brought home to
us by a knowledge of the child's nature before the change of teeth at
about the seventh year. A German writer, Jean Friedrich Richter,
spoke words of great truth v/hen he said that in the first three
years of life man learns more than in all his subsequent student
years. In his time there were only three academic years.
The first
three years, and from then onwards to the seventh year, are much the
most important in the whole development of a man, for the child is
not at all the same being as in later life. In his earliest years the
child is one great sense-organ. The scope of this truth is not
generally understood; indeed it is a question of using very emphatic
words if the whole truth is to be expressed.
In later
years, for instance, man tastes his food in his mouth, tongue and
palate. The sense of taste is, as it were, localized in the head. But
with the child, and especially so during these early years, this is
not the case. Taste then works throughout the whole organism; the
child tastes its mother's milk and first food right down into its
very limbs. The processes that in later life are localized in the
tongue, extend over the whole organism in the young child who lives,
as it were, in this sense of taste. There is a strong element of
animality here, but we must never compare this element in the child
with the ordinary animal nature. The animality of the child exists on
a higher level. The human being is never an animal, not even in the
embryonic state — in fact, at that period least of all. A
comparison may help to make this clearer.
Those who
have a true insight into the processes of nature may have the
following impression of these processes in the animal, if they look
at a herd of cows grazing in a meadow. As each cow lies down to
digest its food, it gives itself up in a most wonderful way to the
Cosmos. It is as though cosmic forces were active in the digesting
animal, inducing the most marvellous visions. The digesting process
in the animal is a mighty act of wisdom. While the cow digests it is
given up to the Cosmos in an imaginative, dreamlike existence. This
may seem an extravagant statement, yet strange to say it is
absolutely true.
If we now
raise this process one stage higher, we can understand how the
child experiences the functions of its bodily organism. All these
physical functions are accompanied by a kind of tasting, and,
moreover, the other processes that in later life are localized in eye
and ear, also extend over the whole organism of the child. Think of
the wonder of the eye, of how the eye takes in colour from outside
and makes an inner picture. This process is localized, separated off
from our conscious experience of life as a whole. The intellect takes
hold of what the eye forms in so wonderful a way and makes of it a
shadowy, mental image. Equally wonderful are those processes which,
in the adult, are localized in the ear. But all
that is localized in the several senses of the adult is spread out
over the whole organism in the child. In the child there is no
separation between spirit, soul and body. Everything from without is
mirrored in his inner being. He imitates his whole environment. And
now, bearing this in mind, we must observe how three faculties,
conditioning the whole of life, are acquired by the child during his
earliest years — the faculties of walking, speaking, and thinking.
‘To
walk’ is but the limited expression for something far, far greater. We
say that the child learns to walk because this is the most evident feature
of the process. But this learning to walk is in reality the bringing of man
into a right equilibrium in the world of space. The child strives for
the upright posture, he strives to relate his legs to the law of
gravity in a way that will give balance. He does the same with the
arms and hands. The whole organism finds its orientation. Learning to
walk means to set the whole organism in a right orientation with the
directions of space.
Now it is
important to perceive in the right way that the child is an imitative being,
for during the first years of life everything must be learnt from
imitation of the environment. Now it is evident that the forces of
orientation must inhere in the organism itself; the organism is
adapted from the very beginning to attain the vertical and not to
remain in the horizontal position. The arms must also find their
right relation to the laws of space. All this inheres in the very
nature of the child and is brought about by the impulses of the
organism itself.
If in education
we coerce the impulses of human nature, if we do not know how to leave this
nature free, and to act only as helpers, then we injure the organism
of the child for the whole of its later earthly life. If we wrongly
force the child to walk by external methods, if we do not merely help
but urge him to walk or to stand, we do the child an injury which
lasts till death and is especially harmful in advanced age. In true
methods of education it can never be a question of considering the
child as it is at a given moment, but the whole of its journey
through life from birth to death must be taken into account, for the
whole earthly life is already present from the first.
Now because
the child is a most delicately balanced organ of sense, he is not only
sensitive to the physical influences of his surroundings, but also to the
moral influences, especially of those of thought. However far-fetched it
may appear to the modern materialistic mind, the child does,
nevertheless, sense all that those in his environment are thinking.
As parents or teachers we must not only refrain from actions that are
outwardly unseemly, but we must be inwardly true, inwardly moral in
our thought and feeling, for the child senses our moods and absorbs
them. He does not merely shape his nature according to our words and
actions, but in accordance with our whole attitude of heart and mind.
