Pedagogy and Morality

The tasks of the educator and teacher¹ culminate in what he can achieve for the moral conduct of the youth entrusted to him. He faces great difficulties in this task within the elementary school education. One of these difficulties is that moral education must permeate everything he does for his students; a separate moral education can achieve much less than the orientation of all other education and all other teaching towards the moral. But this is entirely a matter of pedagogical tact. Because roughly formulated “moral applications” in all possible cases, even if they are still so forceful at the moment they are applied, do not achieve what is intended in the further course. - Another difficulty is that the child who enters elementary school has already formed the basic moral attitudes of life.

The child lives completely absorbed in its surroundings until the period around the seventh year, when it undergoes the change of teeth. One could say that the child is completely absorbed in its surroundings. Just as the eye lives in colors, so the child lives entirely in the expressions of life in its surroundings. Every gesture, every movement of the father and mother is experienced in a corresponding way in the child's entire inner organism. The brain of the human being is formed during this period. And during this period of life everything that gives the organism its inner character emanates from the brain. And the brain reproduces in the finest way what takes place through the environment as a revelation of life. The child's learning to speak is based entirely on this.

But it is not only the external aspects of the behavior of the environment that resonate in the child's being and imprint the character on its inner being, but also the spiritual and moral content of these external aspects. A father who reveals himself to his child through expressions of anger will cause the child to develop a tendency to express anger in gestures, even in the finest organic tissue structures. A timid and hesitant mother implants organic structures and movement tendencies in the child that cause the child to have a tool in its body that the soul then wants to use in a timid and hesitant way.

During the phase of life when the teeth change, the child has an organism that reacts spiritually and morally on the soul in a very specific way.

It is in this state, with an organism oriented towards the moral, that the child is received by the teacher and educator of the elementary school. If he does not see through this fact, he is exposed to the danger of imparting moral impulses to the child, which are unconsciously rejected by the child because it has the inhibitions of the nature of its own body to accept them.

The essential thing, however, is that when the child enters primary school, he has the basic tendencies acquired by imitating his environment, but that these can be transformed with the right treatment. A child who has grown up in an environment of violent temper has received its organic formation from it. This must not be left unnoticed. It must be taken into account. But it can be transformed. If one takes it into account, one can shape it in the second phase of childhood, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, in such a way that it provides the soul with the basis for quick-wittedness, presence of mind, and courage in those situations in life where such qualities are necessary. A child's organization, which is the result of a fearful, timid environment, can also provide the basis for the development of a noble sense of modesty and chastity. Genuine knowledge of the human being is therefore the basic requirement for moral education.

Those who educate and teach must, however, bear in mind what the child's nature requires for its development in general between the change of teeth and sexual maturity. (These requirements can be found in the pedagogical course I have outlined and described in this weekly journal and which Albert Steffen has now published in book form). The transformation of basic moral principles and the further development of those that must be regarded as right can only be achieved by appealing to the emotional life, to moral sympathies and antipathies. And it is not abstract maxims and ideas that appeal to the emotional life, but images. In teaching, one has ample opportunity to present images of human existence and behavior, and even of non-human existence and behavior, to the child's mind, by which moral sympathies and antipathies can be aroused. Emotional judgment of the moral should be formed in the period between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

Just as the child, until the change of teeth, is devoted to imitating the immediate expressions of life in the environment, so in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, it is devoted to the authority of what the teacher and educator say.

The significance of the educational impulse contained in such learning can be seen when one seeks the right relationship to the child after the first third of the second phase of life, roughly between the ninth and tenth birthdays, in true human insight. A most important point in life is reached there. One notices that the child, half unconsciously, is going through something essential in a more or less dark feeling. The ability to approach the child in the right way is of incalculable value for his or her entire later life. If we wish to express consciously what the child experiences in its dream-like feelings, we must say: the question arises in the soul: where does the teacher get the strength that I, believing in him with reverence, receive? As a teacher, one must prove before the unconscious depths of the child's soul that one has the authority that comes from being firmly grounded in the world order. With true knowledge of human nature, one will find that at this point in time some children need few words, spoken correctly, while others need many. But something decisive must happen then. And only the being of the child itself can teach what has to happen. And for the moral strength, moral security, moral attitude of the child, unspeakably important things can be achieved by the educator at this point in life.

If moral judgment has been properly developed with sexual maturity, it can be incorporated into free will in the next stage of life. The young person leaving elementary school will carry with them the feeling, from the psychological after-effects of their school days, that the moral impulses in social interaction with fellow human beings unfold from the inner strength of their human nature. And after sexual maturity, the will will emerge as morally strong if it has previously been cultivated in the rightly nurtured moral judgment of feeling.