Observations on

ADOLESCENCE
The Third Phase of Human Development

by

Rudolf Steiner

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 Published by:
The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America
65-2 Fern Hill Road
Ghent, NY 12075

Observations on
ADOLESCENCE
The Third Phase of Human Development

Author: Rudolf Steiner

Great Britain Editor: Christopher Clouder

North American Editor: David Mitchell,

in conjunction with the AWSNA Waldorf
High School Research Project

Proofreaders: Nancy Jane, Ann Simpson

Cover: Hallie Wooten

© 2001, 2011 by AWSNA

ISBN # 1-888365-31-5

Note:
All excerpts indicating the Anthroposophic Press were
used by permission of:
Anthroposophic Press
PO Box 960
Herndon, VA 20172-0960

All excerpts indicating the Rudolf Steiner Press were

used by permission of:
Rudolf Steiner Press
51 Queen Caroline Street
London W6 9QL
Great Britain

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 Table of Contents
Foreword ………………………………………………………… 5

Introduction …………………………………………………… 7

Education for Adolescents

Interest in the World ……………………………………… 10

Astral Body and Desire ……………………………………… 16

The Connection Between Breathing and Puberty …………… 17

Judgment ………………………………………………………… 22

Performing Deeds Larger Than Our Thoughts ……………… 23

The Law of Authority ………………………………………… 27

The Astral Body and Mathematics ………………………… 28

The Astral Body as the Source of Faith ……………………… 29

The Effects of Occult Development on the Sheaths of Humans … 30

Puberty and the Brother-Sister Soul …………………………… 34

Earthly Maturity ………………………………………………… 38

Change in Dentition …………………………………………… 39

The Freeing of the Astral Body ………………………………… 39

Inner Independence …………………………………………… 39

Mental Picturing and Will Forces ……………………………… 40

The Astral Body ………………………………………………… 41

Battle Between the Outer Will Element and the

Inner Intelligence Element …………………………… 42

Sexual Love …………………………………………………… 44

Cultivating an Inner View of the Human Being ……………… 45

Changes in Muscle ……………………………………………… 46

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 The Liberation of the Astral Body ………………………… 47

The Development of Judgment …………………………… 47

Participation in Life ………………………………………… 49

Modern Education …………………………………………… 52

The Heart of Childhood, Seven to Fourteen ……………… 54

Teaching Economically ……………………………………… 56

Developing Universal Love ………………………………… 63

The Danger of Too Early Incarnation of the Ego ………… 66

A Right Approach to the World of Ideals ………………… 68

Sexual Maturity ……………………………………………… 78

Criticism and Compromise, Masculine and Feminine …… 80

Authority …………………………………………………… 103

True Knowledge–Eighteen- and Ninteen-Year-Olds ……… 113

The Transition from Childhood into Adolescence ……… 117

Instructions to Teachers …………………………………… 119

Puberty and Music ………………………………………… 135

Between the Seventh and the Fourteenth Years ………… 138

Activating the Intellect ……………………………………… 147

Finding Anchorage in Life ………………………………… 151

The Third Seven-Year Period ……………………………… 154

Understanding ……………………………………………… 154

Gender Observations ……………………………………… 159

Bibliography ……………………………………………… 162

Index …………………………………………………………… 164

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 Foreword
This book represents a collaboration which gathers
together statements Rudolf Steiner said or wrote about ado-
lescence. Throughout the years I accumulated golden nug-
gets of wisdom Steiner had made about adolescence which
were not yet translated into English. Christopher Clouder
from the Steiner Schools Fellowship in Great Britain had a
collection of material he used in teacher training. Betty Staley
from Rudolf Steiner College had a translation of comments
Steiner made about the astral body which she used at the
College. Permission was granted by Michael Dobson of the
Anthroposophic Press and Sevak Gulbekian from Rudolf
Steiner Press in England to use material under their respec-
tive copyrights. The collection of comments is wide rang-
ing, and there is some redundancy, but this, in my opinion,
demonstrates how Steiner approached the same topic from
different perspectives.
The material speaks not only about adolescence but
also about the seven to fourteen year phase leading up to
adolescence. Steiner offers guidance to both class teachers
and high school teachers who are working with young people
before and during puberty.
The term “adolescent” is a relatively new word in the
English language. It first appeared in print in England in
1481 when Mark of Erecham wrote of “a certain adolescent
young man.” It identified the time of life between childhood
and adulthood. We observe this period of life as a time of
excess and exaggeration and also as a time of intense loneli-
ness. Rudolf Steiner referred to the onset of adolescence as
a gentle sprinkling of pain that never goes away.
During this age boys are often outwardly brassy in
a group, but when alone they turn inward, exploring their
inner fantasies, and they often seem to live in a dark cave of
emotions which they cannot explain. They need an understand-
ing, warm mother to help them make sense of their complex
feeling life.

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 Girls, on the other hand, can be noisy, brash, sassy,
flirtatious, and moody, and they can exhibit a tremendous
emotional vitality. Often possessing an inner sullenness,
they are helped by the cool logic of an understanding father
whose main help is through listening and sharing detached,
unemotional logic!
Adolescence storms in with major body changes
induced by surreptitiously oozing hormones. First, we may
notice that the young man’s feet rapidly outgrow his shoes,
and the legs and arms dangle too far from the pant cuff or
shirt sleeve. The walk becomes a strut or a rowboat-like ma-
neuvering across the pavement. The voice changes in both
sexes, most notably in the boys where it falls a full octave. The
girls voice falls one tone. The larynx enlarges and the vocal
cords are lengthened. The jaw often drops a bit and juts out.
The center of gravity drops from the second cervical
to the sacral vertebrae. The lungs increase in size in boys and
girls. From about the age of ten they start to breathe differ-
ently. The girls’ breathing becomes costal and is centered at
the top of the ribs, while the boys’ breathing drops down to
2/3 chest and 1/3 diaphragm. Like young lion cubs the boys
enjoy bumping into each other and exult in experiencing
their own vitality.
The blood pressure increases during the teenage
years, and the heart, without growing much in size, doubles
in mass. All of this activity, along with secondary and primary
sexual characteristics which rearrange the shape of the body,
are initiated by twenty-four major and over two hundred
minor hormones.
Thus, adolescence is a picture of youth diving deeply
down into his and her own organism.
It is not surprising that this age, of all the develop-
mental periods of life, requires the most empathy from teach-
ers and parents. It is hoped that this book will kindle those
feelings of empathy.
– David Mitchell
North American Editor

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 Introduction
In Yevtushenko’s autobiographical poem Zima Junc-
tion, which tells of his return as an adult to the town he grew
up in, he describes a meeting between his former self as a
child and his later self as an adolescent. Childhood was time when

Life solved itself without my contributions.

I had no doubts about harmonious answers
Which could and would be given to every question.
But in time there came an unexpected change in him:
I suddenly felt this necessity
of answering these questions for myself.
So shall I go on where I started from,
Sudden complexity, self generated,
disturbed by which I started on this journey.

When his child nature then speaks to his older ver-

sion, he expresses his concern because this is not a state he
had ever envisioned for himself, and he reminded his own
youth how heavily indebted he was to his previous condition.

So youth asked if childhood would help,

And childhood smiled and promised it would help.

In this lyrical form the poet expresses the fact the

human development is based on earlier states, and any un-
derstanding of our natures must take this into account. As
adults we, too, need to recreate and re-enter some elements
of adolescence to rediscover and gain a clearer perspective
on who we are and our motivation as adults. This especially
applies to educators or carergivers who wish to work with

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 would testify, Rudolf Steiner’s insights serve as a sound basis
on which the needs and questions of this age range can be
fruitfully and creatively met by educators who have taken
on these areas of vocational responsibility.

– Christopher
Clouder
Great Britain Editor

_____________________

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young people.
In the following passages in this book Rudolf Steiner
describes this transformation from the view of spiritual sci-
ence. Psychologists, doctors, and educators recognize this as
a critical phase in human development, but all too often the
institutions that young people attend are more concerned
with their future role in society rather than the sources of
such “self generated questions.” Steiner attempts to look
deeper at human development and explore the personal
evolution of this change and its outer manifestations as those
of a spiritual reality. Speaking as he was in the first two de-
cades of the last century he does not touch upon elements of
the present phenomena around adolescence. However, the
insight he gives as to why these occur is as vital today as it
was then. The questions around adolescence are important
to everybody in our contemporary culture as they have a
large and often dynamic influence in how we all live our
lives. It cannot be dismissed as merely a phase that will pass
in time. In fact, the turbulence should be approached with
respect as a general aspect of being human and the questions
thus raised as a necessary regenerative impulse for which we
should feel grateful. It also should be seen in the context of
what preceded it and as part of the culture within which the
young person is immersed. This has educational implications,
as this approach suggests that the curriculum should itself
try to support these inner needs and changes rather than at-
tempt to mold the young person to a preset path of learning
goals that could be irrelevant to the sensitive and idealistic
human soul at this age.
The original collection of my contribution to this
book is drawn from Steiner’s approximately 200 educational
lectures made available by Dr. Hans Rebman for the use of
his colleagues in the Stuttgart-Uhlandshöhe Waldorf School
as a step towards deepening their understanding of their task
as high school teachers.
As anyone who has worked seriously with these texts

9
 delight in power and the eroticism of young people to be the
secondary results of changes in things that, until the age of
twenty or twenty-one, really ought to go in an altogether dif-
ferent direction, but considers them to be natural elements in
the human organism at puberty. If young people are rightly
educated, there should be no need whatsoever to speak about
love of power and eroticism to them at this age. If such things
have to be spoken about during these years, this is in itself
something that smacks of illness. Our entire pedagogical art
and science are becoming ill, because again and again the
highest value is attributed to these questions. A high value
is put upon them for no other reason than that people are
powerless today and have grown more and more powerless,
in the age of a materialistic world conception, to inspire true
interest in the world, the world in the widest sense. . . .
When we do not have enough interest in the world
around us, then we are thrown back into ourselves. Taken
all in all, we have to say that if we look at the chief damages
created by modern civilization, they arise primarily because
people are far too concerned with themselves and do not
usually spend the larger part of their leisure time in concern
for the world but busy themselves with how they feel and
what gives them pain . . . . And the least favorable time of life
to be self‑occupied in this way is during the ages between
fourteen, fifteen, and twenty-one years old.
The capacity for forming judgments is blossoming at
this time and should be directed toward world interrelation-
ships in every field. The world must become so all-engrossing
to young people that they simply do not turn their attention
away from it long enough to be constantly occupied with
themselves. For, as everyone knows, as far as subjective
feelings are concerned, pain only becomes greater the more
we think about it. It is not the objective damage but the pain
of it that increases as we think more about it. In certain re-
spects, the very best remedy for the overcoming of pain is to
bring yourself, if you can, not to think about it. Now there
develops in young people just between fifteen, sixteen and

10
 Education for Adolescents

Interest in the World

When children come to the age of puberty, it is neces-
sary to awaken within them an extraordinarily great interest
in the world outside of themselves. Through the whole way
in which they are educated, they must be led to look out into
the world around them and into all its laws, its course, causes
and effects, into human intentions and goals, not only into
human beings, but into everything, even into a piece of music,
for instance. All this must be brought to them in such a way
that it can resound over and over within them, so that ques-
tions about nature, about the cosmos and the entire world,
about the human soul, questions of history, and riddles arise
in their youthful souls.
When the astral body becomes free at puberty, forces
are released which can now be used for formulating these
riddles. But when these riddles of the world and its mani-
festations do not arise in young souls, then these same forces
are changed into something else.
When such forces become free, and it has not been
possible to awaken the most intensive interest in such
world‑riddles, then these energies transform themselves into
what they become in most young people today. They change
in two directions, two urges of an instinctive kind: first into
delight in power, and second into eroticism.
Unfortunately, pedagogy does not now consider this

11
 a satisfying answer.” Those are the latent inadequacies, the
self‑exposures that occur when the children have the feeling:
“The teacher just isn’t up to giving us the answers we need.”
And for this inability, the personal capacities and incapaci-
ties of the teacher are not the only determining factors, but
rather the pedagogical method.
If we spend too much time pouring a mass of in-
formation over young people at this age, or if we teach in
such a way that they never come to lift their doubts and
questions into consciousness, then, even though we are the
more objective party, we expose, even if indirectly, our latent
inadequacies.
You see, the teacher must, in full consciousness, be
permeated through and through with all this when dealing
with the transition from the ninth to the tenth grades, for it
is just with the entire transformation of the courses one gives
that the pedagogy must concern itself. If we have children
of six or seven, then the course is already set through the
fact that they are entering school, and we do not need to
understand any other relationship to life. But when we lead
young people over from the ninth to the tenth grade, then we
must put ourselves into quite another life condition. When
this happens, the children must say to themselves: “Great
thunder and lightning! What’s happened to the teacher! Up
to now we’ve thought of him as a pretty bright light who has
plenty to say, but now he’s beginning to talk like more than
a man. Why, the whole world speaks out of him!”
And when they feel the most intensive interest in
particular world questions and are put into the fortunate
position of being able to impart this to other young people,
then the world speaks out of them also. Out of a mood of
this kind, verve (Schwung) must arise. Verve is what teachers
must bring to young people at this age, verve which above
all is directed towards imagination; for although the students
are developing the capacity to make judgments, judgment is
actually borne out of the powers of imagination. And if you
deal with the intellect intellectually, if you are not able to deal

12
twenty, twenty-one, something not altogether unlike pain.
This adaptation to the conditions brought about through
the freeing of the astral body from the physical is really a
continual experience of gentle pain. And this kind of experi-
ence immediately makes us tend towards self‑preoccupation,
unless we are sufficiently directed away from it and toward
the world outside ourselves.
If a teacher makes a mistake while teaching a ten‑ or
twelve‑year‑old, then, as far as the mutual relationship be-
tween pupil and teacher is concerned, this does not really
make such a very great difference. By this I do not mean that
you should make as many mistakes as possible with children
of this age. . . . The feeling for the teacher’s authority will
flag perhaps for a while, but such things will be forgotten
comparatively quickly, in any case much sooner than certain
injustices are forgotten at this age. On the other hand, when
you stand in front of students between fourteen, fifteen and
twenty, twenty-one, you simply must not expose your latent
inadequacies and so make a fool of yourself. . . .
If a student is unable to formulate a question which
he or she experiences inwardly, the teachers must be capable
of doing this themselves, so that they can bring about such
a formulation in class, and they must be able to satisfy the
feeling that then arises in the student when the question
comes to expression. For if they do not do this, then when
all that is mirrored there in the souls of these young people
goes over into the world of sleep, into the sleeping condition,
a body of detrimental, poisonous substances is produced by
the unformulated questions. These poisons are developed
only during the night, just when poisons ought really to be
broken down and transformed instead of created. Poisons are
produced that burden the brains of the young people when
they go to class, and gradually everything in them stagnates,
becomes “stopped up.” This must and can be avoided. But it
can be avoided only if the feeling is not aroused in the stu-
dents: “Now again the teacher has failed to give us the right
answer. We really haven’t been answered at all. We can’t get

13
 the creation of the solar system and what one learns through
astronomy and astrophysics today, if they cram into their
skulls only this idea of the cosmos, then in social relation-
ships they will be just such men and women as those of our
modern civilization who, out of anti‑social impulses, shout
about every kind of social reform but within their souls
actually bring anti‑social powers to expression. I have often
said that the reason people make such an outcry about social
matters is because they are anti‑social beings.
It cannot be said often enough that in the years
between fourteen and eighteen, we must build upon the
fundamentally basic moral relationship between pupil and
teacher in the most careful way. And here morality is to be
understood in its broadest sense: that, for instance, as teachers
we call up in our soul the very deepest sense of responsibility
for our task. This moral attitude must show itself in that we
do not give all too much acknowledgment to this deflection
toward subjectivity and one’s own personality. In such mat-
ters, imponderables really pass over from teacher to pupil.
Mournful teachers, unalterably morose teachers who are
immensely fond of their lower selves, produce in children
of just this age a mirror image of themselves, or they kindle
a terrible teenage revolution. More important than any ap-
proved method is that we do not expose our latent inadequa-
cies and that we approach the children with an attitude that
is inwardly moral through and through. . . .
This sickly eroticism which has grown up—also in
people’s minds—to such a terrible extent appears for the
most part only in city dwellers who have become teachers
and doctors. And only as urban life triumphs altogether in
our civilization will these things come to such a terrible—I
do not want to say “blossoming” but to such a frightful—
degeneracy. Naturally, we must look not at appearances but
at reality. It is certainly quite unnecessary to begin to organize
educational homes in the country immediately. If teachers
and pupils carry these same detrimental feelings out into the
country and are really permeated by urban conceptions, you

14
with the intellect with a certain imagination, then you have
“mis‑played,” and you have missed the boat with them.
Young people demand imaginative powers: you must
approach them with verve, and with verve of a kind that
convinces them. Skepticism is something that you may not
bring to them in the first half of this life‑period. The most
damaging judgment for the time between fourteen, fifteen,
and eighteen is one that implies in a pessimistically knowl-
edgeable way: “This is something that cannot be known.”
This crushes the soul of a child or a young person. It is more
possible after eighteen to pass over to what is more or less in
doubt. But between fourteen and eighteen it is soul‑crushing,
soul‑debilitating, to introduce them to a certain skepticism.
The subject you deal with is much less important than not
bringing this debilitating pessimism to young people.
It is important for oneself as a teacher to exercise a
certain amount of self‑observation and not give in to any
illusions; for it is fatal if, just at this age, young people feel
more clever than the teacher during class, especially in sec-
ondary matters. It should be and it can be achieved, even if
not right in the first lesson, that they are so gripped by what
they hear that their attention will really be diverted from all
the teacher’s little mannerisms. Here, too, the teacher’s latent
inadequacies are the most fatal.
Now, if you think, my dear friends, that neglect of
these matters unloads its consequences into the channels of
instinctive love of power and eroticism, then you will see
from the beginning how tremendously significant it is to take
the education of these young people in hand in a bold and
generous way. You can much more easily make mistakes with
older students, for example, with those at medical school. For
what you do at this earlier age works into their later life in an
extraordinarily devastating way. It works destructively, for
instance, upon the relationships between people. The right
kind of interest in other human beings is not possible if the
right sort of world interest is not aroused in the fifteen‑ or
sixteen‑year‑old. If they learn only the Kant‑Laplace theory of

15
 can call a school a country school as long as you like, you
will still have a blossoming of city life to deal with. . . .
What we have spoken about here today is of the ut-
most pedagogical importance and, in considering the high
school years, should be taken into the most earnest consid-
eration.

—Excerpts from a lecture given in Stuttgart on

June 21, 1922. (In a few cases the repetitions appropri-
ate for spoken style have been omitted and sentences
condensed. Translated by Christy Barnes.)

human being is asleep, he has no desires, neither sexual nor

any other kind. The desires arise in the waking state. They
arise in the morning when the astral body wants to enter the
physical body. And in life this astral body craves to enter the
physical body every single morning. Of course, it also wants
to do this after death, but it has to get used to not being able
to do this.
–– GA 349/3-21-23
Lecture to the Workers

The Connection Between Breathing and Puberty

One can observe how the child, in a certain way,
sleeps differently from the person she becomes after the
change of teeth. The difference is not so obvious; however
it exists. The child up to age seven cannot yet send into her
sleeping state—into the state that the soul lives in between
falling asleep and waking up—what later on it can send as
soul forces; for these forces still have to do with the physical-
material, that is, with the physical organism. Therefore, the
child does not yet send into her sleeping state the sharply
contoured concepts. The child sends into the sleep state
barely contoured concepts, barely contoured mental images,
but these less sharply contoured mental images have the pe-
culiarity that they can encompass the soul-spiritual reality in

16
Astral Body and Desire
The first part of life in which the human being devel-
ops includes the time until the child receives his second teeth.
First he has the milk teeth; then he receives the second teeth.
One can say the human being has the milk teeth as a result
of heredity. But the second teeth he has from his ether body.
He then also has his astral body and his ego. This
astral body, with the ego that is embedded in it, always de-
sires the physical body. So we can say that the human being
develops desire in his astral body. All desires are developed
in the astral body.
From the receiving of the second teeth to the time of
puberty, something supersensible is active in the child. And
what does this supersensible something want? It gradually
wants to take hold of the whole body. It is not yet there
when the child has the second teeth, and it begins to receive
the astral body into its entire body in such a way that it per-
meates the whole body. Then the child becomes more and
more mature. Once the astral body has totally permeated
the physical body, then the child is sexually mature. That is
the important thing to know: the astral body is what brings
sexual maturity into the child. . . . A person who has learned
to observe clearly what it is that works its way into the body
during the time from the second teeth to puberty will know
that this is the astral body. It gives rise to all the desires. Of
course, the child already has desires before the second teeth
because the astral body is embedded in the head; but later
it expands throughout the entire body. You can very well
observe how the astral body expands in the boy’s body. The
boy changes his voice and with that he also becomes sexually
mature. That is the sign that the astral body has plunged
into the entire physical body. In the girl you can observe it
through the fact that secondary sexual organs, the breasts
and so forth, develop.
You see this astral body each morning when again
and again it wants to enter the physical body. For while the

17
 essentially through the breathing process. What appears
there in the breathing process could not appear at a younger
age. Certainly the breathing process also exists in the child.
But as long as the child has the forces in her physical grow-
ing and bodily organizing which then emerge at the change
of teeth, nothing takes the place of what later is caused by
the breathing process in the human body in such a striking,
significant way.
As I said, before the change of teeth, what the breath-
ing wants to effect in us cannot become active in the human
organism. But then a battle begins of the forces which re-
mained growth forces against the penetration of what out
of the breathing process penetrates into the human being.
For the first great significant step that appears on the physi-
cal level as a consequence of the breathing process is sexual
maturity.
Natural science has not yet understood this connec-
tion of breathing and puberty. However, it certainly exists.
In a way, we breathe in what makes us sexually mature, but
also what, in a larger sense, gives us the possibility of entering
into a lovingly embracing relationship with the world. That
is what we really breathe in. There is also something spiritual
in each process of nature. So, in the breathing process there is
something spiritual and something soul-spiritual. This soul-
spiritual element enters into us through the breathing process.
It can only enter into us when those forces have become soul
forces which earlier were working on the physical organism
and which at the change of teeth ceased to do that. It is then
that what wants to come out of the breathing process streams
into the human being.
However, this is being opposed—and that’s where the
battle comes in—by what comes out of the growth processes,
those that have remained growth processes. In other words,
that which wants to come out of the breathing process battles
against what arises out of the ether forces. This battle takes
place between the ether forces, those forces that arise out of

18
a better way than the sharply contoured mental images can.
This is something important. The more sharply con-
toured our concepts are for the day-waking life, the less we
send into the sleep state in order to grasp the realities there.
That is how the child in very many cases, in fact, brings a
certain knowledge of spiritual reality out of her sleep state.
These sharply contoured concepts, so to say, dampen the vi-
sion for the spiritual realities within which we live between
falling asleep and waking up. . . .
Between the change of teeth and puberty something
forms itself on the soul level which can in a certain way be
grasped through imagination. One receives experiences
through imagination about what forms itself there in the
human soul. The experience which I just described referring
to the state between falling asleep and waking up is only
one of the experiences which one has through imaginative
cognition. In those interesting states that take place in the
child from the change of teeth until puberty, there we see how
a strong battle is going on in the process of becoming a hu-
man being. In this period of life, the ether body, which runs
through her special organization until puberty, fights, so to
say, against the astral body. It is a real state of battle which
takes place in the child. And if we envision what corresponds
to this state of battle on the physical level, we can say at this
period of life there is a great battle taking place in the child
between the forces of growth and those forces that play into
us through physical inspiration, through the breath. This is
a very significant process in the human inner core, a process
which will have to be studied more and more if we want to
know the human being. For what in part becomes free on
the soul level through the change of teeth are the forces of
growth. Of course, a considerable portion of these forces of
growth still remain in the physical body and manage growth
there. One part becomes free at the change of teeth and ap-
pears as soul forces.
Whatever continues to function as forces of growth in
the child opposes something which now appears in the child

19
 For when the child begins in the first period of her life to
sense her ego distinctively, she is really only beginning to
feel the ego. At this point in time it happens that the child
connects a sharply contoured concept—of course, more or
less sharply contoured concept—with this ego. It is only at
this time that the child learns to distinguish herself clearly
from the outer world. At the same time as this experience,
a corresponding experience occurs, that of the breathing
rhythm and the circulation rhythm, the astral body and the
etheric body storming against each other.
These things always have two sides in the human
being. One side shows itself in the state between waking up
and falling asleep. I have just now described that state. In the
state between falling asleep and waking up, things are some-
what different. The child moves toward imagination and then
develops something of inspiration. When we discern what
happens through inspiration through the breathing process
which corresponds to it on the physical level, we find that
really only at this time—which for one child comes a little
earlier, for another a little later, but on the average between
age nine and ten—we find that at this time a real separation
of the ego and the astral body from the etheric body and
physical body takes place in sleep. The child is very inti-
mately connected especially with her ego, with her physical
and etheric bodies, even in sleep. But from this time on, the
ego begins to light up like an independent being, since the
ego and the astral body do not participate in the functions
of the ether body and physical body.
Then we can say: This battle, which I have described,
gradually subsides, beginning at age twelve, and with pu-
berty the astral body comes into being in its own right in
the human constitution. That which separates itself from
the human being, that which later on takes less care of the
physical, that is the same as what carries the human being
through the portal of death into the soul-spiritual world
when she dies . . . . What separates itself there—individual
subjects are presented in a materialist way—is being orga-

20
our ether body and which correspond on the physical level
to the material system, the metabolic system, and the blood
circulation, and the astral forces. There the metabolism plays
into the circulatory and the rhythmic systems. So that we
can say schematically: We have our metabolic system which
plays into our blood system, in the blood- rhythm system. . .
This is what rushes up from the part of the ether body in the
human being, so to say, at this time between age seven and
fourteen.
The astral body resists this. We then have the rhyth-
mic element that comes from the breath streaming in. This
battle takes place between the blood circulation and the
breathing rhythm. This is what takes place inwardly in the
human being at this time of her life.
If one speaks a little bit in images, one can say in a
perhaps seemingly radical image that it is approximately
between the ages of nine and ten when what took place in
skirmishes before the main battle will then become the main
battle in each child. The main battle between the astral body
and ether body occurs between the ages of nine and ten.
That is why this period, this moment in time, is so
important for the teacher to observe. It is so that, as a teacher
and educator, one has to be carefully aware of what takes
place between the ages of nine and ten, because the interac-
tion happens differently in almost every human being. In each
child one sees something very special. Certain qualities of
temperament reach a certain metamorphosis. Certain ideas
arise. Earlier it was not good to let the child notice anything
of the difference between the ego and the outer world. But
above all, it is at this time when one should begin to point out
this difference between the ego and the outer world. While
before it was good to speak to the child in fairy tale images
and so on, as one personified and explained the events of
nature as if they were like human events, now one can begin
to teach the child in a more didactic, direct way about nature.
Natural history, even in its most elementary form,
should only be taught to the child beginning at this time.

