II. The Three Fundamental Forces in Education

Now I would like to draw your attention to a fact that must have our particular concern in an art of education and can be worked on there. In the struggle I first described, whose outer expression is the change of teeth, and in the later battle whose equivalent is the change of voice, a certain characteristic is to be noted: everything which proceeds downward from the head in the period before the seventh year takes the form of an attack on what is coming to meet it from within in the nature of up-building forces. And everything that works outward from within, rising up towards the head to counter the stream originating there, acts like a defence against this descending stream. The one has the appearance of an attack, the other, working from within outward, gives the appearance of a defence.