Lecture Five

This also shows us how to approach history lessons. Initially, history should be presented in terms of individual figures through a kind of “painting” of the soul, if I may call it that. Until a child’s twelfth year, you should give the children only living pictures. Anything else would harden their being—it would bring about a kind of sclerosis of the soul. If before the eleventh year you speak to children of the way one epoch prepared another through certain impulses and so on, you create in them a sclerosis of the soul. People who have an eye for such things often see old men and women who learned about cause and effect in history much too early. This can even go into the physical body at this age through the same principles I have described. Physical sclerosis in old people can be traced back to, among other causes, the fact that they were taught too much about causality as children.