21
 if they are well nurtured, make our astral body secure and
firm for the rest of life. When we have these ideals, then this
member of the human organization becomes strong. There
is nothing worse than not to enable the idealism to unfold at
this time, and to meet this idealism as a Philistine who will
try to suppress this idealism.
–– GA 304A/8-30-24, London

Performing Deeds Larger Than Our Thoughts

Let’s first of all look at the difference between a hu-
man being who in a certain sense is full of idealism, who sets
high ideals for himself, and a human being who in general
has an aversion to setting high ideals for himself, who only
acts out of outer motivation, so to say. Let’s say he eats when
he is hungry, he sleeps when he is sleepy, he does this or that
whenever these or those passions or instincts urge him to
do that . . . . The idealist always has something in his ide-
als that he thinks about, to which he attaches his feelings,
something that is larger, wider than his deeds. What makes
an idealist in the spiritual-scientific sense is the fact that his
thoughts are larger, more all-encompassing than his deeds . .
. One can say the opposite of the person who lives in the
other direction from the one just characterized: that he does
not think in as large a way as he acts. He who acts only out
of instincts, passions, urges, and desires and so on does not
have an idea which encompasses all that he does in a given
moment, but he performs a deed, a task on the physical level,
that encompasses objects and events which he does not think
about. His intentions, his thoughts, thus, are less wide, are
smaller than his deeds, on the physical level.
Now the clairvoyant tells you the following about
these two types of human beings. Whenever we perform a
deed, a task in life which is larger, more encompassing than
our thoughts, then this task always throws a mirror image
into our astral body. Once we have gone beyond the action,
we cannot do anything in life without having an image of the
action in our astral body. The image later on communicates

22
nized in the Ahrimanic direction especially in an age where
the human being receives only materialistic and intellectual
concepts, where intellectualism and materialism are already
brought into the school, and individual subjects are presented
in a materialistic way. Because we are asleep even by day
with regard to our will and also to our instincts, the instincts
become caught by what separates itself there. We train our-
selves to conquer this life of instincts by taking in especially
the spiritual-scientific concepts.
–– GA 206/ 8-7-21, Dornach

Judgment
At puberty the astral sheath is pushed back, and the
astral body becomes free. Now the young person begins to
form the power of judgment so that a sure judgment can
arise. But something else is even more important. What
the human being has brought with him from his former life
reveals itself in a special way so that in this life between birth
and death he wants to deal with it. The human being at this
time is not yet suitably equipped to observe the outer world
in an objective way. But the way in which he faces the world
is of a beautiful, idealistic disposition. In this way he tries to
express himself, and it comes to expression as idealism, as
hopes for this life. This hopeful expectation and this idealism
show themselves in their true being during the period from
age fourteen, fifteen to age twenty-one, twenty-two. At this
time everything that wants to come out in this way comes
alive, even if it is in contradiction to the reality of current
life. They are memories of former lives stimulated by the
new, fresh forces of the astral body. Woe to the human being
whose ideals of his dreams and his expectations at that time
are thwarted, who is told that a large part of these hopes will
later on be judged only as youthful illusions, that they have
no real validity and are only dreams that cannot be fulfilled!
That’s not what matters, it does not matter whether the ide-
als can be fulfilled, but it is a question of the forces which lie
in them. These are beneficial, stimulating life forces which,

23
 individuals. If we now would research the causes of such
a behavior, we would find that such individuals had little
opportunity, in earlier periods of their physical existence, to
experience what one can call an idealistic transcendence of
their deeds by their thoughts, an experience of their thoughts
being larger than their deeds.
In normal life one does not usually observe such
things, but the effects definitely present themselves. The
effects are there, and many a person feels these effects very
strongly, feels them as the mood of his entire life, as the mood
of his entire soul, and also in his bodily constitution. Thus,
one could deny the astral body; its consequences cannot be
denied, for one does experience the consequences. If in life
what has just been described is seen, then people should real-
ize that it is not so stupid to speak of such things as the line of
reasoning that, even though the observation of supersensible
events is only possible for the clairvoyant, the manifestation
of clairvoyantly observed facts can always be demonstrated
in life.
In contrast to this we see how the deeds which are
smaller than their corresponding ideas leave such impres-
sions and show themselves in later life as courage for life,
confidence in life, and as equanimity in life. That passes
over into the inside of the physical organism, and one only
recognizes the connections if one observes life over a long
period of time, if one does not only look at short periods of
life. That is the mistake of many scientific observations in
which one determines the effects of this or that already after
what has happened in the course of only five years, while
the effects of many things very often show themselves only
after decades. Now consider that one has to say that there
are not only people who are of just an idealistic nature, who
in their thoughts go beyond their experiences. For we have
a great number of experiences, for example, which can be
grasped in ideas only with the greatest difficulty. So eat-
ing and drinking are something which is done daily out of
desire, out of instinct, and it truly takes a long time until he

24
itself to the ether body. The way the image communicates
itself to the ether body remains perceptible for the Akashic
record, so that a clairvoyant can see the mirror images of the
actions performed by a human being in the course of his life.
Thus, mirror images also remain in the astral body which
then continue onto the ether body of those persons whose
thoughts are larger than their actions, that is the actions one
performed out of idealism.
That is now the big difference between the mirror im-
ages of deeds resulting from instincts, desires, passions, and
so on and the mirror images performed out of idealism: all
of the former mirror images have something in a certain way
destructive for our whole life. The images of our astral body
are such that they gradually work back onto the entire human
being in a way that they, one could say, slowly consume this
human being. And these mirror images essentially have to do
with the slow way that the human being in his life consumes
himself until death, that is in his being on the physical level,
while the mirror images which arise out of what from our
thoughts goes beyond our actions have something revital-
izing. Especially for the ether body, they are stimulating, for
they are what continuously brings new revitalizing forces
into our entire human being.
So, according to the descriptions of the clairvoyant,
we have forces in our being on the physical level that, in fact,
are desolating and destructive, and we also continuously
have revitalizing forces in us. Now as a rule one can very
well observe the effects of these forces in life. For example,
there are human beings who wander around in life who are
crotchety, hypochondriacal, of a gloomy temperament, who
cannot cope with their own soul life, and this soul life works
back onto their physical organism. They have become fearful,
and one can observe how their fear, when it lasts forever in
life, undermines the health of their organism all the way into
the physical. In short, there are human beings who in later
life are melancholic, of a gloomy temperament, who have a
hard time with themselves, and are in many ways unbalanced

25
 tual part of our being after death, we have—in the first days
after death—the ether body still attached to us, and through
it we have a review of our entire life. And the best thing that
now remains with us like an inner forming element is the
aforementioned revitalizing forces which originate from the
fact that our ideas went beyond the measure of our deeds.
The ether body continues to have an effect beyond death in a
way that further revitalizes us for the following incarnation.
Therefore, we may say that what we inject into
ourselves as revitalizing forces that remain in the ether
body is a continuing force of youth. And even if we do not
prolong our life through that, we must say, however, that
we can form our life so that it retains its strength of youth
for a longer time, because we do many deeds in such a way
that our thoughts surpass the measure of our deeds. If the
individual asks himself how he can gain such ideals which
best transcend our deeds, we can say that it is possible when
we concern ourselves with spiritual science which leads us
into the supersensible worlds. If, for example, we hear out
of spiritual science about the evolution of the human being
in our earth system, then such messages shake up forces in
our higher members, and it is through this activity that es-
pecially at the present time we receive the most concrete, the
most secure idealism. Take the question, what above all else
does spiritual science serve? We can say: It pours youthful
fructifying forces into our astral body and etheric body.
–– GA 124/ 2-28-11, Berlin

The Law of Authority

Let’s suppose we would not consider that the word
“authority” must be a sacred one for the time between the
ages seven and fourteen. If, thus, between the ages seven
and fourteen we ignore such an important law, then out of an
incorrectly developed ether body a correctly developed astral
body cannot arise. And let us assume that we have to do with
an individual who brought from former lives special forces,
good strong capacities, talents that require an astral body

26
who goes through spiritual development, so to say, includes
these things in his spiritual life. It is just the everyday things
which are the hardest to include into the spiritual life, for we
will have eating and drinking included only when we can
observe why we, in order to serve the whole course of the
world, must take in in a rhythmical way the physical sub-
stances and what relationship the physical substances have to
the spiritual life; how the metabolism is not only something
physical but through its rhythm also has something spiritual
in it.
However, there is a way to spiritualize gradually these
things required not only by an outer material necessity. For
there is the possibility of seeing these things in such a way
that we say to ourselves: We are eating this or that fruit, and
through our spiritual knowledge we can form a mental im-
age of how, let’s say, an apple or some other fruit stands in
relationship to the totality of the universe. But that takes a
long time. Then we will make it a habit to let food not only
be a material fact, but we will make it a habit to observe what
part, for example, the spirit has in the ripening of the fruit
in the rays of the sun. Thus, we spiritualize also the material
everyday processes and gain the possibility of entering with
our thoughts even there; here I can only allude to how even
there thoughts and ideas can be brought in. However, that
is a long journey, and there are few individuals in our time
who can manage to think about food in a fully valid way.
So we must say that there are not only individuals
who perform instinctive actions and those who perform ide-
alistic deeds, but each human being’s life is so divided that
he performs one part of his deeds in a way that the thoughts
cannot come up to the level of the deeds and another part
where the thoughts and the ideals have a greater scope than
the deeds. Therefore, we have other forces in us which give
our astral and etheric bodies revitalizing forces, forces which
always shine a new light in our astral and etheric bodies. It
is these latter ones which truly remain in our ether body as
revitalizing forces. When we leave our sheaths with the spiri-

27
 in each human being. There has never been a people which
did not have it. No religion neglects to talk about it. It is the
longing for faith which permeates the world. The soul always
wants something it can hold onto. If this longing for faith
finds no satisfaction, then the tortured soul is in dire straits.
When what the soul can believe in is taken away, as it hap-
pens through materialism, then the soul feels as the physical
body feels without air to breathe. This is the case except that
the process of suffocation in the body is brief, while the one
of the soul lasts a long time . . . . Because the human being
cannot believe, because she has nothing to which her feel-
ing of faith can hold onto, that is why the human soul is not
healthy, and this unhealthy soul makes the body sick. This is
how nervousness in today’s sense comes about and becomes
worse and worse. It is in this way that the soul has an effect
on the body, and the person who has become this way has an
effect on her surroundings, which she pulls down and makes
sick. That is how it is that humanity degenerates more and
more, and, unfortunately, it will become worse and worse.
It is materialistic science which gives the human beings
“stones for bread.” The soul has no nourishment, while the
intellect is overstuffed with knowledge. And such a human
being then wanders around and does not know what to do
with herself. She does not know where to hold on, and just
as one takes the air away from her breathing, so the human
soul suffocates from the fact that it has no nourishment, no
spiritual life food.
Therefore, Anthroposophy came into the world in
order to provide humanity with nourishment . . . . When
we now consider this in view of the evolution of the world
and of humanity, we must remember that during the Old
Moon phase of the earth, the astral body was added to the
human being. What now is this astral body? It consists of
forces that always have to grasp something, that always have
to hold on somewhere. In their effect these forces are what
we experience as faith. The astral body is the source of faith
itself. Therefore, it must receive nourishment in order to
develop, in order to live. The desire for nourishment is the
longing for faith. If this force of faith cannot be satisfied, then
28
which can catch fire for high ideals. If he sees an unjust deed
in his environment, he can become inflamed with righteous
wrath long before he can judge it with independent clear
thinking. This reaction depends on the astral body. It is just
these qualities of a healthy astral body which really ought to
be available to this person, for he would need to set in mo-
tion what lives in him as a result of his former incarnations.
Let us assume that we have neglected the principles which
must be observed so that the astral body can be born capable
of devotion and enthusiasm at the age of fourteen or fifteen.
Then it becomes impossible to develop these talents because
the astral body does not let these talents emerge—although
significant talents, great capacities were given from before.
The astral body does not have the forces or the currents which
the ego, going from incarnation to incarnation, must use in
order to unfold its talents.
–– GA 118/ 1-30-10

The Astral Body and Mathematics

Everything that we take up in a mathematical way,
through forms of lines, forms of angles, vertical, horizontal,
what we measure, everything that we take up in a mathemati-
cal way, we develop in fact out of our inner core. It lies at
the foundation of our inner being. . . . Then one does not say
any longer that mathematics is an “a priori” knowledge. “A
priori” means that something has been existing all along. If,
however, one learns to observe inwardly, then one will know
from where one has this curious mathematics: the astral body
went through the mathematics of the whole universe, and
thus, it has contracted again. We simply let emerge out of
our soul what we experienced in a former incarnation, what
then went through the whole cosmos, what then reemerges
in the elegance of the mathematical-geometrical lines.
–– GA 202/ 12-14-20, Bern
The Astral Body as the Source of Faith
Faith—what is faith? Faith is a soul force which can
never be taken away totally from the human soul. It lives

29
 interests of the earth. The legend of Paradise leads the pupil
directly to the starting point of our earthly evolution, when
man had not yet entered upon his first incarnation, but when
he is just beginning it, a time when Lucifer approaches him
and he still stands at the beginning of his whole development
and can actually take all human interests into his own breast.
The very deepest problem of education and training is con-
tained in the story of Paradise, a story which uplifts one to
the standpoint of all humanity and imprints in every human
breast an interest which can also speak in each. When the
pictures of the legend of Paradise, as we have tried to com-
prehend them, press into the human soul, they act in such a
way that the astral body is penetrated through and through
by them; and under the influence of this human being whose
horizon is expanded over the whole earth, the astral body
may also make its own interest all that now enters its sphere.
It has now arrived at being able to consider the interests of the
earth as its own. Try, my dear friends, to consider seriously
and earnestly what a universal, educative force is contained
in such a legend, and what a spiritual impulse lies there.
It is the same with the legend of the Grail. While
the Paradise legend is given to the humanity of the earth,
inasmuch as it directs this humanity to the origin, the start-
ing-point of its earthly development, and it uplifts us to the
horizon of the whole development of humanity, the legend of
the Grail is given that it may sink into the innermost depths
of the astral body, into its most vital interests, just because
this astral body becomes an egotist, which, if left to itself,
only considers the interests that are its very own.
As regards the interests of the astral body, we can re-
ally only err in two directions. One is the direction towards
Amfortas and the other, towards Parsifal, before Amfortas
is fully redeemed. Between these two lies the true develop-
ment of man, insofar as his astral body is concerned. This
astral body strives to develop the forces of egotism within
itself. But if it brings personal interests into this egotism,

30
gradually faith will be deprived of what it could hold onto; if
it does not receive good spiritual food, then the astral body
becomes sick and through it the physical human being. If,
however, it receives satisfaction from the concepts, mental
pictures, and feelings which anthroposophy draws from the
truth, from the depths of world knowledge, then it receives
its appropriate soul nourishment; then it has its satisfaction.
It becomes strong, and healthy, and the human being herself
becomes healthy.
–– GA 127/ 6-14-11, Vienna

The Effects of Occult Development

on the Sheaths of Human Beings
The astral body may be described as an egoist. The
consequence of this is that the development which liberates
the astral body must reckon with the fact that the interests of
man must expand and become wider and wider. Indeed, if
our astral body is to liberate itself from the other principles of
human nature in the right manner, its interests must include
the whole of earth and earth-humanity. In fact, the interests
of humanity upon the earth must become our interests; our
interests must cease to be connected in any way with what is
merely personal; all that concerns mankind, not only in our
own times, but all that has concerned mankind at any time
in the whole of its earthly development, must arouse our
deepest interests; we must reach the point of considering as
an extension of what belongs to us not only what belongs to
our family by blood, not only what is connected with us such
as house and farm and land, but we must make everything
connected with the development of the earth our own affair.
When all the affairs of the earth become our own, we
may give way to the sense of selfhood in our astral body. It is,
however, necessary that the interests of mankind on earth be
our interests. Consider two legends from this point of view.
. . . When they were given to humanity at a certain stage,
they were given from the point of view that the human being
should be raised from any individual interest to the universal

31
 of it in the Mysteries, it is really to be handed to the human
being who has obtained the understanding of what makes
man mature enough gradually to raise himself consciously
to that which is this Holy Grail. Through what do we gain
the faculty to raise ourselves consciously to that which is the
Holy Grail?
In the story it is very clearly indicated for whom
the Holy Grail is really intended. And when we go into the
Mystery presentation of the legend of the Grail, we find in
addition something very special. In the original legend of
the Grail, the ruler of the castle is a Fisher King, a king ruling
over fisher folk. There was another who also walked among
fisher folk, but he did not wish to be the king of these fisher-
men, rather something else; he scorned to rule over them as
a king, but he brought them something more than did the
king who ruled over them—this one was Christ Jesus.
Thus, we are shown that the error of the Fisher King,
who in the original legend is Amfortas, was a turning aside.
He is not altogether worthy to receive health really through
the Grail alone, because he wishes to rule his fisher folk by
means of power. He does not allow the spirit alone to rule
among this fisher folk.
At first Parsifal is not sufficiently awake to ask in a
self-conscious way: What is the purpose of the Grail? What
does it demand? In the case of the Fisher King it required
him to kill his personal interest and cause it to expand to
the interest in all humanity shown by Christ Jesus. In the
case of Parsifal it was necessary for him to raise his interest
above the mere innocent vision to the inner understanding
of what in every man is the same, what comes to the whole of
humanity, the gift of the Holy Grail. Thus, in a wonderful
way between Parsifal and Amfortas floats the ideal of the
Mystery of Golgotha. At an important part of the legend it
is delicately indicated that, on the one hand, the Fisher King
has taken too much personality into the sphere of the astral
body, and, on the other, stands Parsifal, who has carried
thither too little general interest in the world, and who is still

32
it becomes corroded, and while it ought to extend over the
whole earth, it will shrivel up into the individual personality.
This may not be. For if it occurs, then through the activity
of the personality, which expresses its ego in the blood, the
whole human personality is wounded and one errs on the
Amfortas side. The fundamental error of Amfortas consists
in his carrying that which still remains in him as personal
desires and wishes into the sphere in which the astral body
ought to have gained the right to be an egotist. The moment
we take personal interests into the sphere where the astral
body ought to separate itself from personal interest, it is
harmful, and we become like the wounded Amfortas.
But the other error can also lead to harm and only fails
to do so when the being who suffers this harm is filled with
the innocence of Parsifal. Parsifal repeatedly sees the Holy
Grail pass. To a certain extent he commits a wrong. Each
time the Holy Grail is carried past, it is on his lips to ask for
whom this food is really intended. But he does not ask. And
at length the meal is over without his having asked. And
so, after this meal he has to withdraw, without having the
opportunity of making good what he had omitted to do. It
is really just as though a man, not yet fully mature, were to
become clairvoyant for a moment during the night, when he
would be separated as if by an abyss from what is contained
in the castle of his body and were then to glance for a moment
into it; and as if then without having obtained the appropri-
ate knowledge, that is, without having asked the question,
everything were again to be closed to him. For then, even
though he wakened, he would not be able to enter this castle
again. What did Parsifal really neglect to do?
We have heard what the Holy Grail contains. It con-
tains that by which the physical instrument of man on earth
must be nourished: the extract, the pure mineral extract,
which is obtained from all foods and which unites in the pur-
est part of the human brain with the purest sense impressions.
Now, to whom is this food to be handed? When we enter
from the exoteric poetic story into the esoteric presentation

33
 first be prepared with the rest of the forces of human nature;
even though they are already intermingled from the time
of birth, they are not yet awake. All this time the child’s
nature is permeated by these sleeping forces. This is what
meets us in the child as such a wonderful mystery. It is the
sleeping generative forces that only waken later on. One
who is sensitive to these things feels something like a gentle
breath of God in the activity of these forces—whatever the
naughtiness, obstinacy, and other more or less unpleasant
characteristics a child may have—working as if hidden in
childhood and awaking in puberty. These innocent qualities
of the child are those of the grown-up person, but in childlike
form. One who recognizes them as among the generative
forces feels the breath of divine powers. As long as these
forces work in unconscious innocence, they are so wonder-
ful, because they really breathe the pure breath of God, but
in later life they appear in the human being’s lower nature.
We must feel these things and be sensitive to them, then we
shall perceive how wonderfully human nature is composed.
The generative forces, sleeping during the most tender age
of childhood, waken around the time of puberty, and from
then on are still active in innocence when the human being
sinks back into sleep at night.
Thus, human nature represents itself in two parts.
In each person we really have two people in front of us: the
person who we are between waking up and falling asleep,
and the other person who we are between falling asleep and
waking up. In our waking state we are continually at pains to
wear and worry our nature down to the animal level with all
that is not pure knowledge, not pure spiritual activity. What
raises us above this part of the human condition lives as a
pure, sublime force within the generative powers as they were
during innocent childhood, and then in sleep these powers
are awakened to regenerate that which has been destroyed
by being awake during the day. So we have one part of us
which is related to the creative forces in the human being and
one part which destroys these forces.

34
too unsophisticated.
It is due to the immense educative value of the Grail
legend that it could work into the souls of the students of the
Holy Grail such that they had before them something like a
balance: in the one scale was that which was in Amfortas,
and in the other was that which was in Parsifal. They then
knew that balance was to be established. If the astral body
follows its own innate interests, it will uplift itself to that
horizon of universal humanity which is gained when the
statement becomes a truth: “Where two are gathered together
in My name, there am I in the midst of them, no matter where
in the development of the earth these two may be found.”
(Matthew 18, 20.)
–– GA 145/ 3-26-13, The Hague

Puberty and the Brother-Sister Soul

I wanted to call your attention to forces at work in
man’s nature that we find at first in the regeneration of his
organism as he sleeps. Now these forces are closely related
to other forces that also develop in the human being with
a certain unconsciousness. Those forces belong to human
procreation, to the propagation of human beings. We know
that up to a certain age a human being’s consciousness is
filled with a pure and straightforward unconsciousness of
these forces—the innocence of childhood. Then at a certain
age this consciousness awakens. From that time onward the
human organism is permeated by an awareness of the forces
afterward known as sensual, sexual love.
These forces that in earlier life live as sleeping forces
only waken with puberty. These are the very same as those
forces that in sleep regenerate the worn out or destroyed
forces in the human being. Only they are hidden by the other
parts of human nature in which they are mingled. These
forces which are invisible in the human being can become
capable of either good or evil only when they awaken, but
they sleep, or at most dream, until puberty begins.
The forces that manifest themselves afterward must

35
 mained permeated through and through by human creative
forces only, and by nothing else. Thus, a
brother- or sister-soul remained behind. It could not enter
the physical process of humanity’s development. It lived on,
invisible to the physical world of human beings. It was not
born as human beings are born, in the flowing stream of this
life, because if it had entered into birth and death, it would
have been in the processes of physical human life. It lived in
the invisible and could only be perceived by those who rose
to the heights of clairvoyance, who developed those forces
that awaken in the state we otherwise know as sleep. For
then the human being is related to those forces that live and
work in a pure form in the sister-soul.
The human being entered evolution, but above it lived
a soul, sacrificing itself, which did not incarnate during the
entire process of human life. It did not strive like ordinary
human souls for birth and death in successive incarnations,
and it could only show itself to them when they attained
clairvoyant vision in their sleep. This soul had, however, an
effect on human beings wherever they could meet it with spe-
cial clairvoyant gifts. There were human beings who either
by nature or special training in schools of initiation had this
power and were able to recognize the creative forces. Wher-
ever such schools are mentioned in history, we can always
find evidence that they were aware of a soul accompanying
humanity. In most instances it was only recognizable in those
special conditions of clairvoyance where a human being’s
spiritual vision was expanded in sleep consciousness.
–– GA 146/ 6-3-13

Between the seventh and fourteenth years every hu-

man being passes through a process of growth and develop-
ment which expresses, as strongly as in her case it is possible,
the individuality she has brought down with her. That is why
in this period of her life the child is thus somewhat closed
to the outer world; and we teachers have the opportunity
to observe during these years the wonderful unfolding of

36
 However, the significant thing in the double nature
of the human being is that behind all that the senses perceive
we have to assume another human being, one in whom the
creative forces dwell. This second part in which the human
creative forces are living never really exists in an unmixed
state, neither during wakfulness nor during sleep. For dur-
ing sleep the physical and etheric bodies still remain perme-
ated by the after-effects of waking life, by the disturbing and
destructive forces. When at last the destructive forces have
been removed altogether, we wake up again.
So it has been since what we call the Lemurian Age,
the beginning, strictly speaking, when present humanity be-
gan its development. At that time, as is described in greater
detail in Occult Science, the Luciferic influences on the human
being began; from this influence there came, among other
things, what today continually forces the human being to
wear and tear himself down to the animal nature. The other
element that exists in human nature, which man as he is now
does not yet recognize—the creative forces in him— all this
came into play in the early Lemurian time before the Luciferic
impulses entered.
In looking at the present human being, we are rising
to see the “becoming human being”; we go from the human
being as a created being to the re-created human being.
In so doing we have to look out into that distant
Lemurian time when the human being was as yet wholly
permeated by the creating forces. At that time the human be-
ing came into existence as he is today. If we follow humanity
beginning at that time of Lemuria, we have this double nature
continually before us in all that has happened since. The hu-
man being then entered a kind of lower nature. However, at
that time—this is shown to us by the clairvoyant view back
into the Akashic record— a certain soul, like a brother- or
sister-soul, was as if added to those human beings that were
permeated by human creative forces. This sister-soul which
had not entered human evolution was kept back, so to say,
and not thrown into the current of human evolution. It re-

37
 Earthly Maturity
cesses which work against each other in rhythm, the process
of tooth formation and the process of sexual maturation. As
the process of tooth formation ends, the process of sexual
maturation happens in the other direction.
–– GA 312/ 4-9-20
The Freeing of the Astral Body
If one now considers what happens in the stage of
puberty, then one will have to say: here we see in a certain
sense the opposite process to the one which happens at the
change of teeth; we see how the desire forces of the human
being, the instinctive character of his will, grasps his organ-
ism in a manner in which it had not been grasped earlier.
We can condense this whole broad complex of facts and say
the following: the body in which the desire nature slumbers,
the astral body of the human being, is freed at puberty. It
is the astral body which now, if I may say so, implants itself
into the physical organism, grasps it, penetrates it, and thus
makes desire physical, and which finds its expression in
sexual maturation.
–– GA 76/ 4-7-21
Inner Independence
Actually it is only at this moment in time (age nine or
ten) where the child learns to see itself as separate from its
surroundings, through feeling and will, through judgment.
It is only at puberty when the child learns to distinguish itself
from its surroundings by complete inner independence.
But in the development between the ninth and tenth
year of life, one can see the beginning of this separation
from the surroundings as a nuance. And that is why it is so
important to be aware of this moment in time because one
still has to hold the child firmly until puberty. Yet one has
to begin to treat the child differently.
–– GA 304/ 11-24-21, Oslo

Mental Picturing and Will Forces

If we ask for the quality of those forces which from
childhood on are more and more being led into the head from
the rest of the organism, we must find them mainly in the will

38
the forces of the individuality. But now, if this development
were to continue after the fourteenth year, if the human be-
ing were to go on into later life with nothing further than
this unfolding of individuality, she would become a person
who was perpetually refusing and rejecting everything that
approached her, a person utterly without interest in the
world around her. That this does not happen is due to the
fact that, during this period between seven and fourteen,
she is all the time building her third body, which appears at
puberty, and this third body is built up under the influence
of the earthly environment. What appears as the relation of
the sexes is not all of it. The exaggerated importance given
to it is just a consequence of our materialistic turn of mind.
In reality, all connections with the outer world which begin
to make their appearance at puberty are fundamentally of
the same nature. We should really speak, therefore, not of
sexual but of earthly maturity. And under earthly maturity
we have to include the maturity of the senses, the maturity
of the breathing—and another such subdivision will also be
sexual maturity. This gives the true picture of the situation.
The human being, then, reaches earthly maturity. She begins
to take again into herself what is outside and foreign to her;
she acquires the faculty of being sensitive and not indifferent
to her environment. Before this time, she is not impression-
able for the other sex, but neither is she susceptible to her
whole environment. It is then that the human being forms
and develops her third body, her astral body, which is active
in her until the beginning of the twenties.
–– GA 317/ 6-25-24, Dornach

Change in Dentition
What is in fact this whole tooth formation in reality?
It is a movement of the mineralization process from the inside
to the outside. When the second teeth are all formed, then
what pushes this mineralization process to the outside has
come to its end. Then the sexual maturation process comes
toward it which pushes inward. These are two opposing pro-

39
 themselves in another way. These are the will forces which
come to a halt before they shoot into the head, so that we say:
At the end of the second seven-year cycle the will forces get
dammed up in our speech organization. Then they are suf-
ficiently filtered, sufficiently ensouled, to become effective
in our head organization. Then when we have gone through
puberty and the voice change that goes along with it, we are
so far that, through our head, mental picturing and will can
work together in our earthly being.
You see how one gradually arrives at truly studying
the interrelationships of the soul-spiritual and physical ma-
terial, and how something like the speech-forming process
can only really be understood when one recognizes it as the
result of these two sources which feed the human being, those
sources which, on the one hand, are in the head system and
those forces, on the other hand, which are in the limb system.
–– GA 201/ 5-1-20, Dornach

The Astral Body

At puberty what we call the astral body is being
implanted into the physical body so that it takes hold of the
body and causes those changes that constitute puberty.
What the human being goes through happens in the
most manifold metamorphoses. Whoever has once truly un-
derstood such a process as the one that is expressed through
puberty, a process which effects a certain new relationship in
the development of the human being toward the outer world,
will also recognize it when it occurs in a certain metamorpho-
sis. What occurs in puberty takes hold of the entire human
body and helps the entire human being to form a relationship
with his surroundings; this process has been gone through
earlier, I should say, in another metamorphosis at the moment
when language developed in the child.
Yet what occurs in puberty occurs in the child in the
formation of speech in another metamorphosis. There what
in puberty grasps the whole human being and pours itself
into his relationship with the outer world occurs between

40
forces, as we characterize these forces on the soul level. The
rest of the organism continuously provides the mental pic-
tures of the head with will forces. We can say schematically:
We receive the head as a result of our former incarnation as
carrier of the mental pictures, but the will forces are being
sent in by the rest of the organism. What I have told you
here does not happen only on the soul level but also shows
its effects on the physical level. As much as we are head
beings, we are being born into this earthly world as mental
picture beings. However, the image-forming forces, as we
are being born into this earthly world, are still very strong.
They ray out from the head onto the whole of the rest of the
organism. And it is these image-forming forces which have
the effect in the first seven years of life, those same forces
which consolidate the life of mental images in us, which are
not yet consolidated before we have the second teeth. It is
those same forces which lead us to the forming of the teeth.
So that when the teeth come in, these forces become free.
Then they can form mental pictures, and they can form the
memory accordingly; then sharply contoured mental pictures
can be formed. As long as we need those forces to form our
teeth, they cannot become the forces that consolidate the life
of the mental pictures.
Now we will have to see how—when we grow beyond
seven or eight—the will, which essentially is connected to the
other parts of the human being, would shoot into the head.
This would not just simply happen. For our head, which is
organized according to the non-earthly, would not be able to
take up these strong forces which want to shoot into the head
from the metabolism, which is the carrier of the will. These
forces have to become dammed up first. These forces first
must come to a stop before they are sufficiently thinned and
ensouled, in order to be received by the head. At approxi-
mately fourteen years of age, the forces of the will become
dammed up in the larynx; they show up in the human being
in such a way that in the male body they show themselves in
the change of voice. In the female they predominantly show

41
 outer world. If one truly studies the whole of this complex,
then one finds that at that time the human being makes the
will element his own through his interaction with the outer
world, not from within. It was a profound intuition when a
poet said,

A talent grows in stillness; the character grows in the

current of the world.

The talent sprouts from inside out; the character, that is the
will element, forms in the current of the world, in the ex-
change of the inner forces with the outer forces. But the hu-
man being must defend himself against what comes toward
him from the outer world. His inner core must react. The
inner core must build a dam against what comes from the
outer world. This will-creating element, which comes toward
the human being out of the interaction with the outer world,
is being opposed by an inner force; in the male this creates
a dam in the larynx, in the female in other organs, and this
damming, this colliding of the outer will element with the
inner will element, expresses itself in the transformation of
the larynx or similar organs. There you see how the spiritual
in the outer world works on the human being.
Now you bring this together with the views of spiri-
tual science which you already know. We know that through
conception or birth we descend out of the spiritual-soul world
into the physical. On the other hand, we know that concern-
ing our astral body and ego, each time we fall asleep we go
into a spiritual world. The spiritual world, which gives us
our soul, worked on forming us until age seven, and from
then on it becomes our intelligence. And it is the will element
which opposes this intelligence already from birth, however
especially strongly beginning from puberty, because it is then
that the exchange with the freed-up intelligence takes place.
And this battle between the outer will element and the in-
ner intelligence element, between the spiritual state which
we sleep through, which we pass through between falling
asleep and waking up, and the spiritual state which we

42
the rhythmic and limb system and the head organization of
the human being. The same forces that in puberty grasp the
whole human being and give him direction in his relationship
to the outer world assert themselves between the upper and
lower beings. And as the lower human being learns to sense
the upper human being, in the same way that in later life
he learns to sense the outer world, he learns to speak. One
can observe outwardly in the human being at a later age a
process, which occurred earlier within the human organism
in learning to speak, that occurs in the whole human being
in puberty.
And if one has understood this, then the possibility
arises of understanding how the playing together of the lower
human being—the rhythmic being and the limb being—in its
interaction shapes an inner experience that is also outwardly
present in nature that surrounds us. This experience inwardly
of what is outwardly present leads one to the fact that what
lives outwardly, taciturnly in things as their own language,
begins to sound as human language in the human inner core.
–– 4-7-21

Battle Between the Outer Will Element and

the Inner Intelligence Element
A second phase in human life is puberty which
in the male gender appears especially through the voice
change and in the female gender in physical changes that are
distributed over the whole body, in both cases around age
fourteen. What is really happening there? What is it that
changes after puberty? It is the whole of the human life of
will. The entire life of will changes, otherwise the feeling of
love could not enter the life of will. . . . When we research
spiritually-scientifically what is happening there, we find the
following: We grow together with the outer world more and
more, especially in the time between the change of teeth and
puberty; we grasp more and more of this outer world, and
our will becomes more and more focused. We learn to bring
our will into conformity with the objects and events of the

43
 love awakens without which there are no social institutions
in the world.
–– GA 192/ 6-15-19, Stuttgart

Cultivating an Inner View of the Human Being

One can study the turning point of life, puberty, when
one finds how the process which comes to peak in puberty
takes place in the organs. One can ask the following ques-
tions. What is shaping itself on the soul-spiritual level? What
is created through the fact that the forces after puberty are no
longer used for the building up of something in the organs,
because the organs have come to a certain completion? What
becomes of these forces which, so to say, were embedded in
the organism until then? When one asks these questions, we
can answer that these forces will become what lives in the
special nature of the will impulses which will exist in a very
different way after puberty than before.
Before puberty they are embedded in a very specific
way into the organic processes. Afterwards they are no longer
embedded in the organic processes, but they do not become
free but rather connect themselves more intimately with the
organism so that especially at this turning point in his life
the human being becomes more the master of his organism
than he was earlier. The will inserts itself into the organism
in a more intimate and intensive manner than was the case
before.
If one thus understands how the soul-spiritual inter-
acts with the organic-physical, then one can study certain
processes which are nothing else but the outer expression of
what one perceives inwardly in the human organism. At the
same time, one contemplates in such a way as to consider
that concepts such as these, which are flexible within them-
selves, are also suited to become ever richer within, so that
what is real can always be perceived. For example, we have
here the process of the voice change which in the male
individual is connected to puberty. There is a similar process
in the female individuality, however spread out more over
the entire organism. One only reaches a full understanding

44
went through before our birth and conception respectively,
the battle between what we have brought with us and what
we sleep through each night, expresses itself in the forming
of our larynx, in the forming of what is in the organism in
puberty. The physical works together with the spiritual. We
pass through a spiritual world from falling asleep to waking;
in this spiritual world the will which we receive is hidden;
in our organism is hidden the intelligence which through
birth we bring with us into physical existence. Thus, we can
understand the human body when we experience it as outer
revelation of what takes place out of the spiritual.
–– GA 199/ 9-18-20, Berlin

Sexual Love
She who, between seven and fourteen, did not learn
to have such trust in human beings that will adapt herself
to them, she will, in her later life, lack something of an inner
strength and will energy which she needs in order to be truly
strong enough for life. . . . She who from age seven to four-
teen or fifteen, did not develop the possibility of looking up
to another human being as an authority will not be capable
of, in the next period of her life beginning with puberty,
developing the most important thing that exists in human
life: the feeling of social love. For in puberty not only sexual
love arises in the human being but also what is the free social
devotion of one soul to another. This free devotion of one
soul to another must develop itself out of something; out of
devotion it must wind its way through the feeling of authority.
Human beings without love and antisocial human beings
come about whenever, between ages seven and fourteen or
fifteen, the feeling of authority is lacking in teaching and
training.
For our time these are things of the greatest and most
eminent importance. Sexual love is, so to speak, a particular
aspect, an excerpt of general human love. It shows itself as
the specific which is connected more to the physical and
etheric bodies, while general human love is connected more
to the astral body and ego. But also the capacity for social

45
 of these two processes if one sees in such a way how what
happens in this change, through the voice change or in the
female organism in other processes, is confirmed by the fact
that the energy of will connects itself more inwardly and
more penetratingly with the organism.
And at the same time one arrives at the understanding
that what develops up to the change of teeth in its culmination
expresses itself especially intensively in the formation of the
human head, in which the development of the teeth is taking
place, while what appears at the time of puberty takes hold of
the whole of the rest of the organism with the exception of the
head. When one sees it that way, it all becomes immediately
clear. And through it one achieves an inner recognition, an
inner view of the human being.
–– 1-14-21
Changes in Muscle
And when age fourteen approaches, only then the
soul-spiritual takes hold of the entire human being, and it is
interesting to observe how beforehand the muscles adapted
themselves to the heartbeat, pulse-beat, and breath. So then
they begin, via the sinews, to make friends with the bones,
with the skeleton, and adapt themselves to the outer move-
ments. Just learn to thoroughly observe how a young person
changes from his victory at the moment of death.
–– GA 210/ 1-19-22, Mannheim
____________________
Several excerpts in this section taken from Das dritten Jahrsiebt–Ausfüh-
rungen Rudolf Steiners in seinem pädagogischen Vorträgen (The Third Seven
Year Period), The Bund der Freien Waldorfschulen, Stuttgart 1977.

