The Task of Anthroposophy in the Context of Science and Life

GA 77a — 28 July 1921, Darmstadt

4. Question and Answer Session at the Pedagogical Evening

Question: The principle of direct observation [in teaching] has been rediscovered in recent times. Now it turns out that when the child leaves school, they are helpless when it comes to thinking about life. They have been so taken by direct observation that they can only see the picture.

Rudolf Steiner: This is an extraordinarily important pedagogical question of the present day, the question of the concreteness or the exclusive concreteness of teaching. Now perhaps this question is not so specialized, but can only be treated exhaustively by looking at pedagogical thinking as a whole. I would like to mention first of all that teaching in the Waldorf school is based on our knowledge of human development. It is certainly not the case that the Waldorf school is a school of world view, but the educational skill, the educational methodology, the educational handling of things that can be achieved from an anthroposophical state of mind should be put into practice to benefit the Waldorf school. In this practical respect, the insight that children up to about the age of six or seven imitate everything plays a major role. Children continue to imitate up to this age. This means that at this age, at kindergarten age, one should not actually teach in the usual sense, but should rely on the child's ability to imitate. You see, when you have been dealing with such things for decades, as I had to, you gain all kinds of experience. People come to you and ask about all sorts of things. Once a father came to me, very unhappy, and said: What should we do, our boy, who has always been a good boy, has stolen. — I asked the father: How old is the boy? - Four to five years. – Then, I said, we must first examine whether he really stole. – The examination showed that he had not stolen at all, the little boy, even though he had taken money from a drawer. He had only seen every day that his mother gave money to the delivery people from her drawer. He thought: if that's how my mother does it, then it must be right – and he simply took money from the drawer too. He bought sweets, but did not eat them himself, but gave them away. The child was simply an imitator, according to his age. What he did was simply an act of imitation. The point is that you don't actually lead children of this age to believe anything that they are not allowed to imitate. Then begins the age of life that starts with the change of teeth and ends with sexual maturity, which is the actual elementary school age. This elementary school age simply demands – what is demanded today from some party lines must be set aside, the factual must be placed in the foreground – this age demands that the child learns to understand and act on the basis of authority. It is of the greatest importance for the whole of later life, especially for the education of the young for later difficult times and for everything that may happen in life, that the child at this age, from about seven to fourteen years, accepts something on the basis of authority. This relationship of a natural authority of the teacher and educator to the child is something that cannot be replaced by anything else for the human being in his or her whole later life. It would be easy to find proof of what cannot be replaced later in life if one has not had the good fortune to have a natural authority in one's life.

And so it is at this age that the question of object lessons arises. The object lessons that are demanded today have grown out of materialism in their extreme form. Everything is simply placed before the eye. They believe in nothing but what is before their eyes; so everything should be placed before the child. But not only the difficulties you have emphasized arise, but also others that arise on the part of the teachers. Take the auxiliary books written for teachers, in which instructions are given for visual instruction. The banalities and trivialities that are served up there are nothing short of monstrosities. There is an instinctive constant striving to push everything to the lowest possible level. This is the kind of visual instruction in which you teach the child nothing more than what he already knows. This is the worst possible teaching, which provides insight in this way. The best teaching is that which not only caters for childhood, but for the whole of a person's life. If life is not such that one still has something to gain from one's time sitting at school in one's forties or fifties, then the teaching was bad. One must be able to look back on one's school lessons in such a way that there are living forces in this reminiscing. We also grow, of course, as our limbs become larger and many other things within us are also transformed; everything about us grows. When we teach children concepts, ideas and views that do not grow, that remain, and on which we place great emphasis, we are violating the principle of growth. We must present things to the child in such a way that they are placed in the context of living growth. We cannot do this with trite, banal object lessons, but rather when we as educators face the child, imponderables come into play. I very often use an example like this: let us assume that we want to teach the child a concept - one that can be understood purely from the knowledge of the psychology of the child at a certain age -: the concept of immortality. One can make this tangible through natural processes, for example, through the transformation of a butterfly from a chrysalis. One can say: the immortal soul in man is contained in it, like the butterfly in the chrysalis, only that it develops in a spiritual world, just as the butterfly develops from the chrysalis. This is an image. One can teach this image to the child in two different ways. The first is this: one imagines, “I am the teacher, I am tremendously clever; the child is young and terribly stupid.” So I set up this symbol for the child to represent this concept. Of course I have long since outgrown this, but in this way the child is to grasp the immortality of the soul. Now I am explaining this in an intellectualistic way. This is not the way to teach a child; not because what I have said is wrong, but because I am not attuned to the child in the right way. When I immerse myself in anthroposophical spiritual science, it is not an image that makes me feel smarter than the child, but a truth. Nature itself has created the butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis at a lower level, and the passage through the gate of death at a higher level. If I bring what is so vividly alive in me to the child, then the child will benefit from it. You can't just say that something should be done in a certain way; instead, it depends on imponderables, on a certain state of mind that you yourself have as a teacher – that is what is important. Difficulties arise when one stops at the flat illustrative teaching, which is becoming more and more impersonal; at the age when the teacher should play the important role as a self-evident authority, he withdraws. There are, for example, certain things that should simply be handed down to the child on the authority of an adult. Not everything can be taught to the child on the basis of direct experience — for example, moral concepts: here one cannot start from direct experience, nor from mere commandments; these can only be conveyed to the child through the authority of an adult. And it is one of the most significant experiences one can have in later life, when one has absorbed something in the eighth, ninth, or twelfth year because a revered personality regards it as correct. This relationship to a revered personality is one of the imponderables of . You reach the age of thirty, and with a certain experience it comes up from the depths of human consciousness; now you understand something that you actually took in twenty or thirty years ago, at that time on authority. This means something tremendous in life. This is in fact a living growth of what one has taken in during childhood. That is why all this discussion about more or less intuition is not so important. These things must arise out of the object itself. Even the discussion about more or less thinking and so on is not very important. The important thing is that teachers are put in their rightful place, that the human element is brought together in the right way in a school organization. That is the main goal. You can't do anything with curricula or anything that can be formulated in paragraphs in real life – and teaching and educational life is real life. Because if three or six or twelve people sit down together, regardless of their antecedents, from which circle, from which education they come, they will be able to work out an ideally beautiful curriculum. If you somehow put something together in paragraphs out of reflection, it can become ideally beautiful, the most wonderful things can be in it. I am not mocking, it does not have to be bad, it can be extraordinarily beautiful and magnificent, but that is not the point. The point is that in the school, which has a number of teachers, real life takes place; each of these teachers has their own special abilities, that is the real thing, and that is what has to be worked with. What use is it if the teacher can see: this and this is the teaching goal? - That is just an abstraction. What he can be to the children as a personality, by the fact that he stands in a certain way in the world, that is what matters.

