VI. Teaching Eurythmy, Music, Drawing, and Language

As for teaching languages, you first need to gain a sense of how to do this. I first became aware of this sense of teaching languages when I had the opportunity of pursuing the result of having children who spoke dialect sit in the same classroom as other children who did not speak the dialect. It is very interesting to observe children who speak a dialect and how they carry themselves. A dialect, every dialect, has a certain characteristic. It arises out of what I would call an inner feeling of the human being just in the same way as the inner organic feeling arises, something that is much less important in today’s intellectualism. Dialect is an inner experience that pushes the entire human being into speech. In modern conversational speech, the so-called educated speech, which has become abstract, there is no longer a proper connection between inner experience and what is expressed in a sound or series of sounds. Certain subtle differences in the relationship between the person and the person’s surroundings are often wonderfully expressed in dialect. That is something you can no longer detect in educated speech. For example, when as a child I heard the word sky-flash ( Himmlitzer), I knew immediately that it was something that must be similar to the sound. Try to feel the word Himmlitzer. In certain dialects, that is the word for lightning. There is something in the sounds or in the series of sounds. Here the language is drawing a picture; it paints in a kind of inner music. The close connection between language and inner experiences of feeling is enormously stronger in dialect than it is in educated language.