46
The Liberation of the Astral Body
When the child enters the third seven-year period
of life, the age of puberty, the astral body is liberated; on it
depends the power of judgment and criticism and the capac-
ity for entering into direct relationships with other human
beings. A young person’s feelings towards the world in
general develop in company with his feelings towards other
people, and now he is at last mature enough for real under-
standing. As the astral body is liberated, so is the personality,
and so personal judgment has to be developed. Nowadays
young people are expected to offer criticism much too early.
Seventeen-year-old critics can be found in abundance, and
many of the people who write and pass judgments are quite
immature. You have to be twenty-two or twenty-four before
you can offer a sound judgment of your own; before then it
is quite impossible. From the fourteenth to the twenty-fourth
year, when everything around him can teach a person some-
thing, is the best time for learning from the world. That is the
way to grow up into full maturity.
These are the great basic principles of education;
countless details can be deduced from them. The Theosophi-
cal Society will publish a book for teachers and mothers which
will show how from birth to the seventh year the essential
thing is example; from the seventh to the fourteenth year,
authority; from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, the
training of independent judgment.
At the Gates of Spiritual Science.
London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1906

Development of Judgment
With the age of puberty the astral body is first born.
Henceforth, the astral body in its development is open to
the outside world. Only now, therefore, can we approach
the child from without with all that opens up the world of
abstract ideas, the faculty of judgment, and independent
thought. It has already been pointed out, how up to this time
these faculties of soul should be developing—free from outer

47
 unripe judgment come in at once and take possession. For this
reason, up to the age of puberty the child should be spared
all theories about things; the main consideration is that he
should simply meet the experiences of life, receiving them
into his soul. Certainly he can be told what different men
have thought about this and that, but one must avoid his
associating himself through a too early exercise of judgment
with the one view or the other. Thus, the opinions of men he
should also receive with the feeling power of the soul. He
should be able, without jumping to a decision or taking sides
with this or that person, to listen to all, saying to himself:
”This man said this, and that man that.” The cultivation of
such a mind in a boy or girl certainly demands the exercise
of great tact from teachers and educators; but tact is just what
anthroposophical thought can give.
The Education of the Child in the Light
of Anthroposophy. London: Ru-
dolf Steiner Press, 1995.

Participation in Life
Today we must learn to let people participate in
life; and if we organize education so that people are able to
participate in life, at the same time setting to work on edu-
cation economically, you will find that we are really able to
help human beings to form a living culture. This, too, will
enable anyone with an inclination towards handicraft to
take advantage of the education for life that begins about the
fourteenth year. A possibility must be created for those who
early show a bent towards handicraft or craftsmanship to be
able to participate in what leads to a conception of life. In the
future, pupils who have not reached their twenty-first year
should never be offered any knowledge that is the result of
scientific research and comes from scientific specialization.
In our days only what has been thoroughly worked out
ought to have a place in instruction; then we can go to work
in an out-and-out economical way. We must, however, have
a clear concept of what is meant by economy in didactic and

48
influence—within the environment provided by the educa-
tion proper to the earlier years, even as the eyes and ears
develop, free from outer influence, within the organism of the
mother. With puberty the time has arrived when the human
being is ripe for the formation of his own judgments about
the things he has already learned. Nothing more harmful can
be done to a child than to awaken too early his independent
judgment. Man is not in a position to judge until he has col-
lected in his inner life material for judgment and comparison.
If he forms his own conclusions before doing so, his conclu-
sions will lack foundation. Educational mistakes of this kind
are the cause of all narrow one-sidedness in life, all barren
creeds that take their stand on a few scraps of knowledge
and are ready on this basis to condemn ideas experienced
and proved by man often through long ages.
In order to be ripe for thought, one must have learned
to be full of respect for what others have thought. There is no
healthy thought which has not been preceded by a healthy
feeling for the truth, a feeling for the truth supported by
faith in authorities accepted naturally. Were this principle
observed in education, there would no longer be so many
people, who, imagining too soon that they are ripe for judg-
ment, spoil their own power to receive openly and without
bias the all-round impressions of life. Every judgment that is
not built on a sufficient foundation of gathered knowledge
and experience of soul throws a stumbling block in the way
of him who forms it. For having once pronounced a judg-
ment concerning a matter, we are ever after influenced by
this judgment. We no longer receive a new experience as we
should have done had we not already formed a judgment
connected with it. The thought must take living hold in the
child’s mind that he has first to learn and then to judge. What
the intellect has to say concerning any matter should only
be said when all the other faculties of the soul have spoken.
Before that time the intellect has only an intermediary part
to play: its business is to grasp what takes place and is expe-
rienced in feeling, to receive it exactly as it is, not letting the

49
 cialization but at the same time one education for all. But
included in this one education will be everything necessary
for life. If this were not included, matters would become
socially worse than they are at present. All instruction must
give knowledge that is necessary for life. During the ages
from fifteen to twenty everything to do with agriculture,
trade, industry, commerce will have to be learned. No one
should go through these years without acquiring some idea
of what takes place in farming, commerce and industry.
These subjects will be given a place as branches of knowledge
infinitely more necessary than much of the rubbish which
constitutes the present curriculum during these years. Then,
too, during these years all those subjects will be introduced
which I would call world-affairs, historical and geographical
subjects, everything concerned with nature-knowledge—but
all this in relation to the human being, so that man will learn
to know man from his knowledge of the world as a whole.
I most certainly do not long for the suppression of
cerebral teachers; I am only calling attention to how cerebral
teachers nowadays give their lectures with no regard to the
fact that printing has been invented, and that what they give
out in their lectures penetrates a student’s brain-box better
when read in a printed book. All the same, I point out that the
best one can gain from a well-written book is hardly worth a
tenth part of what comes from the immediate personality of
the teacher in such a way that a connection arises between
the soul of the teacher and the soul of the one who is taught.
This can happen, however, only in a life of spirit with a
basis of its own and its own administration, in which the
individuality can fully develop and traditions do not hold
sway for hundreds of years—as in universities and other
centers of higher education—and where the individual man
is able to be himself in the most individual sense. Then from
this instruction by word of mouth will come something of
which we can say: We have broken with everything coming
to men, even through the arts of printing and illustration,
but just by doing so we gain the possibility of developing

50
pedagogical matters. Above all, we should not be lazy if we
want to work in a way that is economical from the peda-
gogical point of view. I have often drawn your attention to
something personally experienced by me. A boy of ten who
was rather undeveloped was once given over into my charge,
and through pedagogical economy I was able to let him
absorb in two years what he had lacked up to his eleventh
year, when he was still incapable of anything at all. This was
possible only by taking into account both his bodily and his
soul natures in such a way that instruction could proceed in
the most economical way conceivable. This was often done
by my spending three hours myself in preparation, so as in
a half hour or even in a quarter to give to the boy instruction
that would otherwise have taken hours—this being neces-
sary for his physical condition. If this is considered from the
social point of view, people might say that I was obliged in
this instance to give all the care to a single boy that might
have been given to three others who would not have had to
be treated in this way. But imagine if we had a social educa-
tional system that was reasonable; it would then be possible
for a whole collection of such pupils to be dealt with, for it
makes no difference in this case whether we have to deal
with one or fourteen boys. I should not complain about the
number of pupils in the school, but this lack of complaint is
connected with the principle of economy in instruction. It
must be realized, however, that up to his fourteenth year a
pupil has no judgment; and if judgment is asked of him, this
has a destructive effect on his brain. The modern calculating
machine which gives judgment the place of memorizing and
calculating is a gross educational error; it destroys the human
brain, makes it decadent. Human judgment can be cultivated
only from and after the fourteenth year when those things
requiring judgment must be introduced into the curriculum.
Then, all that is related, for example, to the grasping of reality
through logic can begin. When in the future the carpenter or
mechanic sits side-by-side in school or college with anyone
studying to be a teacher, the result will certainly be a spe-

51
 be striven for in the future, can only arise in human souls if
education after the fifteenth year works consciously toward
universal human love, that is, if all concepts regarding the
world and education itself are based on human love, love
towards the outer world.
Upon this threefold educational basis must be erected
what is to flourish for mankind’s future. If we do not know
that the physical body must become an imitator in the right
way, we shall merely implant animal instincts in this body.
If we are not aware that between the seventh and fourteenth
years the ether body passes through a special develop-
ment that must be based on authority, there will develop in
man merely a universal, cultural drowsiness, and the force
needed for the rights organism will not be present. If from
the fifteenth year onward we do not infuse all education in
a sensible way with the power of love that is bound to the
astral body, men will never be able to develop their astral
bodies into independent beings. These things intertwine.
Therefore, I must say:

Proper imitation develops freedom;

Authority develops the rights life;
Brotherliness, love, develops the economic life.

But turned about it is also true. When love is not

developed in the right way, freedom is lacking; and when
imitation is not developed in the right way, animal instincts
grow rampant.
You will find that most of our leading citizens
were educated in the classical schools—Gymnasium (high
school)—during the years when the soul is pliable and flex-
ible. These classical schools were not born out of the culture
of our age but of the Greco-Latin age. If those Greeks and
Romans had done what we did, they would have established
Egypto-Chaldean classical schools. They did not do that; they
took the subjects for their teaching from immediate life. We
take them from the previous period and educate people ac-

52
quite new teaching capacities, which today are dormant in
mankind. All this belongs, indeed preeminently belongs, to
our present social questions. For only if we have the heart
and mind for it shall we be able to enter into what is neces-
sary for our present age.
Let us reflect how different our situation would
be in life if what we have previously discussed here were
to be carried out. Instead of our gaze being turned back to
the most ancient epochs of culture, which took their shape
from quite different communal conditions, from the age of
fourteen or fifteen upwards, when the sentient soul with its
delicate vibrations is coming to life, the human being must
be led directly to all that touches us most vitally in the life of
the time. He should have to learn what has to do with agri-
culture, what goes on in trade, and he should learn about the
various business connections. All this ought to be absorbed
by a human being. Imagine how differently he would then
face life, what an independent being he would be, how he
would refuse to have forced upon him what today is prized
as the highest cultural achievement, but which is nothing but
the most depressing phenomenon of decadence.
A Social Basis for Education.
Forest Row, England:
Steiner Schools Fellowship

Modern Education
After puberty, between the fourteenth and twenty-
first years, not only the life of sexual love develops in man;
this develops merely as a special manifestation of universal
human love. This power of universal human love should be
specially fostered when children leave the primary school and
go to trade schools or other institutions. For the configuration
of economic life, which is a demand of history, will never be
warmed through as it should be by brotherly love—that is,
universal human love—if this is not developed during the
years between fourteen and twenty-one.
Brotherliness, fraternity, in economic life, as it has to

53
 In this way you will come to see that as the child
descends into this physical world out of higher worlds, the
past descends with him, that when he has accomplished the
change of teeth the present plays itself out in the boy or girl
of school age, and that after fourteen the human being enters
a time of life when impulses of the future assert themselves
in his soul.
If this were not so, real education and teaching would
be utterly impossible. For suppose we had to teach and edu-
cate the whole of the spirit which man brings into the world
only in germ; then our stature as teachers would require us
to be equal to whatever the human beings in our care might
become. If this were so, you might as well give up teaching
at once, for you could only educate people equal in brilliance
and ability to yourselves. But you must, of course, be ready
to educate people who, in some ways, are much more clever
and brilliant than you are. This is only possible if in education
we have to touch only one part of man, for we can educate
this one part even if we are not as clever, as brilliant, perhaps
not even as good, as the child potentially is. The thing we
can accomplish best in our teaching is the education of the
will and part of the education of the feeling life. For we can
bring what we educate through the will—that is through the
limbs—and through the heart, that is, through part of the
chest of man—to the stage of perfection we have reached
ourselves. And just as a man servant (or even an alarm clock)
can be trained to awaken a much cleverer man than himself,
so a person much inferior in cleverness, or even in goodness,
can educate someone who has greater possibilities than he.
We must of course realize that we do not need to be equal to
the developing human being in intellectual capacity; but as,
once again, it is a question of the development of the will, it
is for the attainment of goodness that we must strive to the
uttermost. Our pupil may become better than we are, but
he will very probably not do so unless in addition to the
education we give him he gets another education from the
world or from other people.

54
cordingly. This is very significant, but we haven’t recognized
it. Had we done so, a note would have sounded within the
feminist movement that did not resound, and that is: Men,
if their intelligence is to be specially trained, are sent into
antiquated schools. There their brains become hardened.
Women have the good fortune of not being admitted into
the classical schools. We want to develop our intelligence in
an original way. We want to show what can be developed
in the present age if we are not made dull in our youth by
Greco-Latin classical education.
These words did not resound, but in their place: Men
have crept into and hidden under the Greco-Latin classical
education, so let us women do the same. Let us also become
students of the classical schools.
So little has understanding spread for what is nec-
essary! We must realize that in our present time we are not
educated for our age but for the Greco-Latin culture. This is
inserted into our lives. We must sense it. We must sense what,
as Greco-Latin culture, acts in the leading people of today,
in the so-called intellectuals. This is one aspect of what we
carry within us in our spiritual education. We read no news-
paper that does not contain Greco-Latin education, because,
although writing in our national idiom, we actually write in
the Greco-Latin form.
Education as a Social Problem.
Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic
Press,1969.

The Heart of Childhood, Seven to Fourteen

The second period, from the change of teeth to adoles-
cence, is spent with the unconscious assumption: the world is
beautiful. And only with adolescence dawns the possibility of
discovering: the world is true. Thus, it is not until then that
education should begin to assume a ”scientific” character. Be-
fore adolescence it is not good to give a purely systematizing
or scientific character to education, for not until adolescence
does man attain a right and inward concept of truth.

55
 to attend when they leave the Waldorf school and before
they step out into life. Thus, we must bring our pupils to the
point when they leave of having the necessary qualifications
for whatever further education institution will be suitable
for them when they go out into life. We shall, nevertheless,
achieve our aim and accomplish our task, despite the need
to conform to these restrictions, if we can put into practice
something of the educational principles we have founded on
the present cultural epoch of mankind’s development. We
shall only be able to achieve this, though, particularly with
regard to the older children who come to us and who will
soon have to be sent out into other institutions of life, if we
apply a golden rule: Teach economically.
We shall be able to teach economically if, particularly
with the thirteen-, fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds we care-
fully eliminate everything that is merely ballast for human
soul development at that age and can bear no fruits for life.
For instance, we shall have to make room in our timetable at
least for Latin, and possibly also for Greek. We must in any
case really come to grips with language teaching, for this will
be a most significant feature of our method as a whole. Let
us look at the fact that you will be having pupils who will
already have been taught French or Latin up to a certain stage.
Their lessons will have been conducted in a certain way. You
will now have to spend your first lesson or even your first
week finding out what they can already do. You will have to
repeat with them what they have done so far. But you must
do this economically, so that each according to his capacity
will benefit even from this repetition.
Now you will achieve a great deal simply by taking
into account that what delays you more than anything else
in foreign language teaching is translation from the foreign
language into the mother tongue and vice versa. An enormous
amount of time is wasted when, for instance, so much trans-
lation from Latin into German and from German back into
Latin is expected of grammar school pupils. Instead, there
should be much more reading, and the pupils should spend

56
 Study of Man.
London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1966,
now Foundations of Human Experience.
Anthroposophic Press, 1996.

Teaching Economically
The heretical statement, namely that it is rather obvi-
ous that you have to know the meaning of something that you
are supposed to remember, is aimed particularly at teachers.
But there is something else to consider: what is assimilated
as meaning only works on the faculty of observation, the
faculty of cognizing through thought; by laying emphasis
on the meaning we educate a person one-sidedly merely to
observe the world, to know it through thought. So if we were
to teach only in accordance with that statement, the result
would be nothing but weak-willed individuals. Therefore,
the statement is right in a way and yet not entirely correct. To
be absolutely correct we should have to say: If you want to
do the best you can for an individual’s faculty of cognizing
through thought, you will have to analyze the meaning of
everything that he is to take in and retain. It is indeed a fact
that by first one-sidedly analyzing the meaning of everything,
we can go a long way in the education of man’s observation
of the world. But we would get nowhere in educating his will,
for we cannot force the will to emerge by throwing a strong
light on the meaning of anything. The will wants to sleep; it
does not want to be awakened fully by what I might call the
perpetual unchaste laying bare of meaning. Thus, it is simply
a necessity of life that penetrates beyond the simple truth
about the revelation of meaning and gives rise to the fact that
we must also do things with the children that do not call for
the laying bare of meaning. Then we shall educate their will.

Unfortunately, we cannot straightaway found a

university with all the usual faculties to follow on from the
Waldorf school. So it will be up to us to prepare our pupils
for other institutes of further education that they will have

57
 In this way we shall discover how well these children, who
have come to us from all sorts of classes, know the foreign
language.
Now you cannot teach a foreign language in school
without really working at grammar, both ordinary grammar
and also syntax. It is particularly necessary for children of
over twelve to be made conscious of what lies in grammar.
But here, too, you can proceed very economically. Now al-
though this morning in our study of man I said that in ordi-
nary life we form conclusions and then proceed to judgment
and concept, you can, of course, not give the children this
logical teaching, but it will underlie your teaching of gram-
mar. You will do well to discuss matters of the world with
the children in a way that, particularly with the help of the
lessons in foreign languages, will enable grammar lessons to
arise as a matter of course. It is purely a matter of structuring
such a thing in the right way.
We have come to know the three stages of human
development between birth and the twenty-first year. We
must be quite clear that, particularly in the last of these stages,
in addition to the conscious realm, the subconscious plays a
large part, a part that is significant for the whole future of the
human being. By looking at this matter from another point of
view I should like to make clear to you why this is so.
Just think how many people today travel by elec-
tric train without having the faintest idea how an electric
train is set in motion. Imagine even how many people see
a steam engine rushing by without having any clue as to the
workings of physics and mechanics that propel it. Consider
what position such ignorance puts us in with regard to our
relationship with our environment, that very environment
we use for our convenience. We live in a world that has been
brought about by human beings, that has been formed by hu-
man thoughts, that we use, and that we know nothing about.
This fact, that we understand nothing about something that
has been formed by man and is fundamentally the result of
human thinking, is greatly significant for the whole mood

58
much more time expressing their own thoughts in the foreign
language. How then will you set about teaching a foreign
language, let us say French, on the basis of this rule?
Let us first consider the older children to whom this
will apply, the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. For them
you will first of all have to select carefully what you want to
read with them in the language in question. You select pas-
sages for reading and then call up the pupils in turn to read
them aloud. You will now save the pupils’ time and energy
if you do not at first insist on a translation into German of
the passages in question, but instead see to it that each child
reads properly with regard to pronunciation and so on. Next
with the classes in which you want to let revision intermingle
with new ground to be covered, it would be good if you still
did not turn to translation but instead let the pupils give a
free rendering of the content in the passage they have read.
Just let the children repeat in their own words what the
passage contains while you listen carefully in case anything
is omitted that might indicate that something has not been
understood. It is more convenient for you, of course, simply
to let the children translate, for then you soon see where one
of them cannot go on. It is less convenient to watch in case
something is being omitted instead of just waiting until the
child comes to a stop, but you can, nevertheless, find out by
this means whether something has not been understood, if
a phrase is not rendered in the mother tongue. There will, of
course, be children who make a very capable rendering of
the passage; this does not matter. And there will be others
whose rendering is much freer in the use of their own words;
this, too, does not matter. This is the way we should discuss
the text with the children.
Next we tackle the opposite procedure. First we dis-
cuss some subject with the children in their mother tongue,
some subject that they can follow through with us in their
thoughts and feelings. Then we can try to let the children
repeat freely (depending how far advanced they already are)
in foreign language what we have been discussing with them.

59
 way I described in my previous lecture. In other words, we
must not neglect to use the concepts learned earlier of phys-
ics and natural history to introduce the children at least to
the industrial processes closest to them. In their fifteenth or
sixteenth years they should at least have gained some idea of
what goes on in a soap factory or a spinning mill. Naturally
we shall have to proceed as economically as possible. It is
always possible to condense out of the overall complicated
processes a simple, generalized picture. I think Herr Molt
will agree that one could teach children in an economical
way about the whole process of cigarette manufacture from
beginning to end in a few simple sentences that would then
only need a little elucidation derived from the remainder of
the subjects we have taught them. It is utterly beneficial for
children in their thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth
years to be given such condensed descriptions of different
branches of industry. It would be very good if during these
years they were to keep an exercise book in which to record
the processes of soap manufacture, cigarette manufacture,
spinning, weaving, and so on. They need not be taught about
mechanical and chemical technology on a grand scale, but
they would gain a great deal from keeping such an exercise
book. Even if the book were later to be lost, a residue would
remain. They would not only have the benefit of knowing
these things, but, more important, they would feel as they
went through life and their profession that they had once
known these things, that they had once been through the
process of learning about them. This affects the assurance
with which a person acts; it affects the self-possession with
which he takes his place in the world. It is very important
for his willpower and his capacity for making decisions. No
profession is without people of efficiency and initiative who
occupy their place in the world with a feeling about things
which they do not actually need for their own profession but
which they once knew about, even if only in a primitive way.
Even if they have forgotten it, something will still remain.
However, we do learn a lot in school. And in object lessons,

60
of soul and spirit of mankind. Human beings literally have
to turn a deaf ear in order not to perceive the effects that are
resulting from this.
It is always very satisfying to notice how people
(now I do not want to offend anyone with my turn of phrase)
from the better classes enter a factory and feel thoroughly
ill at ease. This happens because there shoots up from their
subconscious the feeling that they use all the things that are
manufactured in this factory without having the slightest
relationship as human beings with what goes on there. They
know nothing about it. When you notice the discomfiture of
an inveterate cigarette smoker (to take a familiar example)
as he enters the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, knowing
nothing about what goes on so that he can be kept supplied
with his cigarettes, you can be pleased by the fact that at least
he can still dimly perceive his ignorance about the environ-
ment born out of human thoughts, the environment in which
he lives and of which he uses the products. We can be glad if
people enter and leave an electric train with a slight feeling
of unease because they have no idea how it works. This sens-
ing of discomfiture is the beginning of an improvement in
this realm. The very worst thing is to experience and live in
a world made by human beings without bothering ourselves
about this world.
We can work against these things only by starting
during the last stage of the lower school, by really not letting
the fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds leave school without at least
some elementary ideas about the more important procedures
taking place in life. We should teach them in a way that
leaves them with a yearning to be curious and inquisitive
at every opportunity about what is going on around them,
so that they use this curiosity and thirst for knowledge to
add to whatever they already know. Thus, towards the
end of the lower school we should employ all the different
subjects in a comprehensive sense towards a social educa-
tion of our pupils, just as we use the separate subjects in
geography to build an overall geographical structure in the

61
 become materialistic people. If you lead them during these
years into the practical things of life, they will retain a healthy
relationship to the idealistic needs of the soul, since these can
only be wiped out if they are senselessly indulged in during
early youth.
So, relatively healthy instincts regarding food still
live in children during the early years of school. For the sake
of the individual’s development these instincts fade away
during the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth years. And when
puberty finally overtakes the child this also means that he
has lost his good instincts with regard to food, that he has
to replace with reason what his instincts gave him during
earlier years. This is why you can, as it were, intercept the
last manifestations of the growing child’s instincts for food
and health during his thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth years.
You can still just catch the tail end of his healthy instincts for
food, for growth, and so on. Later you can no longer reach an
inner feeling for proper nutrition and health care. Therefore,
during these years the children must receive in school some
instruction on nutrition and health care for the human being.
Practical Advice to Teachers.
London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1976.

Developing Universal Love

Again at the time of puberty, one must be able to ex-
perience the birth of something even higher in human nature,
of something which has been working up until then on the
further transformation of the human organism. Whether one
calls what comes to birth in the fourteenth to fifteenth year the
astral body, and whether one likes such a name or finds it in
bad taste, is of no significance. What does matter is that one
becomes conscious of the fact that just as around the seventh
year the intellectual element is born through the etheric body,
now, around the fourteenth to fifteenth year, the entire body-
free soul-being of man is born. Before that time feeling and
willing were closely bound up with the physical organism.
Just as up to the seventh year thinking was closely linked to

62
which so often degenerate into platitudes, such things are
also taught to pupils. But in these cases it can be found that
later no feeling remains that says: I once learned about that
and how fortunate I was to have done so. Instead the feeling
is: Thank God I have forgotten all that; what a good thing
that I have forgotten what I learned then. We ought never to
be responsible for arousing this feeling in a person. If in our
childhood we were taught in a manner that took account of
what I have just said, then when we later enter a factory or
something similar, innumerable things will shoot up out of
our subconscious. Today everything is specialized in life. This
specialization is actually dreadful. And the main reason why
so much in life is specialized is because we start to specialize
already in the way we teach in schools.
The gist of these remarks might well be summarized
in the words: Every single thing a child learns during the
course of his schooling should in the end be presented so
broadly that threads may everywhere be found linking it
with practical human life. Very many things that are now
unsocial in the world would be made social if we could at
least touch upon an insight into matters that later need not
have any direct bearing on our own work in life.
No child should pass beyond his fifteenth year
without having gone through the stage of writing speci-
men examples of practical business letters. Do not say that
the children can learn to do this later. Yes, by overcoming
dreadful obstacles they can learn it later, but only if they can
overcome these obstacles. It is of great benefit to the children
if you teach them to let their knowledge of grammar and
language flow into business compositions, business letters.
There should be nobody today who has not once upon a
time learned to write a decent business letter. He may not
need to apply this in later life at all, but there really should
be nobody who has not once been encouraged to write a
decent business letter. If you satiate the children mainly
with sentimental idealism between the ages of thirteen and
fifteen, they will later develop an aversion to idealism and

63
 feature of their natural makeup.
When the child reaches sexual maturity, love of the
other sex becomes an obvious consequence. This general
experience of love then will find its individual expression in
the love of a man for a woman. But what appears as a fully
justified fact in such an individual form at the same time is
also an individual expression of a universal human love, of
a love for all mankind. This universal love, as also the love
for the other sex, begins to develop at puberty. The love of
one human being for another can begin to develop as an
independent force during puberty only, for it needs to be
free from all authority. Such love is true devotion. Up to the
age of puberty love is the result of an inner need; it has to be
something which the child demands egoistically. We must
realize that, up to the age of fourteen, the child has an egoistic
desire to love. This means that he needs to feel the support of
an authority upon whom he can depend and to whom he can
be devoted, because such devotion fills him with pleasure. His
love is the outcome of a natural urge. Everything he loves,
whether it be all mankind, nature, stars, supersensible beings,
pagan gods or God Himself, all that lives in him as love is,
fundamentally, the content of his astral body. This astral body
is born as an independent member at puberty. Up until then
it was engaged in building up the individual human nature
in the same way in which the etheric body was at work on
the individual human nature up to the seventh year, up to
the change of teeth.
  The Renewal of Education.
Steiner Schools Fellowship/Kolisko,
1981.

The Danger of Too Early Incarnation of the Ego

What happens further is that the ego is set free—
whether we call it the ether body or intelligence does not
matter. This ego, so to speak, descended at birth, and streams
into the physical body gradually organizes itself through
and through. This means that there takes place a mutual

64
the physical organism, so, up to puberty, feeling and willing
are closely connected with the physical organism. Before the
onset of puberty, that is ”before school-leaving age,” we must
be careful not to allow certain elements to enter the pupils’
thinking, which is then emerging step by step together with
the emerging etheric body, elements which, in a certain sense,
stem from a premature independence of feeling and willing.
If the child is educated with loving care, supported by his
sense of authority, and if he learns to develop his feeling and
willing in dependence on the adult guide, his educator and
teacher, then his own independent feeling and willing will
be born at the right moment, namely at puberty. Children
can rightly develop their feeling and willing only under the
guidance of authority. If they are allowed to develop their
own independent will prematurely, especially if what one
could call certain secretive functions of the will intervene
too early, damage for the rest of their lives will ensue. And if
they are tempted to subject moral and religious impulses to
their own judgments too early, they will make a premature
contact with the finer organizations of their will.
I have to reaffirm that, up to the time of puberty, the
child should learn to develop his moral and religious attitude
under the moral and religious guidance of his teacher’s au-
thority. Only at puberty does the soul and spiritual life of the
adolescent become sufficiently freed from the physical body
for us to begin to allow him to make his own judgments. But
as this affirmation runs counter to present-day trends, one
meets prejudiced opposition everywhere. When, in public
lectures in Germany at the time when that country was un-
der the influence of a would-be revolution that never took
place, I spoke about the child’s natural inclination towards
authority, my remarks were always met by an underlying
feeling that all authority should be abolished, even in the
case of children, who should be left to educate themselves
democratically. My answer had to be that this was not at all
what children really wanted. If rightly understood, they feel
the need for guidance; they have an unspoken longing to look
up to an authority and their love of authority is a distinctive

65
 but that, on the other hand, it must neither be kept too much
outside. If it settles down too firmly in the human organism,
if the ego unites with them too intensively, man becomes too
much an exclusively corporeal being; he will then think only
with his brain, will be entirely dependent on his organism,
in short, he will become too earthly, and the ego will have
been too strongly absorbed by the bodily organization.
That we must avoid. Through our education we must try to
avoid everything that would lead to the ego becoming too
strongly absorbed by the bodily organization, becoming too
dependent on it. You will understand the utter seriousness
of this matter when I tell you that the cause of the criminal-
ity and brutality of some men lies in the fact that their egos
were allowed to be absorbed too strongly during their years
of growing up. The characteristics of degeneracy, found by
anthropologists and known to you, which manifest fully only
in later years, reveal themselves often as an ego which has
been too strongly absorbed by the rest of the bodily organi-
zation. And if there is such a man born with the earlobe of a
criminal, it is all the more important that we see to it that his
ego will not sink too deeply into the rest of his organization.
Through a true artistic treatment in education we can avoid
that. Even in a man with degenerate physical characteristics
when this ego sinks too deeply into his organism, we can
thus save him from becoming a criminal.
We can, on the other hand, fall prey to making the
opposite mistake. There is a difficulty here. As we may place
too small or too large a weight on one side of the scales—if the
weight is too small, the other side will not rise; if it is too large,
it will rise too high and we have to set the balance right—so,
we have to face a similar fact in the realities of life. Living
reality cannot be contained in rigid concepts, and in trying to
rectify one error we may always fall into the opposite. With
regard to a child it is, therefore, the intimate factors of life
which are all important, so that we never bring out one side
or another too strongly but rather develop a feeling for the
fact that in education one has to create an artistic balance.

