Healthy Thinking

Lecture 6

Education and teaching in the face of the present world situation.

Stuttgart on 10 June 1920

My dear honourable friends! After a lengthy absence I managed the day before yesterday, for only a short hour, to once again visit your Waldorf School where I could also take part in lessons in the local eighth elementary school class in which World History was being treated. If I now may speak bluntly, I would say I have the impression, if we really succeed in continuing this way in terms of education and teaching shown here — at least essentially — we may hope to get individuals out of our school who are able to cope with the increasingly difficult questions of life in the near future and who would take their stand in life. Undoubtedly some of what was aimed for was being achieved, it seemed to me to a certain degree, what I would like to call: History as an expression of human development. For the children here, who are in their 13^th, 14^th, 15^th year of life, history has already become so vivid that this history will accompany them; what they receive will work as empowering thoughts, also making it possible as a strength for their entire next life, not merely as a historical understanding but as an understanding for the circumstances of life, for life’s relationships.

If I now ask myself: How could I — after I had dealt with it almost a year ago — pedagogically and didactically let the ideas for the Waldorf School of which our friend Molt has just spoken here, lead the way — how could the interest which I now had to take from the way which the impulses were given in reality at that time, how could this interest be satisfied in such a way as I have just indicated? From this I could see that, what entered as vivid in history was due to the teacher, Dr Stein, who found the inner courage to add to his view of history that which is the power of this spiritual science which I have taken the liberty to allow myself to present for many years, here and also in Stuttgart. This spiritual science certainly should not be merely as an inner comfort to souls who have turned away from the world, but it is meant to be something that actually recognises everything human and penetrates and fertilizes all human actions and human creations. It should be something that is not merely acknowledged but should instil such ideas, I could say, which ensoul heart-blood pouring into the human limbs, into the spiritual and physical limbs, making man more dexterous, more handy, more able in life in any relationship.

However, one must, in order to oppose the many prejudices that still penetrate branches of education, teaching and life which carry impulses of spiritual science, one must, in order to overcome these prejudices in the widest circles, have the inner courage — courage which can only flow from a soul inwardly connected with the persuasive power originating from knowledge of reality derived from the view of spiritual science as I have often suggested here. From what I’ve taken the liberty of speaking about so directly from that day, thoughts can easily link to a phenomenon which, in today’s general world situation, is all too often the case, well founded and only too understandable. We live — and I have already in my lectures the day before yesterday indicated it form a different point of view — we live in a time today when the social question can no longer be one depending on institutions and organisations, but one where it is a great question of human worth, human dignity; an issue of humanity in general. It is no longer important today to think which institution is best where we could find this or that kind of thinking about the social life, but it involves this: how can we win the broad masses of people who have appeared on the scene of life with those who in a certain way, through their intelligence, by the intellectual direction they have acquired, must nevertheless, in a certain way, be leaders in all that is incorporated into the social life of the present?

It becomes extraordinarily difficult to speak out about certain truths which may now sound not quite as paradoxical today, yet still somewhat cruel. Again, and yet again the truth must be pointed out which is all too clearly learnt from events of the recent years. It must be pointed out that in the last century, in particular in the last decade, the bearers of the present education, the bearers of actual civilized life — apart from the survival of traditions — have fallen into a certain materialistic view of life and that they have not found their way out of it towards what meanwhile has developed in the broad masses as theories, as views of life. What developed as religion, as science, as art among the ruling classes did not have the inner strength to seize the broad masses of humanity. In particular it didn’t have the strength to support the broad masses of humanity which had as a result of the upswing of our industrial life been placed before machines in industries and so on, who had to be asked to be brought up to what the content of education, religion, science, and art were of the leading classes. One left the broad masses of the proletariat to themselves. One left the members of the proletariat to what they could see was merely mechanical equipment, merely lifeless, heartless, soulless machines and machinery. From gazing at such a mechanical environment, connected to a life with machines, life could be viewed by the broad masses in such a way that it came to be expressed more or less as radical Marxism and now, unfortunately, already wants to shape reality as I hinted at the day before yesterday.

A bridge between that which was once old traditions recognised by the educated classes as their civilisation, and that which has entered into the sphere of the newer life in the broad masses of people, such a bridge doesn’t exist today. Quite unsurely do we face the great questions of life today: how can a bridge be built between those who from knowledge of the being of man create conceptions, how should our social life go on, and those who understandably only progress in life out of a sphere which is actually only based on the lifeless, and thus the belief that all life, all religion, all science, all art could equally develop from it like a superstructure of production conditions which is distant from all spiritual life?

This, my dear friends here today, this is the most horrific riddle of the present time: When will we ever succeed in bringing together these two parts of humanity — who, despite all that is said, must come together — when are we ever going to meet that demand? This weighs more or less unconsciously, on many, obviously. Out of this burden various well meaning efforts have originated in the present. This is when it becomes difficult again to find anything to say, what I must say to them now, as I certainly want to acknowledge the well meaning endeavours.

