LECTURE III
Arnheim, 19th July, 1924.
You
will have gathered from the remarks I have made during the last
two days that there is a fundamental change in the inner
constitution of the human being at every single stage of his
life. Today, certainly, modern psychologists and
physiologists also take this into account. They too
reckon with these changes which take place in the course of
life, firstly up to the change of teeth, then up to puberty,
and again from puberty into the twenties. But these differences
are more profound than can be discovered by means of the
methods of observation customary today, which do not reach far
enough, however excellent they may be. We must take a further
step and examine these differences from aspects demanded by
spiritual science. You will hear many things that are already
familiar to you, but you must now enter more deeply into them.
Even when the child enters this world from the embryo
condition, that is, to take an external characteristic, when he
adapts himself to the outer process of breathing, even then,
physiologically speaking, he is not yet received directly
by the outer world, for he takes the natural nourishment of the
mother's milk. He is not nourished as yet by what comes from
the outer world, but by what comes from the same source as the
child himself. Now today people study the substances they meet
with in the world more or less according to their external,
chemical, physical properties only and do not consider the
finer attributes which they possess through their spiritual
content. Nowadays everything is considered in this way. Such
methods are not to be condemned; on the contrary they should be
recognised as justified. Nevertheless because the time came
when man was concerned only with the outer aspects of things,
aspects which could not be so regarded in earlier
civilisations, he has now reached a point of extreme
externalisation. If I may make a comparison, things are
observed today in some such way as this. We say: I look upon
death, upon dying; plants die, animals die, human beings die.
But surely the question arises as to whether dying, the passing
away of the various forms of life with which we come in
contact, is in all three kinds of living beings the same
process, or whether this only appears outwardly to be so. We
can make use of the following comparisons: If I have a knife
there is a real difference whether I cut my food with it, or
whether I use it for shaving. In each case it is a knife, but
the properties of “knife” must be further
differentiated. Such differentiation is in many cases not
made today. No differentiation is made between the dying of a
plant, an animal or a man.
We
meet the same thing in other domains too. There are people who
in a certain way want to be philosophers of nature, and because
they aim at being idealistic, even spiritual, they assert that
plants may well have a soul; and they try to discover in an
external way those characteristics of plants which seem to
indicate that they have certain soul qualities. They make a
study of those plants which, when they are approached by
insects, tend to open their petals. The insect is caught, for
it is attracted by the scent of what is in the plant. Such a
plant is the Venus Flytrap. It closes its petals with a snap
and the insect is trapped. This is considered to be a sort of
soul quality in the plant. Well, but I know something else
which works in the same way. It is to be found in all sorts of
places. The mouse, when it comes near, feels attracted by the
smell of a dainty morsel; it begins to nibble, and — hey
presto! snap goes the mousetrap. If one were to make use of the
same thought process as in the case of a plant, one might say:
the mousetrap has a soul.
This kind of thinking, however, although quite legitimate under
certain conditions never leads to conclusions of any depth, but
remains more or less on the surface. If we wish to gain a true
knowledge of man we must penetrate into the very depths of
human nature. It must be possible for us to look in a
completely unprejudiced way at things which appear
paradoxical vis-à-vis external methods of
observation. Moreover it is very necessary to take into
consideration everything which, taken together, makes up the
entire human organisation.
In
man we have, to begin with, the actual physical organism which
he has in common with all earthly beings and particularly
with the mineral kingdom. In man, however, we have clearly to
distinguish between his physical organism and his etheric
organism. The latter he has in common only with the plant
world, not with the minerals. But a being endowed only with an
etheric organism could never experience feeling, never attain
to an inner consciousness. For this again man has his astral
organism, which he has in common with the animal world. It
might appear that this is an external organisation, but in the
course of these lectures we shall see how inward it can be. In
addition to this man still has his ego-organisation, which is
not to be found in the animal world and which he alone
possesses among earthly beings. What we are here considering is
in no sense merely an external, intellectual pattern; moreover,
in speaking, for instance, of an etheric or life-body, this has
no connection whatever with what an outmoded natural science
once called “life-force,” “vital-force”
and so on. On the contrary, it is the result of
observation. If, for instance, we study the child up to the age
of the change of teeth, we see that his development is
primarily dependent on his physical organism. The physical
organism must gradually adapt itself to the outer world, but
this cannot take place all at once, not even if considered in
the crudest physical sense. This physical body, just because it
contains what the human being has brought with him out of the
spiritual world in which he lived in pre-earthly existence,
cannot forthwith assimilate the substances of the outer world,
but must receive them specially prepared in the mother's milk.
The child must, so to say, remain closely connected with
what is of like nature with himself. He must only gradually
grow into the outer world. And the conclusion of this process
of the physical organism growing into the outer world is
indicated by the appearance of the second teeth at about the
seventh year. At approximately this age the child's physical
organism completes the process of growing into the world.
