Rudolf Steiner's Art of Education

An Impulse of the Spirit of the Age

By WALTER JOHANNES STEIN

IN its onward march, in its rising and falling waves, I . in its harmonies and dissonances, human evolution is

\'.....' like a wonderful piece of music. The life of a man is an episode, a song on the waves of time, as it were a single motif within the shoreless wonders of Eternity and those who lend their ears to the voices of the Powers by whom

I the evolution of mankind is moulded and directed soon

~. hear the melody of an individual life or of the life of a \ 1 \\) . people as it echoes down the ages in ever -changing and

'K , yet related tones. These tones awaken in the human ~ : heart the certainty that the value of the individual is

not lost but remains through the streaming current of~ I i the ages, through all their constant changes and

vicissitudes. The course of history is seen as a great and significant whole, sustained by one primordial moti f mnning through many variations, a motif which lends meaning and purpose to the Earth in its process of gro",th and development and in which Universe and Egohood, musically interwoven, maintain their identity to all Eternity.

It is this conception of world-history that arises when we view it in the light of Rudolf Steiner's magni­ficent descriptions. But Rudolf Steiner did not merely narrate events in history. Such is the power of his Spirit that a realisation of the process of human evolution

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can only dawn within us if our soul is capable of hearing new tones, new variations of the primal motif. His words waken chords in our innermost being and, all impercept­ibly, our listening itself becomes an active working. Our study becomes a living activity and in the depths of our being impulses of will are awakened in the service of a great, far-reaching purpose.

The different modes of human experience come into being and pass away in obedience to primeval law. The past whispers across the ages and cosmology arises as the science of the beginnings of human history. All over the East men still live with the past. The individual Ego is still absorbed in the All, and cosmic history is human history. In ancient times of Indian civilisation, the development of a man's bodily nature went parallel with growing experience of the mysteries of the All of which the human body was felt to be a part. 'My Ego is encircled and embraced by the forces of theAll, wrapped away like the bud of a lotus flower, slumberirig in the ocean of wisdom eternal. '-Such was the experience of the ancient Indian. In those times, no matter how

. advanced his age, man was never wholly incarnate on Earth. His Spirit was not really incarnate but hovered above the body as a butterfly hovers above a flower. And as the butterfly draws the living sweetness from the flower when the bloom is about to fade, so did the ancient Indian when he reached venerable old age feel that his way was being prepared to meet the Eternal. Just as the bee sucks the drops of honey in order to fly the further and create new forms, so did the ancient Oriental know his eternal being to be the master-builder of new earthly forms in which he would come to dwell.

In times when this experience was a perfectly natural one, pedagogical science in the modern sense, was, of

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course, quite unknown. The aged were also the WIse, and reverence for age was the quality which led the young to a higher goal. 'May we grow towards the Eternal, may the Eternal breathe upon us.'-Such wasthe guiding maxim of that epoch. Self-education was foreign to men for they neither knew nor recognised a 'Self.' What we call the' Self' was a drop of the Eternal Substance, of the Soma which man felt within himself, in body, soul and Spirit. Soma was everywhere, in the Moon whence the Gods sipped it as their drink, in the juices of plants whence it was drawn as drops of honey from the coloured flower by the bright butterfly. Life and the process of growing old were a God-willed preparation of the drop of Soma. The Soma-so it was said-becomes a delicate aroma in the human being as he grows old and venerable.

And those who knew and realised the presence of the Eternal within themselves played the principal part in the building of the structure of social life, the aim of which was to be a true reflection of the Eternal. Social life was given its configuration by the Twice-born, that is

.to say by those who had brought the Eternal to birth within themselves, those who in their hearts were Sun­Beings just as the bee is a being of the Sun. The bee­community is built and shaped according to eternal principles, without regard to the earthly considerations which guide the existence of the drones. Such was the life of the ancient Orient-remote froni. the Earth and utterly disinclined to grapple with the powers that rise

I, up from the depths of the Earth. The attitude of the ancient Indian was that the powers rising up from the Earth were of little or no significance inasmuch as his aspirations were towards a high spiritual goal. He felt that surrender to these powers of the Earth would be a misconstruction of the goal of his particular epoch.

