VI. A Lecture for Public School Teachers

You can see that this whole lecture revolves around the relationship of spiritual science to pedagogical art, and how important it is to use spiritual science to provide a true understanding of human beings. In this way we obtain something from spiritual science that enters our will in the same way that artistic talents enter the human will. In this way we can remove ourselves from a pedagogy that is simply a science of convention, that always tells us to teach in this or that manner, according to some rules. We can transplant into the essence of our humanity what we must have in our will, the spiritual permeation of the will, so that from our will we can affect the developmental capacities of the growing child. In this manner, a truly effective understanding of human beings should support education in the spiritual scientific sense. The developing human thus becomes a divine riddle for us, a divine riddle that we wish to solve at every hour. If, with our art of teaching, we so place ourselves in the service of humanity, then we serve this life from our great interest in life.