During this time, however, in which the organisation is chiefly
concerned with the shaping and fashioning of the bony system,
the child is only interested in certain things in the outer
world, not in everything. He is only interested in what we
might call gesture, everything that is related to movement. Now
you must take into account that at first the child's
consciousness is dream-like, shadowy; to begin with his
perceptions are quite undefined, and only gradually do they
light up and gain clarity. But fundamentally speaking the fact
remains that during the time between birth and the change of
teeth the child's perception adheres to everything in the
nature of gesture and movement and does so to such an
extent, that in the very moment when he perceives a movement he
feels an inner urge to imitate it. There exists a quite
definite law of development in the nature of the human being
which I should like to characterise in the following way.
While the human being is growing into the physical, earthly
world, his inner nature is developing in such a way that this
development proceeds in the first place out of gesture, out of
differentiation of movement. In the inner nature of the
organism speech develops out of movement in all its
aspects, and thought develops out of speech. This deeply
significant law underlies all human development. Everything
which makes its appearance in sound, in speech, is the result
of gesture, mediated through the inner nature of the human
organism.
If
you turn your attention to the way in which a child not only
learns to speak, but also learns to walk, to place one foot
after the other, you can observe how one child treads more
strongly on the back part of the foot, on the heel, and another
walks more on the toes. You can observe children who in
learning to walk tend to bring their legs well forward; with
others you will see that they are more inclined to hold back,
as it were, between two steps. It is extraordinarily
interesting to watch a child learning to walk. You must learn
to observe this. But it is more interesting still, although
much less attention is paid to it, to see how a child learns to
grasp something, how he learns to move his hands. There are
children who, when they want something, move their hands in
such a way that even the fingers are brought into movement.
Others keep their fingers still, and stretch out their hands to
take hold without moving the fingers. There are children who
stretch out their hand and arm, while keeping the upper part of
the body motionless; there are others who immediately let the
upper part of the body follow the movement of arm and hand. I
once knew a child who, when he was very small and his
high-chair was placed at a little distance from the table on
which stood some dish he wished to get at, proceeded to
“row” himself towards it; his whole body was then
in movement. He could make no movements at all without
moving his whole body.
This is the first thing to look out for in a child; for how a
child moves reveals the most inward urge of life, the primal
life impulse. At the same time there appears in the child's
movement the tendency to adapt himself to others, to
carry out some movement in the same way as his father, mother
or other member of the family. The principle of imitation comes
to light in gesture, in movement. For gesture is what appears
first of all in human evolution, and in the special
constitution of the physical, soul and spiritual organism of
man gesture is inwardly transformed; it is transformed into
speech. Those who are able to observe this know without any
doubt that a child who speaks as though the sentences were
hacked out of him is one who sets his heels down first; while a
child who speaks in such a way that the sentences run one into
the other tends to trip on his toes. A child who takes hold of
things more lightly with his fingers has the tendency to
emphasise the vowel element, while a child who is inclined to
stress the consonants will bring his whole arm to his aid when
grasping something. We receive a very definite impression of a
child's potentialities from his manner of speaking. And to
understand the world, to understand the world through the
medium of the senses, through the medium of thought, this too
is developed out of speech. Thought does not produce speech,
but speech thought. So it is in the cultural development of
humanity as a whole; human beings have first spoken, then
thought. So it is also with the child; first out of movement he
learns to speak, to articulate only then does thinking come
forth from speech. We must therefore look upon this sequence as
being something of importance: gesture, speech, thought,
or the process of thinking.
All
this is especially characteristic in the first epoch of the
child's life, up to the change of teeth. When little by little
the child grows into the world during the first, second, third
and fourth years of life, he does so through gesture;
everything is dependent on gesture. Indeed, I would say that
speaking and thinking take place for the most part
unconsciously; both develop naturally out of gesture, even the
first gesture. Therefore speaking approximately we can
say: From the first to the seventh year gesture predominates in
the life of the child, but gesture in the widest sense of the
word, gesture which in the child lives in imitation. As
educators we must keep this firmly in mind for actually up to
the change of teeth the child only takes in what comes to him
as gesture, he shuts himself off from everything else. If we
say to the child: Do it like this, do it like that, he really
does not hear, he does not take any notice. It is only when we
stand in front of him and show him how to do it that he is able
to copy us. For the child works according to the way I myself
am moving my fingers, or he looks at something just as I am
looking at it, not according to what I tell him. He imitates
everything. This is the secret of the development of the child
up to the change of teeth. He lives entirely in imitation,
entirely in the imitation of what in the widest possible sense
comes to meet him from outside as gesture. This accounts for
the surprises we get when faced with the education of very
young children. A father came to me once and said, “What
shall I do? Something really dreadful has happened. My boy has
been stealing.” I said, “Let us first find out
whether he really steals. What has he done?” The father
told me that the boy had taken money out of the cupboard, had
bought sweets with it and shared them with the other boys. I
said “Presumably that is the cupboard out of which the
boy has often seen his mother taking money, before going
shopping; he is quite naturally imitating her.” And this
proved to be the case. So I said further, “But that is
not stealing; that lies as a natural principle of development
in the boy up to the change of teeth. He imitates what he sees;
he must do so.” In the presence of a child therefore we
should avoid doing anything which he should not imitate. This
is how we educate him. If we say: You should not do this or
that, it does not influence the child in the slightest degree
up to the change of teeth. It could at most have some effect if
one were to clothe the words in a gesture, by saying: Now look,
you have just done something that I would never do! — for
this is in a way a disguised gesture.