My dear friends, it is no use today to somehow not hurt or offend people, to hold back what is based on deeper insight in the developmental laws of humanity which must be spoken about, so that we can move forward with the rebuilding of our social life. Many people feel the neglect of something with spiritual content for mankind and letting this flow as spiritual content into science, religion and art, which could be the persuasive force of the great masses — these masses which up to now only want to accept what they, out of their own life history, about living together with the machine and with mechanism and so on, say. As a result many have concluded: It is necessary that we bring a certain education to the broad masses, because after all our social question is essentially a question of education. It is the well-intended aspiration of many that this education would be in the position to develop ideas about the dissemination of information about possibilities of human coexistence, possibilities of social reciprocity. So people think in many circles out of the most earnest intention about adult education centres and any other similar educational institutions.

You see, this is the hard part, that one must speak about such well-meaning things, as I have to do now. It involves taking for granted those who out of an honest will wish to spread education, the propagation of science so that science, as it presents itself today, how it is taught and learnt in our educational institutions and colleges, is now given in an appropriate way in adult education centres and similar institutions. Many find this quite understandable. Why is that? Because many do not want to ask the question of today’s life situation in a sufficiently consequential way. Today people see how many disturbing powers there are in their public life. People see the dimensions of the declining effects but have become accustomed to them over the last three to four centuries, to what has appeared as generally accepted science and common art, establishing an absolute sense of authority. So people say: Yes, when you take what can be absolutely right, absolutely appropriate and now carry it over into the broad masses, it must be a blessing. Surely it is basically obvious for such a view to come about when people’s questions are not yet consistent enough at present? However, can the other question not also be raised, my dear friends, namely: Yes, were there not also up to now ruling classes of humanity, were they not the owners of this science and art of the spirit, which people now want to throw into universities and similar institutions — were they not those who had mankind’s leadership in hand who brought present humanity into today’s situations? Had this science which is to be given to the broad masses today previously been saved by the leading classes from letting humanity plunge into the absurdities of life? No, it did not!

Can one now hope that something else will come out of the signs of decline when the ruling classes, despite being soaked in this science, in this art and so on, have been sheltered in the current absurdities of life and are not shielded from this science rushing in? Does one want to popularise what apparently played a part in the decline? Does one want to drag the broad masses into it so that these broad masses are in an energetic way led to such absurdities, to which the leading circles have been drawn by this science? This question is a cruel one at present, but it is the kind of question which has to be raised even if one suffers from its utterance because one knows from the outset how little one can be understood by raising such a question. For this reason so little would be understood because most people today still believe: Surely, something solid like the science of the last centuries does exist after all, we can build on it, it has just not yet entered into the masses enough; if it enters into the masses then it will give them a firmer ground. — One can understand that people want something which would mean a firm ground under their feet. However, today the seriousness of our present world situation is so great that it is impossible to recognize certain things you think you know from the course of development of mankind, and simply continue to be silent because in a certain sense, they radically contradict prejudices of the widest circles. What is basically an answer to the fateful question just posed, stares one in the face, as this spiritual science of which I have been speaking about in Stuttgart for years, while this spiritual science wants to be something quite different than what is desired in the widest circles through prejudices; spiritual science always wants not only what it believes could broaden ordinary scientific education but it always wants a thorough enrichment of the whole life of civilised life with a new spiritual insight. It can only promise some enrichment of all of life’s civilizations through a new spiritual vision.

So, we aren’t thinking of directing our intentions towards making common science as broadly based as possible, but we are thinking of a renewal of the entire scientific and world view spirit of the present day and going into the near future.

You see, from such a basic attitude, what is known as pedagogy and didactics, as education and the basic principles of teaching, has flooded the Waldorf School here. Out of such a basic attitude, what has come about is what was spoken about in the time between my previous and present Stuttgart sojourn, over in Switzerland, in Dornach, to a number of doctors and medical students. There we examined the present day form of medicine, particularly with a therapeutic relevance in order to show how everything which can form the basis for this medicine and what can develop further, in fact could be illuminated through spiritual science. Here one wouldn’t proceed from what is called science, and apply it to adult education centres, but one would endeavour to gain a new foundation of knowledge and to fertilize science with it and then only to introduce these into institutions first because the old science may not take away from it, what is to be for the common good. A science of the people, from the healthy ones to the sick ones, must be given through this spiritual science. It is still in its beginnings. Obviously one thinks humbly about everything related to these great problems of the present while in the middle of it. This knowledge of the healthy and sick was because of a belief that only a spiritually illumined science will be capable to work in the widest circles of people, to work with such vital strength that it can rise above what the broad masses through their view of the mechanical have gained. This can never be achieved by the science that has so misled the leading classes; it will only be possible to produce a world view that penetrates sources of knowledge quite different from those to which the intellectual and artistic worldview was inclined to penetrate human conscience during the last centuries, but especially over the last few decades.

I must firstly allow myself, my honourable friends, despite this being such a large gathering today, to speak in an apparently unpopular manner by referring to something about which most people say today: Oh, we really don’t want to speak about the new form of life’s situation of present day humanity. This lies far too much in certain spiritual heights which the broad masses surely can’t understand. — Yes, my dear friends, I am speaking of such points of views as I was implying earlier. When it is often said to me that that, which comes from here, is incomprehensible to the majority of people, then I am always reminded again of what I often heard from theatre directors, whose entire efforts have always been directed towards performing as shoddy pieces as possible to the audience; they’ve always reasoned that it was what the public wanted because they didn’t understand better things. To me it was always obvious that the relevant theatre directors who make such judgements didn’t understand the better pieces. So I make nothing of it when someone or other complain about incomprehensibility but I believe that we, perhaps in part, involved through the plight of the times, are mature enough to take up some of the things that the decades of swimming in philistinism have conveniently called incomprehensible.

