Lecture Five

Indeed, it is impossible to teach anything at all without a child’s inner cooperation. In all education, we must bear in mind how a child will enter life at puberty. Of course, there are also those young ladies and gentlemen who continue their education, and in the Waldorf school we have a university standard, with twelve classes that take them on to their eighteenth or nineteenth year or even farther. But even with these children, we must recognize that after puberty they really do go out into life, and our relationship to those students must be very different from what it was before. We must make every effort to educate in such a way that the intellect, which awakens at puberty, can then find nourishment in the child’s own nature.