66
permeation of the eternal “I” and that which is being formed,
the slowly liberating intelligence, or the ether body is in the
process of being born.
And then, looking at the ensuing age, the time from
the seventh to the fourteenth year up to the time of puberty,
we can say from a certain point of view that an element of
will, a musical element is being absorbed; yes, this process
is best described from one aspect when we say: what lies in
the outer world is really the musical element, and all that
which is being absorbed as music, as sound, is vibrating
through the astral body. Through this activity the astral body
is emancipated from the connection which it had up to this
time with the whole organism. From another point of view
we can, therefore, say with regard to the child: in puberty the
birth of the astral body takes place. But once again, it is the
ego which then, as an eternal being, unites itself with that
which is being liberated, so that from birth to puberty, up to
the age of about fourteen or more, we are concerned with a
progressive anchoring of the ego in the entire human organ-
ism. From the seventh year on the ego fastens itself only to
the etheric body, while before then, when the human being
is still an imitator, the ego anchors itself precisely through
this imitative activity in the physical body, and then later,
even after puberty, the ego penetrates the astral body. So
what takes place is the continuous penetration of the human
organism by the ego, which can be seen really and concretely
as I have described it.
This sphere has an immense significance for the
educator. For, as I have indicated in my article on the artis-
tic element in education in the last copy of Social Future, all
education and teaching should always be carried out in the
light of this gradual incorporation of the ego into the hu-
man organism as I have just described it; this process of the
ego’s incorporation in the human organism should be guided
through an artistic education. What does this mean?
It means, for example, that the ego must not enter
the physical body, etheric body and astral body too deeply,

67
 that concerns only those teachers who will be working with
the new class, but that is a mistake. Our college of teachers
needs to become more and more of a united organic whole.
Every one of us must take his share in the whole education
throughout the school, directly and indirectly. For if we sim-
ply continue, reasoning only from a different point of view,
to arrive at the very same opinions and conclusions that were
instilled into us by the events at the end of the 19th and begin-
ning of the 20th centuries, then it will be impossible for us to
take our part in the work that has now to be done to bring
mankind out of its present misery. And if there is anyone to
whom this applies more than another, it is the teacher, and
especially the teacher who undertakes to guide the children
on their way into the age of maturity, in other words, as they
pass on from the ninth to the tenth class. As we have seen,
however, in order to give this guidance in the right way, we
have also to work towards it throughout the school.
It is imperative, at this turning-point in the history of
our school, that we learn to conceive of our work in a deeper
way than heretofore, and what I am now about to say does
not concern only the higher but all the classes. We need to
gather up our whole pedagogy, our whole didactics, and feel
how there runs right through it all one single purpose, one
single aim—to place into this world of ours human beings.
This is our task, and we must be conscious of the grave re-
sponsibility it lays upon us. Without this, our Waldorf school
will prove to be nothing but empty words. We may say all
sorts of beautiful things about it, but we shall be standing on
a floor that is riddled with holes, and in time the holes will
become so large that there is no floor left to walk upon. We
must find the way to make the whole thing true, inwardly
true. This we can only do when we ourselves have a deep
understanding of our vocation as teachers.
And here we must ask ourselves: What are we, as
present-day human beings? We are the result of all that took
place in the life of our civilization during the last third of the
19th century; we have come into this present time bearing

68
Because if one does not see to it that the ego unites with the
organism in a right way, then it can happen that it remains too
much outside, and the consequence will be that the person
becomes a dreamer or follows fancies, or becomes altogether
useless in life because he only lives in fantasies. This would
be the other mistake, that one does not let the ego sink deeply
enough into the organism. Even those who in their childhood
showed a tendency to fancifulness, to false romanticism, can
be protected from this by their teacher when he or she sees to
it that the ego does not stay outside the rest of the organism,
but penetrates it in the right way.
When one notices the well-known Theophosist’s
mark, which all children who are inclined to theosophy bring
with them at birth—a small bump rising a little way behind
the forehead—then one must strive to prevent this tendency
to fancifulness and false romanticism through pressing the
ego more strongly into the organism. But how do we bring
about the one thing and how the other?
Balance in Teaching.
Spring Valley, N.Y: Mercury Press,
1982.

A Right Approach to the World of Ideals

Our deliberations so far will have made it clear to
you that you must bring to your work an exact and detailed
knowledge of man, a knowledge that includes also his physi-
cal and bodily nature. It may perhaps seem that some of the
matters we speak of are a little remote from your everyday
problems. This has to do with the fact that we are at this mo-
ment facing, as you know, a new and important task, the addi-
tion, namely, of a tenth class to the nine that we have already
and that correspond to the ”Volksschule.” The new class will
be composed of boys and girls of an age that requires very
careful handling, and it is my earnest wish that these lectures
should encourage you to enter upon a thorough study of
this age of life, connected as it is with important conditions
of development. You may think that this is surely a theme

69
 passed was such as to leave us without any understanding
at all for the youth of the present day. Let us try to get a clear
picture of the situation in which we find ourselves today in
this respect.
Consider first of all a human being in his twenties,
say, from twenty-one to twenty-eight years old. This period
of life we denote in spiritual science as the time when the
birth of the “I” takes place, the time when man’s ego comes
to full recognition. We explained yesterday how different for
the boy and for the girl is the situation in regard to the ego
round about the time of puberty. In the case of the girl, the
ego is, as it were, dissolved in the astral body and not yet
independent. With the boy, on the other hand, the ego lives
a life that is withdrawn into itself. And the behavior that can
be observed in girls and boys of this age is nothing else than
the result of these inner facts. But when the ego, at about the
age of twenty-one, begins to assert its importance, a new situ-
ation arises. At this age of life humans seeks humans; people
seek, and find, their fellow human beings.
We understand this when we know that if a man or
woman, let us say of twenty-four years old—or it may be a
little younger, but not less than twenty-one—meets another
who is also not more than twenty-eight, then they stand
over against one another in similar reciprocal relationship,
whether we are considering them from the point of view of
body, soul or spirit. In this age of life, human beings meet as
equals. Teachers should take pains to observe this fact wherever
life gives them the opportunity. The absurd psychological
nonsense that is so much studied by teachers today is just a
piling-up of word-wisdom. If you want to understand life,
you must study such phenomena as the one I have just de-
scribed. See whether you cannot detect a delicate nuance of
feeling in the mutual relationships of human beings between
the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight.
And now let us see how the matter stands when a
boy or girl between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one
meets a man or woman between twenty-eight and thirty-

70
that with us. What then are we all, my dear friends? Some of
us have studied philology, have studied history . . . as these
subjects were taught in the schools round about the beginning
of the century. Others of us have gone further with mathemat-
ics and science. One has perhaps grown into what he is now
by studying some particular method of singing, or again
of gymnastics. Another, whose teachers had a strong bias
in that direction, has been brought up to be a ”gentleman”
(probably with a rather physical and external understanding
of the word), while the education of still another has been
directed more to the inner qualities of mind and spirit, al-
though through purely intellectual development. And all this
education that we have received has gone right into us; we
humans of today are, to our very fingertips, the product of it.
We have, however, now the task to understand what
has thus been ”educated” into us. We must see it for what it
is, we must make ourselves master of it. This will require a
searching self-examination, not of ourselves as individuals,
but of ourselves as men of our time. Without undergoing
this, we shall not be able to grow out beyond what our time
can give us. And we must grow out beyond what our time
can give us. It will not do to be mere puppets of the age, re-
flecting always the direction given to thought and culture at
the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. It is
of the utmost importance that we should submit ourselves,
as people of our time, to this conscientious self-examination
and come to a recognition of where we stand as human beings.
Yesterday we were considering the conscientious
self-examination, not as an individual but as people of this
present age, which a teacher needs to undertake before he can
be ready to confront a class of children of fourteen or fifteen
years old. (I made it clear at the same time that the event of
puberty has to be taken into account not only at the age when
it occurs, but throughout the whole period of school life.)
And I went on to show why this intense self-examination is
so imperative in our time, namely, because the whole tenor of
the education we ourselves received in the age that has just

71
 Nowadays, human relationships tend to be abstract.
Among the Greeks social life was much more instinctive.
One person meant something to another just through the
fact that he was older or younger, and relationships of this
kind between different age-groups were a powerful factor
in Greek life.
Let us try to picture for a little how life went on in
this land of Greece. The child who was beginning to grow up
into manhood would feel a reverence for a thirty-year-old.
But as soon as he had passed his twentieth year, he would
begin to feel a strong impulse to unite, instead, with those of
his own age. This gave diversity to life. It gave also intimacy
and inwardness. And it helped to build up the whole struc-
ture of society. That is an important point for us today. For
what is our situation, we who no longer feel these instinctive
relationships with one another? We teachers have no under-
standing for the children in their teens. We cannot solve the
riddle that faces us in these boys and girls; for we have not yet
the thoughts and ideas that can reawaken in us consciously
those feelings that we had long ago instinctively and have
been obliged to lose in the natural course of evolution.
The only hope is to bring anthroposophical-spiritual
knowledge into the domain also of pedagogy and didactics.
Unless we can do this, we shall merely go on widening the
gulf between ourselves and these older children, until at
last it will be so wide that we shall be forced to rely entirely
upon our word of command. It may even go so far that we
reckon on being able to fall back on the police if we cannot
keep order; we may have to count on the children knowing
that the police are there in the background. The only way for
us teachers to attain the intimate kind of relationship that we
desire with our pupils is to open our hearts and souls to the
truths of spiritual science, for these truths can verily call up
again in us consciously what was once given to man long
ago in his life of instinct.
Yesterday, I told the teachers who are to take the
tenth class that they should be ready to give the children the

72
five. Here a relationship of complete equality is impossible.
Nevertheless, under certain conditions (of which I will say
more presently), a good and significant understanding can
be established between these two age-groups. For the situa-
tion here is as follows.
The development that is taking place in the younger
person under the influence of the astral body is, at this age,
mainly unconscious. It expresses itself in outward behavior, in
the whole manner in which such young people (who are but
children still!) make their way into life. They become perhaps
more and more skilled, or they begin to have great ideals.
All this development and growing contact with the outer
world goes on, as it were, under the spell of unconsciousness,
just as the external growth and development of the body is
unconscious. But now in the older person the same kind of
development is taking place, only with him, it is inward, in
the soul. And this is why a person of twenty-eight to thirty-
five is best fitted to feel and perceive with his soul what is
going on in a young person of fourteen to twenty-one. He is
predestined for it. And boys and girls in their teens are on
their part ready to look up to men and women of twenty-eight
to thirty-five. For in these men and women they can see at
work, inwardly, the very same kind of development that is
taking place in themselves externally, in the physical body,
and more unconsciously.
Among the Greeks this relationship was still a very
common experience. Quite simply and instinctively, the boys
and girls of fourteen to twenty-one looked up to the men
and women of twenty-eight to thirty-five, feeling that these
had in their souls what they themselves had in their physical
bodies. Without being fully conscious of it, they recognized in
the older person, in a more refined and intimate form, what
was for themselves an outward experience. And the men
and women who had reached the twenty-eight to thirty-five
period, felt strongly drawn on their part to boys and girls in
their teens with all the development they could see taking
place in them.

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 vocation of a teacher is not for him.
It has even gone so far as this today, that people
make experiments because they want to come to their own
conclusions. They experiment with memory, to find out how
it works; they experiment with the will; they experiment
even with thinking, to see how thoughts work. Quite nice
little games—and certainly some results do emerge from it
all. We need not look with disapproval upon games, either
in children or in laboratories; but the narrowing down of the
field of vision that is implied in all this—against that we must
most emphatically protest.
In these studies I have had to make it clear that our
work as teachers depends upon our own self-development,
depends upon our own ability to take our right place in the
world. And we have seen how at the turning point in a child’s
life that occurs in the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth year,
our success as teachers, even more than ever before, depends
on having prepared ourselves to meet the boys and girls
rightly at this important moment in their lives.
I have also explained to you that, in addition to this
self-preparation of the teacher, we must arrange our whole
work in the lower classes in such a way that the children
themselves receive a right preparation for the event of puberty.
Everything depends, as you know, on the relation-
ship to the world that develops gradually during the years of
childhood. At the time of puberty, the child’s attitude to the
world finds expression in an inclination for ideals. Boys as
well as girls begin at this age to show a desire for more than
the world of the senses can give them. They want to reach out
to something beyond. Even the very awkwardness of boys—
as well as the corresponding qualities we notice in girls—are
signs of this ”feeling after” some supersensible ideal, some
higher aim in life. That life must be there for some purpose,
that life must have a meaning, is a conviction that lies deep
in human nature; we must reckon with it. And we must also
be alive to the danger that this deep intuitive conviction can
be led on wrong paths. You will frequently find with a boy of
fourteen or fifteen years old who is beginning to be haunted

74
rudiments of a knowledge of man. It must, of course, be a
knowledge that places man once again into the whole great
universe, gives him his place and part there, in body, soul
and spirit. To do this worthily, as true educators, we shall
have first of all to study the current textbooks on anatomy,
for example, and physiology. It is, however, most important
that we use these textbooks merely as books of information,
to bring us up to date with the achievements in the various
sciences during the past hundred years, achievements that
have, as we know, been arrived at with complete disregard
of the spirit. And then we have to illuminate these achieve-
ments of science at every point with what we can gain from
anthroposophy.
You will have to take up a completely different at-
titude towards all this modern scientific literature from the
attitude that is common among teachers today. You will,
of course, be taunted with being ”superior,” but that you
must bear with. You have to accept the fact that, for you,
all this modern science and culture are nothing more than a
groundwork of information. You are really in the same posi-
tion in regard to it as a Greek would be if he were to come
alive again on earth today. He would point perhaps to our
chemistry and say: ”The knowledge I have of earth—that it is
dry and cold, that it has influence on the plants—that knowl-
edge you elaborate on and particularize. It is, of course, quite
interesting to develop this detailed, specialized knowledge
of the earth element. But you know nothing of the working
of the whole; your knowledge extends no further than over
one fourth of the whole.”
It is really high time we got back to this more living
kind of knowledge, a knowledge that can find its way into
our intuitive perception, into our feelings and into our will,
a knowledge that is, for the soul and spirit, what blood is for
the body. As possessors of such knowledge, we become dif-
ferent men and women, capable of being true teachers and
educators, which no automaton who mechanically follows
all manner of artificially invented methods can ever be. The

75
 When a child attains puberty, he should at the same
time undergo a change through the fact that he is now about
to dispense with authority; he has outgrown it. But if we have
not in the earlier years accustomed him to the acceptance of
authority, this important change will be missed. He must first
experience the dependence on authority; then at puberty he
can outgrow this feeling of dependence and begin to judge
for himself.
And this will mean that the time has come for us
teachers to enter into a new relationship with the children, a
relationship that is well expressed in the familiar saying: ”Ein
jeglicher sich seinen Helden wahlt, dem er die Wege zum Olymp
sich nacharbeitet.” (Each one of us chooses his own hero, in
whose footsteps he will follow on the path to Olympus.)
This change in relationship can obviously bring us often into
troublesome situations with the children. We no longer have
it in our power to be their ideal as a matter of course. We
have to see that we live up to it! Hitherto we have been able
simply to give orders. Now the children begin to take note of
our behavior; they begin to have a very sensitive perception
for faults or lapses on the part of the teacher. Yes, there is this
danger, and we must face it quite consciously. Boys and girls
of this age are particularly sensitive to the teacher’s mood, to
his attitude of mind. If, however, we are not bothering about
ourselves in an egotistic way, but are intent on dealing hon-
orably with the children, then we shall accept the situation
and reckon always with the possibility of sensitiveness. In that
way we shall find we can establish a free relationship with
the growing boy and girl.
Thus, we shall be able to bring about that our children
grow in the right way into the true, which they bring with
them as an inheritance from the spiritual world; they then
unite themselves aright with the beautiful; and finally they
learn also—here in this world of sense existence—the good.
For it rests with them to impress the good upon the world
into which they have come. It is a downright sin to speak
in an abstract way of the true, the beautiful, and the good,

76
by all kinds of hopes and desires that his early training and
education have been such as to encourage in him the feeling
that he knows quite well how things ought to be. The girl,
too, begins to pass judgment upon life around her. Girls are,
in fact, severe critics of life at this age. They think they know
perfectly well what is right and what is not right, and more
especially what is just and fair and what is unjust and unfair.
They lay down their opinions about everything around
them, and they are in no doubt whatever that life will give
them the possibility of placing something new into the world,
something that will have its source outside of everyday life,
in the land of ideals. So strong at this age is the turning to
ideals—and ideas.
A right approach to the world of ideals will, however,
only be possible for our children if we have prepared them
for it during their previous years of school. And for this pur-
pose, we must be able to steep our own thought and feeling
in those basic facts of human life that can give us insight into
the growth and development of the child. Theoretically, we
learn from spiritual science of three cardinal aspects of the
child’s development. We learn how, up to his seventh year,
he is a being who imitates. He grows by doing what he sees
done around him. Indeed, the whole activity of a little child is
nothing but imitation. At the period of the change of teeth, he
begins to feel a need to follow an authority. He wants to hear
from those around him what he is to do. Whereas hitherto he
has received into himself and imitated, as a matter of course,
whatever went on around him, good or bad, true or false, now
he begins to listen to what is spoken in his presence and obey
that. At puberty, a further stage is reached. The child begins
to feel that he can judge for himself. He still, however, needs
to feel the support of authority behind him; but the authority
must be chosen by himself, must commend itself to him as
self-evident. He must be able to say: ”That is a person I can
rely on when it is a question of forming an opinion.” Now it
is for us to see that the young child grows up into the natural
acceptance of authority in the right way.

77
 at maturity within themselves. The time between these two
points, that of compulsory schooling, is when individuals,
complete with their soul life, are in a somewhat unstable state
of balance, an equation in which the teacher only belongs.
When teachers can teach from out of a background of true
knowledge about human beings, they will successfully make
the transition for the child to reach maturity with the inbuilt
urge to become a practical human being.
This is why we try to introduce practical work
throughout Waldorf schools in the years leading up to pu-
berty. We bring in crafts and handwork that are approached
from an artistic angle. I would like to say at this point that if
one follows the phenomenon of blushing and going pale as
it were inwards, one sees the result of all that the teacher, in
his role of implicit authority, of didactic and pedagogical art-
ist, has shaped within the child’s soul and spirit between the
change of teeth and sexual maturity. Morality is not taught.
Morality is lived. Goodness is transferred into sympathy and
antipathy from teacher to pupil. This lives on in the soul’s
internal blushing and growing pale, when the inner sense of
life is jeopardized, destroyed or lamed by some threat, or by
something of which one is ashamed. In this way a feeling, a
complex of feelings, develops within the child in response
to real, true human dignity. It is of the greatest importance,
within the finely balanced relationship between children and
their teacher, that living morality develop. For when the child
reaches sexual maturity, what I yesterday characterized as an
ether body in time, as a time organism, is faced with what is
now a sort of higher member of the human composition. At
physical maturity what is known in anthroposophy as the
astral body, and what has placed the individual out into the
world as I described, now approaches the ether body. All that
has been shaped into a system of sympathy and antipathy
by artistic means is now transformed into a moral attitude
of soul.
You see, the wonderful mystery of sexual maturity is
that the living moral we tended in the younger child becomes

78
without showing clearly and practically how these three are
related to the different ages of childhood.
Supplementary Course.
Forest Row, England:
Steiner Schools Fellowship, 1956.

Sexual Maturity
Nowadays, in this age of rather materialistic thought,
sexual maturity is a much discussed topic. The subject is gen-
erally treated in isolation, yet to unencumbered observation
it is in fact nothing less than the complete metamorphosis
of human life at that particular age. Adolescents do not only
develop soul-spiritually or physically conditioned erotic
sensation. They begin to form judgments directly from out of
their personality at this stage, relating to the world through
sympathy and antipathy. For the first time they are placed
out in the world. They become able to give themselves to
the world in such a way that independent thinking, feeling,
and willing in relation to the world can now proceed them.
The time between changing their milk teeth and sex-
ual maturity is one primarily based on an implicit feeling for
authority towards the teacher, the educator. This important
age bridges, in a certain sense, two polar opposites. On the
one hand we have childhood, during which the children are
abandoned to objectivity, without in any way feeling them-
selves to be the subject. On the other hand, they approach
maturity when, with varying degrees of clarity, they separate
themselves and their entire inwardness from the outer world.
This is achieved through all that can be brought under the
heading of sympathy and antipathy—all the expressions and
manifestations that we call love. Between these two stages,
these two poles, lie the years of compulsory schooling, a time
when we have to effect this transition through education, by
means of the lessons.
At both these stages, in childhood and at physical
maturity, each person has a certain point of gravitation in
their lives. During childhood it lies outside with the world,

79
 importance.
The afternoon lessons are given over to more physical
activities, such as gym and eurythmy, and to artistic work
which plays a very special part in a Waldorf school. I will
give further details in the coming days.
We try, as far as this is possible, to teach the more
intellectual subjects in the morning, and only when the
children’s headwork has been done are they given move-
ment lessons, in as far as they have not let off steam already
between morning lessons. However, after these movement
lessons they are not taken back to the classroom in order to
do more headwork. I have already indicated that this has a
destructive effect upon life. For while the child is engaged in
physical movement, supersensible forces are unconsciously
working through it. And the head, having surrendered itself
to physical movement, is no longer in a position to resume its
headwork. It is, therefore, quite erroneous to believe that by
sandwiching a gym lesson between other more intellectual
lessons, one is providing a helpful change with its attendant
benefits. The homogeneous character of both morning and
afternoon sessions has shown itself to be beneficial to the
general development of the pupils. If one constantly bears
in mind the characteristic features of human nature, one will
best serve human inclinations.
From what you have heard so far, you may have
gained the impression that the art of education based on an-
throposophical knowledge of man seeks to nurture above all
a healthy and harmonious development of the child’s physi-
cal body. You may have noticed that the following questions
could be looked upon as guidelines for our educational aims:
How can we assist the free unfolding of the formative forces,
issuing from the head and working upon and shaping the
young organism? How do we work in harmony with the
child’s developing breathing and blood circulation during
the middle years? What must we do in order to cultivate in
the widest sense possible the forces working throughout the
child’s muscular system? How can we rightly support the
processes of the muscles growing onto the bones through the

80
conscious morality, conscious moral principles at puberty.
This constitutes metamorphosis on a grand scale. What hap-
pens in eroticism is merely a subsidiary expression of this.
Only a materialistic age sees eroticism as the main issue.
But the core issue must be found in that wondrous mystery,
so that what we initially attributed to natural factors from
direct experience can now emerge into the light of day as
conscious morality.
Anthroposophically Based Education
and Teaching Methods.
Forest Row, England: Steiner Schools
Fellowship

Criticism and Compromise, Masculine and Feminine

It is all too easy to criticize life at the present time.
Most people meet displeasing aspects of it every day, and
one could easily feel tempted to make clever suggestions
about how to put the world in order. But it simply won’t do
to educate pupils in such a way that, when they leave school
to enter life, they can only criticize the senselessness of all
they find there. However imperfect life may be when judged
by abstract reasoning, one nevertheless must be able to play
one’s full part in it. Waldorf pupils, who have been treated as
individuals perhaps more than is usually the case elsewhere,
have to be sent out into life—otherwise there would be no
sense in having a Waldorf school at all. But they must not
become estranged from contemporary life to the extent that
they can only criticize what they meet outside.
We have no intention of denying that in many ways
the Waldorf school is built upon compromise, but as far as it
is humanly possible, we shall always try to educate out of a
true knowledge of man.
To continue, the morning sessions are arranged in the
way already indicated. Because it is essential for our pupils
to be able to move on to higher forms of education, we have
to include in our curriculum certain other subjects, such as
Greek and Latin, which are also taught in morning lessons.
In these ancient languages ”soul-economy” is of particular

81
 his school years from the change of teeth to the coming of
puberty, we have done our utmost to help and equip him for
later life. (During the coming days, when dealing with the
aesthetic and moral aspects of education, we shall look more
closely at the stage of puberty. Just now we will consider the
more general human aspects.) We must realize that during
his past school years we have been dealing mainly with his
etheric body, with his body of formative forces, and that the
soul life—of which more will be said a little later—was only
beginning to manifest itself towards the approach of his
school-leaving age. We must consider the next stage, which
begins with the fourteenth to fifteenth year and which contin-
ues right up to the beginning of the twenties, a time in which
the young man or woman has to face the task of fitting himself
or herself more and more into external life. We have already
seen how gradually the child takes hold of his body, finally
incarnating right into his skeleton, and how, by doing so, he
grows together more and more with the external world, how
he learns to adapt to outer circumstances. Fundamentally,
this process continues up to the early twenties, after which
there follows a most important period of life. Although as
teachers we now no longer have any direct influence over the
young person, we have in fact already done a great deal in
this direction during the previous years, and this will become
apparent from the early to the late twenties.
After leaving school, the young person has to un-
dergo a training for a particular vocation. Now he or she no
longer receives what has mainly come out of human nature
itself, but rather what has become part and parcel of the
civilization we live in, at least with regard to a chosen trade
or profession. Now the young person has to be adaptable to
certain forms of specialization. In our Waldorf school we try
to prepare this stepping out into life by introducing practical
crafts, such as spinning and weaving, to our fourteen- and
fifteen-year-olds. To gain practical experience in such crafts
is not only important for a future spinner or weaver but
for every person who wishes to be able to turn his hand to

82
tendons, so that the young adolescent can place himself prop-
erly into the external world? All these questions imply that
whatever we do to enhance the development of the child’s
soul and spirit is directed, first of all, towards the best possible
healthy and normal development of its physical body. And
this, indeed, is the case. We do aim in full consciousness to
aid and foster the healthy development of the child’s physical
body, for in this way the child’s soul and spiritual nature is
given the best means of unfolding freely and out of its own
resources. By damaging as little as possible the spiritual forces
working through the child, we give it the best possibility of
developing healthily. Not that we have our preconceived
ideas of what a growing human being should be like. What-
ever we do in our teaching is an attempt to create the most
favorable conditions for the children’s physical health. And
because we have to pay attention also to the soul and spiri-
tual element, because the physical must ultimately become
its outer expression, its manifestation, we have to come to
terms also with the soul and spiritual aspect in the way best
suited for the healthy development of the child.
You may ask: From which educational ideal does
such an attitude spring? It is the outcome of a total dedication
towards human freedom. It springs from the ideal of placing
the human being into the world in such a way that he can
unfold his individual freedom or, at least, that no physical
hindrances should prevent him from doing so.
What we are specially striving for in our education
with its emphasis on the promotion of the physical devel-
opment of the child is that our pupils should learn to make
full use of their physical powers and skills in their later
lives. Waldorf education rests upon the knowledge and the
confidence that life in general will have the best chance of
developing if it is allowed to develop freely and healthily.
Naturally, all this has to be taken in a relative sense which, I
hope, will be understood.
When the pupil leaves school at the age of fourteen
plus, it is time for us to examine once more whether, during

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 is entirely linked to the external world, and it is right for the
child to live in it during the time between the change of teeth
and puberty. If already before the change of teeth there were
an excess of these etheric forces, that is, if the child has lived
too much in its etheric sheath before the second dentition, the
outcome is a markedly phlegmatic temperament. However,
it is quite possible for a child to have a normal and balanced
relationship with the etheric body, and this is absolutely es-
sential between the seventh and the fourteenth years, that
is, between the change of teeth and puberty. Again, if this
condition is carried over too far into later life, a decidedly
phlegmatic temperament will develop in the grown-up.
The next member of the human being which, under
normal circumstances gains its independent existence in
puberty and which yesterday I called the astral body—the
member of the human being which lives beyond space and
time—is the real birthplace of the sanguine temperament.
And if, during the time between the change of teeth and
puberty, a child draws too much upon what should come
into its own only when sexual maturity is reached, the san-
guine temperament comes into being. Only with the arrival
of puberty does the growing human being become inwardly
mature for sanguinity. Thus, everything in life has its right
or normal period of time. The various abnormalities come
about if that which is normal for one particular time of life
is pushed into another period of life. If you can survey life
from this viewpoint, you learn to understand the human
being in depth.
And now, what is actually happening during the
time of sexual maturity? Our considerations of the last few
days have already shed some light on it. We have seen how,
after the change of teeth, the child is still working inwardly
with those forces which, to a certain degree, have become
emancipated soul and spiritual forces. During the subsequent
stages the child incarnates via the system of breathing and
blood circulation to where in the tendons the muscles grow
onto the bones. It incarnates from within outwards towards

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anything that a given situation may demand. However, it is
important to introduce the right activities at the right time.
Now, what has been cultivated in a child’s etheric
body, or body of formative forces, during the early school
years reemerges in the soul sphere of a young person during
his or her twenties, that is, at the time when he or she has
to enter a profession. The way in which he was treated at
school will be largely instrumental in his responding to outer
conditions—either clumsily, reluctantly, full of inhibitions, or
skillfully and with an inner strength to overcome obstacles.
During his twenties the young person will certainly become
aware of how the experiences of his school years first went
underground, as it were, while he was training for a trade
or profession, only to surface again in the form of capacities,
such as being able to handle certain situations or to fit oneself
into life in the right way. A teacher who is aware of these facts
will pay due attention to the critical moments in the life of
the pupil between the change of teeth and puberty.
With the onset of puberty, an entirely new situation
arises, with the effect that fundamentally the emerging
adolescent is a totally different being from what he was be-
fore sexual maturity. In order to characterize the situation,
it may be useful to refer to what was spoken of at the end of
yesterday’s lecture. Up to the change of teeth, it is normal for
a child to live entirely within the physical body. However, if
this state is extended beyond its normal time—and in later
life such a situation would no longer represent normal con-
ditions—the consequences will be a markedly melancholic
temperament. During childhood it is natural to have the
kind of relationship between the soul-spiritual and physical
organization which is characteristic of an adult melancholic.
We must always bear in mind that what is right and good for
one stage of life becomes abnormal for another.
During the second dentition certain soul and spiri-
tual forces are freed from their previous organic activities,
and they flow into what I have called the body of formative
forces, or the ether body. This member of the human being