The question of schooling in our time is essentially a question of the teacher, and from this point of view all the more detailed questions, such as the question of practical instruction and the like, should be treated. Can children, for example, be taught in a very extreme way through visual instruction? I must say that I feel a slight horror when I see these tortures with the calculating machines in a class, where they even want to transform things that should be cultivated in a completely different way into visual instruction. If you just want to continue with pure visual instruction, you will, of course, end up with clumsy children. This is the result of unbiased observation. It has nothing to do with phenomenology, with phenomenalism: in order to develop proper phenomenalism, you first have to be able to think properly. At school, you are dealing with pedagogical methodology, not with scientific methodology. But one must know how closely proper thinking is connected not only with the brain and the mind of the person, but with the whole person. It depends on the way in which someone has learned to think, on the skill in the fingers. For in reality, man thinks with his whole body. It is only believed today that he thinks with the nervous system; in reality he thinks with the whole organism. And the reverse is also true: if one can teach a child quick thinking in the right way, and even presence of mind to a certain extent in a natural way, one is working for physical dexterity; and if one carries this quickness of thinking to the point of physicality, then the children's dexterity also comes to one's aid. What we have now established in the Waldorf school is much more important: instead of the usual visual instruction in manual skills, the children move on to self-forming, through which they get a sense of the artistic design of the surface. This then leads in turn to the mathematical conception of the surface in later years. This living into the subject matter, not through mere visual instruction for the senses, but through a living together with the whole environment, which is achieved for the whole human being, is what we must work towards.

I just wanted to point out that such questions should be placed in the context of pedagogical thinking as a whole, and that today we spend far too much time discussing specifics.