The environment, then, is the most important thing of all in the
first period of the child's education, up to the seventh year.
And now the
question will arise: ‘What kind of help are we to give in this process
of orientation and learning to walk?’ Here it must be remembered
that the connections of life can be observed by a science that is
spiritual in character, but not by a science that is materialistic
and dead.
Let us take a
child who has been forced on to walk and to adjust himself in space by all
kinds of coercive measures, and then look at him in his fiftieth year, or
between the fifties and sixties. If nothing else has intervened, we
shall find him suffering from all manner of metabolic diseases which
he cannot throw off, from rheumatism, gout, and so on. Everything of
the nature of soul and spirit that we do to the child — for we
are exercising forces of the soul and spirit if we urge him to adopt
the vertical position, or to walk — everything comes to the
stage where the spiritual works right down into the physical. For the
forces that have been called into play by the use of highly
questionable methods remain for the whole of the earthly life, and
reappear later in the form of bodily diseases.
As a matter of
fact, all education of the child is at the same time physical education.
We cannot speak of a specifically physical training of the child, for
soul and spirit are always at work upon his bodily nature. We observe
how the child's organism adjusts itself to attain the upright
position, and to walk, and we lovingly watch this wonderful mystery
enacted by the human organism as it passes from the horizontal to the
vertical position. Piety and reverence must pervade us as we observe
how the divine powers of creation are adapting the child to the laws
of space, and then we must lovingly help him to walk and to acquire
balance. If with inner devotion we observe every expression of human
nature in the child and hold out a helping hand, we generate
health-bringing forces which can then re-appear as healthy metabolic
activities between the ages of fifty and sixty, a time of life when
we especially need control of the processes of the metabolism.
Herein lies
truly the mystery of human evolution: All that is of the nature of soul
and spirit at one stage of life becomes physical, manifests itself
physically in later life. Years later it makes itself evident in the
physical body.
So much then as
regards learning to walk. A child who is lovingly guided to walk develops
into a healthy man, and to apply this love in the process of learning
to walk is to add much to the healthy education of the body.
Now from this
process of orientation in space there develops speech. Modern physiology
knows something of this, but not very much. It knows that the movements
of the right hand correspond to a certain activity of the left side of
the brain, which is related to speech. Physiology admits the
connection between the movements of the right hand and the so-called
convolutions of Broca at the left side of the brain. As the hand
moves and makes gestures, forces pour into it; all this motive force
passes into the brain, where it becomes the impulse of speech.
Science knows only a fragment of the process, for the truth is this:
Speech does not arise merely because a movement of the right hand
coincides with a convolution in the left portion of the brain; speech
arises from the entire motor-organism of the human being. How the
child learns to walk, to orientate himself in space, to transform the
first erratic and uncontrolled movements of the arms into gestures
definitely related to the outer world, all this is carried over by
the mysterious processes of the human organism to the head, and
appears as speech.
Anyone who is
able to understand these things realizes that children who shuffle their
feet as they walk pronounce every sound, and especially the palatal
sounds, quite differently from those whose gait is firm. Every nuance
of speech is bound up with organic movement; life to begin with is
ail gesture and gesture is inwardly transformed into speech.
Speaking, then,
is an outcome of walking, that is to say, of the power to orientate the
being in space. And the degree to which the child is able to control
speech will depend very largely upon whether we give him really wise,
loving help while he is learning to walk.
These are some
of the finer connections revealed by a true knowledge of man. Not without
reason have I described in detail the process of guiding the spirit to the
human organism. With every step that is taken, the body follows the
spirit, if the spirit is brought into the child in the right way.
Again, it is a
fact that to begin with the whole organism is active when the child is
learning to speak. First there are the outer movements, the movements of
the legs corresponding to the strong contours of speech; die more delicate
movements of the arms and hands correspond to the inflection and
plastic form of the words. In short, outer movements are transformed
into the inner movements of speech.
Just as the
element of love should pervade the help we give to the child as he learns
to walk, so while we help him to speak we must be inwardly true. The
strongest tendencies to untruthfulness in after life are generated during
the time when a child is learning to speak, for in those years the
element of truth in speech is taken into the whole bodily organism. A
child whose teachers are filled with inner truthfulness will, as he
imitates his environment, so learn to speak that the subtle activity
constantly generated in the organism by the processes of in-breathing
and out-breathing will be strengthened. Naturally, these things must
be understood in a delicate and not in a crude sense. The processes
are highly rarefied but are nevertheless revealed in every
manifestation of life. We breathe in oxygen and exhale carbonic acid.
