V. The Teachers' Conference in the Waldorf School

It is therefore perfectly possible for a teacher or educator who carries out his profession in a truly loving way and bases his teaching on a comprehensive knowledge of man, to speak in the following way about some special case: Here the physical body shows signs of hardening, of stiffening, so that the child is unable to develop the faculties which, spiritually, are potentially present, because the physical body is a hindrance. Or, to take another case, it is possible that someone might say: In this particular child, who is about 7 or 8 years old, certain attributes are making their appearance. The child surprises us in that he is able to learn this or that very early; but one can observe that the physical body is too soft, it has a tendency which later on may cause it to run to fat. If the physical body is too soft, if, so to say, the fluid element has an excess of weight in relation to the solid element, then this particular tendency causes the soul and spirit to make themselves felt too soon, and then we have a precocious child. In such a case, during the further development of the physical body, this precocity is pushed back again, so that under certain conditions everything may well be changed and the child become for the whole of life, not only an average person, but one even below average. In short, we must reckon with the fact that what external observation reveals in the child must be estimated rightly by means of inner perceptiveness, so that actually nothing whatever is said if one merely speaks about faculties or lack of faculties.