Rudolf Steiner (in response to other questions): What has been said and often emphasized must be noted: the Waldorf School does not want to be a world view school as such. The fact that it is based on anthroposophical soul-condition is only the case insofar as it is implemented in educational practice. Thus, what is at issue in the Waldorf School is the development of what can be achieved through the anthroposophical movement by purely pedagogical means. The Waldorf School does not want to be, and cannot be, a school of world view in any sense. That is why the Waldorf School has never claimed the right to provide religious instruction for the children in its care. What individual anthroposophists believe about worldviews is not the point. The important thing is that anthroposophy in schools and all that goes with it is intended to have an effect only in the pedagogical practice. For this reason, the religious education of the Catholic children was handed over to the Catholic priest and that of the Protestant children to the Protestant pastor. Now it turned out – this simply came about due to the current circumstances – that there were quite a lot of dissident children who would actually have grown up without religion. For these children, religious education is now provided, but it is not considered part of the school, rather it is presented as free religious education alongside Protestant and Catholic religious education. We have at least had the success that children who would otherwise not have been admitted to any religious education at all now grow up with a religious life as a result. This is a free religious education that is taught by someone who understands it and is called to do so, like the others who teach Catholic and Protestant religion. However, it must be strictly maintained that the intentions of the Waldorf School are not to promote any particular world view. The aim is not to indoctrinate children with anthroposophy but to apply anthroposophy in practice. So questions on this topic are irrelevant. At the beginning we had to find an appropriate approach to what follows from practice. We have our views about how a seven-, eight- or nine-year-old child should be taught, and these are appropriate. We believed that we had to decide these things on the basis of purely objective principles. Now, of course, the Waldorf school is not an institution for hermits or sects, but an institution that wants to fully engage with life, that wants to make capable people out of children for the sake of contemporary, very practical life. Therefore, it is important to organize the lessons in such a way that, on the one hand, the strict pedagogical requirements are met, and on the other hand, it is important that the Waldorf school is not just any institution for eccentrics. I then worked out the matter in such a way that from the time of entering school until the completion of the third class, you have an absolutely free hand in the individual years, but by the time they have completed the third class, the children are ready to transfer to any school. From the ninth to the twelfth year, you again have a free hand, and then the child must be ready to transfer to any other school, and the same applies when they have completed primary school. We are currently setting up one class each year; what happens next remains to be seen.

As you can see, it is not a matter of working from party-political views, worldviews or anything like that, but purely of putting anthroposophy into pedagogical practice. The ideal would be that the children initially — because Anthroposophy is only developed for adults, we have no children's teaching, and have not yet been in a position to want to have one — would not know that there is an Anthroposophy, but that they would be kept objective and thus placed in life. These things cannot be achieved in the ideal: no matter how hard the teacher tries to remain objective, one child will live in the circle of these parents, the other in the circle of those parents; there are also anthroposophical fanatics, and their children bring anthroposophical mischief into the school, as well as all kinds of other things. It must be made absolutely clear that it can never be a question of the Waldorf School in any way being a school of world view or anything of the sort. It is not that at all, but it wants to make children into capable people in the immediate present, that is, in the life in which we are placed within the state and everything else, so that they are capable within it. It is self-evident that the Waldorf school does not bring the ideas of threefolding into the school. This cannot happen through the efforts of Waldorf education. No party politics are brought into the Waldorf school from the anthroposophical side.

Question: Isn't the methodology that the pastor uses somewhat opposed to the rest of the teaching? Isn't there a conflict here?

Rudolf Steiner: You can't achieve anything completely in life. It would be very nice if we could find not only a Protestant pastor but also a Catholic one who would teach according to our methodology. As I said, our school only wants to put pedagogical practice into practice, not a worldview. The other can go hand in hand with this. Now it is self-evident that in free religious education — because after such, only by anthroposophists to be held, was asked —, also after our methodology is proceeded. It would be very dear to us if the Protestant and Catholic lessons were also given in this way, but we have not yet achieved that.

Question: What is the content of the material taught to anthroposophical children?

Rudolf Steiner: The material is determined in such a way that an attempt is made to take the child's age into account. This is what is always at the psychological basis. That is why it is important in all things that they are most effectively brought to the child when they are introduced at exactly the right age, when the child's inner being resonates most strongly with them. It is a fact that in the seventh or eighth year of life, little is achieved with objective gospel or Bible knowledge, and nothing at all with catechism knowledge. It is not absorbed by the child. This is an anthropological law. On the other hand, everything religious that can be directly formed from a certain shaping of natural processes is very well absorbed by the child at this age; all ethical and genuinely religious concepts that can be formed from natural processes. Above all, one can lead the child to religious feeling indirectly through images of nature. One can only lead the child to the actual Christian feeling from the age of eight, or even from the age of nine. It is only then that they begin to grasp what lies behind the figure of Christ Jesus, for example. These are the concepts that one must teach the child if they are to grasp the content of the Gospels. It is good if it has a foundation and is only introduced to the content of the Gospels around the age of nine, and then gradually led up to the deeper mysteries of Christianity. It must be emphasized that this free religious education is, in the most eminent sense, a thoroughly Christian one, in that the various denominations that take part in it are introduced to a real Christianity. It is the case that if you are a teacher at the Waldorf School, you have come to this [Christian] conviction yourself, from an anthroposophical point of view. You have entered into Christianity from this side. You might phrase it differently, but the children are introduced to a real Christianity. Just as we leave the Protestant and Catholic religious education to their own devices, we also leave the free religious education based on anthroposophy to its own devices. It has never been my intention to ensure that children come to this free religious education. They came in large numbers, but it is really not the aim to damage the external reputation of the school by making it happen in such a way that it could be said to be a school of world view. One does not want to be that at first. That is why we are careful about free religious education and only give it because it is requested.