Oxygen has to be changed into carbonic acid in the body by the
breathing process. We receive oxygen from the cosmos, and give back
carbonic acid. Truth or untruth in those around us while we are
learning to speak determines whether, in the more subtle functions of
life, we are able to change the oxygen within us into carbonic acid
in the right way. This process consists in a complete transformation
of the spiritual into the physical.
One of the most
common and untruthful influences brought to the child is the use of
“baby-language.” Unconsciously the child does not like
this; he wants to listen to true speech, the speech of grown men and
women. We should speak in ordinary language to the child and avoid
the use of this “baby-language.” At first the child will
naturally only babble in imitation of words, but we ourselves must
not copy this babbling. To use the babbling, imperfect speech of the
child to him is to injure his digestive organs. Once more the
spiritual becomes physical, and works directly into the bodily
organs. And everything that we do spiritually for the child
constitutes a physical training, for the child is not all individual.
Many later defects in the digestive system are caused by a child's
having learnt to speak in a wrong way.
And just as
speech arises from walking and grasping, in short from movement, so thought
develops from speech. Just as in helping the child as he learns to
walk we must be pervaded by love, so in helping the child to gain the
power of speech we must be absolutely truthful; and since the child
is one great sense organ and his inner physical functions are also a
copy of the spiritual, our own thinking must be clear if right
thinking is to develop in the child from out the forces of speech.
No greater harm
can be done to the child than by the giving of orders and then causing
confusion by reversing them. Confusion set up in the child's surroundings
as the result of inconsequent thinking is the actual root of
the many so-called nervous diseases prevalent in our modern civilization.
Why have so
many people ‘nerves’ to-day? Simply because in childhood there
was no clarity and precision of thought around them during the time when
they were learning to think after having learned to speak. The
physical condition of the next generation, as evinced by its gravest
defects, is a faithful copy of the preceding generation. When we
observe the faults in our children which develop in later life, we
should gain self-knowledge. All that happens in the child's
environment expresses itself in the physical organism — though
in a subtle and delicate way. Loving treatment while the child is
learning to walk, truthfulness while he learns to speak, clarity and
precision as he begins to be able to think, all these qualities
become a part of the bodily constitution. The vascular system and
organs develop after the models of love, truth and clarity in the
environment. Diseases of the metabolic system are the result of
coercive treatment while the child is learning to walk. Digestive
disturbances may arise from untruthful actions during the time at
which the child is beginning to speak. Nerve trouble is the outcome
of confused thinking in the child's environment.
When we see
the prevalence of nervous disease in this third decade of the twentieth
century, we cannot but conclude that there must have been much confused
thinking on the part of the teachers about the beginning of the century.
Many diseases of the nerves to-day are really due to confused thinking,
and again the nerve troubles from which people suffered at the
beginning of the century were equally the result of the confused
thought of the last three decades of the nineteenth century.
Now these
matters can be handled in such a way that physiology, hygiene, and
psychology no longer need to remain shut off from each other as specialized
branches of knowledge, so that to-day the teacher must call in the
doctor the moment any question of health arises. Physiological
education, school hygiene and the like can be united in such a way
that the teacher's work will come to include an understanding of the
activity of the soul and spirit in the physical organism. But since
everyone has in a certain sense to train children from birth up to
the seventh year, a social task stands before us, inasmuch as a true
knowledge of man is absolutely necessary if humanity is to
follow an ascending, and not a descending, path.
* * *
Quite rightly
has our “humane” age attempted to do away with a certain
educational measure very frequently applied in earlier days, I mean
the habit of caning. The last thing I wish to do is to speak in
favour of such punishment, but this I must say, that the reason why
our age has made some attempt to get rid of corporal punishment is
because it very well knows the evil results of this; the moral
consequences of injury to the physical body are very evident. But, my
dear friends, one terrible form of punishment has crept into the
educational methods of to-day, when all eyes are so concentrated on
the physical and material and there is so little comprehension of the
soul and spirit. I am here referring to a form of punishment that is
never realized as such because men's minds are not directed to the
spiritual.
Parents often
think it desirable to give their little girl a beautiful doll as a plaything.
This ‘beautiful’ doll is a fearful production because for
one thing it is so utterly inartistic, in spite of its
‘real’ hair, painted cheeks and eyes which close when it
is laid down or open when it is lifted up! We often give our children
toys that are dreadfully inartistic copies of life. The doll is
merely one example. All modern toys are of the same type and they
constitute a form of cruel punishment to the child's inner nature.
