VI. Teaching Eurythmy, Music, Drawing, and Language

By slowly developing everything intellectual out of the artistic, that is, out of the entire human being, you will also develop the entire human being, people with real initiative, with a real force of life in their bodies. They will not be like people in our own population who no longer know where they are after they have done their final examinations. This is a real tragedy. If your professional task is to understand human beings, then it is possible that you can experience the following. You are, for example, to test someone around the age of twenty-five or thirty whether he is to receive a given position. You approach him with the expectation they should develop some initiative, particularly if he is to go into a practical profession. The person tells you, however, that you expect one thing or another but that he wants to go to India or to America in order to learn more about the profession. What that means is that he actually wants to move into the profession passively. He does not want to develop anything out of his own initiative, but instead wishes to have the opportunity that the world will make something of him. I know that saying this is something horrible for many people, but at the same time I am pointing out something we can see in people who have completed their education in the last decades. It has not developed a genuine initiative, initiative that reaches down into people’s souls when it is necessary later in life. It is of course easy to say that we should develop initiative. The question is, though, how we do that, how we can arrange the material we are to present in education so that it acts not against initiative in the will, but strengthens it.