It
comes to this: with our whole manhood we should fully
understand how up to the change of teeth the child is an
imitating being. During this time there is actually an inner
connection between the child and his environment, between all
that is going on around him. Later on this is lost. For however
strange and paradoxical it may sound to people today, who are
quite unable to think correctly about the spirit, but think
always in abstractions, it is nevertheless true that the whole
relationship of the child to gesture and movement in his
surroundings has an innate religious character. Through his
physical body the child is given over to everything in the
nature of gesture; he cannot do otherwise than yield himself up
to it. What we do later with our soul, and still later with our
spirit, in that we yield ourselves up to the divine, even to
the external world, as again spiritualised, this the child does
with his physical body when he brings it into movement. He is
completely immersed in religion, both with his good and his bad
qualities. What remains with us as soul and spirit in later
life, this the child has also in his physical organism. If
therefore the child lives in close proximity with a surly,
“bearish” father, liable to fall into rages,
someone who is often irritable and angry, expressing
uncontrolled emotions in the presence of the child, while the
inner causes of such emotions are not as yet understood by the
child, nevertheless what he sees, he experiences as something
not moral. The child perceives simultaneously, albeit
unconsciously, the moral aspects of these outbreaks, so
that he has not only the outer picture of the gesture, but also
absorbs its moral significance. If I make an angry gesture,
this passes over into the blood organisation of the child, and
if these gestures recur frequently they find expression in his
blood circulation. The child's physical body is organised
according to the way in which I behave in his presence,
according to the kind of gestures I make. Moreover if I fail in
loving understanding when the child is present, if,
without considering him I do something which is only suitable
at a later age, and am not constantly on the watch when he is
near me, then it can happen that the child enters lovingly into
something which is unfitted for his tender years, but belongs
to another age, and his physical body will in that case be
organised accordingly. Whoever studies the whole course of a
man's life from birth to death, bearing in mind the
requirements of which I have spoken, will see that a child who
has been exposed to things suitable only to grown-up people and
who imitates these things will in his later years, from the age
of about 50, suffer from sclerosis. One must be able to examine
such phenomena in all their ramifications. Illnesses that
appear in later life are often only the result of educational
errors made in the very earliest years of childhood.
This is why an education which is really based on a
knowledge of man must study the human being as a whole
from birth until death. To be able to look at man as a whole is
the very essence of anthroposophical knowledge. Then too one
discovers how very strong the connection is between the child
and his environment. I would go as far as to say that the soul
of the child goes right out into his surroundings, experiences
these surroundings intimately, and indeed has a much stronger
relationship to them than at a later period of life. In this
respect the child is still very close to the animal, only he
experiences things in a more spiritual way, in a way more
permeated with soul. The animal's experiences are coarser and
cruder, but the animal too is related to its environment. The
reason why many phenomena of recent times remain unexplained is
because people are not able to enter into all the details
involved. There is, for instance, the case of the
“calculating horses” which has made such a stir
recently, where horses have carried out simple arithmetical
operations through stamping with their hooves. I have not seen
the famous Elberfelder horses, but I have seen the horse
belonging to Herr von Osten. This horse did quite nice little
sums. For instance Herr von Osten asked: How much is 5 + 7? And
he began to count, beginning with 1, and when he got to 12 the
horse stamped with its foot. It could add up, subtract and so
on. Now there was a young professor who studied this problem
and wrote a book about it which is extremely interesting. In
this book he expounds the view that the horse sees certain
little gestures made by Herr von Osten, who always stands close
to the horse. His opinion is that when Herr von Osten counts 7
+ 5 up to 12 and the horse stamps when the number 12 is
reached, this is because Herr von Osten makes a very slight
gesture when he comes to 12 and the horse, noticing this, duly
stamps his foot. He believes that it can all be traced back to
something visible. But now he puts a question to himself:
“Why,” he says, “can you not see this gesture
which Herr von Osten makes so skilfully that the horse sees it
and stamps at the number 12?” The young professor goes on
to say that these gestures are so slight that he as a human
being cannot see them. From this the conclusion might be drawn
that a horse sees more than a professor! But this did not
convince me at all, for I saw this wonder of an intelligent
horse, the clever Hans, standing by Herr von Osten in his long
coat. And I saw too that in his right-hand pocket he had lumps
of sugar, and while he was carrying out his experiments with
the horse he always handed it one lump after another, so that
feeling was aroused in the horse associating sweet things with
Herr von Osten. In this way a sort of love was established
between Herr von Osten and the horse. And only when this is
present, only when the inner being of the horse is, as it were,
merged into the inner being of Herr von Osten through the
stream of sweetness that flows between them, only then can the
horse “calculate,” for it really receives something
— not through gesture, but through what Herr von Osten is
thinking. He thinks: 5 + 7 = 12, and by means of suggestion the
horse takes up this thought and even has a distinct impression
of it. One can actually see this. The horse and his master are
in a certain way merged in feeling one into the other: they
impart something to one another reciprocally when they are
united through the medium of sweetness. So the animal still has
this finer relationship to its environment, and this can
be stimulated from outside, as, in this case, by means of
sugar.