Children often behave well in the presence of others merely from a
fear of conventional punishments; equally they do not always express
aversion from toys like the ‘beautiful doll,’ although
this dislike is deeply rooted in their souls. However strongly we may
suggest to children that they ought to love such toys, the forces of
their unconscious and subconscious life are stronger, and the
children have an intense antipathy to anything resembling the
beautiful doll. For, as I will now show you, such toys really amount
to an inner punishment.
Suppose that
in the making of our toys we were to take into consideration what the
child has actually experienced in
his infant thought up to the age of six or seven in the processes of
learning to walk after learning to stand upright and then we were to
make a doll out of a handkerchief, for instance, showing a head at
the top with two ink-spots for eyes. The child can understand and,
moreover, really love such a doll. Primitively this doll possesses
all the qualities of the human form, in so far at any rate as the
child is capable of observing them at this early age. A child knows
no more about the human being than that he stands upright, that there
is an ‘upper’ and a ‘lower’ part of his
being, that he has a head and a pair of eyes. As for the mouth, you
will often find it on the forehead in a child's drawings! There is as
yet no clear consciousness of the exact position of the mouth. What a
child actually experiences is all contained in a doll made from a
handkerchief with ink-spots for eyes. An inner, plastic force is at
work in the child. All that comes to him from his environment passes
over into his being and becomes there an inner formative power, a
power that also builds up the organs of the body.
If the child
has a father who is constantly ill-tempered and irritable, and the child
as a result of this lives in an environment of perpetual shocks and
unreasonableness, all this turmoil expresses itself in his breathing
and the circulation of the blood. The lungs, heart and the whole
venal system are affected by such a condition. Throughout the whole
of his life the child bears within him the inner effects upon the
organs of his father's ill-temper.
This is merely
an example to show you that the child possesses a wonderful plastic power
and is perpetually at work as a kind of inner sculptor upon his own being.
If we give the child the kind of doll made from a handkerchief, these
plastic, creative forces that arise in the human organism from the
rhythmic system of the breathing and blood circulation and build up
the brain, flow gently upwards. They mould the brain like a sculptor
who works upon his material with a fine and supple hand, a hand
permeated with the forces of the soul and spirit. In the child's
perception of the handkerchief-doll these plastically creative
elements are called upon and healthy forces are generated which then
flow upwards from the rhythmic system and work upon the structure of
the brain.
If, on the
contrary, we give the child one of the so-called ‘beautiful’
dolls, with moving eyes and painted cheeks, real hair and so on —
a hideous, ghostly production from the artistic point of view —
then the plastic, brain-building forces that are generated in the
rhythmic system have the effect of the constant lashing of a whip.
All that the child cannot as yet understand works upon the brain like
the lashings of a whip. The whole brain is lashed to its very
foundations in a terrible way.
Such is the
secret of the ‘beautiful’ doll, and it can be applied to many
of the playthings given to the child to-day.
If we would
give loving help to the child at play we must realize how many inner,
formative forces are active in his being. In this respect our whole
civilization is on the wrong road. For instance, modern culture has
evolved the concept of ‘Animism.’ A child bumps against
the table and strikes it in anger. We say to-day that the child
imagines the table to be a living thing, he endows it with imaginary
life and strikes it. Now this is not true. The child does not
imaginatively endow the table with life, or with anything at all, but
feels as though the living were lifeless. When he hurts himself, a
kind of reflex movement makes him strike the table. He does not think
of the table as living, for everything is as yet lifeless for him; he
treats the living and the lifeless exactly in the same way.
These false
ideas show that our civilization does not know how to approach the child.
The first great essential is to learn to deal with children wisely and
lovingly and give them what their own being needs. We should not inflict
inner punishment by giving the child toys of the type of the beautiful
doll. Rather should we be able to throw ourselves into the child's
inner life and give him such toys as he can himself inwardly understand.
Thus play also
is something that calls for true insight into the nature of the child. If
we prattle like a little child and think to bring our speech down to his
level, if we model our words falsely, we bring an untruthful
influence to bear upon him. On the other hand, however, we must be
able to descend to the stage of the child's development in everything
that has to do with the will-nature in
play. We shall then realize that intellectuality, a quality so much
admired in this age, simply does not exist in the child's organic
nature, and should therefore have no place in his play.