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ANTHROPOSOPHY

But the world went on its way. Man had not reached his goal when, under the guidance of sages, a still nomadic race sprang up along the shores of the Indus. A second phase of evolution led man to a more settled existence as a tiller and a cultivator of the soil beneath his feet.

Man attached himself to the Earth, sowed the Earth with seed, wai~ing for rain and sun to complete and perfect handiwork in harmony with the great laws of the Universe. Vistas of new worlds opened out before his inner V1SlOn. The rosy hues of dawn, the crimsons of sunset created before his eyes the wonderful picture in which the Soul of the World was revealed to him. His senses were aroused into activity. Dream-consciousness , gave way to waking consciousness. The awakening of all that lies in slumber became the fundamental aL.-u. Men began to enquire into the mysteries of the hidden powers and forces of Nature, to lay hold of what Nature produces in germ but does not fully develop. They set out to complete and perfect what Nature leaves incomplete and imperfectly developed-in other words to reveal the Soul of the VI! orld just as the painter with his colours reveals the mysteries of the soul. Such was the man of ancient Persia. The struggle between the processes of coming­into-being and passing-away was revealed to him by the Light and the Darkness and he entered into this struggle, impelled by an instinctive, devotional zeal to let his being ring out in the great All as one tone in the ocean of tones emanating from the forces o~ the whole Universe. The aim of the Persian was to be a man of Earth-but a man of Earth whose eyes of aspiration were raised to the shining Sun. To make the Sun the Ruler of the world, to transform slumbering faculty into deed-this "vas the ideal of the Persian Magi. Here we have the birth of the idea of education, but not yet in the form in

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which we know it to-day. Not man alone but the world of animals around him, the plants, nay even the minerals­all must be purified and ennobled. The taming of animals and the cultivation of plants originated with the ancient Persians. The regulating of activities in line with the course of the seasons is their contribution and gift to civilised life. To the Persians we owe bread-fruit and the finer fruits of the Earth. Their solicitude for the minerals and metals is still beyond our full comprehension. Not until we have reached a higher stage of development, in a future yet to come, shall we fulfil-and then with clear, conscious knowledge-the goal towards which this agricultural civilisation opened up a way: the redemption of the World-Soul from crucifixion upon the Earth-Body. When we teach Nature-Lore to-day, when we try in our lessons to convey to the children pictures of the soul of Nature, we have by no means brought to life but have only dimly and gropingly expressed what once existed asa wonderful World-Impulse in those far-off ages. When the forces lying hidden in stone and plant, in animal and man reveal the World-Soul once again in a radiance of colour and of light, then and only then will that world of experience awaken in its fulness in the souls of men. This new world of experience <::ontains within itself the model for the social life of ages yet to come. Our 'world-economy' is but a dim foreshadowing of what lies slumbering in the womb of the future. There will come a time .when men will sit in very truth at God's board, partake of His bread and drink His wine,

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seeing the wide Earth as His table and the bright colours of Earth as the manifestation of His soul. Painting will . then express the purification and ennoblement of the soul. Crude reds, tongues of fiery flame will shade off into clear violets and ethereal blues; the realm of the living

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will shine with a rosy radiance and the green of the plant­ f j ,

world will express the pulsation of the living blood of God. The whole of living Nature will become a mani­festation of what happens when the rose transforms the green saps into the colour-ed blossom. Lite is enfilZed with soul.

