VI. Meetings of Parents and Teachers

But let us add something else. I said that between the change of teeth and puberty children should not be given moral precepts, but in the place of these care should be taken to ensure that what is good pleases them because it pleases their teacher, and what is bad displeases them because it displeases their teacher. During the second period of life everything should be built up on sympathy with the good, antipathy for the bad. Then moral feelings are implanted deeply in the soul and there is established a sense of moral well-being in experiencing what is good and a sense of moral discomfort in experiencing what is bad. Now comes the time of puberty. Just as walking is fully developed during the first 7 years, speech during the second 7 years, so during the third 7 years of life thinking comes fully into its own. It becomes independent. This only takes place with the oncoming of puberty; only then are we really capable of forming a judgment. If at this time, when we begin to form thoughts out of an inner urge, feelings have already been implanted in us in the way I have indicated, then a good foundation has been laid and we are able to form judgments. For instance: this pleases me and I am in duty bound to act in accordance with it; that displeases me and it is my duty to leave it alone. The significance of this is that duty itself grows out of pleasure and displeasure; it is not instilled into me, but grows out of pleasure and displeasure. This is the awakening of true freedom in the human soul. We experience freedom through the fact that the sense for what is moral is the deepest individual impulse of the individual human soul. If a child has been led to a sense of the moral by an authority which is self-understood, so that the moral lives for him in the world of feeling, then after puberty the conception of duty works out of his individual inner human being. This is a healthy procedure. In this way we lead the children rightly to the point at which they are able to experience what individual freedom is. Why do people not have this experience today? They do not have it because they cannot have it, because before puberty a knowledge of good and bad was instilled into them; what they should and should not do was inculcated. But moral instruction which pays no heed to a right approach by gradual stages dries up the human being, makes out of him, as it were, a skeleton of moral precepts on which the conduct of life is hung like clothes on a coat-hanger.