In
a delicate way a similar relationship to the outer world is
still present in children also. It lives in the child and
should be reckoned with. Education in the kindergarten should
therefore never depend on anything other than the principle of
imitation. The teacher must sit down with the children
and just do what she wishes them to do, so that the child has
only to copy. All education and instruction before the change
of teeth must be based on this principle.
After the change of teeth all this becomes quite different. The
soul life of the child is now completely changed. No longer
does he perceive merely the single gestures, but now he sees
the way in which these gestures accord with one another. For
instance, whereas previously he only had a feeling for a
definite line, now he has a feeling for co-ordination, for
symmetry. The feeling is awakened for what is co-ordinated or
uncoordinated, and in his soul the child acquires the
possibility of perceiving what is formative. As soon as
this perception is awakened there appears simultaneously
an interest in speech. During the first seven years of life
there is an interest in gesture, in everything connected with
movement; in the years between seven and fourteen there is an
interest in everything connected with the pictorial form, and
speech is pre-eminently pictorial and formative. After the
change of teeth the child's interest passes over from gesture
to speech, and in the lower school years from seven to fourteen
we can work most advantageously through everything that
lies in speech, above all through the moral element underlying
speech. For just as the child before this age has a religious
attitude towards the gesture which meets him in the surrounding
world, so now he relates himself in a moral sense — his
religious feeling being gradually refined into a soul
experience — to everything which approaches him through
speech.
So
now, in this period of his life, one must work upon the child
through speech. But whatever is to work upon him in this way
must do so by means of an unquestioned authority. When I want
to convey to the child some picture expressed through speech, I
must do so with the assurance of authority. I must be the
unquestioned authority for the child when through speech I want
to conjure up before him some picture. Just as we must actually
show the little child what we want him to do, so we must be the
human pattern for the child between the change of teeth and
puberty. In other words, there is no point whatever in giving
reasons to a child of this age, in trying to make him see why
we should do something or not do it, just because there are
well-founded reasons for or against it. This passes over the
child's head. It is important to understand this. In exactly
the same way as in the earliest years of life the child only
observes the gesture, so between the change of teeth and
puberty he only observes what I, as a human being, am in
relation to himself. At this age the child must, for instance,
learn about what is moral in such a way that he regards as good
what the naturally accepted authority of the teacher, by means
of speech, designates as good; he must regard as bad what this
authority designates as bad. The child must learn: What my
teacher, as my authority, does is good, what he does not do is
bad. Relatively speaking then, the child feels: When my teacher
says something is good, then it is good; and if he says
something is bad, then it is bad. You will not attribute to me,
seeing that 30 years ago I wrote my
Philosophy of Freedom
[Also called
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
in some English translations.]
a point of view which upholds the principle of authority as the
one and only means of salvation. But through the very fact of
knowing the true nature of freedom one also knows that between
the change of teeth and puberty the child needs to be faced
with an unquestioned authority. This lies in the nature of man.
Everything is doomed to failure in education which disregards
this relationship of the child to the unquestioned
authority of the personality of the teacher and educator.
The child must be guided in everything which he should do or
not do, think or not think, feel or not feel, by what flows to
him, by way of speech, from his teacher and educator. At this
age therefore there is no sense in wanting to approach him
through the intellect. During this time everything must
be directed towards the life of feeling, for feeling is
receptive to anything in the nature of pictures and the child
of this age is so constituted that he lives in the world of
pictures, of images, and has the feeling of welding separate
details into a harmonious whole. This is why, for instance,
what is moral cannot be brought to the child by way of precept,
by saying: You should do this, you should not do that. It
simply doesn't work. What does work is when the child, through
the way in which one speaks to him, can feel inwardly in his
soul a liking for what is good, a dislike of what is bad.
