VI. A Lecture for Public School Teachers

This is the time that determines whether people can honestly and truly look from their innermost depths to something that divinely courses through the spirit and soul of the world and human life. At this point, those who can place themselves into human life through a spiritual point of view will, as teachers, be intuitively led to find the right words and the right behavior. In truth, education is something artistic. We must approach children not with a standardized pedagogy, but with an artistic pedagogy. In the same way that artists must be in control of their materials, must understand them exactly and intimately, those who work from the spiritual point of view must know the symptoms that arise around the age of nine. This is the time when people deepen their inner consciousness so that their Iconsciousness becomes spiritual, whereas previously it was soulful. Then the teacher will be able to change to an objective observation of things, whereas previously the child required a connection to human subjectivity. You will know, when you can correctly judge this moment, that prior to this you should, for example, speak to children about scientific things, about things that occur in nature, by clothing them in tales, in fables, in parables. You will know that all natural objects are to be treated as having, in a sense, human characteristics. In short, you will know that you do not separate people from their natural surroundings. At that moment around the age of nine when the I awakens, human beings separate themselves from the natural environment and become mature enough to objectively compare the relationships of natural occurrences. Thus, we should not begin to objectively describe nature before this moment in the child’s life. It is more important that we develop a sense, a spiritual instinct, for this important change.