Lecture Five

This can be prepared during the whole of elementary education. It is the task of every teacher; it concerns every teacher. We must, in our lessons, see to it that the children experience the beautiful, artistic, and aesthetic conception of the world; and their ideas and mental pictures should be permeated by a religious /moral feeling. Such feelings, when they are cultivated throughout the elementary school years, will make all the difference during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth years. For a child whose feelings for the beautiful, for the aesthetic conception of the world, have not been stimulated will during puberty easily become overly sensual, even perhaps erotic. There is no better way of counteracting the erotic feelings than through the healthy development of the aesthetic sense for the sublime and beautiful in nature. If you succeed in making the children feel deeply the beauty, the colors, in sunrise and sunset, in the flowers, experience the sublime splendor of a thunderstorm—if, as it were, you cultivate in them the aesthetic sense—you will do more for them than is done by the often absurdly practiced sex education given to children at an ever younger age. It is the feeling for the beautiful, an aesthetic confrontation with the world, that counteracts the erotic feeling. By experiencing the world as beautiful, the human being will also attain the right, healthy relation to his or her body, will not be tormented by it, as happens in eroticism.