VI. A Lecture for Public School Teachers

Around the age of six or seven there is a particularly important turning point that has far-reaching consequences for human structure and function. Modern physiology does not yet have a correct picture of this. Something also occurs in people in the spirit-soul realm. Until this time, human beings are fundamentally imitative beings. The constitution of their body and soul is such that they totally devote themselves to their surroundings. They feel their way into the surroundings. They develop themselves from the center of their will so that they mold the force lines and force rays of their will exactly to what occurs in their surroundings. More important than everything that we can bring to the child through reprimanding words, through preaching in this stage, is the way in which we ourselves behave in the presence of the child. Since the intangibles of life act much more strongly than what we can clearly observe on the surface, we must say that what the child imitates does not depend only upon the observable behavior of people. In every tone of speech, in every gesture that we as teachers use in the presence of the child during this stage, lies something to which the child adapts itself. As human beings we are much more than we know by the external reflection of our thoughts. In life we pay little attention to how we move a hand, but the way we move a hand is the faithful reflection of the whole state of our souls, the whole reflection of our inner mood. As adults with developed soul lives we pay little attention to the connection between the way we step forward with our legs, the way we gesture with our hands, the expressions on our faces, and the will and feeling impulses that lie in our souls. The child, however, lives into these intangibles. We do not exaggerate when we say that those in the young child’s surroundings who inwardly strive to be good, to be moral, who in their thinking and feeling consciously intend to do the child no wrong, even in what is not spoken—such people affect the child in the strongest possible manner through the intangibles of life.