85
 he ”breaks through” into the external world via his bony
system? It is what originally he had brought down with him
from pre-earthly existence and what, gradually, had become
interwoven with his whole inner being. And now, with the
onset of sexual maturity, the adolescent is being cast out of
the spiritual world, as it were. Without exaggerating, one
can really put it that strongly, for it represents the actual
truth; with the coming of puberty the young human being
is cast out from the living world of the spirit and thrown
into the external world which he or she can perceive only
by means of the physical and etheric bodies. And though
the adolescent is not at all aware of what is going on inside
him, subconsciously this plays an all the more intensive part.
Subconsciously, or semi-consciously, it makes the adolescent
compare the world he has now entered with the world which
he formerly had within himself. Previously he had not expe-
rienced the spiritual world consciously, but, nevertheless, he
had found it possible to live in harmony with it. His inner
being felt attuned to it and ready to cooperate freely with the
soul and spiritual realm. But now, in these changed condi-
tions, the external world no longer offers such possibilities to
him. It presents all kinds of hindrances which, in themselves,
create the wish to overcome them. This, in turn, gives rise to
the tumultuous relationship between the adolescent and the
surrounding world, lasting from the fourteenth or fifteenth
year until the beginning of the twenties.
This inner upheaval is bound to come, and it is well
for the teacher to be aware of it already during the previous
years. There may be people of an unduly sensitive nature
who believe that it would be better to save teenagers from
such inner turmoil, only to find that they have made them-
selves their greatest enemy. It would be quite wrong to try
to spare them this tempestuous time of life. It is far better to
plan ahead in one’s educational aims so that what has been
done with the pre-puberty child can now come to the help
and support of the adolescent’s soul and spiritual struggles.
The teacher must be clear that with the arrival of pu-

86
the human periphery, and at the time of sexual maturity, the
young adolescent breaks through into the external world.
Only then does she or he fully stand in the world.
This dramatic development makes it imperative
for the teacher to approach the adolescent, who has passed
through sexual maturity, quite differently from the way in
which he has dealt with him or her prior to this event. For,
fundamentally, the previous processes involving the eman-
cipated soul and spiritual forces before puberty had as yet
nothing to do with sex in its own realm. True, boys or girls
show a definite predisposition towards their sexes, but this
cannot be considered as actual sexuality. Sexuality only de-
velops after the breakthrough into the external world, when
a new relationship with the outer world has been established.
But then, at this particular time, something is hap-
pening within the realm of the adolescent’s soul and bodily
nature which is not unlike what happened previously during
the second dentition. During the change of teeth forces were
liberated to become actively engaged in the child’s thinking,
feeling, and willing, forces which were directed more towards
memory. The powers of memory were then released. Now at
puberty something else becomes available for free activity
in the soul realm. These are powers which previously had
entered the rhythms of breathing and which, subsequently,
were striving to introduce rhythmical qualities also into the
muscular and even into the bony systems. This rhythmical
element now becomes transmuted into the adolescent’s recep-
tiveness for all that belongs to the realm of creative ideas, for
all that belongs to fantasy. Fundamentally speaking, genuine
powers of fantasy find their birth only during puberty, for
they can come into their own only after the astral body has
been born. It is this same astral body which exists beyond
time and space and which links together past, present, and
future according to its own principles, as we can experience
it in our dreams.
What is it that the adolescent brings with him when

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 ings. It is surging up through blunted will impulses. It lives
itself out in the disappointment of apparently unattainable
ideals, in frustrated desires, and perhaps also in a certain
inner dullness towards what presents itself out there in the
unreasonable happenings of the world.
If, during this stage, education is to be effective at
all—and this indeed must be the case for any youngster will-
ing to learn—then the teaching content must be transmitted
in the appropriate form. It must also be a preparation for
the years to come, up to the early twenties or even later in
life. Having suffered the wounds inflicted by life and having
paid back in his own coinage, the young person of fifteen
to twenty-one or twenty-two eventually will have to find
his way back again into the world from which he has been
cast out during puberty. (The duration of this period varies,
especially so during our chaotic times which tend to prolong
it even further into adult life.) The young person must feel ac-
cepted again; he must be able to make a new contact with the
spiritual world, for without it, life is not possible. However,
should he feel any coercion coming from those in authority,
this new link will lose all meaning and value for life.
If we are aware of these difficulties already well
before the arrival of puberty, we will make good use of the
child’s inborn longing for authority in order to bring it to the
stage when there is no longer any need for an authoritarian
approach. And this stage should coincide with the coming
of sexual maturity. But by then the educator must always
be ready and able to give convincing reasons for everything
he wishes his pupil to do. Seen from a wider, spiritual per-
spective, we can thus observe the grandiose metamorphosis
which is taking place in the human being during the period
of sexual maturity.
It is of the greatest importance to realize that the
whole question of sex becomes a reality only during puberty,
when the adolescent enters the external world in the way I
have described it. Naturally, since everything in life is relative,
this, too, has to be taken as a relative truth. Nevertheless, one

88
berty an altogether different being emerges, born out of a new
relationship with the world. It is no good appealing to the
pupil’s previous sense of authority, for now he demands to
know reasons for whatever he is expected to do. The teacher
must get into the habit of approaching the young man or
woman rationally. For example, if the adolescent who has
been led by the spiritual world into this earthly world be-
comes rebellious because this new world is so different from
what he had expected, the adult must try to show him—and
this without any pedantry—that everything he meets in the
world has a prehistory. He must get the adolescent to see that
present conditions are the consequences of what has gone
on before. One must act the part of the expert who really
understands why things have come to be as they are. From
now on, one will accomplish nothing by way of authority.
Now one has to be able to convince the adolescent through the
sheer weight of one’s indisputable knowledge and expertise
and by giving him waterproof reasons for everything one
does or expects of him. If, at this stage, the pupil cannot see
sound reasons in all the content given to him, if conditions in
the world appear to make no sense to him, he will begin to
doubt the rightness of his previous life. He will feel himself
in opposition with what he experienced during those years
which, apparently, only led him into these present unac-
ceptable outer conditions. And if, during his inner turmoil,
he cannot find contact with people who are able to reassure
him, at least to a certain extent, that there are good reasons
for what is happening in the world, then the inner stress may
become intolerable to the extent that the adolescent breaks
down altogether. For this newly emerged astral body is not of
this world. The young person has been cast out of the astral
world, and he is willing to place himself into this earthly
world only if he feels convinced of its rightful existence.
You will completely misunderstand what I have been
describing if you think that the adolescent is at all aware of
what is thus going on within him. During his ordinary day
consciousness it rises up from the unconscious in dim feel-

89
 entire compass. Love between the sexes is but one specific
and limited aspect of love in the world. Only by seeing hu-
man love in this light can one understand it correctly, and
then one also understands its task in the world.
We may well ask: What is really happening in a hu-
man being during the process of sexual maturity? Prior to this
stage, as a child, his relationship to the world was one where
he first imitated the surroundings and when, subsequently,
he stood under the power of authority. Outer influences were
working upon him for, at that time, his inner being mainly
represented what he had brought down with him from pre-
earthly life. Humanity as a whole had to work upon him
from without, first through the principle of imitation and
then through authority. But now, at puberty, having found
his own way into humanity and no longer depending on its
outer support to the same extent that a pre-puberty child
does, there rises up in him a new feeling, an entirely new
appraisal of mankind as a whole. It is this new experience of
humankind which represents the spiritual counterpart to the
physical faculty of reproduction. Physically he becomes able
to procreate. Spiritually he becomes capable of experiencing
mankind as a totality.
During this new stage, the polarity between man
and woman becomes very marked. Only through a real under-
standing of the other sex by means of social intercourse, also
in the realm of soul and spirit, is it possible for the human
potential to come to some kind of realization on earth. Both
man and woman fully represent humankind, but each in a
differentiated way. The woman sees in humanity a gift of the
metaphysical worlds. Fundamentally, she sees humanity as
the result of a divine outpouring. Unconsciously and in the
depths of her soul she bears a picture of mankind which acts
as her standard of values, and she evaluates and assesses
mankind according to this standard. If these remarks are not
generally accepted today, it is due to the fact that our present
civilization shows all the signs of a male-dominated society.
For a long period of time the most powerful influ-

90
has to recognize that up to the stage of sexual maturity, the child
lives more as a general human being, and that an experience
of the world, differentiated according to whether one lives as
a man or woman, only begins with the onset of puberty. This
realization—which in our generally intellectual and natu-
ralistic civilization cannot be taken for granted—will allow
people who, without prejudice, are striving for a knowledge
of man, a real insight into the relationship between the sexes.
It also helps them to understand the problem regarding the
position of women in society, not only during our present
times but also in the future.
Only if one can appreciate the tremendous metamor-
phosis which is taking place in the male organism during
voice maturation—to mention just one example—will one
be able to understand fully the statement that up to the age
of sexual maturity the child retains a more general human
character, as yet undivided into sexes. Other similar processes
occur also in the female organism, only in a different area.
The human voice with its ability to moderate and to form
sounds and tones is a manifestation of man’s general human
nature. It is born out of the soul and spiritual substance which
is working upon the child up to puberty. Changes of pitch
and register, on the other hand, occurring during matura-
tion, are the result of external influences. They are forced
upon the adolescent from outside, as it were. They are the
means by which he places himself into the outer world with
his innermost being. It is not only a case of the soft parts in
the larynx relating themselves more strongly to the bones,
but a slight ossification of the larynx itself takes place which
fundamentally amounts to a withdrawal of the larynx from
the purely human inner nature into a more earthly existence.
This stepping out into the world should really be
seen in a much wider context than is usually the case. Usu-
ally, in people’s minds, the capacity to love, which awakens
at this time, is directly linked to sexual attraction. But this is
by no means the whole story. The power to love, born during
sexual maturity, embraces everything within the adolescent’s

91
 tinctly masculine attitude, however strange this may sound
to you. In fact, one could hardly find a better illustration of
male thinking than in what modern medicine so blatantly
reveals to us.
If one expounds the truth today, people tend to think
that one does so merely for the sake of putting paradoxical
statements into the world. Yet the reality is often paradoxi-
cal. Therefore, if one wishes to speak the truth, one has to
put up with appearing paradoxical, however inconvenient
this may be.
While womankind lives more in the image it creates
of humanity, man’s experiences of humanity are more of a
wishful and enigmatic kind. In order to understand this situ-
ation, one needs to become clear about one other symptom
of our times, which is of particular significance for the art of
teaching: When people speak about love today, they do not
generally differentiate between the various kinds of love.
Of course, one can generalize about the concept of love, just
as one can speak about condiments in a general way. But if
someone puts abstract speculations about certain matters
into the world and then holds forth about them, it always
strikes me as if he were talking about salt, sugar, or pepper
merely in terms of condiments. He only needs to apply such
abstractions to practical life by putting salt into his coffee
instead of sugar—because, after all, both are condiments—
to realize his foolishness. Anyone who indulges in general
speculations instead of entering the concrete realities of life
commits the same folly.
A woman’s love is very different from that of a
man. Her love originates in the imaginative realm, and it is
constantly engaged in making pictures. A woman does not
love a man just as he is, standing there before her in ordinary
humdrum life—forgive me for saying this but, after all, men
are not exactly of the kind a healthy imagination could fall
in love with—but she weaves into her love the ideal she has
received as heaven’s gift. Man’s love, on the other hand, is
tinged with desire; it is of a wishful nature. This differentia-
tion needs to be made, no matter whether it shows itself more

92
ences in our civilization have displayed a decidedly mas-
culine character. An example of this—however grotesque it
may sound—can be found in freemasonry. It is symbolic of
our times that men, if they wish to keep certain matters to
themselves, separate themselves off into lodges of freema-
sonry. There are also lodges in which both men and women
congregate, but in these, freemasonry has already become
blunted, and they no longer bear its original stamp. The con-
stitution of freemasonry is, of course, a specific example, but
it is, nevertheless, indicative of the male-dominated character
of our society. Women, too, have absorbed a great deal of the
masculine element in our civilization, and because of this
they are actually preventing the specifically feminine element
from coming into its own. This is the reason why one so often
gains the impression that, with regard to inner substance and
outer form, there is hardly any difference between the ideals
and programs of the various women’s movements and those
of men, even to the very tone of speeches in which they are
delivered. Obviously these movements are different from
each other insofar as on the one side demands are made to
safeguard women’s interests, while on the other they are
made on behalf of men, but with regard to inner substance,
they are scarcely distinguishable from each other.
Man, in his innermost being, experiences humanity
as something of an enigma. To him it appears as something
unfathomable which poses endless questions, the solutions
of which seem to lie beyond his powers. This typically
masculine characteristic expresses itself in all the mysterious
ceremony with its dry and manly atmosphere which belongs
to freemasonry. This same male tendency has permeated our
culture to such an extent that, on the one hand, the women
are suffering under it and, on the other, they are wanting to
emulate it, wishing to make it part of their lives too.
If you take a good look at modern medicine with all
its materialistic features, if you see how it fails to comprehend
human nature, especially with regard to its physical aspect,
so that it depends on experimentation, and if you observe
modern medicine, you will find there the product of a dis-

93
 ogy will confirm this trend. As representative of Western
civilization, man longs to escape from the physical world
in which he is caught up, but he lacks the courage to do so.
He cannot find the bridge from the sense-perceptible world
to the spiritual world. And so we find everywhere in our
civilization a yearning to get away from it all and yet, at the
same time, an inability to act accordingly.
It is hard enough to achieve the right outer conditions
for teaching children of pre-puberty age. But anyone who
has to teach adolescents could almost feel helpless because
the means available for meeting their needs are so totally
inadequate. This fact alone should kindle a real longing
in their teachers for deeper insight into the human being.
This longing may, of course, be there already in teachers of
younger children, but it is a prerequisite for anyone of sound
pedagogical sense who is teaching adolescents.
A woman’s nostalgia for the ways of the East and a
man’s wish to free himself from the bondage of Western life
represent a fundamental feature of our times. This differen-
tiation between the sexes is less apparent in pre-adolescent
children who still bear more general human features. Yet
as soon as we are confronted by adolescents, we meet the
resulting difficulties quite concretely.
Let us assume, for example, that a teacher of German
literature wanted to recommend a book about Goethe—as
seen from a German point of view—to an adolescent pupil.
He really would find himself in a quandary, for there simply
are no suitable books on the market. If he chose one of the
available ones, his scholar would not gain the right picture
of Goethe. If he chose a biography of Goethe written by, let
us say, Lewes, a German scholar would learn to know the
more outward features of Goethe better than from any of the
German books on the subject, but again he would not become
acquainted with the specifically German characteristics of
Goethe. This is the general situation today, for we simply
do not have an adequate literature for teaching adolescents.
To remedy this situation, everything will depend on

94
in an idealistic or a realistic sense. Ideal love may inspire
longings of an ideal nature. The instinctive and sensuous
kind may be a mere product of fancy. But this fundamental
difference between love as it lives in a man or a woman is a
reality. A woman’s love is steeped in imagination. In man’s
love there is an element of desire. It is just because of this
complementary character that the two kinds of love can
become harmonized in life.
An educator should bear this in mind when con-
fronted with pupils who have already passed through the
stage of sexual maturity. He should realize that by that time
it is no longer possible to bring to them certain things which
belong to the pre-adolescent stage and that the opportunity
for doing so has been missed. Therefore, in order to prevent
a one-sided attitude in later life, one must endeavor to give
to pre-puberty children enough of the right content to last
them through the coming stages.
In our times when, fortunately, coeducation in both
primary and secondary education is accepted more and more
readily so that boys and girls work side by side in order to
learn how to cooperate as men and women in social life later
on; it is of special importance to pay heed to what has just
been said. Through it, a contemporary phenomenon, such as
the women’s movements, will be placed upon a really sound
and healthy basis.
During our previous meetings I already mentioned
that really one ought to throw away all school textbooks,
because only the direct and personal relationship of teacher
to pupil should work upon the child. But when it comes to
teaching adolescents, all available textbooks and, for that
matter, almost our entire outer civilization, become one great
source of pain. I know that there are many people who are
unaware of this, because they do not enter real life with suf-
ficiently open eyes. But here again in this outer civilization
we find a marked and one-sidedly masculine character. Any
book on history, on the history of civilization or anthropol-

95
 occurred, but also shows their metamorphosis into ideas
current at the present time. This latter approach to history
shows how impulses which led the past have become current
ideas of the present, and how impulses, in turn, continue to
lead present times further. This Promethean way of looking
at history appeals especially strongly to the feminine element.
However, it would be very one-sided to teach his-
tory in the Promethean style in a girls’ school and in an
Epimethean style in a boys’ school. The minds of the young
men would simply flow back into past times to become even
more rigid than they are already. If only the Promethean way
of teaching history were to be applied in a girls’ school, the
pupils would feel tempted to fly off into futuristic specula-
tions. Everywhere they would feel attracted to those impulses
for which they happened to have a natural liking. We will
also achieve a more balanced social life only if we add to
the Epimethean way, which up until now is practically the
only one available, a historical outlook bearing the prophetic
marks of Prometheus. Then, if both attitudes are alive in our
lessons, we shall at last achieve the right approach to history
for pupils who have reached the age of sexual maturity.
One can characterize the astral body from many dif-
ferent aspects, and one of them is based on what happens in
the human being during the development of sexual maturity. If
one observes the relevant phenomena and their underlying
forces, one will arrive at a picture of the astral body, because
puberty is the time of its birth, the time when it can be freely
used by the human being.
St. Augustine, the medieval writer, tried to approach
the human astral body in yet another way. Here I wish to
point out that in his writings one finds a description of
man’s invisible members which is still in agreement with
the one given in anthroposophy. His findings, however,
were the outcome of an instinctive clairvoyance, once the
common heritage of all mankind, and not the result of a
conscious investigation into the spiritual realm, as practiced
in anthroposophy. The way in which St. Augustine describes

96
the women taking their proper place in our cultural life. They
should be allowed to contribute their specifically feminine
qualities, but, at the same time, they must be careful not to
introduce anything they have adopted from our male-
oriented civilization.
Whenever we, as teachers, approach the growing hu-
man being, we must be aware of the striking contrast between
pre-puberty and post-puberty years. Let us take a concrete
example: There is Milton’s Paradise Lost. It would be good to
use it in our lessons. The question is, when? Those of you
who have thought over what has been said so far and who
have understood my remarks about the right time for intro-
ducing the narrative and descriptive element, will find that
this work by Milton—as all epic poetry in general—would
become suitable material after the tenth year. Also Homer
will be appreciated best if taught between the tenth and the
fourteenth years. On the other hand, it would be premature
to use Shakespeare as study material already at this stage for,
in order to be ready for dramatic poetry, the pupil must at
least have entered puberty. To absorb the dramatic element at
an earlier age would mean that the pupils concerned would
have to drive something out of themselves prematurely,
something which, later on, they would definitely miss.
What I tried to indicate just now can be experienced
vividly if one has to give, for example, history lessons to boys
and girls after their entry into puberty. Both masculine and
feminine forces were at work during the actual historical hap-
penings, though in a different form from that of today. Yet all
historical accounts available for teaching adolescents bear a
decidedly masculine quality, as if they had been compiled by
Epimetheus. Girls who have reached sexual maturity show
little inclination towards such an approach. Boys may find it
somewhat boring, but in their case it is not impossible to use
this Epimethean way, which is one of judging, of holding on
to what can be ascertained and established.
But there is also a Promethean way of looking at
history which does not only record the events that actually

97
 looks entirely different. Anyone who uses products of mod-
ern technology without having any knowledge of how they
work or of how they were made is like a person in a prison
cell without a window through which he would at least be
able to look out into nature, into freedom.
Educators ought to be fully aware of this fact. With
the adolescent’s experience of the differentiation between
the sexes, the time is ripe for the understanding of yet other
differentiations in modern life. The pupil now needs to be
introduced to the practical aspects of life, and this is the
reason why, with the approach of puberty, we include crafts,
such as spinning and weaving, in our curriculum. Naturally,
such a plan brings many difficulties in its wake, certainly
from the timetable point of view. When planning our cur-
riculum, we must also bear in mind the demands of other
training centers, such as universities, technical colleges, or
other similar institutions, to which our pupils may wish to
gain entry. This, in turn, makes it imperative for us to include
some subject matter which, in our opinion, is of lesser value
for life. It really causes us a great deal of trouble and pain to
achieve a balanced curriculum which is entirely dependent
on strict soul economy in teaching. It is a most difficult task,
but not an impossible one.
It can be achieved if the teacher develops a sense
of what is of real importance for life and if he is capable of
getting it across to his pupils in the most economical and
simplified ways, so that eventually they will learn to know
what they are doing when using a telephone, a tram, or any
other modern invention. We must aim at making our pupils
familiar with the ways of our present civilization, so that
they can see sense in it. Already before the age of puberty
the teacher has to prepare his chemistry and physics lessons
in such a way that, after the onset of puberty, he can build
upon what was given and extend it to become the basis for
an understanding of the practical spheres of life.
Here we must consider yet another point, namely that
the pupils are now entering an age when, at least to a certain

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the astral body becoming independent at puberty is truly
characteristic of human life. He says it is due to the funda-
mental properties of the astral body that the human being is
able to become acquainted with everything of a man-made
origin which affects human life. If we build a house, make a
plough, or invent a spinning machine, we do so by making
use of forces which are directly bound to the astral body. It
is a fact that the human being learns with his astral body to
know everything which is the product of human activities
within his surroundings. It is, therefore, fully consistent
with a true knowledge of man if we, as educators, introduce
the adolescent to the practical sides of life which represent
the results of human ingenuity. This, however, is a far more
complicated process today than in St. Augustine’s times,
when life was altogether simpler. Only by applying what,
during previous lectures, I called ”soul-economy in teaching”
can we hope to succeed in planning an education for pupils
aged fifteen to twenty, or even older, which will gradually
introduce them to the manifold contrivances surrounding
them today. Just think for a moment of how much we fall
short of this task in our present civilization. You only need
to ask yourselves how many people there are who regularly
use the telephone, the tramway, or even a steamship without
having the faintest idea of how they work. In our civilization
people are almost engulfed by a technology which they do
not understand. Those who believe that only our conscious
experiences are of real importance will dismiss these remarks
as irrelevant. Certainly, it is easy enough to enjoy life con-
sciously if one is satisfied with buying a tram ticket in order
to be set down at the place of one’s choice, or if one receives
a telegram without having any idea of how the message ever
reached the recipient, without having the slightest notion of
what a Morse apparatus is like. The ordinary consciousness
is unconcerned about whether it understands the processes
or not, and from this point of view, it is arguable enough
whether these things matter or not. But if one looks at what
is happening in the depths of the unconscious, the picture

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 see any reason why older pupils should not be given the task
of manufacturing certain articles in school workshops to be
sold on the open market. This has already been achieved in
some of our prisons, where prisoners’ products are being
sold outside.
A young person should remain within a school set-
ting for as long as possible, provided that life at school is both
constructive and healthy. For it is in keeping with the inner
nature of the human being to enter life gradually and not to
be flung into it too early and all of a sudden. It is just because
the older generation has shown so little understanding of the
needs of the younger generation that there exists today such
a strong international youth movement, the justification of
which is understood least of all by the older people. There
are deep reasons for the emergence of this movement, which
ought to be not only recognized but also guided into the right
channels. This, however, is only possible if the principles of
education, too, are guided into the right channels.
One of the main objectives of Waldorf education is
to fit the students for life as far as this is possible, so that
when a young person reaches the early twenties—when his
ego enables him to take his full share in social life—he can
develop the right relationship to the world at large. At that
time, young people should be able to feel a certain kinship
with their elders; for, after all, it was their generation which
provided the wherewithal used by the young generation. The
young folk should feel appreciation of and understanding for
the achievements of the older generation. Thus, when sitting
in a chair, they should not only realize that the chair was made
by someone belonging to the generation of their fathers, but
they should also know something about how it was made.
And when we turn to the life of feeling, we find there
something which takes us out of ourselves, which leads us out
into the surrounding world. When experiencing gratitude, we
find ourselves confronting other beings. But if we can identify
ourselves with other beings to the extent of experiencing them
as ourselves, then something begins to develop in our feeling

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extent, they need to be grouped according to whether they
will follow a more academic or a practical career later on. At
the same time we must never forget that an education based
on a true knowledge of man will always strive for balance in
teaching, for teaching the whole man. What is needed here is
the knowledge of how to achieve this in practice. Naturally,
we must equip pupils of a more academic disposition with
what they will need for their future schooling. At the same
time, in order to retain a proper balance, any specialization—
also during later ages—should be compensated for by some
widening out into otherwise neglected areas. If on the one
hand we direct the pupils’ will impulses more towards the
academic side, we must give them also some concrete insights
into practical life, so that they will not lose sight of life as a
totality. In this way we are actually fulfilling the demands
of the human astral body which, when it guides conscious
will impulses in a certain direction, at the same time feels the
need for appropriate counter impulses.
To give a concrete example: It would be quite
wrong—to quote an extreme case—if a statistician were to
spend his time making statistics of the consumption of soap
in certain districts without having the slightest notion of
how soap is manufactured. No one can arrive at a proper
understanding of such statistics unless he has at least some
general knowledge of how soap is made in factories.
Those of our pupils who are likely to follow an
academic career should gain at least some experience of
practical work involving manual skills. On the other hand,
pupils who are likely to take on an apprenticeship for a trade
should become acquainted also with the kind of background
needed for the more academic types of professions. All this
should be part of the general school curriculum. It is not
right to send boys and girls straight into the factories to work
there alongside grownup workers. Instead the various crafts
should be introduced at school, so that the young people can
use what they have learned there as a kind of model before
they find their way into more professional skills. Nor do I

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 that one no longer knows what to do with youngsters when
they reach sexual maturity. And the reason for this failure lies
in the children not having been prepared adequately for this
event because one did not know how to handle the previous
stages of childhood. If adolescents have been guided rightly
up to this incisive time in their lives, one does not have the
same difficulties with them.
Soul Economy and Waldorf Education.
Hudson, N.Y.: A n t h r o p o s o p h i c
Press, 1986.

Authority
When the child has outgrown the stage of authority,
when he has attained puberty and through this has physi-
ologically quite a different connection with the outer world
than before, he also attains in soul and body (in his bodily life
in its most comprehensive sense) a quite different relation-
ship to the world than he had earlier. This is the time of the
awakening of spirit in humanity. This now is the time when
the human being seeks out the rational and logical aspect
in all verbal expression. Only now can we hope to appeal
with any success to the intellect in our education and instruc-
tion. It is immensely important that we do not consciously or
unconsciously call upon the intellect prematurely, as people
are so prone to do today.
And now let us ask ourselves: What is happening
when we observe how a child takes on authority, everything
that is to guide and lead his soul? For a child does not listen
to us in order to check and prove what we say. Unconsciously
the child takes up as an inspiration what works upon his
soul, what, through his soul, builds and influences his body.
And we can only rightly educate when we understand the
wonderful, unconscious inspiration which holds sway in the
whole life of a child between seven and fourteen, when we
can work into the continuous process of inspiration. To do this
we must acquire still another power of spiritual cognition we
must add inspiration itself to intuition. And when we have
led the child on his way as far as the fourteenth year we make

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life which we call love in the true sense of the word. Love is
the second mood of soul which needs to be nurtured with
regard to the ethical and religious life. It is the kind of love
which we can foster at school by doing everything we can
so that the pupils will love each other. It is the kind of love to
which we can give a firm grounding by aiding the children’s
gradual transition from the stage of imitation and that of
authority between their ninth and tenth years to a genuine
feeling of love for their teachers, whose bearing and general
behavior at school naturally must warrant it.
In this way we lay the foundations of a twofold hu-
man quality: on the one hand we implant what is contained
in the ancient call, ”Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Since at
the same time we are also developing a feeling of gratitude
which points more to a comprehension of the world, ”Love
thy neighbor as thyself” is complemented by the words,
”Love the Divine Being above all things.”
Such words of truth have a familiar ring to most
people today, for they have been sounding across the ages.
However, to know them in theory and to repeat them is not
the point. What matters is that in our immediate present,
and every age sees a renewal of mankind, we find ways and
means of putting them into practice. Nowadays one hears
all too often, ”Love thy neighbor as thyself and God above
all things.” Yet one sees little evidence of it. Life at school
should help to bring about that such things are not merely
talked about, but that they become infused with new life.
There is only one way which will offer a firm foun-
dation for a mature capacity to love, and that is the natural
transformation of the childhood stages of imitation and au-
thority to that of love. And if we work in harmony with the
child’s natural development towards the attainment of love,
the quality of which should be self-evident when seen in this
context, we no longer need to invent long-winded theories of
the kind that are fabricated by materialistic thinkers with the
intention of guiding the newly sexually mature adolescent in
his first experiences of love. A whole literature has been writ-
ten on this subject, all of which suffers from the simple fact

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 tional questions. Now we do not endow a child with moral
impulses by giving him commands, by saying: You must do
this, this has to be done, this is good, or by wanting to prove
to him that a thing is good and must be done. Or by saying:
That is bad, that is wicked, you must not do that, and by
wanting to prove that a certain thing is bad. A child has not
as yet the intellectual attitude of an adult towards good and
evil, towards the whole world of morality. He has to grow up
to it. And this he will only do on reaching puberty, when the
rhythmic system has accomplished its essential task and the
intellectual powers are ripe for complete development. Then
the human being may experience the satisfaction of forming
moral judgment in contact with life itself. We must not engraft
moral judgment onto the child. We must so lay the foundation
for moral judgment that when the child awakens at puberty he
can form his own moral judgment from observation of life.
The last way to attain this is to give finite commands
to a child. We can achieve it, however, if we work by exam-
ples, or by presenting pictures to the child’s imagination: for
instance through biographies or descriptions of good men
or bad men; or by inventing circumstances which present a
picture, an imagination of goodness to the child’s mind. Since
the rhythmic system is particularly active in the child during
this period, pleasure and displeasure can arise in him, not
judgment as to good and evil, but sympathy with the good
which the child beholds presented in an image or antipathy
to the evil which he beholds so presented. It is not a case
of appealing to the child’s intellect, of saying, ”Thou shalt”
or ”Thou shalt not,” but of fostering aesthetic judgment, so
that the child shall begin to take pleasure in goodness, shall
feel sympathy when he sees goodness, and feel dislike and
antipathy when he beholds evil. This is a very different thing
from working on the intellect, by way of precepts formulated
by the intellect. For the child will only be awake for such
precepts when it is no longer our business to educate him,
namely, when he is a man and learns from life itself. And we
should not rob the child of the satisfaction of awakening to

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a peculiar discovery. If we attempt to give the child things
that we have conceived logically, we become wearisome to
him. To begin with he will listen, when we thus formulate
everything in a logical way; but if the young man or maiden
must rethink our logic after us, he will gradually become
weary. Also in this period we, as teachers, need something
besides pure logic. This can be seen from a general example.
Take a scientist such as Ernst Haeckel who lived
entirely in external nature. He was himself tremendously
interested in all his microscopic studies, in all he built up.
If this is taught to pupils, they learn it, but they cannot de-
velop the same interest for it. We as teachers must develop
something different from what the child has in himself. If the
child is coming into the domain of logic at the age of puberty,
we (in our turn) must develop imagery, imagination. If we
ourselves can pour into picture form the subjects we have to
give the children, if we can give them pictures, so that they
receive images of the world and the work and meaning of the
world, pictures which we create for them, as in a high form
of art—then they will be held by what we have to tell them.
So, in this third period of life we are directed to imagi-
nation, as in the other two to intuition and inspiration. And
we now have to seek for the spiritual basis which can make
it possible for us as teachers to work from out of imagination,
inspiration and intuition—which can make it possible not
merely to think of spirit, but to act with spirit.
And when the child has passed the age of puberty—
the age in which young ladies and gentlemen come into full
possession of their own minds, their own spirits—he enters
upon the age in which we must no longer speak of him as a
child. Thus, man progresses from what is of the body, by way
of the soul, into the spiritual. But, as we shall see, we cannot
teach what is of the spirit. It has to be freely absorbed from
the world. Humans can only learn of spiritual things from life.
If we now turn to the moral aspect, the question is
how we can best get the child to develop moral impulses?
Here we are dealing with the most important of all educa-