Many things have happened to me which I can cite as proof of this incomprehensibility. For example, about twenty years ago I was once invited to give talks to a circle of educated people in a German town, about Goethe’s “Faust”. There were certainly a number of people to whom it didn’t occur to mention that what I said was incomprehensible. Yet an enthusiastic representative of the muse of Oskar Blumenthal appeared who said: Yes, “Faust” is indeed no piece of theatre, it is a science. — It has gradually come about from certain foundations which I will not characterize here, to have an educational ideal handy which says: People should speak in a more popular and more generally understandable way. Precisely because of this comfort, we are in the position we are in now. We won’t come out of it any earlier, my dear friends, until a large enough number of people decides to listen to their conscience in order to understand that it can’t be communicated as clear as water where you can also be unconscious.

When one speaks about the meaning of education and teaching in relation to today’s world situation, then it concerns mainly something than needs insight: The teacher, the educator of today, can only be what he is supposed to be in a fruitful way through a real knowledge of the developing human being, out of a real gift, by looking into what is revealed as human riddles from the first day the child is born, right into the days when it has grown up. However, we don’t have a general world view which can direct us really in an intimate way into people, namely the becoming of a person. Our world view during the last years, during the last decades and centuries, has not actually steered us towards people but away from people. It has indicated in a very shrewd way to identify man as at the top of the animal line, how he has evolved from lower animal forms and today we believe we can recognise what kind of relationship man actually has to the nonhuman. By us raising the big issues of humanity in the common sense, we don’t actually ask: What is a human being? What is the inner being of man? — no, we ask: What is the animal, what is the inner being of an animal? — We study the development of the animal kingdom, and when we have studied how the animal kingdom develops up to its highest peak we remain stuck at this level in order to reach an understanding of people only through the evolution of the animal kingdom.

From a certain point of view it was certainly a great and meaningful route to take, but it is characteristic of the basic principles of the view of development in recent times. As a result the human being is through this not regarded as an individual within his own being but he is only standing in front of himself insofar as he is at the pinnacle of the animal kingdom, insofar as he is something other than an actual human being.

In what way is man an animal? This is a question we ask today and in all kinds of ways. That brings us to the question that got lost: To what extent is man in the true sense of the word, man? And so it becomes almost a fact that people, I would say, grit their teeth on logic at the question: What is the relationship between what we call soul, what we call spirit in human beings, and what we call body in human beings? — In all kinds of forms this is raised in current philosophy, but people only bite with logical teeth. How remarkable it is when sometimes such a white raven is put into the number of viewers who today are so correct in their world view while dealing with such questions, to then speak from a certain healthy common sense. For this I have an example which illustrates much.

For a long time a spirited philologist, Rudolf Hildebrand, worked at the Leipzig University as a student of Jacob Grimm’s linguistic research, also editing to a large extent the famous dictionary concerning the parts that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm left to be edited. This Rudolf Hildebrand also wrote a number of newspaper diary pages which were published by Diederichs in 1910. In these he expresses himself as the kind of person whose life is within teaching and education of the present time and contained in the attitude, I could say, which suddenly stopped and him wanting to use common sense in all that was going on around him, especially in those people who, in today’s scholastic and doctrinal manner, is talking about questions of a world view. An interesting sentence sequence can be found in the chapter where Rudolf Hildebrand writes about his education, upbringing and teaching in his daily column “Thoughts about God, the world and the self” which only appeared after his death. Here he says: When I bring to mind how my university colleagues actually spoke about the world view question, then I often want to, while the lecturer spoke above and the listeners sat below with their sense of duty or even listening to something other than him, I would like — so says Hildebrand, and not me — that a man of the people would come and give a lecturer an earlobe tugging, not too weakly, but enough to hurt, and say to him: You! Look me in the face, or look into the faces of the students, as a person to another person, and try accept this empirical fact, and then ask yourself if everything you say is only talk, because you are obstinate in yourself and don’t have the awareness that in the social life you are standing in front of another human being. –

Rudolf Hildebrand said it would be particularly interesting, if once the wife of the lecturer would accompany him and remark, by tugging his earlobe, not too gently but strong enough to cause pain, and say: You! Would you really dare to say what you say under the influence of your authority to me at home in private, and do you think I would attach any value to it? — Now, my dear friends, I have expressed this to you not to merely hand down a verdict of my own, but the judgement of a man who, for decades worked at a representative university throughout his career, saw that the observed issue at stake here has become a real matter of conscience. What the issue here is that we need, today, with the present world situation and wanting to work in teaching, in education, is a real human knowledge — a knowledge of human nature which we must demand so that at the same time it stimulates us to work with people, and that is a human treatment, flooded through and through with human love. Only such human knowledge, permeated with skill for human treatment, permeated with human love, may direct teaching and education in such a way that the coming generations are positioned in the right way in life’s relationships.

