Twelfth Lecture

But once you recognize this, once you recognize, I would say, the soul teaching of teaching, then the other question arises, the question that has played the greatest role in the development of a pedagogy for the Waldorf school. It still sounds paradoxical to today's people, this other side of teaching pedagogy, and yet, in the training of the pedagogy of the Waldorf School, this other side has played the greatest role, and that is that we bring it to realization at the same time that the children who grow into the world are each a mystery in themselves and that we can really learn from the children. By being teachers, we not only satisfy our need to communicate, but at the same time our need to know, by saying to ourselves: You have grown older, but those who are coming in now bring you news from the spiritual world from a later time, they reveal to you that which has taken place in the spiritual world since your own birth, for they have remained in the spiritual world longer. The teachers at the Waldorf School have been taught in the most diverse ways to receive messages from the spiritual world in the growing child, to really think about it in every moment, and to feel it in particular: in the child that is given to you, what is sent to you from the spiritual world is revealed to you.