III. Man and the World

People today take no account of how it actually was in earlier times. History is really a kind of fable convenante, but that is not what concerns us today. People were educated differently in earlier times. In earlier education, much more consideration was given to the life of the mind. This purely intellectual life has only really emerged in the last four or five centuries. In this, no consideration is given to the fact that the human being is a multi-part entity. The intellect is very capable of being educated in humans; it can develop, but unfortunately it is not capable of development throughout the whole of a person's life, and especially not in our present time cycle. It is bound to the human head, and the head remains capable of development only up to the age of twenty-eight at the most. A person needs to live three times as long as their head is capable of developing. Of course, we are intellectually capable of development in our youth, but we only remain so until around the age of twenty-eight. The rest of our organism remains capable of development throughout the rest of our lives; it also demands something from us throughout our lives. What is given to people today is only head knowledge, not heart knowledge. I call heart knowledge that which speaks to the whole organism, head knowledge that which is only intellectual and speaks only to the head. Now the head must stand in a continuous interrelationship with the heart, morally and spiritually as well. This cannot take place today because we give our children so little for the heart, so to speak, for the whole of the rest of the organism, and only give them something for the head. A person reaches the age of thirty-five. At most, he now has head knowledge; if he is lucky, he has the memory of the head knowledge he absorbs. He remembers purely intellectually what he has acquired. But ask whether today's teaching is able to achieve that later in life one not only remembers by heart what one has learned, but that one lovingly transfers oneself back to what one took in during one's youth with feeling; that one really still has something of what one was taught there, so that one can refresh it anew. But this must become the ideal of spiritual science in education, so that one does not just remember back. Now, today, people do not even do that. They take their exams and then forget what they have studied. But let us assume that people do remember back: is what people had at school a paradise to which one likes to be transported? Do you go back so far that you can say: As I think back, the morning of life shines in for me, and as I have now grown older, becoming older transforms it within me into something new; I have been taught in such a way that I can transform it, I not only remember it, I transform it, it becomes new to me.