However, my dear friends, this is precisely the difficulty that our present science is lurching around in abstract heights, it believes, with its atoms and atom groupings, that it grasps a reality, while it only drifts around in abstract heights of thinking, in abstract terms. So, if one first creates a concept of the soul and then creates a concept of the body, without thoroughly penetrating the actual human body’s configuration, the actual being of the human soul through direct spiritual looking, then one can’t arrive at anything but a logical grudge against these big riddles of life, which must underlie all human knowledge.

There is a point where what is meant here as spiritual science, applies in such a way that it is possible to determine the relationship between the body and soul, not according to abstract philosophical formulas which are almost exclusively sought today, but that a search will be undertaken towards really looking at the soul activities of people as a way to self-education and self-discipline in the sense of spiritual research which I have often described here, and an attempt is also being made to look at the physical, the corporeal, in the sense of spiritual research. For this one has terms, a few of which I will characterise today. Through these few terms I will be able to show how such a living human knowledge springs up from such a renewal, from such a refreshment of a human life’s view of the world.

We see how a child grows up from birth, where it enters into the physical world out of the spiritual world. We see something appearing out of the deepest inner being of a person as it expands, week by week, month by month, year by year, ever more full of riddles yet ever more magnificent and meaningful in the outer structure, in the outer corporeal-bodily form of the human being. We see how this person grows up, how significant life events strike at its human existence. These life events are usually only described by what is now popular science, and underestimated. I will name two of these life events first; from other points of view I have characterized it often already for you.

I want to mention that at about the seventh year of a child something occurs which replaces the original milk teeth with permanent teeth, I already called your attention yesterday to the complete change in a person’s soul constitution at this age. It is at the same time the age where the child comes out of his parents’ house and enters the primary school. This is the age we need to look at if we want to gain a methodological, didactic pedagogical starting point for the primary and elementary school education. I have drawn you attention to how, in the years up to the change of teeth, a person is predominantly an imitator, how in his soul he is formed in such a way that he lives from his instincts outward, into all that goes on around him in his immediate surroundings and to a certain extent doesn’t seem to be able to detach himself from his surroundings. Hand gestures of the mother and father, the tone of voice uttered by father and mother are imitated by the child, while it is to a certain extent, if not so visibly, connected to the father and mother and the immediate surroundings; just like the father’s arm and mother’s arm are connected to their bodies, only to a higher degree. However, what I have pointed out already I don’t want to refer to today but to something else, which is in relation to it.

What appears as a change of teeth is in a way the conclusion of an entire organic process; which culminates, so to speak, in the emergence of the second teeth, which are the results of forces that have been generated in the preceding age, forces which now flood through the whole human organism. Here we don’t need to differentiate between what is soul-spiritual and what is bodily-physical. When we look at the facial expressions of the child, as its face changes from one year to the next, we see how the spiritual is working on the physical. To a certain extent we only see deeper into this soul-spiritual working when we see how the soul-spiritual works organically in the child, how it penetrates outward into the outside world by finally finding a conclusion in the insertion of the second teeth. What is actually working here?

Now, I can only sketch it, but what I sketch, however, can be determined with scientific precision into its smallest details — so what is this really, that happens in human beings? One first observes what happens soul-spiritually with a child while he has to undergo the change of teeth. At the same time those human ideas that are so fluctuating in earlier life are not remembered in later life in sharply defined terms. Just think how far you need to go back if you want to remember the first sharply defined concepts you had in your childhood; during this age up to the change of teeth concepts are still unclear, fluctuating, not sharply outlined, not firm yet, that they are woven into the soul-spiritual life that can be kept in such a way that all these memories outline the whole of life. The relationships of the soul-spiritual with sharply outlined concepts and imagination, which can be assimilated in thoughts and memories, are established at the same age as the change of teeth takes place. If one now investigates what is actually present there, it turns out that the same forces which then appear in our memory, in what we carry as the power of thought in us, the power or memory in thinking, that these forces are so to speak emancipated from the physical-bodily, had been working in the physical-corporeal right up to the change of teeth: these are the same forces that drove the teeth outwards. So we have up to the change of teeth the same forces intimately connected with the physicality of the human being which then become powers of thought; they work in every bone formation and find their conclusion in the change of teeth.

My dear friends, here we are looking at quite an actual, a very real, relationship between the soul and the body. Later in life we have our sharply contoured memory concepts, we know what the power of thought and imagination is, we gaze into ourselves and observe these powers of thought and say to ourselves: There powers of though work as a free power of thought in us only from the seventh year. Before that it was submerged in our organism and had orchestrated those powers which pushed out the second teeth. We have an intimate relationship between the soul and body, we are looking concretely at this relationship. We are not speculating about it: What is the relationship of the body to the soul? — We look at the soul and we see where we can observe, so to speak, where the free ideas occur in our memories. We see how these forces, before they became free for memories, worked in the organism, how they were organically formative.

You see, this is the progress in the world view of spiritual science from the abstract to the concrete, from merely moderated thoughts that imagine themselves to penetrate to reality, to the actual, truly realistic. This is the advance to the true being of man, because now one knows how to answer the question: What works in the body of the human being before his seventh year? — This can’t be described abstractly, you have to somehow refer to facts, pointing out a few things that are active there in human beings. What is working there is the same as what works in our powers of recollection. This is one example which will characterise what a radical shift in our scientific approach is taking place in the direction of our thought, and must come into our world view. As you can imagine, my dear friends, something like this lies quite beyond the minds of the so-called educated people because no-one — science in the least — wants to know about it, what concretely exists in the soul-spiritual and bodily-physical of the human being, for this reason man is a stranger and why you can’t see inside people. How can you create the foundation for education and teaching if you can’t see into people?