Between the change of teeth and puberty the child is an
aesthete and we must therefore take care that he experiences
pleasure in the good and displeasure in what is bad. This is
the best way for him to develop a sense of morality.
We
must also be sincere, inwardly sincere in the imagery we use in
our work with the child. This entails being permeated to the
depths of our being by everything we do. This is not the case
if, when standing before the child we immediately
experience a slight sense of superiority: I am so clever
— the child is so stupid. Such an attitude ruins all
education; it also destroys in the child the feeling for
authority. Well then, how shall I transform into a pictorial
image something that I want to impart to the child? In order to
make this clear I have chosen the following example as an
illustration.
We
cannot speak to the child about the immortality of the soul in
the same way as to a grown-up person; but we must nevertheless
convey to him some understanding of it. We must however do so
in a pictorial way. We must build up the following picture and
to do this may well take the whole lesson.
We
can explain to the child what a butterfly's chrysalis is, and
then speak in some such words as these: “Well, later on
the finished butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. It was
inside all the time only it was not yet visible, it was not yet
ready to fly away, but it was already there inside.” Now
we can go further and tell him that in a similar way the human
body contains the soul, only it is not visible. At death the
soul flies out of the body; the only difference between man and
butterfly is that the butterfly is visible and the human soul
is invisible. In this way we can speak to the child about the
immortality of the soul so that he receives a true picture of
immortality and one suited to his age. But in the presence of
the child we must on no account have the feeling: I am clever,
I am a philosopher and by no means of thought can I convince
myself of the truth of immortality; the child is naive, is
stupid, and so for him I will build up the picture of the
butterfly creeping out of the chrysalis. If one thinks in this
way one establishes no contact with the child, and then he gets
nothing whatever from what he is told. There is only one
possibility. We must ourselves believe in the picture, we must
not want to be cleverer than the child; we must stand in the
presence of the child as full of belief as he is. How can this
be done? An anthroposophist, a student of spiritual science
knows that the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis
is actually a picture of the immortality of the human
soul placed into the world by the gods. He can never think
otherwise than that the gods inscribed into the world this
picture of the emerging butterfly as an image of the
immortality of the human soul. In all the lower stages of the
process he sees the higher processes which have become
abstract. If I do not get the idea that the child is stupid and
I am clever, but if I stand before the child conscious that
this actually is so in the world and that I am leading him to
believe in something which I too believe with all my heart,
then there arises an imponderable relationship between
us, and the child makes real progress in his education. Then
moral imponderabilia continually enters into our educational
relationship. And this is the crux of the matter.
When we are quite clear about this we shall, out of the whole
nexus of our studies, come to see how we can find the right
approach to an instruction which is truly educational, an
education which really instructs. Let us take an example. How
must the child learn to read and write? There is actually a
great deal more misery connected with this than one usually
imagines, though human intellectualism is far too crude to
perceive it. One recognises that learning to read and write is
a necessity, so it follows that the child must at all costs be
drilled into learning reading and writing. But just consider
what this means for a child! When they are grown-up, people
have no inclination to put themselves in the child's place, to
imagine what he undergoes when he learns to read and write. In
our civilisation today we have letters, a, b, c and so on; they
are there before us in certain definite forms. Now the child
has the sound a (ah, as in father). When does he use it? This
sound is for him the expression of an inner soul experience. He
uses this sound when he is faced with something which calls up
in him a feeling of wonder, of astonishment. This sound he
understands. It is bound up with human nature. Or he has the
sound e (eh, as in they). When does he use this? He uses it
when he wants to show he has the feeling: “Something has
come up against me; I have experienced something which
encroaches on my own nature.” If somebody gives me a
blow, I say e (eh).
[In English we tend to prefix an aspirate
to the vowel, saying “Ha” when something astonishes
us, or “Heh” when something impinges on us, e.g.
“Heh, stop it!”]
It is the same with the
consonants. Every sound corresponds to some expression of life;
the consonants imitate an outer, external world, the vowels
express what is experienced inwardly in the soul. The study of
language, philology, is today only approaching the first
elements of such things.