105
 which must be embraced by the teacher’s whole being, not
held as theory, are: Reverent gratitude to the world in the
person of the child which we contemplate every day, for the
child presents a problem sent to us by divine worlds. Thank-
fulness to the universe. Love for what we have to do with the
child. Respect for the freedom of the child—a freedom we
must not endanger; for it is to this freedom we educate the
child, that he may stand in freedom in the world at our side.
Among girls, in certain circumstances, you will find
a slight tendency to chlorosis, to anemia, in the whole
developing organism. The blood in the girl’s organism be-
comes poor; she becomes pale, anemic. This is due to the fact
that during these fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth years
the spiritual nature is separated out from the total organism;
and this spiritual nature, which formerly worked within the
whole being, regulated the blood. Now the blood is left to
itself. Therefore, it must be rightly prepared so that its own
power may accomplish this larger task. Girls are apt, then, to
become pale, anemic, and one must know that this anemia
comes about when one has failed to arouse a girl’s interest in
the things one has been teaching or telling her. Where atten-
tion and interest are kept alive, the whole physical organism
participates in the activity which is engaging the inmost self
of the human being, and then anemia does not arise in the
same way.
With boys the case is opposite. The boys get a kind
of neuritis, a condition in which there is too much blood in
the brain. Hence, during these years the brain behaves as
though it were congested with blood. In girls we find a lack
of blood in the body, in boys a superabundance, particularly
in the head—a superabundance of white blood, which is a
wrong form of venous and arterial blood. This is because
the boys have been given too many sensations, they have
been over-stimulated and have had to hurry from sensation
to sensation without pause or proper rest. And you will see
that even the troublesome behavior and difficulties among
fourteen-, fifteen- and sixteen-year-old children are character-
istic of this state and are connected with the whole physical

106
morality of his own accord. And we shall not do this if we
give him the right preparation during the rhythmic period
of his life; if we train him to take an aesthetic pleasure in
goodness, an aesthetic dislike of evil, if here, also, we work
through imagery.
Otherwise, when the child awakens after puberty he
will feel an inward bondage. He will not perhaps realize this
bondage consciously, but throughout his subsequent life he
will lack an important experience: morality has awakened
within me, moral judgment has developed. We cannot attain
this inner satisfaction by means of abstract moral instruction;
it must be rightly prepared by working in this manner for
the child’s morality.
If we have received the child in religious reverence, if
we have educated him in love up to the time of puberty, then
our proper course after this will be to leave the youth’s spirit
free, and to hold intercourse with him on terms of equality.
The aim is not to touch the spirit but to let it be awakened.
When the child reaches puberty, we shall best attain our aim
of giving the child over to free use of his intellectual and spiri-
tual powers if we respect the spirit and say to ourselves: You
can remove hindrances from the spirit, physical hindrances
and also, up to a point, hindrances of the soul. What the spirit
has to learn it learns because you have removed the impedi-
ments. If we remove impediments, the spirit will develop in
contact with life itself even in very early youth. Our rightful
place as educators is to be removers of hindrances.
Hence, we must see to it that we do not make the
children into copies of ourselves, that we do not seek forc-
ibly and tyrannically to perpetuate what is in ourselves in
those who in the natural course of things develop beyond us.
Each child in every age brings something new into the world
from divine regions, and it is our task as educators to remove
bodily and physical obstacles out of his way, to remove hin-
drances so that his spirit may enter in full freedom into life.
These then must be regarded as the three golden rules of the
art of education, rules which must imbue the teacher’s whole
attitude and all the impulse of his work. The golden rules

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 from the standpoint of a true human knowledge, this is of
great significance. Growing, the overcoming of the earth’s
gravity by growth, engages the fundamental being of man,
his essential manhood, whereas it is not essentially a concern
of the human being whether a certain organic phenomenon
appears at one stage or another of this life. Actually, certain
cosmic, extra-human influences, which work in upon the
human being from the external world, affect the female or-
ganism more intensely between the tenth and twelfth years
than they do the male organism. In a certain sense the female
organism between the tenth and twelfth years partakes even
bodily of the supersensible world.
Please realize the importance of this: Between the
tenth and twelfth years, or the thirteenth and fourteenth,
the female organism begins to dwell in a spiritual element.
It becomes permeated by spirit at this period. And this af-
fects the processes of the blood in girls in a very special way.
During these years the blood circulation is, as it were, in con-
tact with the whole universe. It must take its time from the
whole world, from the universe, and be regulated by it. And
experiments carried out to find the relationship between the
rhythm of pulse and breath between ten and twelve years,
even if done with external instruments, would find the results
among girls other than among boys.
The boy of thirteen or fourteen begins to show a na-
ture hitherto unrevealed, and now he begins to grow more
than the girls do. He grows in all directions. He makes up for
the delay in his growing. At the same time his relationship
to the outer world is quite other than it was in the earlier
periods of his life. And so in boys it is the nervous system
which is now affected, rather than the circulation of the blood.
Thus, it can easily happen that the boy’s nervous system gets
overstrained if the instruction at school is not given him in
the right way. For in these years, the form and content of lan-
guage, or of the languages he has learned, have an enormous
influence upon him. The ideas of men enshrined in language,
or in foreign languages, press upon the boy, beset him as it

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development.
When one can view the nature of the human being
in this way, not despising what is physical and bodily, one
can do a great deal for the children’s health as a teacher or
educator. It must be a fundamental principle that spirituality
is false the moment it leads away from the material to some
castle in the clouds. If one has come to despising the body,
and to saying the body is a low thing, it must be suppressed,
flouted, one will most certainly not acquire the power to
educate men soundly. For, you see, you may leave the physi-
cal body out of account, and perhaps you may attain a high
state of abstraction in your spiritual nature, but it will be like
a balloon in the air, flying off. A spirituality not bound to what
is physical in life can give nothing to social evolution on the
earth, and before one can wing one’s way into the Heavens
one must be prepared for the Heavens. This preparation has
to take place on earth.
I alluded yesterday to what takes place when the boys
and girls one is educating come to be fourteen- or fifteen-year
olds and reach puberty. At this stage, a teacher who takes his
responsibilities seriously will encounter many difficulties.
And these difficulties are particularly apparent in a school
or college where the education is derived from the nature of
man. Now, it is out of the question to overcome these difficul-
ties by extraneous discipline. If they are repressed now they
will only reappear later in life in all manner of guises. It is far
better to look them squarely in the face as an intrinsic part
of human nature and to deal with them. In a school like the
Waldorf school where boys and girls are educated together
and are constantly in each other’s company such difficulties
occur very frequently.
We have already referred to the difference between
boys and girls which begins to appear about the tenth year. At
this age girls begin to grow more vigorously and, particularly,
to shoot up in height. Boys’ growth is delayed until around
puberty. After that, the boys catch up with the girls. For one
who observes the fine interplay between spirit, soul and body

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 the nervous system of the fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy.
With girls it is different. But when we aim, as we
should aim, at equal treatment for both sexes, at an equal
recognition, a thing which must come in the future, it is all
the more important to have clearly in view the distinction
between them. So, now, whereas for the boy his own self
becomes a problem, and he is perplexed by himself, for girls
at this time the problem is the world about them. The girl
has taken up into herself something not of the earth. Her
whole nature is developing unconsciously within her. And
a girl of fourteen or fifteen is a being who faces the world
in amazement, finding it full of problems; she is above all, a
being who seeks in the world ideals to live by. Thus, many
things in the outer world become enigmatic to a girl at this
age. To a boy the inner world presents many enigmas. To a
girl it is the outer world.
One must realize, one must come to feel, that one
now has to deal with quite new children—not the same chil-
dren as before. And this change in each child comes, in some
cases, remarkably quickly, so that a teacher not alive to the
transformation going on in the children in his charge may
fail to perceive that he is suddenly confronting a new person.
You see, one of the most essential things in the train-
ing of the Waldorf school teachers themselves is receptivity
to the changes in human nature. And this the teachers have
acquired relatively quickly for reasons which I shall explain. A
Waldorf teacher—if I may express myself paradoxically—has
to be prepared to find a thing completely different tomorrow
from what it was yesterday. This is the real secret of his train-
ing. For instance, one usually thinks in the evening: Tomor-
row the sun will rise and things will be the same as they are
today. Now—to use a somewhat drastic mode of expression
which brings out my meaning—the Waldorf teacher must be
prepared for the sun not to rise one day. For only when one
views human nature afresh like this, without prejudice from
the past, is it possible to apprehend growth and development
in human beings. We may rest in the assurance that things

110
were, while his body grows more delicate. And so at this age
the whole world drones and surges within a boy—the world,
that is, of this earthly environment.
Thus, in girls a year or two sooner is implanted
something of the surrounding universe; in boys earthly en-
vironment is implanted through the medium of language.
This is apparent externally in the boy’s change of voice. And
indirectly, in connection with this transformation in the voice
enormously important things take place in the boy’s whole
organism. In the female organism, this rounding off of the
voice is very slight. On the other hand in connection with
the quickened growing, there has been a preparation in the
organism, which is, as it were, a flowing into the maiden of
supernal worlds. The recent advances of materialistic science
of the world come into their own spiritual view.
When you have the attitude of a Waldorf teacher to-
wards the children, you tend to look in quite a different way
upon a child who has reached puberty, a child who has just
passed through that stage of development which includes the
organic changes I have alluded to. You look upon this child
in quite a different way from that of a person who knows
nothing of all this, who knows nothing of it, that is, from the
spiritual point of view.
A boy of fourteen or fifteen years old echoes in his
being the world around him. That is to say: Words and their
significant content are taken up unconsciously into his ner-
vous system, and they echo and sound in his nerves. The
boy does not know what to do with himself. Something has
come into him which begins to feel foreign to him now that
he is fourteen or fifteen. He comes to be puzzled by himself,
he feels irresponsible. And one who understands human
nature knows well that at no time and to no person, not even
to a philosopher, this two-legged being of the Earth called
Anthropos seems so great a riddle as he does to a fifteen-
year-old boy. For at this age all the powers of the human
soul are beset by mystery. For now the will, the thing most
remote from normal consciousness, makes an assault upon

111
 not be known before we reach a certain time in life, that is,
between about the eighteenth and nineteenth years. Just as it
is impossible to get the second teeth before the seventh year,
so it is impossible to know something in its essential reality
before the eighteenth year. It is simply impossible before the
eighteenth year really to know about those things that are
not just under our noses, things for which active judgment
is necessary. Before this one may have heard something,
may believe something on authority. But one cannot know
anything about it. Before this we cannot unfold that inner
activity of soul necessary for us to say: I know something
about this or that which does not lie in a region accessible to
mere eyes or ears. Such things are hardly mentioned today.
They are, however, exceedingly important for life. If culture
is to find roots again, one must speak about such things and
treat them in a knowledgeable way.
What, then, follows from the fact that before his
eighteenth year the human being cannot, properly speaking,
know anything? It follows that the human being before he
is eighteen must depend upon those who are older, just as
the infant is dependent on his mother’s breast—it is in no
way different.
One answer to this question is found by learning to
perceive—for it is a matter of the unfolding of will and not
of a theoretical solution—that when the child enters earthly
existence, he brings with him the power of imitation; up to
the time of the change of teeth, the child just imitates. Out
of this power of imitation speech is learned. Speech is, so to
speak, poured into the child just as his blood circulation is
poured into him when he comes into earthly existence. But
the child should not come to a more and more conscious edu-
cation by giving him, out of consciousness-soul, knowledge
in the form of truth. In earlier times it was said: Before the
eighteenth year the child cannot know anything, so he must
be led through ability to knowledge which he accepts first
as belief; thereby the forces of knowledge will be awakened
in him between the eighteenth and nineteenth years. For it is

112
out there in the universe will be somewhat conservative. But
when it is a case of that transition in human nature from the
early years of childhood into the fourteenth, fifteenth and
sixteenth years, why then, ladies and gentlemen, the sun that
rose earlier often does not rise. Here, in this microcosm, Man,
in this Anthropos, so great a change has come about that we
face an entirely new situation, as though nature upon some
day should confront us with a world of darkness, a world in
which our eyes were of no use.
Openness, a readiness to receive new wisdom daily,
a disposition which can subdue past knowledge to a latent
feeling which leaves the mind clear for what is new—it is
this that keeps a man healthy, fresh and active. And it is this
open heart for the changes in life, for its unexpected and
continuous freshness, which must form the essential mood
and nature of a Waldorf teacher.
Spiritual Grounds of Education.
London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1976.

True Knowledge—Eighteen- and Nineteen-Year-Olds

Now let us suppose that a three-year-old child were
to resolve not to pass through the tedious process of waiting
for its second teeth until the seventh year, but this child were
to say: It is weary work to go through four more years until I
get my second teeth; I will get them at once. (I could use other
comparisons which would appear still more grotesque, but
this one will suffice.) Such a thing is impossible, is it not? For
there are certain conditions of natural development.
And so, too, it is a condition of natural development,
for which today only few people have any feeling, that only
from a certain age onwards the human being can know some-
thing about the connections in life of which he must know,
but which cannot be exhausted by information about external
things. Naturally even at the age of nine we may know, for
example, that the human being has ten fingers. But matters
where judgment formed by active thinking is necessary can-

113
 concepts. But in the life of feeling, deep within the soul, there
lives unconsciously a question in the heart of the growing
human being. This question takes different forms in dif-
ferent people. But a question arises which put in the form
of a concept might be expressed as follows: Up to now the
astral body has believed in other human beings; now I need
something that somebody says to me so that I may believe in
him or in others in my environment. Those who as children
have most resisted this are those who need it most. Between
the ninth and tenth years the human being, to strengthen his
ego, begins to be dependent on an older person in whom he
can trust—without this trust needing to be drummed in—in
whom he can believe with the help of the artistic atmosphere
that has been created. And woe betide him if this question
which may still be one for many children up to their sixteenth
or seventeenth year and sometimes even to the years I men-
tioned yesterday, the eighteenth or nineteenth—woe betide
him if nothing happens to enable this question of the young
to be answered by the old so that the young say: I am grateful
that I have learned from the old what I can learn only from
the old; what he can tell me, he alone can tell me, for it will
be different if I learn it when I am old.
Through this can be created something in an edu-
cational way which, applied in the right way, can be of the
greatest significance for the epoch of the consciousness soul,
which, in fact, in the earliest times of the Patriarchs, was
already alive between young and old. Then, every young
person said to himself: The old man with his snow-white hair
has experiences which can only come when one is as old as
he. Before then the necessary organs are not there. Therefore,
he must tell his experiences to us. We are dependent on what
he relates, because he alone can relate it. Certainly I shall one
day be as old as he. But I shall not experience what he tells
for thirty-five or forty years. The times will have progressed
by then and I shall experience something different. But what
I want to learn is only to be learned from him.
Before puberty it is preeminently an experience of

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out of the inner being that the forces of knowledge must be
awakened. To keep the young waiting until their eighteenth
year, adults behaved in relation to youth so as to show what
they were capable of, afterwards educating them to experi-
ence together with the teacher in a provisional way, up to the
eighteenth year, what later they would be expected to know.
Up to the eighteenth or nineteenth year the ”acquisition of
knowledge” was provisional, because before the eighteenth
or nineteenth year it is not possible really to know anything.
But in fact no teacher can convey knowledge to any boy or
girl if in their feeling there has not ripened the conviction: He
is capable! A teacher has not the right sense of responsibility
towards the human being if he wants to set to work before
the young take it as a matter of course that he knows his job.
Science does not leave the human being alone even
in earliest childhood. It cannot very well be otherwise. For
the teacher is so drilled in systematized botany (and many
books are entirely given over to systematized botany) that
he believes he is committing a sin if he speaks to the children
about botany in a way that is not scientific. But what is found
in a botanical textbook cannot mean anything to a child before
he is ten, and it is not until he is at least eighteen or nineteen
that it can acquire any real significance for him.
Such is the situation. Now I have no intention of
creating another intellectual theory about education. The aim
is to create an artistic atmosphere between the older and the
younger. But when this comes about, something happens
which must occur if young people are to grow into the world
in a healthy way. What the human being of today grows into
can be described quite concretely. Between the ninth and tenth
years an undefined feeling lives in the soul of every human
being who is not a psychopath. There need not necessarily
exist either a clear or unclear concept of this. But it begins to
live within the human being from his ninth or tenth year. Up
until then what is called the astral body alone is concerned
with man’s life of soul. But from that time onwards the force
of the ego nature first begins to stir. It is not formulated in

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 One can clearly see how what is thus flashing, stream-
ing, and surging through language delivers a final jolt to the
physical body before becoming liberated. Look at a boy of
this age and listen to how his voice changes during puberty.
It is a change equally as decisive as the change of teeth in the
seventh year. When the larynx begins to speak with a differ-
ent undertone of voice, it is the last jerk the astral body, that
is, the forces flashing and working through speech, makes in
the physical body. A corresponding change also occurs in the
female organism, only in a different way and not in the larynx.
It is brought about through other organs. Having undergone
these changes, the human being has become sexually mature.
And now the young person enters that period of life
when what previously radiated into the body from the nerve-
sense system is no longer the determining factor. Now it is
the motor system, the will system, so intimately connected
with the metabolic system, that takes over the leading role.
The metabolism lives itself out in physical movements. Pa-
thology in adults can show us how at this later age illnesses
radiate out predominantly from the metabolic system. (Even
migraine is a metabolic illness.) We can see how in adults ill-
nesses no longer spread from the head, as they do in children.
It does not matter so much where an illness manifests itself.
What matters is to know the source from which it radiates
out into the body.
Only when the transition from the second life-
period to the third takes place is the possibility given for—
how shall I call them now in these modern times?—the young
men and the young women to observe the activities going
on around them. Previously it was the meaningful gesture
that was perceived, and later the meaningful language of
the events around the child. Only now does the possibility
exist for the adolescent to observe the activities performed
by other people in the environment. I have also said that
out of the perception of meaningful gestures, and through
the experience of gratitude, the love of God develops, and
that through the meaningful language coming from the sur-

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the pre-earthly. The pre-earthly sheds its light through every
movement of the hands, every look, through the very stress-
ing of words. Actually, it is the quality of the gesture, the
word, the thought, of the teacher that works through to the
child and which the child is seeking.
And when as grown-up people—so grown-up that
we have reached the age of fifteen or sixteen or even beyond—
we meet other human beings, then the matter is still more
complicated. Then what attracts or repels others in a human
being actually veils itself in a darkness impenetrable to the
world of abstract concepts. But if, with the help of anthro-
posophy, we investigate what one can really experience in five
minutes but cannot describe in fifty years, we find that it is
what rises up from the previous earth-life or series of earth-
lives into the present life of the soul and what is exchanged.
This indefinite, indefinable element that comes upon us when
we meet as adults is what shines through from earlier lives
on earth into the present, not only the pre-earthly existence
but everything the human being has passed through in the
way of destiny in his successive earth-lives.

The Younger Generation.

Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic
Press, 1967.

The Transition from Childhood into Adolescence

When the child has reached puberty, the astral body,
which has been working through language up to this point,
now becomes free—free to work independently. Previously,
the forces working through the medium of language were
needed for the building up of the inner organization of the
child’s body. But after puberty, these forces, which are also
working in many other spheres—in all that is form-giving,
both with regard to plastic and musical forms—these mani-
fold forces are becoming liberated, to be used for the activity
of thinking. Only now does the young person become an
intellectualizing and logically thinking person.

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 quite apart from the dull ones, about whom we will have to
speak later. You surely will admit that it is not possible to
select only geniuses for the teaching profession, and that it
is bound to happen that teachers are not endowed with the
genius that some of their pupils will display in later life. Yet
teachers must be able to educate not only pupils of their own
caliber but also those who, with their exceptional brightness,
will far outshine them.
However, this the teachers will be able to do only if
they get out of the habit of hoping to make their pupils into
what they themselves are. If they can make a firm resolve to
stand in the school as selflessly as possible, and to obliter-
ate not only their own sympathies and antipathies but also
their personal ambitions, in order to dedicate themselves to
all that comes from the pupils, then they will rightly educate
potential geniuses as well as dull-witted pupils. Only such
an attitude will lead to the realization that all education,
fundamentally, is a matter of self-education.
Basically, there is no education other than self-
education, whatever the level may be. In its full depth this
is recognized in anthroposophy, which through spiritual
investigation has conscious knowledge of repeated earth
lives. Every education is self-education, and as teachers we
can only provide the environment for the child’s own self-
education. We have to provide the most favorable conditions
in which, through our agency, the child can educate himself
in accordance with his own destiny.
This is the attitude the teacher should have towards
the child, and it can be developed only through an ever-growing
awareness of this fact. For people in general there may be
many kinds of prayers. Over and above these there is this
special prayer for the teacher:

Dear God, make that I, as far as my personal ambi-

tions are concerned, quite obliterate myself. And
Christ make true in me the Pauline word—Not I,
but the Christ in me.

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roundings, love for all things human is developed as the
foundation for the individual’s sense of morality. If now the
adolescent is enabled to observe other people’s activities in
the right way, love of work will develop. While gratitude
must be allowed to grow and love must be awakened, what
is to evolve now must make its appearance with the young
person’s full inner awareness. We must have enabled him or
her to enter this new phase of development after puberty with
full inner awareness, so that in a certain way the adolescent
comes to find the self. Then love of work will develop. This
love of work has to grow freely on the strength of what has
already been attained. It is love of work in general and also
love for what one is doing oneself. At the moment when an
understanding for the activities of other people awakens, a
conscious attitude towards love of work, “love of doing,”
must arise as a complementary image. In this way, during
the intervening stages, the child’s early play has become
transmuted into the right conception of work, and this is
what we must aim for in our society today.

Instructions to Teachers
What part do teachers and educators have to play in
all this? It is something that belongs to one of the most dif-
ficult things in their vocational lives. For the best thing they
can do for the child during the first and second life-periods is
to aid what will awaken out of its own accord with the advent
of puberty. When, to their everlasting surprise, they witness
time and again how the child’s individuality is gradually
emerging, they have to realize that they themselves have been
only a tool. Without this attitude, sparked off by this realiza-
tion, one can hardly be a proper teacher. For in one’s classes
one is faced with the most varied types of individualities,
and it would never do to stand in one’s classroom with the
feeling that all one’s pupils ought to become copies of oneself.
Such a sentiment should never arise. And why not? Because
it could well happen that, if one is fortunate enough, among
one’s pupils there might be three or four budding geniuses,

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 qualities which, to a greater or lesser extent, lived in the
initiators, namely loving devotion to what they were doing,
and an understanding interest in what the others were doing.
If one looks at the social ferment in our times with
open eyes, one will find that the most peculiar ideas have
arisen, especially in the social sphere, simply because the
present situation was not understood properly. Let me give
you an example.
Today, the message of so-called Marxism regarding
human labor and its relationship to social relationships is
being drummed not just into thousands but into millions of
heads. And if you investigate what its author alleges to have
discovered—something with which millions of people are
being indoctrinated so that they look upon it as their social-
ist gospel, to use as a means for political agitation—you will
find that it all rests upon a fundamental error regarding the
attitude towards social realities. Karl Marx wants to base
the value of work done on the human energy spent while
performing it. This leads to a complete absurdity. For from
the point of view of energy output, it makes no difference
whether someone cuts a certain quantity of firewood within
a given time or whether—if he can afford to avoid such a me-
nial task—he spends his energy and time on treading down
the pedals of a wheel specially designed to combat incipient
obesity. According to Karl Marx’s reckoning there is no dif-
ference between the human energy expended on those two
physical activities. But cutting firewood has its proper place
within the social order. Treading the pedals of a slimming
wheel, on the other hand, is of no social use, because it only
provides a hygienic effect for the person doing it. And yet,
Karl Marx’s yardstick for measuring the value of work con-
sists of calculating the food consumption necessary for work
to be done. This way of assessing the value of labor within the
context of the national economy is simply absurd. Neverthe-
less, all kinds of calculations were made towards this end.
But the importance of one factor was ignored, namely loving
devotion towards what one is doing and an understanding

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 This prayer, addressed to God in general and to Christ
in particular, continues: “. . . that the Holy Spirit may hold
sway in the teacher.” This is the true Trinity.
If one is able to live in these thoughts while in close
proximity to the pupils, then the hoped-for results of this
education can at the same time also become a social deed. But
here other matters, too, come into play, and I can only touch
upon them. Just consider what in the opinion of many people
would have to be done in order to improve today’s social
order. They expect better conditions through the implementa-
tion of external measures. You need only look at the dreadful
experiments that are being carried out in Russia. There the
happiness of all the world is sought through the inaugura-
tion of external programs. It is believed that improvements
in the social sphere depend on the creation of institutions.
And yet, these are the least significant factors within social
development. You can set up any institutions you like, be
they monarchist or republican, democratic or socialist. The
decisive factor will always be the kind of people who live
and work under any of these systems. And for those who
spread a socializing influence, the two things that matter
are a loving devotion towards what they are doing, and an
understanding interest in what the others are doing.
Think about what can flow from just these two at-
tributes. With nothing less than that, people can again work
together in the social sphere. But this will have to become a
tradition over eons. As long as you work only externally, you
will produce no tangible results. You have to bring out these
two qualities from the depths of human nature. If you want
to introduce changes by external means, even if these are
set up with the best of intentions, you will find that people
will not respond in the way expected. And, conversely, their
actions may elude your own understanding. Institutions
are the outcome of individual endeavor—you can see this
everywhere. They were brought into being by the very two

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 third fundamental virtue, which is the sense of duty. It is
impossible to drill it into young people. It can only unfold
as part of natural development, and this only on the founda-
tion of gratitude—in the sense described yesterday—and on
the ability to love. If these two virtues have been developed
rightly, when sexual maturity is reached, the sense of duty
will emerge, the experience of which is an essential part of
life. For what belongs to the realm of the human soul and
spirit has to develop according to its own laws and conditions,
just as what belongs to the realm of the physical has to obey
the physical laws. Just as an arm or a hand has to be allowed
to grow freely, that is, in accordance with the inner forces of
growth, just as these must not be artificially controlled by,
say, being fixed into a rigid iron frame—although in certain
regions of the earth there is a custom of restricting the free
growth of feet in a way similar to that in which we, here,
impede the free unfolding of the child’s soul life—so must
the adolescent feel that this new sense of duty is arising freely
from within. Then the young person will integrate him or
herself rightly into society, and Goethe’s dictum will find
its noblest fulfillment. ”Duty is to love what one commands
oneself to do.” Here again you see how love plays into
everything, and how the sense of duty has to be developed in
such a way that eventually one comes to love it. In this way
one properly integrates oneself as a human being into society.
And then, from the previous experience of right authority,
the ability of supporting oneself on one’s own strength will
evolve.
What finally reveals itself as genuine piety, when seen
with spiritual eyes, is the transmuted, body-linked, natural
religiousness during the time before the change of teeth, as I
have described it to you in fair detail. These are all things that
have to be deeply rooted in a true pedagogy and its practical
application. Soon enough, one will realize how necessary it
is to let the curriculum, from the twelfth year until puberty,
and, above all, after puberty, tend more and more towards
practical activities. In the Waldorf school the ground for this
task is already prepared early on. In our school, boys and

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interest in what others are doing.
What we must achieve when in the company of the
young is that by our own conduct a full consciousness of the
social implications contained in those two sentences will enter
the minds of the adolescents. To do so we must realize what
it means to stand by the child in such a way that we aid his
own self-education.
Now, to come back to our point, after the twelfth year
it becomes increasingly difficult to find a workable compromise
with regard to our way of teaching. Up to the twelfth year
it is just possible to do so, so long as one really knows what
is going on inside the pupils. But afterwards the situation
begins to get more and more difficult, because from that time
on, the curricula and the required standards of achievement
no longer have any connection with what corresponds to the
nature of the growing human being; they are chosen entirely
arbitrarily. The subject matter to be covered in any one year is
chosen entirely autocratically, and one simply can no longer
bridge the conflicting demands made, on the one hand, by
the powers that be, and, on the other, by what springs directly
from the evolving human being. Remember what I said yes-
terday, by the time puberty is passed, the adolescent ought
to have been helped towards developing sufficient maturity
and inner strength to enter the realm of human freedom.
I referred to the two fundamental virtues—gratitude, for
which the ground has to be prepared before the change of
teeth, and the ability to love, for which the ground needs to
be prepared between the change of teeth and puberty—this
theme was developed yesterday.
Furthermore, we have seen that, with regard to the
life of ethics, the soul life of the child must also experience
feelings of sympathy and antipathy towards what is good
and evil. If one approaches a pupil of this age with a ”thou
shalt” attitude, one will hinder the right development in the
years to come. On the other hand, if instead, through natural
authority, one moves the pre-pubescent child to love the good
and hate the evil, then during the time of sexual maturity,
out of the inner being of the adolescent, there develops the

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 the book of human nature, we are simply led to introduce
the children—or rather, the young men and women, as we
should call them now—to the art of weaving and of setting
up a loom. From there it follows quite naturally that they
should also learn to spin, and that they gain a working idea
of how paper is manufactured, for instance. They should
be taught not only mechanics and chemistry, but also how
to understand at least simple examples of mechanical and
chemical processes used in technology. These they should
reproduce on a small scale with their own hands, so that
they will know how various articles are manufactured. This
change of direction towards the more practical side of life
must definitely be made possible. It has to be striven for with
honest and serious intentions, if one wishes to build up the
right curriculum, specifically for the upper classes.
But this can land one in terrible difficulties. It is just
possible to equip children under nine with sufficient learning
skills for a transfer into Class IV of another school, without
neglecting what needs to be done with them for sound peda-
gogical reasons. This is also still possible in the case of twelve
year olds who are to enter Class VII. It is already becoming
very difficult indeed to bring pupils to the required standards
of learning for their transfer to a Gymnasium or Realschule.
But tremendous difficulties have to be overcome if pupils
from our upper classes have to change to one or the other of
these senior schools.
In such cases one would do well to recall the days
of ancient Greece, where a wise Greek had to put up with
being told by an Egyptian, ”You Greeks are like children—
you know nothing about all the changes the earth has gone
through.” A wise Greek had to listen to the judgment of a
wise Egyptian. But nevertheless, the Greeks had not become
so infantile as to demand of a growing youth, who was to be
educated in one or another particular subject, that he should
first acquire knowledge of the Egyptian language. They were
quite satisfied with his using his native Greek tongue. Unfor-
tunately, today we do not act as the Greeks did, for we make

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girls sit side by side. Although interesting psychological
facts have emerged from this practice alone—and each class
has its own psychology, of which more tomorrow—one can
definitely say: if one lets boys and girls practice their handi-
crafts sitting side by side as a matter of course, it is an excellent
preparation for their adult lives. Today there are but few men
who recognize how much help towards healthy thinking and
healthy logic can be derived from the ability to knit. Only a
few men can judge what it means for one’s life if one is able to
knit. In our Waldorf school, boys do their knitting alongside
the girls, and they also mend socks. Through this practice,
the differentiation between the types of work performed by
the two sexes will find its natural course later on, should this
become necessary. At the same time, a form of education is
being implemented that takes full account of the practical
aspects of the pupils’ future lives.
People are always terribly surprised when they hear
me say—and the following assertion not only expresses
my personal conviction but is based upon a psychological
fact—I cannot consider anyone to be a good professor in the
full meaning of the word unless he or she is also capable of
mending a shoe in an emergency. For how could it be pos-
sible for anyone to know something of real substance about
being and becoming in the world, unless such a person can
also repair a shoe or a boot if the situation demands it? This
is, of course, rather a sweeping statement, but there are men
who cannot even sew on a trouser button properly, and this
is a lamentable failing. Knowledge of philosophy carries little
weight, unless one is also able to turn a hand to anything
that needs doing. This is simply part of life. In my opinion,
one can only be a good philosopher if one could equally well
have become a shoemaker, should this have been one’s des-
tiny. And, as the history of philosophy shows, it sometimes
happens that cobblers become philosophers.
Knowledge of the human being calls upon us to
make adequate provision in our curricula and schedules
for preparing pupils for the practical side of life. Reading in

