Lecture IV

In ages of remote antiquity the Initiates were preserved from something that is nowadays a great boon for the human race. If they had been subjected to it in those times it would have been regarded as anything but a boon, on the contrary as a great hindrance to Initiation. It is not permissible now to prevent anyone from learning in the modern way to read and write. But as a matter of fact one loses a great deal through being forced to adopt these alphabetical ciphers to which one has no human relationship whatever. When the more civilised Europeans showed the letters of their alphabet to the uncultured American Indians, the latter were frightened by what they took to be so many little kobolds, little demons. This will show you what it means to introduce to a human being something that is so unnatural, so alien to him at the age of six or seven, as the letters of our script—for I ask you, has an A or a B in the form that is thrust upon us as children any relation to human life? It has none, not the very remotest! In ancient Egypt there were at least hieroglyphs, and the picture that was painted or drawn did bear some suggestion of resemblance to the reality; moreover men were made conscious of the relation between the picture and the reality. But to-day we learn A, B, C, as something entirely remote from life. Those who want to judge everything materialistically, to live in the world only with the ordinary, everyday consciousness, cannot possibly realise all that is driven out of the human being, what is really killed in him as the result of having to learn this A, B, C, this reading and writing, by modern methods. (In the Waldorf School we are trying to rectify the worst mistakes in education and so, among other things, we have introduced a different way of teaching reading and writing.)