X. The Tasks of Schools and the Tripartite Social Organism

You all know Jean Paul's saying that in our first three years we actually learn more for life from our nurse than we do later in three academic years. That was still the case in Jean Paul's time. This saying is absolutely correct, there is no objection to it. But you know that much is determined by the physiology of the child. The child does not need to be maltreated in terms of his memory. He remembers so much, retains so much in his memory, than he needs to retain at this age until the change of teeth. But with the change of teeth, it becomes necessary to take careful consideration of the child's memory. Above all, we must not overload the memory during this period, that is, we must not force something into the memory that will then fall out by itself. It is hard to believe that this is not known. This, too, is a consequence of today's poor psychology. It is hard for a person when his memory is so mistreated during this time that he has to incorporate things into his memory that then fall out by themselves. Therefore, one has to ensure that one works as much as possible through repetition and the like – repetition must form the basis for the period between the seventh and fourteenth, fifteenth year – that one lays the things that one first presented in more detail, if possible in short, summarized sentences, for the memory, so that one really has certain things within oneself, at least to a certain degree, and retains certain things from these years of life within oneself, as a Christian does the Lord's Prayer, albeit to a lesser degree, so that it comes up again and again and again, and forms part of the inner life of the soul. During this time, one must not forget to focus on the development of the soul's powers. But in this respect much is sinned, for in this time more attention is paid to the school subjects that are required by life and the state than to the growing human being himself. The situation is such that everything that is as conventional for life as reading and writing is not something that is as internally based as, for example, geometry or arithmetic. The fact that we have this language, in particular, is something that is less fundamentally connected to the outside world, and also to the generality of the world. That we have these letters of the alphabet has less to do with general world conditions than, for example, a triangle having three sides or its angle sum being 180 degrees or the like. Everything that is as conventional as reading and writing can be used primarily to develop intellectuality, which particularly forms the mind. It would be going too far if I were to now expand on this sentence of a true psychology in a broader way, but anyone who looks at life from all sides will find this sentence to be true.