But we must now return to the evolutionary path of humanity. . In Babylonian and Egyptian humanity men have become personalities. In the Babylonian custom of wailing for the Dead, in the Funeral Rites of Egypt, there speaks · the yearning for individual immortality. The desire of man in this third epoch is not to be a tone ringing forth in the Cosmos, nor yet a soul widened by living, cosmic experience of the interplay between Sun and Earth. His desire now is to be an Ego. The element of sorrow and travail that is inevitably connected with the development of Egohood-the emergence from bondage to the Great All-are apparent everywhere. In architecture and sculpture men have tried to capture for eternity that which all too swiftly is passing away. Priestly wisdom gives aim and direction to this emerging Ego-consciousness and reminds man of his divine descent from spiritual worlds beyond the ·Earth. lVIan finds himself involved in the play of the Elements. Sages direct the aspiring eyes of their neophytes to the circling planets and to the constellations of the fixed stars in the heavens. This is a world of experience which we to-day rnust re-attain from our home on the Earth, for it faded from vision long, long ago. We ourselves have made the w hole descent to Earth ; we are ensnared by the earthly and the personal but we are already on the way back to the heights whence pre-Grecian humanity descended. To the Egyptians, the pyramids were still the expression of a central force coming downwards from above and then

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expanding, whereas the form of the pyramids seems to us to diminish in size from the base towards the heights. And yet we can only truly understand Egypt and Babylon when we see in their sculpture and architecture expres­sions of Divinity descending to Earth, Divinity in the process of assuming bodily form. The age dawned when man began to seek for the Divine in local cults, and a local cult can only be part of a whole. One part only is expressed at one place, another part at another place. The learners became wanderers, kn0wledge became a piecework, the Godhead was divided and dismembered and the aim of all schooling was to lead back the scattered portions to the whole, the dead to the living, that which had already come into existence to its primal origin.

The stamp of learning and of teaching in that age may be indicated by words which express the fundamental principle of training: " 0 man, learn from thy forefathers and know that they are of divine origin." The feeling of responsibility to forefathers and to the Gods was the guiding moral principle. Before the judgment-seat of Osiris and in the presence of the forty-two forefathers, the heart of the dead man is weighed in the balance.

And then, in the fourth epoch of history, the World­Spirit Himself was made man. The World-Spirit trod the Earth in the form of man-a model for every human being.-" Suffer little children to come unto Me," He said, for He knew that little children learn through imitation. And those who had grown to maturity were bidden to become " as little children."

The Greeks were the people of whom the Egyptians said that they remained children their whole life long. The Greeks themselves said: 'all learning is imitation.' It was in Greece that man first became truly , young' and that is why we cannot speak of education in our

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sense of the word, be/ore the time of the Greeks. It was in Greece that education, as we understand it, had its rise. Until then, the education of man was carried out ; by the Gods and by the Priests. It was a question of the reacquisition of primeval wisdom. The Greeks were the first people who developed, as it were, from below upwards, that is to say, from the human to something higher than the human. And this is quite a new element. Greek education was primarily an education of the bodily nature through imitation and it became more and more an education through the word. And so it remained until the l\lidd1e Ages and on into the modern age. Education in the Christian era is based upon the word and upon the doctrine.

But education in this form can only really affect the human being up to the age of puberty. After that .' age something else is now required, something quite unknown in earlier times. It is the education of the human being who is possessed of and applies his own, independent power of judgment. During the process of the development of inner freedom man needs a system of education which conveys authority and lays down a standard through the word, lets these principles do their · work but does not then desert him. Education which fails at this point is not reckoning with the needs of modern man. But there is an art of education which does reckon with these needs, namely that inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner. He, the writer of The Philosophy 0/ Spiritual Activity, has brought to humanity that art of education which embraces in its scope everything that man has already made his own, but it adds thereto the principles of education for the human being who is actually entering into possession of his inner freedom.

As evolution proceeds it will be more and more

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again. From the Ego, from the Earth, there comes into being what once came from God. We are on the path of return to the Cosmos.. We have become personalities, men of Earth. The task we were set was to learn to love the Earth, and we were not shielded from Earth's suffering. The heavens of the Gods of old have long since been closed to us, but within the soul there is born in freedom that which gives aim and purport to the whole of existence, namely, the inner ideal.

And so to-day when years of practical experience have proved the reality of the life-force contained in Rudolf Steiner's art of education, there stands before the souls of those who strive with all too feeble powers but with warm enthusiasm to fulfil what the Spirit of the Age voiced through Rudolf Steiner, the ideal of this education. It is a picture which kindles the impulse to fulfil what our age demands and so sorely needs, what the future of humanity needs and what must live on into the future for the healing and the progress of mankind.