Education for Life: Self-Education and Pedagogical Practice

GA 297a — 4 April 1924, Prague

7. Education and Teaching on the Basis of a Real Knowledge of Human Nature

Author's note¹ Prague, April 4, 1924

I would like to speak of a kind of education and teaching that strives to develop the whole human being, body, soul and spirit, in an equal way. Such an education can only be achieved if the educator is aware of how the physical is formed out of the soul and spiritual during development. For one can only contribute to the formation of a being if one understands the laws of this formation.

Anthroposophy leads to such knowledge of the human being. It does not look at the physical one-sidedly, as it happens in the scientific world view. It rises to a spiritual vision and thereby looks at every age of the human being at the way in which the spirit works on the body of the human being and how the soul lives in the body.

In the face of such a view, clearly distinct epochs arise in the growing human being.

The first epoch runs from birth to the change of teeth, around the seventh year. The appearance of the second teeth is not just a localized process in the human organism. When the first teeth fall out and the second teeth appear, something is happening in the whole organism. Until then, the soul and spirit participate intensively in the formation of the body. During this period of human development, body, soul and spirit are still highly unified.

The whole human being is therefore like a comprehensive sensory organ. What later is concentrated only in the sensory organization, still works in the whole human being at this time. The human being is therefore completely devoted to the activities of the environment, just like a sensory organ. In the most pronounced sense, he is an imitative being. His will reacts reflexively to everything that happens around him.

Therefore, the only way to educate a child at this age is for the educator to behave in such a way that the child can imitate everything they do. This must be taken in the broadest sense. There are imponderables at work between the child and their educator. The child is not only influenced by what it perceives with its external senses in its environment, but it also senses the attitudes, characters, and good and bad intentions of other people from their behavior. Therefore, as an educator, one should cultivate purity of life in the child's environment, right down to one's thoughts and feelings, so that the child can become what one is oneself.

But one should also be aware that one's behavior has an effect not only on the soul but also on the body. What the child absorbs and allows to flow reflexively into his will continues to vibrate in the organization of his body. A teacher with a violent temper can cause the child's physical organization to become brittle, so that in later life it is easily influenced by pathogenic influences. How one educates in this direction will become apparent in later life in the state of health of the person.

The anthroposophical art of education does not focus on the spiritual and soul aspects of education because it wants to develop only these, but because it knows that it can only develop the physical properly if it develops the spiritual, which works on the body, in the right way.

A complete metamorphosis takes place in the child when the teeth change. What was previously absorbed in the physical organization and working in it becomes an independent soul being and the physical is more left to its own forces.

Therefore, when dealing with the soul of the age at which the child is to be educated and taught in a scholastic way, one has to bear in mind that one is dealing with forces that were previously the malleable forces in the body. One only works in an educational and teaching way if one keeps this in mind. The child at this age does not yet absorb with an abstract mind; it wants to experience images, as it has worked with images up to this period of life. This is only achieved if the educator and teacher relate to the child in an artistic way through the soul. They cannot assume that the child already understands what they are communicating. He should work in such a way that the child is immersed in love in the images that he unfolds in an artistic way. He should be the self-evident authority for the child. The child cannot yet absorb what is true, good and beautiful because it understands it, but something must be true, good and beautiful for the child because the beloved teacher or educator presents it as such in front of the child.

Everything in teaching and education must be brought out in a pictorial way. All teaching must be artistically designed. You cannot start with reading and not with the letterforms, which in their present form are foreign to the inner experience of the human being. One must begin with a kind of painting drawing. The child must paint and draw forms that are similar to certain processes and things, like the signs in the pictographic writing of prehistoric peoples. First there must be a picture, which the child fixes from the things and processes of the world. Then one should proceed from the picture to the letter forms, just as pictographic writing developed into abstract sign writing.

Only when the child has progressed from painting to drawing to writing in this way should one move on to reading. This is because only one part of the human being is activated in this process: the ability to comprehend that is tied to the organization of the head. In painting, drawing and writing, a more comprehensive part of the human organization is also involved. This is how you educate the whole person, not just one side of the brain.

All education should be based on the same attitude until the second decisive point in the child's development. This lies in the onset of sexual maturity. Here, too, not only a local part of the human organism undergoes a metamorphosis, but the human being as a whole. It is only at this point that the relationship between the human being and his environment unfolds, which is revealed in the more abstract conceptualization. Only from this point on should one count on the adolescent to grasp things intellectually and freely. Before that, everything should be presented in a pictorial form, and in grasping it, one should count on the child's love of pictures.

Such an education has the whole of human life in mind, not just childhood. It is quite a different matter to occupy the child in a pictorial way, so that what it has absorbed is only later understood, than to develop only the intellectual system one-sidedly at an early stage in so-called visual instruction, which is not true visual instruction because it has no artistic element. What is laid down in childhood only comes to expression in later life. A child who has gone through the pictorial stage at the appropriate age will become a person who can still be fresh and fit for life in old age; a child who is taught in a one-sided way to understand what is often thought to be appropriate for childhood will become a person who ages prematurely and is susceptible to disease-causing living conditions.

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