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 possible to make even a professor of botany, however clever
he might be, fail in his own subject—if such were one’s only
intention! I really believe such a thing to be possible, for
anyone could fail in an exam. In this chapter of life, also,
some most peculiar facts have come to light. There lived,
for instance, a Robert Hamerling, an Austrian poet, whose
use of the German language was later acclaimed the highest
level any Austrian writer could possibly reach. The results
of his exam certificate, qualifying him for a teaching posi-
tion at an Austrian Gymnasium, make interesting reading:
Greek—excellent; Latin—excellent; German language and
essay writing—hardly capable of teaching this subject in
the lower classes of a middle school. You actually find this
written in Hamerling’s teaching certificate! So you see, this
matter of failing or passing an exam is quite a tricky business.
And so the difficulties besetting us make us realize
that society at large must provide better conditions before
one can achieve more than what is possible making the kind
of compromise of which I have spoken. If I were to be asked,
quite abstractly, whether a Waldorf school could be opened
anywhere in the world, I could only answer, again entirely in
the abstract, ”Yes, wherever one would allow it to be opened.”
On the other hand, even this would not be the determining
factor for, as already said, in the eyes of many people these
are but two aspects of one and the same thing. There are some
who struggle through to become famous poets, despite hav-
ing bad exam results in their main subject. But not everyone
is able to do so. For many, a failed graduation exam means
being cast out of the stream of life. And so it has to be admit-
ted that the higher the class in our school, the less one is able
to work towards all one’s educational ideals. It is something
not to be lost sight of. It shows how one has to reckon with
actual life situations.
For an education based on an understanding of the
human being, the following question has to be ever-present.
Will the young people, as they enter life, find the right human
contact in society, which is one of the fundamental human

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our youngsters learn Greek. I do not wish to speak against it;
to learn Greek is something beautiful. But it is inconsistent
with fulfilling the needs of a particular school age. It becomes
a real problem when one is told to allocate so many lessons
to this subject on the schedule at a time when such a claim
clashes with the need for lessons in which weaving, spin-
ning, and a rough knowledge of how paper is made ought
to be practiced. Such is the situation in which one is called
upon to finalize the schedule! And since we know only too
well that we shall never be granted permission to build up
our own university anywhere, it is absolutely essential for
us to enable those of our pupils who wish to continue their
education at a university, technical college, or other similar
institution, to pass the necessary graduation exam (Arbitur).
All this lands us in an almost impossible situation,
with almost insuperable difficulties. While one is trying to
cultivate the practical side in education, prompted by insight
into the inner needs of adolescent pupils, one has to face the
bitter complaints of a Greek teacher who declares that he
could never cover the exam syllabus with the lesson time al-
located to his subject, and that, in consequence, his candidates
are doomed to fail in their exams.
Such are the problems we have to tackle. They surely
show that it is impossible for us to insist on pushing through
our ideals with any fanatical fervor. What will eventually
have to happen no longer depends solely on the consensus
of a circle of teachers regarding the rights and wrongs of
education. Today it has become necessary for much wider
circles within society to recognize the ideals of a truly human
education, so that outer conditions will make it possible for
education to function without alienating pupils from life.
For this is obviously the case if, after having gone through
a grammar school type of education in one’s own school,
pupils were to fail their graduation exams, which they have
to take somewhere else.
Speaking of failing an exam—and here I am speak-
ing to specialists in education—I do believe that it would be

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 that I should not have been able to accomplish certain things
in spiritual science in the way this proved possible if, at a par-
ticular time in my life, I had not learned bookbinding—which
may well appear to be of little use to many a person. And
this was not in any way connected with Waldorf pedagogy,
but simply as part of my destiny. This particularly human
activity is of special consequence to most intimate spiritual
and soul matters, especially if it is practiced at the right time
of life. The same also holds true for other practical activities.
I should consider it a sin against human nature if we did not
include bookbinding and box-making in our Waldorf school
craft lessons, introduced into the curriculum at a particular
age determined by insight into the pupil’s development.
These things are all part and parcel of becoming a full human
being. What matters in this case is not the fact that a pupil
has made a particular cardboard box, or that she or he has
bound a book, but that the pupils have undergone the dis-
cipline necessary in making such items, and that they have
experienced the inherent feelings and thought processes that
go with them.
The natural differentiation between the boys and girls
will become self-evident. Yet here also one needs to have an
eye for what is happening, an eye of the soul. For instance,
the following situation has arisen, the psychology of which
has not yet been fully investigated because I have been unable
to spend enough time at the Waldorf school. It will be gone
into thoroughly at a later date. What has happened is that
during lessons in spinning, it was the girls who took to the
actual spinning. The boys, too, wanted to be involved, and
somehow they found their task in fetching and carrying for
the girls. The boys wanted to be chivalrous. They brought
the various materials the girls then used for spinning. The
boys seemed to prefer doing the preparatory work. This is
what happened, and we still need to digest it from the psy-
chological point of view.
But this possibility of ”shunting our craft lessons
about”—if I may put it thus—allows us to switch, now to

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needs? For, after all, those responsible for the demands made
in graduation exams are members of society, too, even if the
style and content of their exam papers is based upon error.
And so, if one wishes to integrate Waldorf pedagogy into
our present social conditions, one has to put up with having
to do certain things that in themselves one would not con-
sider right or beneficial. Anyone inspecting our top classes
may well be under the impression that what is found there
does not fully correspond to the avowed ideals of Waldorf
pedagogy. But I can guarantee you that if we were to carry
these out regardless of the general situation—and especially
where we attempt to make the transition to the practical side
of life—all our candidates for the graduation exam would fail!
So diametrically opposed do matters stand today. But they
have to be reckoned with, and this can be done in the most
varied ways. At the same time an awareness has to emerge
of how much needs to be changed, not only in the field of
education, but in life in general, before a truly human form
of education becomes established.
Despite all obstacles, the practical activities are being
carried through in the Waldorf school, at least to a certain
level—even if it does happen, from time to time, that in some
cases they have to be curtailed because the Greek or Latin
teacher claims some of these lessons. It is something that
cannot be avoided.
From the foregoing you will have seen that puberty is
the right time to make the transition, leading the adolescent
into the realities of outer life. And that those elements will
have to play more and more into school life that, in a higher
sense, will make the human individual, as a being of body,
soul, and spirit, a helpful and useful member of society. In
this respect our present period lacks the necessary psycho-
logical insight, for the finer interrelationships in the human
spiritual, soul, and physical spheres are generally not even
dreamt of. These can be felt intuitively only by people who
make it their special task to learn to know the human psyche.
From personal self-knowledge I can tell you in all modesty

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 tion.” (No negative judgment regarding colleges in general
is implied in this wording, although such judgments are
frequently met with in present-day society.)
All this presents us with the greatest difficulties. But
as you have made the effort to come here in order to find
out what this Waldorf pedagogy is all about—something
we know how to appreciate only too well—these problems
should also be aired. Any sincere interest in what is willed
in this education deserves a clear indication of all the dif-
ficulties involved.
So far, Waldorf pedagogy is being practiced only by
the teachers of the one existing Waldorf school, and there we
find that our difficulties increase the higher up in the school
we go. I can only assume that in a college run along anthro-
posophical lines, they would be greater still. But since such a
college is only a very abstract ideal, I can speak about it only
hypothetically. It has always been my way to deal directly
with the tasks set by life, and this is the reason why I can talk
about this education only up to Class XII, for its opening is
imminent. The kind of things that belong to a misty future
must not take up too much of the time of persons standing
in life, since it would otherwise only detract from the real
tasks at hand.
All one can say is that the problems would increase
substantially and that there obviously would be two kinds
of difficulties. First, if we were to open a college, our exam
results would not be recognized as proper qualifications,
which means that successful candidates could not take up
professional positions in life. They could not become medical
doctors, lawyers, and so on, professions that in their present
customary forms are still essential today. This presents one
side of the problem. The other side would conjure up really
frightening prospects, if certain hard facts did not offer relief
from such anxieties. For, on the strength of the praiseworthy
efforts made by our young friends, an association has actually
been founded with the express aim of working towards the
creation of such a college, to be based upon the principles of

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bookbinding and then to box-making. All are part of the
practical activities which play such a dominant role in Wal-
dorf pedagogy, and which show how an eye for the practical
side of life is a natural by-product for anyone who has made
spiritual striving and spiritual research the main objective in
life. There are educational methods in the world, the brain-
child of downright unpractical theoreticians who believe
they have eaten practical life experience by the spoonful,
methods that are, nevertheless, totally removed from real-
ity. If one begins with educational theories, one will end up
with the least practical results. Theories in themselves yield
nothing useful, and all too often they breed only prejudices.
A realistic pedagogy, on the other hand, is the offspring of
a true knowledge of the human being. And the part played
by arts and crafts at a certain time of life is nothing but such
knowledge applied to a particular situation. In itself this
knowledge already presents a form of pedagogy that will
turn into the right kind of practical teaching through the
living way in which the actual lessons are given. It becomes
transmuted into the teacher’s right attitude, and this is what
really matters. The nature and character of the entire school
has to be in tune with it.
This has led to the situation where, quite recently,
while other problems facing the anthroposophical cause were
being dealt with, a memorandum was handed in by the pupils
of the present top class in the Waldorf school. Those among
them who were expecting to have to take their graduation
exam had worked out a remarkable document, the deeper
aspects of which will be appreciated only when the whole
matter is seen in the right light. They had sent more or less
the following memorandum to the Anthroposophical Society:
”Since we are being educated and taught in the sense of the
true human being . . .”—this they had somehow gleaned “. .
. and since, in consequence, we cannot enter already existing
types of colleges, we wish to make the following proposal to
the Anthroposophical Society: that a new Anthroposophical
college is to be founded in which we can continue our educa-

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 At that tender age it is still possible for these impulses to be
immersed into the soft and pliable organism of the child,
still so open to the musical-formative forces. In later years
the organism becomes harder, not necessarily physically,
but at any rate tending towards psycho-bodily sclerosis.
However, what one has absorbed through one’s upbringing
and education does not grow old. However old one may
have become, one is still inwardly endowed with the same
youthful element that was one’s own from, say, the tenth to
the fifteenth year. This element of youthfulness one always
carries within. But it has to remain so supple and flexible
that the now aged brain—perhaps already covered by a bald
head—is capable of using it in the same way in which the
formerly soft brain did. However, if a person’s education
has not aided this process, the result is the generation gap,
which so often makes its appearance these days, and which
is considered unbridgeable.
People sometimes say something that, in reality, is
the opposite of what is actually happening. For instance, one
often hears the remark, ”Today the young do not understand
the old, because old people no longer know how to be young
with the young.” But this does not represent the truth. Not
at all. What is really happening is that the young generation
expects the old generation to be able to make the right use
of the physical organization which has grown old. In this,
the young recognize something in the old that is different
from their own condition, something that is not yet theirs.
It is this quality that leads to the natural respect for old age.
When young people meet an old person who is still capable
of using an already bald head in the way a child uses its
tousled head, they feel that they can receive something from
the old generation, something that they cannot find in their
contemporaries. This is how it ought to be.
We must educate the young so that they know how to
grow old in the right way. It is the malaise of our times that the
young, as they grow up, do not recognize in members of the
old generation people who have aged rightly. Instead, they

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Waldorf pedagogy. The only reason why there is no need to
feel thoroughly alarmed about the potential consequences
of such an undertaking is that the funds to be raised by this
association surely will not reach such giddy heights as to
tempt anyone to think seriously about going ahead with the
project. The underlying striving towards this aim is thor-
oughly laudable, but for the time being it is still beyond the
realm of practicality. The real worry would come only if, for
example, an American millionaire were to suddenly offer
the many millions needed to build, equip, and staff such a
college. The best one could do in such a situation would be
to promote, en masse, the entire teaching staff of the Waldorf
school to become the teachers of the new college. But then
there would no longer be a Waldorf school!
I am saying all this because I believe that actual facts
are far more important than all kinds of abstract arguments.
While acknowledging that the idea of founding education,
including college education, upon true knowledge of the
human being represents a far-reaching ideal, we must not
overlook the fact that the circle of those who stand firmly
behind our ideals is an extremely small one. This is the very
reason why one feels so happy about every move towards an
expansion of this work, which might possibly gain further
momentum through your welcome visit to this course. At the
same time, one must never lose sight of all that must happen
in order that the Waldorf ideal can rest upon really firm and
sound foundations. This needs to be mentioned within the
context of this course, for it follows from the constitution of
the Waldorf school.
This will also lead one to see that if one brings up
children in the light of the education spoken of here, one
allows something to grow up in them that will outlast their
childhood days, something that will continue to have an effect
throughout their lives. For what is it you have to do when
you grow old? People who do not understand human nature
are incapable of judging how important certain impulses,
which can be implanted only during childhood, are for life.

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 noticeable, namely that from this stage onward the natural
musical memory begins to weaken a little with the effect that
pupils have to make greater efforts in remembering music.
This is something which has to be specially borne in mind
during music lessons. Whereas prior to puberty the children’s
relationship to music was a spontaneous, natural one and,
because of it, their musical memory was excellent, some of
them now begin to encounter difficulties—not in taking in
the music, but in remembering it. This needs to be seen to.
One must try to go over the same music several times, not
by immediate repetition, but intermittently.
Another characteristic sign just at this stage is that
whereas previously the instrumental and vocal parts of a
piece were experienced as a unity, after the sixteenth to sev-
enteenth year they are listened to with clear discrimination.
(From a psychological point of view there is a fine and inti-
mate difference between these two ways of listening.) At this
age musical instruments are listened to far more consciously.
There is also a greater understanding for the musical qualities
of the various instruments used. Whereas earlier the instru-
ment appeared to join in with the singing, it is now heard as
a separate part. Listening and singing become two separate,
though parallel, activities.
This new relationship between singing and the
appreciation of the part played by musical instruments is
characteristic of this new stage, and the methods of teach-
ing must be changed accordingly. What is important is not
to introduce any music theory before this age. Music should
be approached directly, and any theoretical observations a
teacher may wish to make should come out of the pupils’
practical experience of it. Gradually it should become possible
for pupils of this age to make the transition towards forming
musical judgments on a more rational basis.
What Herr Baumann indicated at the end of his
contribution, namely that one can make use of the ways in
which pupils express themselves musically for increasing
certain aspects of their self-knowledge, is absolutely correct.

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see in them merely childish individuals who have remained
at the same level of development as the young generation.
Because, due to their inadequate education, old people are
unable to make proper use of their physical organization, they
remain infantile. The expression ”big kids” is really chosen
with great ingenuity, for it implies that such persons lost the
ability to get hold of their entire organism during the course
of their lives. They can work only with the head, which is
precisely what children or youngsters are meant to do. So
the young respond by saying, ”Why should we learn from
them? They have progressed no further than we have; they
are just as childish as we are.” The point is not that old age
is lacking in youthfulness, but that it has remained behind
at too infantile a stage, and this is what causes the difficul-
ties today. You see how sometimes expressions chosen with
the best of will have the opposite meaning of what they are
supposed to convey.
All these things must be seen in their proper light
before education can be put back on its feet again. This has
become more than necessary today. Forgive this somewhat
drastic way of saying it, but in our intellectual age education
really has been turned upside down.

Puberty and Music

In answer to a question regarding music lessons
given to a girl of seventeen Rudolf Steiner said: The essential
thing is what Herr Baumann has already presented to us.
With the onset of puberty and during the years following
it, a certain musical judgment takes the place of a previous
feeling for music and of a general musical experience. The
faculty of forming musical judgments emerges. This becomes
very noticeable through the phenomenon characterized by
Herr Baumann, namely that a certain self-observation be-
gins to manifest itself, a self-observation of the pupil’s own
singing and, with it, the possibility of using the voice more
consciously, and so on. This has to be cultivated methodically.
But at the same time, something else becomes very

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 the motivation of one’s own musical judgments if there is an
opportunity for continuing music lessons at this age.
The Child’s Changing Consciousness
and Waldorf Education.
London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1988.

Between the Seventh and Fourteenth Years

In Greek education the Gymnast must be recognized
as one who preserved the forces of childhood on into the sec-
ond period of life between the seventh and the fourteenth or
fifteenth years. The ”child” must be preserved—so said the
Greeks. The forces of childhood must remain in the human
being to the time of earthly death; they must be conserved.
The Greek educator, the Gymnast, has in general to foster
what he could not but point to in the seven- to fourteen-
year- old child before him as his nature-foundation, his
inherited nature-foundation. Out of his spiritual wisdom
he had to know how to judge this and preserve it. Evolu-
tion in the Middle Ages went beyond this, and, as a result,
our present age developed. Only now does the position of
a modern man within the social order become a matter of
consciousness. This fact of conscious life can only come into
being after the age of puberty has been reached, after the
fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then there appears in the human
being something which I shall have repeatedly to describe
in the following lectures as the consciousness of the real
nature of inner freedom in the being of man. Then, indeed,
man ”comes to himself.” And if, as it sometimes happens
today, human beings believe themselves to have reached
this consciousness before the fourteenth or fifteenth year,
before the age of puberty, this is only an aping of later life. It
is not a fundamental fact. It was this fundamental fact, which
appears after the age of puberty, that the Greek purposely
sought to avoid in the development of the individual man.
The intensity with which he invoked nature, the ”child,” into
human existence, darkened and obscured full experience of
this moment of consciousness after puberty. The human being

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For instance, in the Waldorf school we let the older pupils
do some modeling, and there, right from the start, one can
perceive individual characteristics in what they produce.
(When you ask children to model something or other, their
work will always display distinctly individual features.)
But with regard to musical activities, only when the age of
sixteen to seventeen is reached can the teacher go into the
pupils’ more individual characteristics. Then, in order to
avoid one-sidedness, it is right to deal with questions posed
by too great an attraction for a particular musical direction.
If pupils of that age should develop a passion for certain
types of music, for instance if they are strongly drawn to
Wagner’s music—and in our times many young people slide
into becoming pure Wagnerites almost automatically—then
the teacher must try to counterbalance their tendency to be
swept away by music in too emotional a way, instead of
their developing an appreciation of the inner configuration
of the music itself. This in no way implies any criticism of
Wagner’s music.
What happens in such a case is that the musical
experience too easily slips into the emotional sphere and
consequently needs to be lifted up again into the realm of con-
sciousness. A musician will already notice this in the quality
of a pupil’s singing voice. If music is experienced too much
in the realm of feeling, the voice will sound differently from
that of a young person who listens more to the formation of
the tones and who has a correct understanding of the more
structural element in music.
To work toward a balanced musical feeling and un-
derstanding is of special importance at this age. Naturally,
before puberty the teacher, who is still the authority, has not
yet any opportunity to work in this way. After puberty it is no
longer the teacher’s authority that counts, but the weight of
her or his musical judgments. Up to puberty, right or wrong
is concurrent with what the teacher considers to be right or
wrong. After puberty reasons have to be given, musical rea-
sons, also. Therefore, it is very important to go deeply into

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 feeling, in other parts of the human organism.
Feeling releases itself much later than thinking from
the bodily nature, from the physical constitution of the hu-
man being. And between the seventh and fourteenth years
the child’s feeling-life is still inwardly bound up with its
physical organization. Thinking is already free; feeling is still
inwardly bound up with the body. All the feelings of joy, of
sorrow and of pain that express themselves in the child still
have a strong physical correlation with the secretions of the
organs, the acceleration or retardation, speed or slackening
of the breathing system. If our perception is keen enough, we
can observe in these very phenomena the great transforma-
tion that is taking place in the life of feeling, when the outer
symptoms of the change make their appearance. Just as the
appearance of the second teeth denotes a certain climax of
growth, so the close of the subsequent life-period—when feel-
ing is gradually released from its connection with the body
and becomes a soul function—is expressed in speech. This
may be observed most clearly in boys. The voice changes;
the larynx reveals the change. Just as the head reveals the
change which lifts thinking out of the physical organism,
the breathing system—the seat of the organic rhythmic activ-
ity—expresses the emancipation of feeling. Feeling detaches
itself from the bodily constitution and becomes an indepen-
dent function of soul. We know how this expresses itself in
the boy. The larynx changes, and the voice gets deeper. In
the girl different phenomena appear in bodily growth and
development, but this is only the external aspect.
Anyone who has reached the first stage of exact clair-
voyance already referred to, the stage of imaginative percep-
tion, knows—for he perceives it—that the male physical body
transforms the larynx at about the fourteenth year of life. The
same thing happens in the female sex to the etheric body, or
body of formative forces. The change withdraws to the etheric
body, and the etheric body of the female takes on—as etheric
body—a form exactly resembling the physical body of the
male. Again, the etheric body of the male at the fourteenth

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passed through it in a dimmed consciousness, restrained by
nature. The historical course of human evolution, however,
is such that this is no longer possible. This conscious urge
would burst forth with elemental, volcanic force after the age
of puberty if attempts were made to hold it back.
During what we call the elementary school age, that
is to say, between the seventh and fourteenth years, the Greek
had to take into consideration the earliest nature-life of the
child. We in our day have to take account of what follows
puberty, of that which will be experienced after puberty in
full human consciousness by the boy or girl whom we have
been guiding for seven years. We may no longer suppress
this into a dreamlike obscurity as did the Greeks, even the
highest type of Greek, even Plato and Aristotle, who, in
consequence, accepted slavery as a self-evident necessity.
Because education was of such a kind that it obscured this
all-important phenomenon of human life after puberty, the
Greek was able to preserve the forces of early childhood into
the period of life between the seventh and fourteenth years.
Just as the period of life at about the seventh year
is significant in earthly existence on account of all the facts
which I have described, so, similarly, is there a point in the
earthly life of man which, on account of the symptoms which
then arise in life, is no less significant. The actual points of
time indicated are, of course, approximate, occurring in the
case of some human beings earlier, in others later. The indica-
tion of seven-year-long periods is approximate. But round
about the fourteenth or fifteenth year there is once more a
time of extraordinary importance in earthly existence. This is
the period when puberty is reached. But puberty, the emer-
gence of the life of sex, is only the most external symptom of
a complete transformation that has taken place in the being
of man between the seventh and fourteenth years. Just as we
must seek in the growth-forces of the teeth—in the human
head—for the physical origin of thought that frees itself about
the seventh year of life, and becomes a function of soul, so we
must look for the activity of the second soul-force, namely

139
 To spiritual observation, however, the secondary phenomena
are primary, and vice versa.
These metamorphoses, the whole way in which
feeling withdraws itself from the organs of speech, are of
extraordinary significance. And as teachers and educators
it is our wonderful task—a task that really inspires one’s in-
nermost being—gradually to release speech from the bodily
constitution.
All this, however, the way in which the legs are
placed, the capacity to prolong the movement of the arms
into dexterity of the fingers—all this is still an outer, physi-
cal manifestation of the will in the boy or girl, even after the
fifteenth year. Only at about the twentieth year does the will
release itself from the organism in the same way as feeling
releases itself about the fourteenth year and thinking about
the seventh year at the change of teeth. The external processes
that are revealed by the freed thinking, however, are very
striking and can readily be perceived; the change of teeth is
a remarkable phenomenon in human life. The emancipation
of feeling is less so; it expresses itself in the development of
the so-called secondary sexual organs—their growth in the
boy, the corresponding transformation in the girl—the change
of voice in the boy and the change of the inner life-habits of
the girl, and so forth. Here, the external symptoms of the
metamorphosis in the human being are less striking. Feeling,
therefore, becomes independent of the physical constitution
in a more inward sense.
The outer symptoms of the emancipation of the will at
about the twentieth or twenty-first year are still less apparent
and are, therefore, practically unnoticed by an age like ours,
which lives in externalities. In our time—in their own opin-
ion—human beings are ”grown up” when they have reached
the age of fourteen or fifteen. Our young people will not
recognize that between the fifteenth and twenty-first years
they should be acquiring not only outer knowledge but de-
veloping inner character and, above all, the will. Even before
the age of twenty-one they set up as reformers, as teachers,

140
year takes on a form resembling the physical body of the
female. However extraordinary it may appear to a mode of
knowledge that clings to the physical, it is, nevertheless, the
case that from this all important period of life onwards, the
man bears within him etherically the woman, and the woman
etherically the man. This is expressed differently in the cor-
responding symptoms in the male and female.
Now if one reaches the second stage of exact clairvoy-
ance—it is described in greater detail in my books—if, beyond
imagination, one attains to inspiration—the actual perception
of the independently spiritual that is no longer bound up
with the physical body of man—then one becomes aware
how, in actual fact, in this important period round about
the fourteenth and fifteenth years, a third human member
develops into a state of independence. In my books I have
called this third being the astral body, according to an older
tradition. (You must not be jarred by expressions; words have
to be employed for everything.) This astral body is more es-
sentially of the nature of soul than the etheric body; indeed,
the astral body is already of the soul and spirit. It is the third
member of man and constitutes the second supersensible
member of his being.
Up to the fourteenth or fifteenth year this astral body
works through the physical organism and, at the fourteenth
or fifteenth year, becomes independent. Thus, there falls upon
the teacher a most significant task, namely to help the devel-
opment to independence of this being of soul and spirit which
lies hidden in the depths of the organism up to the seventh
or eighth year and then gradually—for the process is suc-
cessive—frees itself. It is this gradual process of detachment
that we must assist, if we have the child to teach between the
ages of seven and fourteen. And then, if we have acquired the
kind of knowledge of which I have spoken, we notice how
the child’s speech becomes quite a different thing. The crude
science of today—if I may call it so—concerns itself merely
with the crude soul-qualities of the human being and speaks
of the other phenomena as secondary sexual characteristics.

141
 intelligently into practical life. Our pupils learn spinning and
weaving and get to know something of how these things are
done in a factory. They should also have some knowledge of
elementary technical chemistry, the preparation and manu-
facture of colors, and the like.
During their school life children ought to acquire
really practical ideas of their environment. The affairs of or-
dinary life often remain quite unintelligible to many people
today, because the teaching they receive at school does not
lead over, at the right moment, from the essentially human
to the practical activities of life and the world in general. In
a certain direction this is bound to injure the whole devel-
opment of the soul. Think, for a moment, of the sensitivity
of the human body to some element in the air, for instance,
which the organism cannot assimilate. In the social life of the
world, of course, conditions are not quite the same. In social
life we are forced to put up with many incongruities, but we
can adapt ourselves, if at the right age and in the right way
we have been introduced into them.
Just think how many people nowadays get into a
tram without having the faintest idea of the principles gov-
erning its motion and mechanism. Or they see a railway
every day and have absolutely no notion of the machinery of a
locomotive! This means that they are surrounded on all hands
by inventions and creations of the human mind with which
they have no contact at all. It is the beginning of unsocial life
simply to accept these creations and inventions of the mind
of man without understanding them, in a general way, at any
rate. At the Waldorf school, therefore, when the children are
fourteen or fifteen years old, we begin to give instruction and
actual experience in matters that play a role in practical life.
This age of adolescence is nowadays regarded from a very
limited, one-sided point of view. The truth is that at puberty
the human being opens out to the world. Hitherto he has lived
more within himself, but he is now ready to understand his
fellow men and the things of the world. Hence, to concentrate
before puberty on all that relates man to nature is to act in

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and instead of applying themselves to what they can learn
from their elders, they begin to write pamphlets and things
of that kind. This is quite understandable in an age that is
directed to the externals of life. The decisive change that takes
place about the twentieth or twenty-first year is hidden from
such an age, because it is wholly of an inner kind. But there is
such a change, and it may be described in the following way.
Up to his twenty-first year of life, approximately, of
course, man is not a self-contained personality; he is strongly
subject to earthly gravity, to the earth’s force of attraction. He
struggles with earthly gravity until about the twenty-first
year. And in this connection, external science will make many
discoveries that are already known to the ”exact clairvoy-
ance” of which I spoke yesterday.
In our blood, in the blood corpuscles, we have iron.
Until about the twenty-first year, the nature of these blood
corpuscles is such that their gravity weighs them down. From
the twenty-first year onwards, the being of man receives an
upward impulse from below; an upward impulse is given to
all his blood. From the twenty-first year he sets the sole of his
foot on the earth otherwise than he did before. This, indeed,
is not known today, but it is a fact of fundamental importance
for the understanding of the human being so far as education
is concerned. From the twenty-first year onwards, with every
tread of the foot there works through the human organism
from below upwards a force which did not work before. Man
becomes a being complete in himself, one who has paralyzed
the downward-working forces by forces which work from
below upwards, whereas before this age all the force of his
growth and development flowed downwards from the head.
On the other hand, it is altogether our intention to
enable our children to enter the life of the world in the right
way. To achieve this we must lead over from physics and
chemistry to various forms of practical work when the child
has reached the fourteenth and fifteenth years. In the classes
for children of this age, therefore, we have introduced hand-
spinning and weaving, for through these things one enters

143
 not been prematurely engaged.
At the Waldorf school we allow the child of fourteen
or fifteen to find his own feet in life. We put him really on
a par with ourselves. He unfolds his judgment, but he still
looks back to the authority which we represented and retains
the affection he had for us when we were his teachers. His
power of judgment has not been fettered, if we have merely
worked upon his life of feeling. And so, when the child has
reached the age of fourteen or fifteen, we leave his nature of
soul and spirit in freedom and, in the higher classes, appeal
to his own power of judgment and insight. This freedom in
life cannot be achieved by inculcating morality and religion
in a dogmatic, canonical fashion but by working simply and
solely on the child’s powers of feeling and perception at the
right age—the period between the change of teeth and pu-
berty. The great thing is to enable the human being to find
his place in the world with due confidence in his own power
of judgment. He will then feel and sense his complete man-
hood, because his education has been truly and completely
human. If someone has been unfortunate enough to have
lost a leg or an arm, he cannot feel himself a complete man;
he is conscious of mutilation. Children of fourteen or fifteen,
educated according to modern methods, begin to be aware
of a sense of mutilation if they are not permeated with the
qualities of moral judgment and religious feeling. Something
seems lacking in their manhood. There is no better heritage
in the moral and religious sense than to bring children up
to regard the elements of morality and religion as such an
integral part of their being that they do not feel themselves
wholly man if they are not permeated with morality, warmed
through and through by religion.
This can only be achieved if we work, at the proper
age, on the life of feeling and perceptive experience alone,
and do not prematurely give the children intellectual concep-
tions of religion and morality. If we do so before the twelfth
or fourteenth year, we are bringing children up to be skeptics,
men and women who, instead of healthy insight, in later

144
accordance with true principles of human development, but
at the age of fourteen or fifteen we must with all energy begin
to connect the children with the creations and inventions of
the human mind. This will enable them to understand and
find their right place in social life. If educators had adhered
to this principle some sixty or seventy years ago, the so-called
”Social Movement” of today would have taken quite a differ-
ent form in Europe and America. Tremendous progress has
been made in technical and commercial efficiency during the
last sixty or seventy years. Great progress has been made in
technical skill, national trade has become world trade, and
finally a world-economy has arisen from national economies.
In the last sixty or seventy years the outer configuration of
social life has entirely changed, yet our mode of education
has continued as if nothing had happened. We have utterly
neglected to acquaint our children with the practical affairs
of the world at the time when this should be done—namely,
at the age of fourteen or fifteen.
After puberty, when the child has reached his fif-
teenth or sixteenth year, a change takes place in his inner
nature, leading him from dependence upon authority to his
own sense of freedom and hence to the faculty of independent
judgment and insight. Here is something that must claim our
most watchful attention in education and teaching. If, before
puberty, we have awakened the child’s feeling for good and
evil, for what is and is not divine, these feelings will arise
from his own inner being afterwards. His understanding,
intellect, insight, and power of judgment are uninfluenced;
he can now form independent judgments from out of his
own being.
If we start by telling the child that he ought to do
this and ought to do that, it all remains with him through
his later years, and then he will always be thinking that
such and such a thing is right, and such and such a thing
is wrong. Convention will color everything. Now in true
education today, the human being should not stand within
the conventional but have his own judgment even about
morality and religion, and this will unfold naturally if it has

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 passes over into living artistry. Only when he has reached
the age of fourteen or fifteen does the child make claims in
his education and instruction upon what the teacher himself
has learned. And this goes on until after the twentieth or
twenty-first year, when the child is fully grown (true, we call
him a young lady or young gentleman even before this) and
when at twenty years he can confront another human being
on equal terms, although the latter may be older.
In discussing the true method of teaching and the life
conditions of education, we must speak of that enthusiasm
which can be stimulated not by theoretical, abstract insight,
but by real insight into the world. When we, thus, approach
the child between the change of teeth and puberty, we are
able to guide him/her in the right way to puberty. The mo-
ment when puberty sets in, the astral body begins to unfold
its independence. What has been taken in as the music of
the world goes on developing in the inner being. And the
remarkable thing is that what has been developed in pictures
between the change of teeth and puberty, and has become
the possession of the soul in an inwardly musical, plastic
sense, in living pictures, is then laid hold of by the intellect.
The intellect of the human being does not take in anything
at all that we force upon him intellectually from outside;
his intellect takes in what has first developed within him
in another way. And then this important factor comes into
play: the human being has prepared what lies before the age
of puberty in healthy development; he has prepared for the
intelligent understanding of what he already possesses. All
that he has taken hold of in pictures rises up intelligibly from
his own inner wellsprings. The human being is looking into
himself as he passes over to intellectual activity. He is lay-
ing hold of his own being within himself, through himself.
The astral body with its musical activity beats in time with
the etheric body which works plastically. There is a pulsing
together within the human being, and as a result of this he
becomes aware of his own being after puberty in a healthy
way. And when there is this concordance between the two

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life develop skepticism in regard to the dogmas inculcated
into them—skepticism in thought (the least important), but
then skepticism in feeling, which makes them defective in
feeling. And finally there will be skepticism of will which
brings moral error in its train. The point is this: Our children
will be brought up only to be skeptics if we present moral
and religious ideals to them dogmatically; such ideals should
only come to them through the life of feeling. Then, at the
right age they will awaken their own free sense of religion
and morality which will then become part of their very being.
And they feel that only this can make them fully man. The
great aim at the Waldorf school is to bring up free human
beings who know how to direct their own lives.
A Modern Art of Education.
London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972.

