Lecture XI

If this were not so, real education and teaching would be utterly impossible. For suppose we had to teach and educate the whole of the spirit which man brings into the world only in germ, then our stature as teachers would require to be equal to whatever the human beings in our care might become. If this were so you might as well give up teaching at once, for you could only educate people equal in brilliance and ability to yourselves. But you must of course be ready to educate people who, in some ways, are much more clever and brilliant than you are. This is only possible if in education we have to touch only one part of man, for we can educate this one part even if we are not as clever, as brilliant, perhaps not even as good, as the child potentially is. The thing we can accomplish best in our teaching is the education of the will, and part of the education of the feeling life. For we can bring what we educate through the will—that is through the limbs—and through the heart, that is through part of the chest man—to the stage of perfection we have reached ourselves. And just as a man servant (or even an alarm clock) can be trained to awaken a much cleverer man than himself, so a person much inferior in cleverness, or even in goodness, can educate someone who has greater possibilities than he. We must of course realise that we do not need to be equal to the developing human being in intellectual capacity; but as, once again, it is a question of the development of the will it is for the attainment of goodness that we must strive to the uttermost. Our pupil may become better than we are, but he will very probably not do so unless in addition to the education we give him he gets another education from the world or from other people.