VI. A Lecture for Public School Teachers

Today, we want to speak about the essence of the developing human. I would say that people speak quite abstractly about human individuality and its development. However, they are quite correctly conscious that the teacher especially needs to take the development of this human individuality into account. I only wish to point out that insightful teachers are very clear about how little our modern science of education is able to identify the orderly stages of human development. I would like to give two examples. The oft-mentioned Viennese educator Theodor Vogt represented the reformed Herbartian school of thought. He said that we are not advanced enough in our understanding of human history to derive a view of child development from human historical development in the same way biologists derive the individual human embryonic development from the development of the species. The pedagogue Rein repeated this point of view. It culminates in accepting that today we do not have research methods of any sort that could identify the basis of human development. The development of such capacities as those I have just cursorily mentioned (you can read more in my books) enables us to approach the riddle that meets us so wonderfully when we observe how, from birth onward, an inner human force increasingly appears in every gesture. In particular, we can see how it manifests through speech, through the relationships of people with their surroundings, and so forth. Usually people observe the different manifestations of human life much too superficially, both physiologically and biologically. People do not form a picture of the whole human being in which the body, soul and spirit intertwiningly affect one another. If you wish to teach and educate children as they need, you must form such a picture.