Activating the Intellect

But it is also apparent today that what I have learned
has absolutely no significance with regard to what kind of
teacher I am for the child up to the change of teeth. After the
change of teeth, it does begin to have a certain significance,
but this is again lost if I impart what I have learned to the
child in the form in which I bear it within me. It must all be
artistically transformed, brought into pictures, as we shall see
later. I must awaken imponderable forces between the child
and myself. And in the second life period, from the change
of teeth to puberty, what is of far greater importance than
the content of what I have learned and carry in my head is
whether I can transform into visual imagery, into living forms,
what I unfold before the child and have to let flow into him.
What a man has himself learned has significance only for
children who are between puberty and the beginning of the
twentieth year. For the little child up to the change of teeth
the most important thing in education is the man himself.
The most important element in the education of the child
from the change of teeth to puberty is the human being who

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 have accomplished something with me; but my freedom has
been left unimpaired. You have made it possible for me to
give myself my own freedom at the right moment of life. You
have done something that enables me to stand before you
now, shaping myself as man from out of my individuality,
which you left reverently untouched.”
The intellect only becomes active in its own way
when the child has already reach puberty. For this reason I
have already indicated that it is really a question of bringing
the human being to that point where she can find in herself
what she has to understand, where she can draw out of her
own inner being what has been given her first for natural
imitation, and then for artistic, imaginative activity. So that
even in the later period we should not force things upon the
human being in such a way that she feels a logical compul-
sion, whether she likes it or not.
It was certainly a great moment in the development of
German spiritual life when, just in reference to moral experi-
ence, Schiller set himself in opposition to Kant’s conception
of morality. For when Kant spoke the words, ”Duty, thou
sublime and mighty name, thou that bearest no enticements
but demandest stern submission,” Schiller set himself up
in opposition. He opposed this idea of duty which did not
allow the moral to proceed out of the source of goodwill,
but out of subjection. Schiller replied to the Kantian idea of
duty in remarkable words containing a true moral motif. He
said, ”Willingly I serve my friend, but unfortunately I serve
him from inclination; therefore, alas, I am not virtuous!” In
effect, only when duty begins to be an innermost human
inclination, when it becomes what Goethe expressed in the
words, ”Duty—where a man loves that which he tells himself
to do,”—only then will the whole of the moral life proceed
from human nature in its purity. It was a great moment when
morality was purged of Kant’s influence and made human
again through Schiller and Goethe.
What came forth at that time from German spiritual
life has been immersed, however, in the materialism of the

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sides of his nature, the human being after puberty comes to a
true inner experience of freedom, the result of understanding
for the first time what was only perception in earlier life. The
greatest thing for which we can prepare the child is that, at
the right moment of life, he experiences freedom through the
understanding of his own being. True freedom is an inner
experience, and true freedom can only be developed when
the human being is conceived of in this way. As a teacher, I
must say to myself: I cannot impart freedom to the human
being; he must experience it for himself. But what I have to
do is to plant within him something to which his own be-
ing—this I leave untouched—feels attracted and into which
it sinks itself. This is the wonderful thing I have achieved. I
have educated in the human being what has to be educated.
In reverence of the Godhead in every single human being, I
have left untouched those things that may only be laid hold
of by himself. I educate everything in the human being except
what belongs to himself, and then wait for his own being to
lay hold of what I have brought forth within him. I do not
lay brutal hands on the development of the human self, but
prepare the soil for the development of that self that sets in
after puberty. If I give an overly intellectual education before
puberty, if I offer abstract concepts or ready-made, sharply-
outlined observations and not growing, living pictures, I
am doing violence to the human being, I am laying brutal
hands upon the self within him. I only educate him truly if
I leave the self untouched and wait until it can take hold of
what I have prepared in education. And thus, together with
the child, I look forward to the time when I am able to say:
Here the self is being born in its freedom; all I have done is to
prepare the ground so that the self may become conscious of
its own being. And if I have educated the child in this way up
to puberty, I find before me a human being who says: ”While
I was not yet fully man, you gave me something that enables
me now, when it is possible, to become fully man myself.”
That is to say, I have educated in such a way that with every
look, every movement, the human being says to me: ”You

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 general feelings about life and looked upon it as an old
acquaintance. But now, when he has attained sex-maturity,
he feels that the single experiences which come to him are
connected with his destiny. It is only when man conceives
of life in terms of destiny that it becomes his own individual
life in the right way—so what man has experienced before
must be recalled a second time in order to connect it with
his destiny. Before fourteen everything must be based on the
authority of the teacher, but in order that it may become a
part of the child’s destiny, it must be presented to him again
after fourteen and experienced in an individual way. This
must not be left out of account. And with regard to moral
concepts, we must bring the child before puberty to have
such a liking for the good and such a dislike of the bad that
when, in the next period of life, what he has formerly devel-
oped in sympathy and antipathy appears again in his soul,
he will of himself make what he loved into his precepts and
what was repugnant to him he must now eschew. This is
freedom, but man can only find it if, before he comes to the
”Thou shalt” and ”Thou shalt not,” he feels attracted to the
good and repelled by the bad. It is through feeling that the
child must learn morality.
With regard to religion, we must be clear that a young
child is by nature religious. At the change of teeth, when the
soul and spirit become freer of the body, this close connection
with nature falls away, and, therefore, what was formerly
natural religion has to be raised into a religion of the soul.
And it is only after puberty that religious understanding
can arise. Then, when the spirit has become free, what was
formerly expressed in the imitation of father or mother must
be handed over to the invisible, supersensible powers. Thus,
there develops gradually in the child in a concrete way what
has always been there in him as a germ, a seed. Nothing is
grafted on to the child. It comes out of his own being.
It is really impossible to teach at all without this
inward cooperation on the part of the child. In all education
we must constantly be thinking of how the child will be able

150
nineteenth century, and is still so today. We must again raise
mankind out of what has arisen in civilization as a result
of the fact that men have forgotten this mighty deed in the
sphere of the moral. This rehabilitation of man as a fully hu-
man and moral being is the special task of those who have
to teach and educate.
The Essentials of Education.
London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1968.

Finding Anchorage in Life

If you wish to understand the whole human being
you must also realize that the freeing of the body from soul
and spirit in the grown man, as against the unity of body,
soul, and spirit in the child, is not an abstract theory but a
matter of concrete knowledge, for it protracts the time when
various influences take effect in a man’s life. The time that
the body takes to work anything out becomes longer and
longer compared with the time taken by the soul. The physical
body remains behind, and harmful influences are manifested
much later in the body than in the soul. So one can often see
that if one transgresses against a little child in his very early
years, then many wrong things will show themselves in his
soul-life when he is a teenager. But this can be made good. It
is not so difficult to find means of helping even apparently
ungovernable children in their teens. They may even become
quite good and respectable citizens later on. That is not so
serious. But the body develops more and more slowly as life
goes on, and the end of it all will be that long after all the soul
difficulties of early youth have been overcome, the physical
effects will gradually emerge, and in later life the man will
have to contend with gout and other illnesses.
Then the child reaches puberty, and an important
change comes about. The more general feelings of sympathy
and antipathy give place to individualized feelings. Each
single thing has or has not value in his eyes, but in a different
way from before. This is because at puberty the real destiny
of man begins to be felt. Before this time the child had more

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 The Roots of Education.
London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1982.

The Third Seven-Year Period

Next comes the period immediately following
puberty, the period between the onset of puberty and the
twenty-first or twenty-second year. Just think of all that a hu-
man being reveals to us in this phase of his life! Even with our
ordinary consciousness we see evidence of a complete change
in his life, but it takes a crude form. We speak of the raging
hormone years, of the ”awkward” years, and this in itself
indicates our awareness that a change is taking place. What
is actually happening is that the inner being is now emerging
more clearly. But if we can acquire sensitive perception of the
first two life-periods, what emerges after puberty will appear
as a ”second man,” actually as a second man who becomes
visible through the physical man standing there before us.
And what expresses itself in the awkwardness, and also very
much in what is admirable, appears like a second, cloud-like
man within the physical man. It is important to detect this
second, shadowy being, for questions on the subject are being
asked on all sides today. But our civilization gives no answer.
Karmic Relationships.
London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1957.

Understanding
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

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to go out into life at puberty. Of course, there are also the
”young ladies” and ”young gentlemen” who continue with
their education, and in the Waldorf school we go on to Uni-
versity standard; we have twelve classes and take them on
to their eighteenth or nineteenth year and even further. But
even with these children we must realize that after puberty
they do really ”go out into life,” and our relationship to them
is quite different from what it was before. We must strive to
educate in such a way that the intellect, which awakens at
puberty, can then find its nourishment in the child’s own
nature. If during his early school years he has stored up an
inner treasury of riches through imitation, through his feeling
for authority, and from the pictorial character of his teaching,
then at puberty these inner riches can be transmuted into
intellectual activity. He will now always be faced with the
task of thinking what before he has willed and felt. And we
must take the very greatest care that this intellectual thinking
does not appear too early. For a human being can only come
to an experience of freedom if his intellectuality awakens
within him of itself, not if it has been poured into him by his
teachers. But it must not awaken in poverty of soul. If he has
nothing within him that he has acquired through imitation
and imagery, which can rise up into his thinking out of the
depths of his soul, then, when his thinking should develop at
puberty, he will find nothing within himself to further his own
growth, and his thinking can only reach out into emptiness.
He will find no anchorage in life, and just at the time when
he ought really to have found a certain security in himself,
he will be running after trivialities; in these awkward years
of adolescence he will be imitating all kinds of things which
please him (usually they are not just the things which please
his elders who have a more utilitarian point of view), and he
imitates these things now because he has not been allowed
to imitate rightly as a young child in a living way. So it is
that we may see many young people after puberty seeking
a support in this or that, and thereby deadening their inner
experience of freedom.

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 body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. Between the seventh
and fourteenth years the etheric body works mainly on the
physical body; the astral body descends into the physical
and etheric bodies at the time of puberty. But anyone able to
penetrate deeply into these matters, anyone able to perceive
more than just physical processes, whose perceptions always
include spiritual processes and, when the two are separated,
can perceive each separately, such a man or woman can dis-
cern how in an eleven- or twelve-year-old boy the astral body
is already sounding, chiming, as it were, with the deeper tone
which will first make itself heard outwardly at puberty. And
a similar process takes place in the astral body of an eleven-
or twelve-year-old girl.
Just as the ether body works at freeing itself in order
to become independent at the time of the change of teeth, so
does the astral body work in order to become independent
at puberty. The ether body is a sculptor, the astral body a
musician. Its structure is of the very essence of music. What
proceeds from the astral body of man and is projected into
form is purely musical in its nature. Anyone able to grasp this
knows that in order to understand the human being a further
stage of training must develop receptivity towards an inner
musical conception of the world. Those who are unmusical
understand nothing whatever about the formation of the
astral body in man, for it is fashioned out of music. If, there-
fore, we study old epochs of culture which were still built up
out of inner musical intuition, if we enter into such oriental
epochs of culture in which even language was imbued with
music, then we shall find a musical conception of the world
entering even into the forms of architecture. Later on, in
Greece, it became otherwise, and now, especially in the West,
it has become very different, for we have entered an age
when emphasis is laid on the mechanical and mathematical.
In the Goetheanum at Dornach an attempt was made to go
back again in this respect. Musicians have sensed the music
underlying the forms of the Goetheanum. But generally
speaking there is little understanding for such things today.

154
discomfort in experiencing what is bad. Now comes the time
of puberty. Just as walking is fully developed during the
first seven years, speech during the second seven years, so
during the third seven 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 be-
fore 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.
The Waldorf teacher also attends meetings where
the world conception of anthroposophy is studied. There
he hears from those who have already acquired the neces-
sary knowledge derived from Initiation Wisdom about such
things as the following: The human being consists of physical

155
 has proved beyond any manner of doubt the spiritual jus-
tification for its existence. Again and again, every month,
we experience the utmost anxiety as to how we are to make
the existence of the Waldorf school economically possible.
Destiny allows us to work, but in such a way that the Sword
of Damocles—financial need—is always hanging over our
heads. As a matter of principle we must continue to work,
as if the Waldorf school were established for eternity. This
certainly demands a very pronounced devotion on the part
of the teaching staff, who work with inner intensity without
any chance of knowing whether in three months’ time they
will be unemployed.
Nevertheless, Waldorf education has grown out of
anthroposophy. What has been least sought for is what pros-
pers best. In other words, what the gods have given, not what
men have made, is most blessed with good fortune. It is quite
comprehensible that the art of education is something which
perforce lies especially close to the hearts of anthroposophists.
For what is really the most inwardly beautiful thing in the
world? Surely it is the growing, developing human being.
To see this human being from the spiritual world enter into
the physical world through birth, to observe how what lives
in him, what he has carried down in definite form, is gradu-
ally becoming more and more defined in his features and
movements, to behold in the right way divine forces, divine
manifestations working through the human form into the
physical world—all this has something about it which in the
deepest sense we may call religious. No wonder, therefore,
that wherever there is the striving towards the purest, truest,
most intimate humanity, such a striving as exists as the very
foundation of anything anthroposophical, one contemplates the
riddle of the growing human being with sacred, religious fer-
vor and brings towards it all the work of which one is capable.
That is something which, arising out of the deepest
impulses of the soul, calls forth within the anthroposophical
movement enthusiasm for the art of education. So one may
truly say: The art of education stands within the anthropo-

156
 It is, therefore, necessary that we should gain in this
way a concrete understanding of the human being and reach
the point at which we are able to grasp the fact that man’s
physiological and anatomical form is a musical creation in-
sofar as it stems from the astral body. Think how intimately a
musical element is connected with the processes of breathing
and the circulation of the blood. Man is a musical instrument
in respect of his breathing and blood circulation. And if you
take the relationship between the circulation of the blood
and the breathing, 72 pulse beats in a minute, 18 breaths in a
minute, you get a ratio of 4:1. Of course this varies individu-
ally in many ways, but by and large you find that man has
an inner musical structure. The ratio 4:1 is the expression of
something which, in itself an inner rhythmical relationship,
nevertheless impinges on and affects the whole organization
in which man lives and experiences his own being. In olden
times the scansion of verses was so regulated that the line
was regulated by the breath and the metrical foot by the cir-
culation. Dactyl, dactyl, caesura, dactyl, dactyl. Four in one,
the line expressive of the man.
But what man expresses in language is expressed still
in education. We have no wish to introduce anthroposophy
into the school, for we are no sect; what we are concerned
with is universally human. We cannot, however, prevent
children from leaving the evangelical and Catholic religion
lessons and coming to the free religion lesson. It is not our
fault, but they come. And so we have ever and again to see
to it that this free religion lesson is continued.
The Waldorf school is growing, step by step. It now
has about 800 children and between 40 and 50 teachers. Its
growth is well in hand—not so its finances. The financial situ-
ation is very precarious. Less than six weeks ago there was
no means of knowing whether the financial position would
allow the Waldorf school to exist beyond June 15th. Here we
have an example which shows clearly how difficult it is today
for an undertaking to hold its own in the face of the terrible
state of economic affairs in Central Europe, even though it

157
 artistic means, with the first simple beginnings of arithmetic.
All this must thus form a unity. Such things as these must be
gradually developed as ”soul milk” which we need for the
child when he comes to school.
And when he reaches the age of puberty, he will
require ”spiritual milk.” This is extremely difficult to give
to present-day humanity, for we have no spirit left in our
materialistic age. It will be a difficult task to create ”spiritual
milk,” but if we cannot succeed in creating it, we shall have
to leave our boys and girls to themselves at the so-called
“raging hormone” stage, for there is no ”spiritual milk” in
our present age.
Man consists not only of his physical body and ethe-
ric body, which later is emancipated and free at the seventh
year, but also of the astral body and ego. What happens to
the astral body of the child between the seventh and four-
teenth years? It does not really come to its full activity until
puberty. Only then is it working completely within the human
organism. But while the etheric body between birth and the
change of teeth is in a certain sense being drawn out of the
physical body and becoming independent, the astral body
is gradually being drawn inwards between the seventh and
fourteenth years, and when it has been drawn right in and
is no longer merely loosely connected with the physical and
etheric bodies but permeates them completely, then the hu-
man being has arrived at the moment of puberty, of sex maturity.
With the boy one can see by the change of voice that
the astral body is now quite within the larynx; with the girl
one can see by the development of other organs, breast
organs, and so on, that the astral body has now been
completely drawn in. The astral body finds its way slowly
into the human body from all sides.
The lines and directions it follows are the nerve fibers.
The astral body comes in along the nerve fibers from without
inwards. Here it begins to fill out the whole body from the
outer environment, from the skin, and gradually draws itself
together inside. Before this time it is a kind of loose cloud in

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sophical movement as a creation which can be nurtured in
no other way than with love. It is so nurtured. It is indeed
nurtured with the most devoted love. And so many venture
to say further that the Waldorf school is taken to the heart of
all who know it and what thrives there, thrives in a way that
must be looked upon as an inner necessity.
Human Values in Education.
London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1971.

Gender Observations
The child is curious, but not with an intellectual
curiosity, for as yet it has no reasoning powers, and anyone
who appeals to the intellect of a child of seven is quite on the
wrong lines; but it has fantasy, and it is this with which we
must deal. It is really a question of developing the concept
of a kind of ”milk of the soul.” For you see, after birth the
child must be given bodily milk. This constitutes her food,
and every other necessary substance is contained in the milk
that the child consumes. And when she comes to school at
the age of the changing of the teeth, it is again milk that you
must give her, but now, milk for the soul. That is to say, your
teaching must not be made up of isolated units, but all that
the child receives must be a unity; when she has gone through
the change of teeth she must have ”soul milk.” If she is taught
to read and write as two separate things, it is just as though
her milk were to be separated chemically into two different
parts, and you gave her one part at one time and the other at
another. Reading and writing must form a unity. You must
bring this idea of ”soul milk” into being for your work with
the children when they first come to school.
This can only come about if, after the change of teeth,
the children’s education is directed artistically. The artistic
element must be in it all. Tomorrow I will describe more
fully how to develop writing out of painting and thus give
it an artistic form, and how you must then lead this over
artistically to the teaching of reading, and how this artistic
treatment of reading and writing must be connected, again by

159
160
which the child lives. Then it draws itself together, lays firm
hold upon all the organs, if we may put it somewhat crudely,
it unites itself chemically with the organism, with all the tis-
sues of the physical and etheric bodies.
But something very strange happens here. When
the astral body presses inwards from the periphery of the
body, it makes its way along the nerves which then unite
in the spine. Above is the head. It also forces its way slowly
through the head nerves, crawls along the nerves towards
the central organs, towards the spinal cord, bit by bit, into
the head, gradually coming in and filling it all out.
The Kingdom of Childhood.
London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1964.

161
 ______________. Supplementary Course, Stuttgart, June 1921,
Steiner Schools Fellowship/Kolisko. Now pub-
lished as Education for Adolescents, Anthroposophic
Press, 1996.
______________. The Child’s Changing Consciousness and
Waldorf Education, Dornach, April 1923, Rudolf
Steiner Press, 1988. Now published as The Child’s
Changing Consciousness as the Basis of Pedagogical
Practice, Anthroposophic Press, 1996.
______________. The Education of the Child in the Light of
Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1965.
______________. The Essentials of Education, Stuttgart, April
8-12, 1924, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1968,
Anthroposophic Press, 1997.
______________. The Kingdom of Childhood, Torquay, August
1924, Anthroposophic Press, 1995.
______________. The Renewal of Education, Dornach, April/
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______________. The Roots of Education, Bern, April 1924,
Rudolf Steiner Press, 1982, Anthroposophic Press,
1998.
______________. The Younger Generation, Stuttgart, October
1922, Anthroposophic Press, 1967.

Note:
All excerpts indicating the Anthroposophic Press were used by
permission of
Anthroposophic Press,
PO Box 960,
Herndon, VA 20172-0960

All excerpts indicating the Rudolf Steiner Press were used by

permission of the
Rudolf Steiner Press,
51 Queen Caroline Street,
London, W6 9QL Great Britain

162
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______________. Practical Advice to Teachers, Rudolf Steiner
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 battle between the astral and etheric bodies 20
Baumann 135-136
before puberty 116
biographies 106
blood 107, 108, 110, 143, 157
blood circulation 20, 157
bookbinding 129, 130
botany 115
box-making 130
boys 71, 72, 75, 77, 86, 97, 110-112, 142, 159, 160
boys and girls 109
breath 19, 46
breathing 19
breathing and puberty 17
breathing rhythm 19, 20, 21
brother-sister soul 37
brotherly love 53
brutality 67
business 52
business letters 62

C
capacities 84
change of teeth 18, 39, 46, 55, 76, 86, 123
change of voice 41, 160
changes in muscle 46
changes in teeth 159
changing school 126
chemistry 74, 100, 125, 143
childhood 75
childhood into adolescence 117
chlorosis 107
Christ Jesus 33, 120
circulation rhythm 21
clairvoyant vision 25, 37

164
 Index
A
abstract idea 47
achieving a new relationship with the students 77
adolescents 89, 95
advice to teachers 51, 70
aesthetic dislike of evil 106
age nine and ten 20
age twenty-one 71
agriculture 51-52
Ahriman 22
Akashic record 24, 37
Amfortas 32-34
anatomy 74
anemia 107-108
anthroposophy 29, 30, 73, 98, 117, 120, 156, 158
antipathy 79, 123, 152
anti‑social powers 15
appreciation of elders 102, 116, 134
apprenticeship 101
Aristotle 139
artistic atmosphere 115
artistic balance 68
astral body 10, 12, 16-18, 20-24, 27-30, 34, 38-39, 47, 53,
66, 71-72, 80, 87, 97-98, 115, 117, 141, 148,
156, 160-161
astral body and desire 16
astral sheath 22
Augustine, St. 98
authoritarian approach 89
authority 27, 44, 47, 64-65, 76-77, 79, 89, 102-103, 113,
124, 137, 152

B
balance in teaching 100

165
 egotism 32
Egyptian 126
eighteenth year 114
emancipation of feeling 140
enthusiasm 148
environment 59, 115
epic poetry 96
Epimetheus 97
equanimity in life 25
erotic sensation 79
eroticism 14-15, 80
ether forces 19
etheric body 16, 18, 21, 24, 27, 65, 84, 156
ethics 123
eurythmy 81
evil 106, 123
evolution 27
exams 127-128, 132
extraneous discipline 109

F
faith 29, 30
falling asleep and waking up 21
false romanticism 68
fantasies 68, 87
feelings 139-140, 142, 147
female organism 46, 109
finding your anchor in life 151
finite commands 106
Fisher King 33-34
food 63
forces of knowledge 114
forces of will 41
foreign-language teaching 57-59, 110
free religion lesson 157
freed-up intelligence 44

166
classical schools 53
coeducation 94
college of teachers 69
consciousness 34
contoured concept 17, 21
courage of life 25
crafts 79, 99, 101, 130
craftsmanship 49
creative ideas 87
criminality 67
criticism 47, 80
cultural life 96

D
damaging judgment 14
death 27
decadence 52
degeneracy 67
descriptions from a clairvoyant 24
desire 16-17, 24
destiny 152
destructive effects on the brain 50
developing universal love 63
devotion 44
double nature of the human being 36
dramatic poetry 96

E
earthly gravity 143
earthly maturity 38
eating and drinking 26
economic life 53
educational mistakes 48
educators can remove hindrances 107
effects of occult development 30
ego 16, 21, 66, 67, 71, 160

167
 idealistic deeds 26
ideals 4, 76, 68
image forming forces 40
imagery 106
imagination 14, 18, 21, 104-105, 141
imitation 53, 76, 114
incapacities of the teacher 13
independent judgment 47-48, 141, 145
individualized feelings 152
industrial processes 61
inner independence 39
inner upheaval 87
inspiration 21, 105, 141
instinct 24, 26
instinctive actions 26
instructions to teachers 119
intellect 13, 104, 106, 147-148, 150, 153
intellectual concepts 22
intellectualism 22
intelligence 44, 66
interest in the world 10
intuition 105
iron 143

J
judgment 13, 22, 39, 47-48, 50, 79, 145-146, 155

K
Kant 150
Kant‑Laplace theory 14
knitting 124
knowledge 74

168
freedom 53, 146, 149, 154
freemasonry 92-93

G
geography 61
girls 71, 72, 75-77, 86, 97, 107-111, 130, 140, 142, 160
Goethe 95, 124, 150
goodness 105, 123
grammar 59, 62
gratitude 102, 118, 123
Greco-Latin culture 54
Greek 57, 72-73, 81, 126, 138-139
Gymnast, importance of 138

H
Haeckel, Ernst 104
Hamerling, Robert 127
handicraft 49, 124
handwork 79
head system 41
health 113
healthy logic 124
healthy thinking 124
heredity 16
history 97
Holy Grail 32-34
Homer 96
human judgment 50
human love 45
human thought 60
human voice 90

I
idealism 22-23

169
 memory 86
mental picturing and will forces 40
metabolic system 20, 26, 118
middle school years 82
migraine headaches 118
milk teeth 16
Milton 96
mirror images 24
modeling 136
modern medicine 93
modern technology 99
moral feelings 15, 64, 155
moral impulses 105
moral judgment 105
moral relationships 15
morality 15, 79, 106, 118, 146-147, 150
morning lessons 81
morose teachers 15
music 66, 135-137, 156
musical instruments 136
musical judgment 135, 137
Mystery of Golgotha 34

N
natural history 21
natural respect for old age 134
nature 20, 51
nerve fibers 161
nervous system 110-111
neuritis 108
ninth and tenth years 116
ninth to tenth grades 13

O
Old Moon phase of the earth 29
overcoming of pain 11

170
L
language teaching 57, 110
larynx 41, 43-44, 91, 117, 118, 140
late twenties, the 83
Latin 57, 58, 81
legend of Paradise 31
legend of the Grail 31
Lemurian Age 36
life of instincts 22
limb system 41
literature 96
living culture 49
logic 51, 104
love 44, 53, 65, 79, 91, 94, 102-103, 107, 118, 123-124, 159
love of work 119
lower human being 42
Lucifer 31, 36

M
male dominated society 92
male love 94
male organism 41, 109
man 91-95, 141
manual skills 101
manufacturing 101
Marx, Karl 122
Marxism 122
masculine and feminine 80
materialism 22
mathematics 28
maturity of the breathing 38
maturity of the senses 38
mechanics 125
melancholic temperament 25, 85
memories of former lives 22

171
 R
raging hormones 154
reading 159
religious impulses 64, 146, 152
religious reverence 102, 106
reproduction 91
respect for freedom 107
respiration 157
rhythmic system 20, 105
right preparation 75
rigid concepts 67

S
sanguine temperament 85
Schiller 150
schools of initiation 37
second period of life 147, 155
second teeth 16, 85, 113
secondary sexual organs 17
secretions of the organs 140
self-education 120, 122
self-preparation 75
sense of selfhood 31
seventh year 76
sex 90
sexual love 34, 44, 52
sexual maturation 39
sexual maturity 16, 19, 38, 65, 78-80, 85, 87, 89, 91, 94,
103, 123
sexuality 86
Shakespeare 96
singing 136
sister-soul 37
skepticism 14
sleep 17-18, 36-37, 44
sleeping forces 35

172
overly cerebral teachers 51

P
Parsifal 32-34
participation in life 49
passion 24
Pedagogical Law 156
performing deeds larger than our thoughts 3, 23
personal relationship of teacher to pupil 95
pessimism 14
phenomena 72
phlegmatic temperament 85
physical body 16-17, 82
physical development of the child 82
physical movement 81
physics 100, 143
physiology 74
pictures 104
Plato 139
poison 12
polarity between man and woman 91
power 10, 14
power of judgment 22
powers of imagination 13
practical life 51, 61-62, 79, 98, 100, 125-126, 130, 143
pre-adolescent children 95
premature intellect 104
process of learning 61
professional skills 101
Prometheus 97
proper nutrition 63
psycho-bodily sclerosis 133
puberty 10, 35, 38-42, 44-45, 47, 63-66, 71, 75-76, 86,
96, 103, 106, 109, 117, 119, 123, 129, 138-139, 144,
148
puberty and music 135
puberty and the brother-sister soul 34

173
 social life 101, 144
social love 44
social movement 145
soul difficulties 151
soul economy in teaching 81, 98
soul milk 159
soul suffocation 29
sound judgment 47
special prayer for the teacher 120
speech 42, 114, 140, 142
speech organization 41
spinning 99, 126, 130, 144
spiritual life 26
spiritual milk 160
spiritual vision 37
spiritual-scientific concepts 22
statistics 100
stimulating life forces 23
sympathy 79, 123, 151
sympathy and antipathy 120

T
tact 49
tasks of teachers 14, 20, 75
teacher’s authority 12
teacher’s mood 77
teaching economically 56, 57
technology 98
teenage revolution 15
temperament 20, 24
tenth class 74
thankfulness 107
Theosophist’s mark 68
thinking 117, 140, 155
third body 38
third period of life 105
thought 56

174
three golden rules of the art of education 107
timetable 57
tooth formation 39
training of the Waldorf school teachers 112
transition from the ninth to the tenth grade 13
truth 55

U
unformulated questions 12
universal human love 53, 65
urban life 15

V
verbal expression 103
verve 13
visual imagery 147
vocal music 136
voice 110
voice change 46, 90

W
Wagner 137
weaving 125-126, 144
will 40-41, 43, 44-45, 55-56, 111
will impulses 89
will system 118
women 92-96, 141
word-wisdom 71
world-affairs 51
writing 159

Y
youthfulness 134

175