VI. Educational Methods Based on Anthroposophy II

My point is that, if we follow up this blushing and paling in a child’s soul, we find the consequences of what teachers and educators have cultivated in the field of education during the period between a child’s second dentition and puberty. It is a question not of teaching morals, but of living morally. Through the relationship between the teacher and the child, what is good crosses over into the realm of sympathies and antipathies. They express themselves outwardly in paling and blushing, which are generated by the soul either when the inner life of feeling is threatened, destroyed, or paralysed, or when it feels a sense of shame. As a result, the appropriate feeling, or an entire complex of feelings for a genuine and true human dignity, is engendered in the child. It is of paramount importance that a living morality develop in this changeable, mobile relationship between child and teacher. Remember that yesterday I characterized the member of the human organism that works in time as the etheric body. When the child reaches sexual maturity, another, higher member of the human organism comes to meet the etheric body. That is, during the age of sexual maturity, the human astral body, as it is called in anthroposophy, comes to meet the etheric body. This is a stage when what had developed into a system of sympathies and antipathies in the child changes into a person’s moral attitudes. It is the astral body that places human beings within the world. It holds and gathers the person together far more tightly than the etheric body. What was previously a system of sympathies and antipathies, cultivated by the teacher’s artistic approach, now becomes transmuted into a moral attitude of soul.