Learned scholars, who devote themselves to research into
language, have given much thought to what, in the course of
human evolution, may have been the origin of speech. There are
two theories. The one represents the view that speech may have
arisen out of soul experiences in much the same way as this
takes place in the animal, albeit in its most primitive form
— “moo-moo” being the expression of what the
cow feels inwardly, and “bow-wow” what is
experienced by the dog. And so, in a more complicated way, what
in man becomes articulated speech arises out of this urge
to give expression to inner feelings and experiences. In
somewhat humorous vein this is called the “bow-wow
theory.” The other point of view proceeds from the
supposition that in the sounds of speech man imitates what
takes place in the outer world. It is possible to imitate the
sound of a bell, what is taking place inside the bell:
“ding-dong — ding-dong.” Here there is the
attempt to imitate what takes place in the outer world. This is
the basis for the theory that in speech everything may be
traced back to external sounds, external event. It is the
“ding-dong theory.” So we have these two theories
in opposition to one another. It is not in any way my intention
to make fun of this, for as a matter of fact, both are correct:
the “bow-wow” theory is right for the vowel element
in speech, the “ding-dong” theory for the
consonantal element. In transposing gestures into sounds we
learn by means of the consonants to imitate inwardly outer
processes; and in the vowels we give form to inner experiences
of the soul. In speech the inner and the outer unite. Human
nature, itself homogeneous, understands how to bring this
about.
We
receive the child into the primary school. Through his inner
organisation he has become a being able to speak. Now, suddenly
he is expected to experience — I say experience
deliberately weighing my words, not recognise,
experience — a connection between
astonishment, wonder, (ah) and the demonic sign a. This
is something completely foreign to him. He is supposed to learn
something which he feels to be utterly remote, and to relate
this to the sound “ah.” This is something outside
the sphere of a young child's comprehension. He feels it as a
veritable torture if at the very outset we confront him with
the forms of the letters in use today.
We
can, however, remember something else. The letters which we
have today were not always there. Let us look back to those
ancient peoples who had a picture writing. They used pictures
to give tangible form to what was uttered, and these pictures
certainly had something to do with what they were intended to
express. They did not have letters such as we use, but pictures
which were related to their meaning. Up to a certain point the
same could be said of cuneiform writing. These were times when
people still had a human relationship to things, even when
these were fixed into a definite form. Today we no longer have
this, but with the child we must go back to it again. We must
of course not do so in such a way that we study the cultural
history of ancient peoples and fall back on the forms which
were once used in picture writing; but we must bring all our
educational fantasy into play as teachers in order to create
the kind of pictures we need. Fantasy, imagination
[The German phantasie is often more equivalent
to the English imagination than to fantasy. In this
lecture the latter is probably more appropriate.]
we must certainly have,
for without it we cannot be teachers or educators. And so it is
always necessary to refer to the importance of enthusiasm, of
inspiration, when dealing with some characteristic feature of
anthroposophy. It never gives me any pleasure, for instance,
when I go into a class in our Waldorf School and notice that a
teacher is tired and is teaching out of a certain mood of
weariness. That is something one must never do. One simply
cannot be tired, one can only be filled with enthusiasm. When
teaching, one must be absolutely on the spot with one's whole
being. It is quite wrong to be tired when teaching; tiredness
must be kept for some other occasion. The essential thing for a
teacher is that he learns to give full play to his fantasy.
What does this mean? To begin with I call up in the child's
mind something that he has seen at the market, or some other
place, a fish for example. I next get him to draw a fish, and
for this I even allow him to use colours, so that he paints as
he draws and draws as he paints. This being achieved I then let
him say the word “Fish,” not speaking the word
quickly, but separating the sounds, “f-i-ssh.” Then
I lead him on so that he says only the beginning of the word
fish (f...) and gradually I transfer the shape of the fish into
a sign that is somewhat fish like, while at the same time
getting the child to say f ... And there we have it, the letter
“f!”
Or
I let the child say Wave (W-a-v-e) showing him at the same time
what a wave is (see sketch). Once again I let him paint this
and get him to say the beginning of the word — w —
and then I change the picture of a wave into the letter w.
Continuing to work in the same way I allow the written
characters gradually to emerge from the painting-drawing and
drawing-painting, as indeed they actually arose in the first
place. I do not bring the child into a stage of civilisation
with which as yet he has nothing in common, but I guide him in
such a way that he is never torn away from his relationship to
the outer world. In order to do this there is no necessity to
study the history of culture — albeit the writing in use
today has arisen out of picture-writing — one must only
give free play to one's fantasy, for then one brings the child
to the point at which he is able to form writing out of this
drawing and painting.
Now
we must not think of this only as an ingenious and clever new
method. We must value the fact that the child unites himself
inwardly with something that is new to him when his soul
activity is constantly stimulated. He does not “grow into
it” when he is pushed, so that he is always coming into
an unfamiliar relationship with his environment. The whole
point is that we are working on the inner being of the
child.