A second life event I want to draw your attention to is puberty. Just as much as what happens in the years from birth to the change of teeth, proceeds from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. When you now look again from the same spiritual scientific standpoint to that which works into puberty and in puberty reaches its culmination, then you can ask, what is this actually? Just as the power of thinking work within the body and — if I may express myself in a trivial manner — push the teeth out, in the same way — this is shown in spiritual science, I can only sketch it here — in the same way it works up to the fifteenth year, in the will. The will has an organic forming effect. It works in such a way that it controls the growth conditions, the inner organic conditions. These inner organic processes of the will find a conclusion, just as the process of thinking at the appearance of the change of teeth. What is found as a conclusion here appears in the outer formation of a person in puberty. The will forces don’t take root in the head but in the entire being of the person. The will forces are what regulate human growth forces until sexual maturity.

Then they dam up. In a way they have the tendency to extend into the formation of the head. These will forces also dash forward before sexual maturity; they were inwardly organically active in the whole person; with puberty, they accumulate. They dam up in the human vocal organ which is at first the most intimate outflow of the human will, just as the other forces accumulate in tooth formation. They accumulate below the head — the head, the organ of the actual intellectual human being, is being excluded. The will forces accumulate and this accumulation in the male nature is the transformation of the voice finding expression through the larynx; in the nature of the female it is something different. In this lies the release of those will forces which now have to deal with the outside world in experiences and in life — those will forces which had until then been working internally in the human body in a soul-spiritual way. It is just the same as with the powers of thought which first came forward in the change of teeth and are then emancipated in their own form in the powers of thinking.

So, as spiritual scientists we look on the one hand at the thinking human being with powers of thought and on the other hand to human beings with will forces. We aren’t talking abstractly of some or other soul, but we are talking about the soul we are observing. We follow the activity, as souls of thought, up to the change of teeth, then we follow their release, their becoming independent, independent of certain inwardness in the organic process. In the same way we follow the will. That means, we are not posing some or other theory of the soul and the spirit in relation to the body, to the physical body, but we observe and aim for reality. You see, here a way is being taken quite differently, but, I believe, to be quite suitable, to flood general human education, in a way in which an honest mind once had the idea of giving the lecturer a tug on his earlobe, and not too gently either. Now it involves something else entirely. It involves not only attaching importance to results, to the knowledge gained in this way, but that one should bestow value to how one can be guided through spiritual-scientific methods as I have depicted in my “Occult Science”, in “Knowledge of Higher worlds” or in “A way to self-knowledge”, how through such ways of thinking one is enabled to truly recognise much, much more regarding healthy and unhealthy people, which to science, deemed so authoritative today, it’s depths are simply closed. Here the mind has to be schooled in a certain way; the mind needs orientation in a certain way. Here the mind must take a different direction to what it is used to, today. Much depends on this. After all, results are just results; they can be more or less important or unimportant, interesting or uninteresting. However, what we apply by taking the path to such knowledge, what we make of ourselves by forming ourselves in our being, what we make of ourselves as people by taking the path prepared by such knowledge — that is essentially what matters.

It always comes down to what we make of ourselves as human beings through our particular soul constitution and in a very specific way look at the world from within ourselves. This enables us to have a life free of illusions and still look at it in its wonderful greatness. We watch for example, a child in its first years and later in life, engrossed in a game. The direction and control of the game belongs essentially to the tasks of a reasonable, humanely correct educational and teaching art. A child plays. For someone who has now sharpened his gaze for problems of the world and people’s lives, notices a large difference between how one child, and another child, plays. For the superficial observer, nearly all children play in the same way. For someone who has sharpened his gaze, every child plays in a different way to other children. Each child has his own way of playing. How extraordinary it is at all, if one looks at what the game means for children at that age: an actuation of the individuals in the soul-spiritual, as it is present when the actual powers of thought are still within the organic form right up to the change of teeth. It is very strange how this childlike soul-spiritual, which has not yet absorbed thoughtfulness, moves in free play — in this game whose design lies separate from the benefit and purpose of life, this game where the child follows only what flows from his own soul. It could appear to be a breakthrough in the principle of imitation because of the way the child lives into it; it is surely something that comes from the freedom of the child’s soul — however only apparently. For someone who observes more acutely it certainly appears as if the child’s game comes out of what the child experiences in his environment and all that is happening around him. If one has sharpened one’s gaze, then one sees this game not only as something interesting, which happens in individual children’s lives at certain times, but you put this game with all its character into the whole of human life.

