Lecture XVII

Priests should note the strange course which pedagogy has taken. Pedagogy proceeded from the life of instincts, and it was most effective when one did things instinctively, so that one didn't think in a pedagogical way at all. People were not really pedagogically active in ancient times, they just followed their instincts. Teachers only began to talk a lot about pedagogy after they had forgotten how to teach in an instinctive way. All our talk about it proves that we are the worst teachers in the whole of evolution. People begin to talk a lot about something when they don't know much about it anymore. Like one began to talk about transubstantiation when one no longer knew its secret. Whenever one notices predominantly intellectual contents of discussion in a particular age one has to ask: what are these people lacking? At the time when there was a lot of discussion about the labor question, all that this really meant was that they knew very little about it. Of course this applies to an even greater extent to the time when the printing press replaced writing. That was a time when people gradually lost their understanding for the divine script that speaks out of the sun, wind and stars.