What is usually done today? It is perhaps already somewhat
out-of-date, but not so long ago people gave little girls
“beautiful” dolls, with real hair, dolls that
could shut their eyes when one laid them down, dolls with
pretty faces and so on. Civilisation calls them
beautiful, but they are nevertheless hideous, because they are
inartistic. What sort of dolls are these? They are the sort
which cannot activate the child's fantasy. Now let us do
something different. Tie a handkerchief so that you have a
figure with arms and legs; then make eyes with blobs of ink and
perhaps a mouth with red ink as well; now the child must
develop his fantasy if he is to imagine this as having the
human shape. Such a thing works with tremendous living force on
the child, because it offers him the possibility of using his
fantasy. Naturally one must do this first oneself. But the
possibility must be provided for the child, and this must be
done at the age when everything is play. It is for this reason
that all those things which do not stimulate fantasy in the
child are so damaging when given as toys. As I said, today
these beautiful dolls are somewhat out-dated, for now we give
children monkeys or bears. To be sure, neither do these toys
give any opportunity for the unfolding of a fantasy having any
relationship to the human being. Let us suppose that a child
runs up to us and we give him a bear to cuddle. Things like
this show clearly how far our civilisation is from being able
to penetrate into the depths of human nature. But it is quite
remarkable how children in a perfectly natural, artistic way
are able to form imaginatively a picture of this inner side of
human nature.
In
the Waldorf School we have made a transition from the ordinary
methods of teaching to what may be termed a teaching
through art, and this quite apart from the fact that in no
circumstances do we begin by teaching the children to write,
but we let them paint as they draw, and draw as they paint.
Perhaps we might even say that we let them splash about, which
involves the possibly tiresome job of cleaning up the classroom
afterwards. I shall also speak tomorrow about how to lead over
from writing to reading, but, quite apart from this painting
and drawing, we guide the child as far as possible into the
realm of the artistic by letting him practise modelling in his
own little way, but without suggesting that he should make
anything beyond what he himself wants to fashion out of his own
inner being. The results are quite remarkable. I will mention
one example which shows how something very wonderful
takes place in the case of rather older children.
At
a comparatively early age, that is to say, for children between
ten and eleven years old, we take as a subject in our
curriculum the “Study of Man.” At this age the
children learn to know how the bones are formed and built up,
how they support each other, and so on. They learn this in an
artistic way, not intellectually. After a few such lessons the
child has acquired some perception of the structure of the
human bones, the dynamic of the bones and their
interdependence. Then we go over to the craft-room, where the
children model plastic forms and we observe what they are
making. We see that they have learned something from these
lessons about the bones. Not that the child imitates the forms
of the bones, but from the way in which he now models his forms
we perceive the outer expression of an inner mobility of soul.
Before this he has already got so far as to be able to make
little receptacles of various kinds; children discover how to
make bowls and similar things quite by themselves, but what
they make out of the spontaneity of childhood before they have
received such lessons is quite different from what they model
afterwards, provided they have really experienced what was
intended. In order to achieve this result, however, these
lessons on the “Knowledge of Man” must be given in
such a way that their content enters right into the whole human
being. Today this is difficult.
Anyone who has paid as many visits to studios as I have and
seen how people paint and model and carve, knows very well that
today hardly any sculptor works without a model; he must have a
human form in front of him if he wishes to model it.
This would have had no sense for a Greek artist. He had of
course learned to know the human form in the public games, but
he really experienced it inwardly. He knew out of his own inner
feeling — and this feeling he embodied without the aid of
a model — he knew the difference between an arm when it
is stretched out or when, in addition, the forefinger is also
extended, and this feeling he embodied in his sculpture.
Today, however, when physiology is taught in the usual way,
models or drawings of the bones are placed side by side, the
muscles are described one after another and no impression is
given of their reciprocal relationship. With us, when the
children see a vertebra belonging to the spinal column,
they know how similar it is to the skull-bone, and they get a
feeling for the metamorphosis of the bones. In this way
they enter livingly right into the different human forms and so
feel the urge to express it artistically. Such an experience
enters right into life; it does not remain external.
My
earnest wish, and also my duty as leader of the Waldorf School,
is to make sure that wherever possible everything of a fixed
nature in the way of science, everything set down in books in a
rigid scientific form should be excluded from class teaching.
Not that I do not value science; no one could value science
more highly. Such studies can be indulged in outside the
school, if so desired; but I should be really furious if I were
to see a teacher standing in front of a class with a book in
his or her hand. In teaching everything must come from within.
This must be self-understood. How is botany taught today for
instance? We have botany books; these are based on a
scientific outlook, but they do not belong to the classroom
where there are children between the change of teeth and
puberty. The perception of what a teacher needs in the way of
literature must be allowed to grow gradually out of the living
educational principles I shall be speaking about here.