By observing this, you learn to compare what happens at different ages of a human being’s life. Just as one can compare zinc and copper in the lifeless element, as one can compare a May bug with a sun beetle in the living element, so can one compare the different ages of man with one another. It shows something which is quite strange. If one does, with the sharpened gaze — characterized today — created a real idea about the child’s play, then one has to search in the various ages of man, where this particular character of the child’s play flows. One discovers through quite experiential searching that when the human being, between about the 20^th to 28^th, 29^th year, is in the position to find his position in the world, to deal with what the world offers him as an experience and guideline for an independent life, and if one now look at how mankind intervenes in life, is touched by life, you actually find a certain level in the metamorphosis, a transformation of the special character of the child’s game. Before the change of teeth, the child has to deal with what doesn’t belong to life, with the doll, with other playthings, freely formed out of its soul activity; it is activated in a certain configuration, a certain structure. Learn to recognise this, look through these and observe the human being then in his twenties, how he is within the seriousness of life with what is purposeful in life, with what is found through experience, and you find that now he has been invested in the usefulness, the expediency of the world, in that which is demanded of life, positioning himself in such a way, with such characteristics as he had displayed freely in his childhood games.

Consider what this now means. You want to focus on education and you know: what you see as a particular character trait in the childhood game, what you then understand and how you guide the child’s game must be done in such a way that it comes to fruition, when the person comes to terms with the world in his twenties, as being useful and appropriate to his life. Consider what feelings are worthy in the soul of the educator when he knows: What I achieve with the child is what I do for the adult in his twenties. This doesn’t depend on basic educational laws one knows in abstract form and that can be applied from intellectual foundations and didactic-methodical rules, but it depends on such knowledge we enkindle in our hearts with a deep sense of responsibility. True human knowledge doesn’t speak to our minds; it speaks to our feelings, it speaks to our experiences, to our entire view of life. It flows and weaves though us with a sense of responsibility in the posts we represent.

We aren’t looking for a kind of art of education coming merely out of some spineless or other justified cleverness, saying that one should educate in this or that way, but we are looking for the kind of art of education in relation to the present situation of man, which — out of the knowledge of the human being — puts into the educator a sense of responsibility, social responsibility towards all of mankind. The art of education comes out of a sense of responsibility which can only develop in us out of the correct foundation of our world view.

I do not speak to you here of a renewal of science for the reason that I am particularly interested or excited to tell you that there will be other results of science and that these other results would create a different world view to the one which is common today. No, I’m speaking to you in this way because I believe that the whole procession, the whole characteristic style of the world view and scientific life will change. I say this because I believe that a science, a world view of life will come about which will penetrate the wholeness of the human being, penetrate the body, soul and spirit and which in quite a special way would relate to our present situation in life, important for all art of education, all art of teaching. Yet something else is connected to what is based on such a new view of man.

What are we striving for today when we speak about science, about a scientifically based foundation regarding a world view? We speak about what is presented largely in abstracts concepts and we are satisfied when we can say to ourselves: That is what we must insist upon, only what sharply outlined concepts can give us: we must challenge such concepts precisely because of our prejudice. — Yes, but when nature and the world is not as we would have them fit into the concepts we demand, when the world comes about according to completely different forms, when nature for instance isn’t shaped according to our law of nature, when these laws of nature only to a small degree include actual reality and that the essentials of nature are not formed according to abstract laws of nature and ideas, but according to images — then we can still for a long time discuss the logical foundations of sharply outlines natural laws, but we are not penetrating nature because nature doesn’t submit to such laws because it requires being captured in images. Human nature in particular requires to be captured in images. Then one is led through all I have sketched here today also by a figurative, by an imaginative mode of imagination.

I would like to mention: When one observes people in this way by looking at how the power of thought weaves in his organism up to the appearance of teeth, how the powers of the will weaves, how they draw up into the larynx and take care of the transformation of the voice, when one looks at all of this, one can’t remain fixed on cultivating these abstract laws of nature which are so loved today, but one arrives at making the soul active, more pliant, in its effort to understand a human being. One is able not to remain with abstract concepts, with abstract precepts, but one arrives at images. In other words, one becomes able to take the abstract-logical scientific concepts and lead them into an artistic conception of the world, to an aesthetic grasp of the world.

One acquires understanding for the deep foundations Goethe spoke about in his world view: ‘Art is based on the observation of deeper natural laws which will never reveal themselves to man without art.’ — Goethe meant that they would never be revealed through abstract natural laws, but they would reveal themselves through the observation of nature in pictorial form. In this way, one takes the path from a logical-abstract view, from a mechanistic view of outer nature to an artistic understanding, this kind of artistic understanding gives our entire personality a different suppleness of soul than the abstract concepts do.

We can think of those people who have swung upwards from scientific human knowledge to an artistic grasp of the world and mankind, one can think how these people are flooded, permeated, with this artistic image-rich view of people and them practicing education and the art of teaching this way. Life flows from them directly over into the developing human being; there it is not a philistine, abstract educational science, here a living educational art is at work which in the most beautifully social interactive way can take place between one person and another. Here finally from a deeper foundation of knowledge, fulfilled out of a more humanistic sentiment, Schiller tried to present in his letters: ‘The aesthetic education of man’. In fact it makes it clear that the human being, in true cognition holds the balance between mere abstract reasoning necessities and mere sensual natural instincts; it becomes clear that man is caught between these drives and that he acts out of an attitude that is as valid as an attitude in artistic creation or in artistic observation. It asserts itself in such a way that what we pursue as spirit is at the same time sensual; it makes what we pursue as sensual, spiritual at the same time. It is out of his attitude that we begin here at the Waldorf School to educate and teach. Here pupils are not given something prescribed, here we give ourselves as teachers, as educators, completely over to the developing human being; we educate the entire person who can capably position himself in life. I have only mentioned a few examples. Just as we give, through directing the children’s games towards what is best for his or her integration into life in his or her twenties, we can observe other things in the nascent human being which we establish in our education in order to give him or her, the best for their life in the future. Here we have established the foundation for an education which accounts for the whole person and for the whole of human life. One can already say: the seriousness of the present world situation requires that one looks a little deeper than only into what can become better, out of which suffering and hardship can be overcome in the present. This can’t be done with indifferent means or with superficial means but it can only happen through deeper means. Only in this way will we bring people to us who will have what they must have in the most eminent sense, because it is precisely this that is missing in the present world situation.