The child at
play will naturally imitate what is going on in his surroundings, but it
will seldom happen that a child of four expresses a wish to be a
philologist, let us say,
although he may say he would like to be a chauffeur! Why? Because
everything about a chauffeur makes an immediate sense-impression. It
is different with a philologist, for what he does makes no impression
on the senses; it simply passes unnoticed by the child. Everything
intellectual leaves the child unaffected, he passes it by. What, then,
must we do if we are to help the child to the right kind of play?
Now when we
plough, or make hats, or sew clothes, and so on, all these things are done
with a certain purpose and have a certain intellectual quality. But
everything in life, no matter whether it be ploughing, building
carriages, shoeing horses, or the like, besides having a definite
purpose, contains another element in outward appearance. At the sight
of a man guiding his plough over the field one can feel, apart from
the object of ploughing, the plastic quality of the picture;
it is a picture which arises. If we can feel this pictorial element
quite apart from its purpose (and it is the æsthetic sense
that enables us to do this) then we can begin to make toys that
really appeal to the child. We shall not aim at intellectual beauty
as in the modern doll, but at something expressed in the whole
content, in the whole feeling of the human being. Then, instead of
the beautiful doll, we shall produce for the older children a
primitive, really enchanting doll something like this one.
[Dr. Steiner here showed a doll made by pupils of
the Waldorf School]
In true
education therefore the essential thing is to be able to bring an artistic
element into our work and to apply it in the making of toys, for then we
begin to satisfy the needs of the child's own nature.
Our civilization
has made us almost exclusively utilitarian, intellectualistic, and we offer
even our children the result of what we have ‘thought
out’ with our brains. But we ought not to give them what adult
life has ‘thought out,’ but what our maturer
life feels and perceives. This
is the quality the toy ought to exhibit. If we give a child a toy
plough, the essential thing is that it should express
the aesthetic quality of form and movement in the plough, for
this will help to unfold the natural forces in the child.
Certain
Kindergarten systems, in other ways worthy of all respect, have made great
mistakes in this direction. Froebel's system, as also others, have
arisen from a true inner love for children, but they have failed to
realize that although imitation is a part of the very nature of the
child, he can only imitate that which is not yet permeated by an
intellectual quality. We must therefore not introduce into the
Kindergarten such various forms of handiwork as have been ingeniously
‘thought out.’ The stick-laying, plaiting, and so on,
that often play so large a part in modern Kindergarten methods, have
all been ingeniously thought out. Kindergarten work ought rather to
be so arranged that it contains an actual picture of what older
people do, and
not mere inventions. A sense of tragedy will often arise in one
possessed of a true knowledge of man when he goes into these modern
Kindergartens, for they are so full of good intentions and the work
has been so conscientiously thought out. They are based on infinite
goodwill and a sincere love of children, yet on the other hand it has
not been realized that all intellectualism ought to be eliminated.
Kindergarten work should consist simply and solely of imitative
pictures of what grown-up people do.
A child whose
intellectual faculties are developed before the fourth or fifth year bears
a dreadful heritage into later life. He is being educated for
materialism. To the extent that an intellectual education is
given to the child before the fourth or fifth year, will he become
materialistic in later life. The brain can either develop in such a
way that the spirit dwells within it and gives birth to intuition, or
on the other hand the whole nature can tend towards materialism if at
this early age the child's brain is intellectually forced.
If we would
so train the child that as man he may comprehend the spirit, we must
delay as long as possible the giving of mental concepts in a purely
intellectual form. Although it is highly necessary, in view of the
nature of our modern civilization, that a man should be fully awake
in later life, the child must be allowed to remain as long as
possible in the peaceful, dreamlike condition of pictorial
imagination in which his early years are passed. For if we allow his
organism to grow strong in this way, he will develop in later life
the intellectuality needed in the world to-day.
If the child's
brain has been punished in the way I have described, permanent injury is
done to the soul. The use of ‘baby-language’ injuriously
affects the digestion; unloving, mistaken coercion in the process of
learning to walk has an unfavourable effect upon the metabolic system
in later life. Soul and body alike suffer if the inner being of the
child is injured in these ways, and it must be the first aim of
education to do away with such inner punishments as are represented,
for instance, by toys like the beautiful doll. These do not only
lacerate the soul of the child, but also harm his bodily
constitution, for in childhood body, soul and spirit are one.
The essential thing, therefore, is to raise the games and play of
children to their true level.
In these
lectures I have tried to indicate how false forms of spirituality must
be avoided when we are dealing with the child, so that a true spirituality,
in short, the whole individuality, may come to full expression in later
life.
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