So
we are really concerned with the teacher's attitude of mind,
whether in soul, spirit and body he is able to relate himself
to the world. If he has this living relationship he can do much
with the children between the change of teeth and puberty, for
he is then their natural and accepted authority. The main thing
is that one should enter into and experience things in a living
way and carry over into life all that one has thus experienced.
This is the great and fundamental principle which must form the
basis of education today. Then the connection with the class
will be there of itself, together with the imponderable mood
and feeling that must necessarily go with it.
Answer to a
Question
Question: There are grown-up people who seem to have
remained at the imitative stage of childhood. Why is this?
Dr. Steiner: It is possible at every stage of
human development for someone to remain in a stationary
condition. If we describe the different stages of development,
adding to today's survey the embryonic stage, and continuing to
the change of teeth, and on to puberty, we cover those epochs
in which a fully developed human life can be formed. Now quite
a short time ago the general trend of anthroposophical
development brought it about that lectures could be held on
curative education, with special reference to definite
cases of children who had either remained backward or whose
development was in some respect abnormal. We then took the
further step of allowing certain cases to be seen which were
being treated at Dr. Wegmann's Clinical-Therapeutic Institute.
Among these cases there was one of a child of nearly a year
old, about the normal size for a child of this age, but who in
the formation of his physical body had remained approximately
at the stage of seven or eight months embryo. If you were to
draw the child in outline with only an indication of the limbs,
which are somewhat more developed, but showing exactly
the form of the head, as it actually is in the case of this
little boy, then, looking cursorily at the drawing, you would
not have the faintest idea that it is a boy of nearly a year
old. You would think it an embryo, because this boy has in many
respects kept after his birth the embryonic structure.
Every stage of life, including the embryonic, can be carried
over into a later stage; for the different phases of
development as they follow one after the other, are such that
each new phase is a metamorphosis of the old, with something
new added. If you will only take quite exactly what I have
already said in regard to the natural religious devotion of the
child to his surroundings up to the change of teeth, you will
see that this changes later into the life of soul, and you
have, as a second attribute the aesthetic, artistic stage. Now
it happens with very many children that the first stage is
carried into the second, and the latter then remains poorly
developed. But this can go still further: the first stage of
physical embodiment can be carried over into each of the
others, so that what was present as the original stage appears
in all the later stages. And, for a superficial observation of
life, it need not be so very obvious that an earlier stage has
remained on into a later one, unless such a condition shows
itself particularly late in life. Certain it is however that
earlier stages are carried over into later ones.
Let
us take the same thing in a lower kingdom of nature. The fully
grown, fully developed plant usually has root, stalk, with it
cotyledon leaves, followed by the later green leaves. These are
then concentrated in the calyx, the petals, the stamen, the
pistil and so on. There are however plants which do not develop
as far as the blossom, but remain behind at the stage of herbs
and other plants where the green leaves remain stationary, and
the fruit is merely rudimentary. How far, for instance, the
fern has remained behind the buttercup! With the plant this
does not lead to abnormality. Man however is a species for
himself. He is a complete natural order. And it can happen that
someone remains his whole life long an imitative being, or one
who stands in need of authority. For in life we have not only
to do with people who remain at the imitative stage, but also
with those who in regard to their essential characteristics
remain at the stage that is fully developed between the change
of teeth and puberty. As a matter of fact there are very many
such people, and with them this stage continues into later
life. They cannot progress much farther, and what should be
developed in later years can only do so to a limited extent.
They remain always at the stage where they look for the support
of authority. If there were no such people, neither would
there be the tendency, so rife today, to form sects and such
things, for sectarian associations are based on the fact that
their adherents are not required to think; they leave the
thinking to others and follow their leaders. In certain spheres
of life, however, most people remain at the stage of authority.
For instance, when it is a question of forming a judgment about
something of a scientific nature people do not take the trouble
to look into it themselves, but they ask: Where is the expert
who must know about this, the specialist who is a lecturer at
one of the universities? There you have the principle of
authority. Again in the case of people who are ill the
principle of authority is carried to extremes, even though here
it may be justifiable. And in legal matters, for instance,
nobody today will think of forming an independent judgment, but
will seek the advice of a solicitor because he has the
requisite knowledge. Here the standpoint is that of an eight or
nine year old child. And it may well be that this solicitor
himself is not much older. When a question is put to him he
takes down a lawbook or portfolio and there again you have an
authority. So it is actually the case that each stage of life
can enter into a later one.
The
Anthroposophical Society should really only consist of people
who are outgrowing authority, who do not recognise any such
principle but only true insight. This is so little understood
by people outside the Society that they are continually saying:
“Anthroposophy is based on authority.” In reality
the precise opposite is the case; the principle of authority
must be outgrown through the kind of understanding and discernment
which is fostered in anthroposophy. The important thing is that
one should grasp every scrap of insight one can lay hold of in
order to pass through the different stages of life.
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