When we look at people, how they are today, when we look at what life wants to direct on the surface, what life wants to direct in what is lived out in public relations, the way they have been unfolding these past few days — we see everywhere there are two things missing in people today, which one would so like to wish for them in the most intensive degree: today people lack, to a high degree, what one could call self-confidence, but also what one would like to call trust in humanity. Examine, my dear friends, why people today do so little in themselves to engage actively in present social life, which needs the energy so urgently. We discover: Self-confidence [The German word “Selbstvertrauen” literally means trust-in-the-self, which translates as “self-confidence” — so wherever “Vertrauen” (to trust) appears it means both trust as well as confidence in this text. Trsl.] is missing in people. However, self-confidence is only justified and can only exist when it is carried by trust/confidence in other people. Like the North Pole and the South Pole belong to one another, they can’t exist without one another, so self-confidence can’t exist without confidence in other people. Never will a teaching science, an educational science, supply people with self-confidence, with what it means to trust in humanity, if it is not born out of such a love for humanity that has its origins in the knowledge of human nature, as I have characterised today, because that is what you experience, my dear friends.

If one learns to characterise as I have, how to know people, if one learns to recognise how the soul-spiritual work in their organism, how the various ages in human beings work together — as I have for instance taken the children’s games and their effect on the twenties of the individual — if one learns to intimately know the soul-spirit-bodily being of the human being, then one can do nothing other than at the same time draw this knowledge to actual human love, because the power of the soul is connected to another soul power, just as in the plant’s blossom the stamens are connected to the pistil; if the stamens are perfect, they require a perfect pistil. So out of love for humanity a true knowledge comes out, not developing into those abstractions which people often despise today with good reason, but to something on the other hand, which also draws them near to true human love.

Teaching and education which come out of such human knowledge, out of such human love is what we have tried, in our pedagogy and didactic as a curriculum and timetable, out of such a recognition of the nature of man as far as possible today, we have tried here in our Waldorf School. This has the effect, my dear friends, that love dawns in the child for other people. Human confidence kindled within the child through the power which is born within us as true human knowledge, which becomes an artistic understanding out of the natural human being, creates out of us that power which in the child can enkindle the lasting, the unfading self-confidence. Two other qualities that mankind today lacks so much and that can only be passed on to the human spirit through such an art of education is what I would like to call prudence on the one hand and on the other hand joyfulness, willingness to take action and the ability to be active. Today these things are not clearly considered, really not clearly, because people don’t think from reality, especially not from a social reality.

I have in the past offered very praiseworthy words to the gracious scholar Rudolf Hildebrand. For this reason you are not going to believe that I don’t want to recognise this man. However, he too, was a human being — despite sometimes being driven out of instinct to such considerations as I have mentioned — he was a man exposed to all the prejudices that have brought us into our present misfortune. In his diary he wrote this strange sentence: ‘Compare a gaffer standing in front of a target to be shot at, with a shooter beside him, who aims for the target. The gaffer can hit the target with his gaze; he hits it every time. The shooter must first learn to hit the target, only then does he hit it in reality. Likewise there is a difference’ — this is what Hildebrand says — ‘between one who is a mere gawper of life, that is, the one who is philosophic or scientific or mystical or theosophical or otherwise, to the one who is actively involved in life.’ — There’s a great deal that’s the truth in such a sentence, yet despite that, a great deal of one-sidedness. Let’s think for a moment not just about the example of Hildebrand, but about a “gaffer in life”, about someone who has only looked at life, for example Leibniz, who discovered the differential- and integral calculus. Let’s imagine how this “gaffer in life” who had discovered the differential- and integral calculus has now become the cause of all that which is made today in technology through the differential and integral calculus, to all that, what is done in life today by the "shooter", by him, who puts in a hand.

When one looks at people in an isolated unsocial way, the comparison of the life-gaffer and the shooter who aims at his target, is striking. When one looks at this however in a broad social sense then one has to admit: when the one who is the life-gaffer has a fruitful thought out of his life’s gaffing that leads to innumerable deeds, then with respect to the interaction of people, with reference to the social life, perhaps the life-gaffer is far more active than the one who one compares with the shooter. It involves the fact that we have gradually come to observe life in its isolated circumstances in a one-sided way, that today we lack the opportunity to look at the big social connections. In order to point this out, we need prudence, contemplation.

