The Task of Today's Youth

GA 217a — 23 March 1924

XII. What I have Further to Say to Younger Members

Newsletter from the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science

Wherever the “youth movement” appears today, it reveals that it lives out of deprivation. What does the young person, who becomes aware of his or her youth, “lack”? After all, there is so much to “learn” in today's civilization. It contains not only a wealth of knowledge, but an overabundance.

It is tempting to think that young people are confused by this overabundance, that they cannot “understand” the content of it. But experience shows that this belief is false. Young people “understand” quite well what civilization offers them. One can understand what can be grasped in thought. And our present-day civilization, despite its overabundance, can almost be grasped entirely in thought.

The young person realizes when he begins to develop a relationship with civilization that he understands. And a right instinct tells him that this understanding, this thinking grasping should also be his further fate. But one cannot be young with “understanding” alone. One can only be young when one experiences with one's whole heart and soul what awaits understanding. And as a young person, one senses that one will grow old if one gradually leads the experienced into the understood.

Today's youth absorbs something from civilization that allows them to grow old, but not to be young. This civilization has almost nothing to give to the first years of life. One should enter the earth at the age of twenty today, then one could imbue oneself with the content of civilization.

This civilization has lost its spirit. It brings only matter into thought. These thoughts cannot be experienced; they can only be understood. And once they have been understood, they lie in the soul, incapable of transformation, as hard as stone. They are already fully ripe when they arise; that is why they cannot grow. But the young person must grow; and he wants what he takes up into his soul to be able to grow with him.

A genuine spiritual science can reveal itself only in thoughts. But these thoughts can be seen and experienced; they can be taken up by no one at a higher degree of maturity than he himself has. But they are akin to the human being's nature. They grow and mature with him. If someone gives me material thoughts when I am eighteen years old, I take them in the same way as I would if I were forty or fifty years old. If someone allows me to experience thoughts that arise from the spirit in their unfolding of humanity, then they may be seventy years old; if I myself am only eighteen years old, they will harmonize with my eighteen-year-old state of mind and grow as I myself grow.

The materialistic way of thinking and looking at things demands that young people fill themselves inwardly with “old things”. But young people want to experience their youth. Therefore, “experiencing old age” becomes a deprivation for young people. The Youth Section at the Goetheanum wants to give young people a living knowledge that can be used to grasp youth in a living way. Today's civilization has no thoughts with which one can experience “being young”. A real spiritual science will have such thoughts.

If you are an older person today and hear young people speak, you often have the feeling: oh, how old the speeches sound that come from the mouths of young people! But these are the speeches that young people find among the “old people” today. He absorbs them, but does not make them his own. In his desire to experience them, he feels false. He speaks words that cannot be true for him; and he carries his truth within him, without being able to reveal it to himself. It chokes him; it becomes a nightmare coming from within.

The young want freedom of breathing in a living spiritual life so that the nightmare will disappear. They want an awakening to a healthy spiritual outlook so that their consciousness can be filled with the experience of being young.

Young people want to be awake when they are young; but the thoughts of materialistic civilization only allow them to dream of it. But one can only dream when one has dulled one's consciousness. So the consciousness of youth must walk dulled through mechanical reality. Its hammer blows, its electric waves pierce into dreams. But they cannot bring about awakening. For they are not human; they are extra-human.

Spiritual science can be for souls that want to awaken. It does not just want to impart knowledge to people, but to bring them closer to life. Then it will be given to their freedom to transform life into knowledge.

People who believe themselves to be poets, but who are really just philistines, object: take away the dreams of youth, bring them to awakening, and you take away the best of their youth. Those who speak thus know not that dreams attain their full value only when illuminated by the light of waking. Mechanistic civilization does not bring the dreams of youth to joyful revelation, but rather crushes them as they arise, so that they become oppressive and burdensome.

Only in such images can we say here what the Youth Section wants to achieve. It will not publish a “programme”; it will not give an explanation of the “nature of youth”. It will try to bring to life what its founders themselves can experience of the deprivations of young people today. This will give rise to a “youth wisdom” that can unfold anew in life every day.

Immediately after the announcement of the Youth Section and ever since, young people living at the Goetheanum have expressed their desire to work within this section. Enthusiasm speaks from these expressions. In the first announcement, I said that the Youth Section will be able to work if it is understood for what it is meant. I truly believe that enthusiasm can bring about the right “understanding”. Not the “understanding” of which I have spoken here, and which is lacking in young people, but the kind that is called by the same word but is quite different. An understanding that comes not from the intellect but from the whole human being.

The longing of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society “can only be to feel a receptive enthusiasm. Then it can hope that the life force of spiritual science is sufficient to give this enthusiasm what it would like to take. This board would like to live with the young in such a way that they can lead their youth towards old age in true humanity, because it believes that in doing so it will meet the needs of the young and give them what their yearning hearts desire.