Today it often happens that people avoid contemplation, this being-turned-inwards into oneself, this “gazing” at life, because they are too comfortable to let thoughts or ideas become deeds because they don’t want to enter into actual relationships in life, because, when misery pushes one into the window, when it reaches right up to the mouth, when misery is so great, they turn into fatalists and say: ‘From some or other corner it will getter better by tomorrow.’ — Discretion, active life within effective thoughts is what we need. On the other hand we need a new readiness to act; it will follow from such thoughts in those people in whom we ignite human love, which we can draw from true spirit-, soul- and physically gained knowledge — as the basis of a future world view, as we have described it today. The best, the ultimate is that we can provide teaching and education in the face of the present world situation, that is, that we acquire an open and free sense for life, if the human being is given such an understanding of human nature as is meant here.

In our time we experience people misjudging life in a strange way. They imagine themselves as spirits of reality but when it comes to reality, this reality is truly quite, quite far away. I offer an example.

You see, in the course of the 19^th century a certain judgement was made. Please read the parliamentary reports, read the best speeches of the best minds, read from newspaper reports, what the most respected practitioners have said. You can always find them in the parliamentary reports, in the speeches of the best national economists, the best practitioners, as they have arrived at a certain judgement, which has been of utmost importance for the development recently in political, governmental, and economic relationships. People started to introduce the gold currency in certain countries. One can read what was said about it. The best practitioners, the most conscientious national economists have predicted that this gold currency would bring a lifting of customs borders; in particular the gold currency will support free world trade. — If you now research what these life practitioners, these business people, these industrialists, these parliamentarians have said, which had arisen from a knowledge such as one had in the 19th century, one finds — I do not want to mock, I only want to speak the truth — one finds that they said something very clever; but in reality it happened quite differently. They said: Customs borders, protective tariffs and all that will be taken out of the world when the gold currency enters. — The opposite happened.

After the introduction of the gold currency, customs borders and protective tariffs have been erected everywhere. So, the opposite of what the cleverest people have said, happened. I say explicitly, the brightest people; I am far from saying that the people who so radically fumbled past reality were fools; they were the opposite of fools. Out of their education according to how current time shaped them, they said the cleverest things, but no one can come to the truth if the truth is not given by anything, when the conditions around us are such that one can’t see through reality even with the sharpest intellect. That is why the cleverest people then talk nonsense in such an area. For this reason, because the economic conditions in their connection with the state-political conditions were so entangled, because the threads were so intertwined that they could not be overlooked, as clever as one was, one talked nonsense, of course, because one could learn nothing from reality. One could not create reality beforehand in such a way that one could have learned from it.

What we term the idea of the Threefold Social Order, intends for the economic life, just like the spiritual life and state life on the one side, to be placed on its own foundation; that these three areas of life should exist side by side as interactive members of the combined social organism. Here it is required that individual economic areas, be they areas of production or consumption or professions or something similar, develop in such a way that they are not influenced by government or other organisations which themselves had to be created according to an economic authority. It is demanded that they form themselves so independently from professional competence and expertise of the people working in them that one organization, which can only have a certain size, connects to another, and to a third, and a fourth in a certain way; depending on how such associations are formed, they will again be associated with one another. In this way a net of associations will come about. Whoever is then in one association will know: in the other association in which I am involved in traffic, in goods exchange, is someone I know; one overlooks the relations of the two associations. The mutual relationship is regulated by contract.

This is how we can concretely look into the economic area. Through the principle of association, overview ratios are created and life comes about in such a way that one can learn from it. The time situation itself demands that the unmanageable economic life, through the associative principle, is replaced by something transparent, the essence of which you can read about in my book "Key Points of the Social Question" and especially in our newspaper "The Threefold structure of the Social Organism", which has already been published in fifty issues. One can’t learn from something which is not transparent. Life wants to be shaped in such a way that, if one positions oneself in the right way in life, one is able to learn from it.

People who are trained in a teaching based on genuine, true knowledge of man, from which, according to natural law, human love will follow — such people will feel how the economic life wants to shape its independence through associations. Such people would have learnt in their childhood that this learning was for them such a school that they now can constantly learn from life. This is the greatest empirical science of the school, that we may come out of it in such a way that life for us will always remain a continuation of a great school. In this way we are guaranteed through our entire life: We develop further, we don’t remain standing in one place, we carry the world further. Right up to the end of our life, right up to passing through the portal of death into the spiritual world, we can learn here to expand our soul-spiritual nature, make our physical body more skilful, so that we consider our entire life as a school. The present life situation of mankind demands this. What it demands can best be expressed when we say: everything that comes from the renewal of such a view of the world, as it is meant here from the foundation of spiritual science, must lead to the development of an art of education, and art of teaching, which comes out of true, genuine knowledge of mankind, gives birth to that love of mankind, which educates such people who have come out of the childhood school to be released in the right way into the school of life, because only through this learning in the school of life the right process is possible to exist on a social basis.

Next week I will speak about this in my lecture regarding “Questions of the Soul and questions of Life”. Today I only wanted to show that we need to say about education and teaching at present, out of all that is pressing and powerful in this time, that we need to keep the saying: Give education, give teaching from a deeper view of the world and more profound basis of education and teaching. Because through this you create the true, the genuine, the firm basis for a solution of those social and human questions which are now so pressing in the whole of human life.