From Kindergarten Into the Grades

From Kindergarten into the Grades INSIGHTS FROM RUDOLF STEINER

Selected and edited by Ruth Ker

From Kindergarten into the Grades: Insights from Rudolf Steiner First English Edition © 2014 Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America ISBN: 978-1-936849-23-9 Cover photos: Courtesy of Sunrise Waldorf School, Duncan, BC, Canada Editor: Ruth Ker Managing Editor and Graphic Design: Lory Widmer We are grateful to Judith Soleil and the Rudolf Steiner Library, Ghent, NY for assistance in preparing this volume, and to the publishers of the quoted works for permission to reprint these excerpts: SteinerBooks/Anthroposophic Press • www.steinerbooks.org Rudolf Steiner Press • www.rudolfsteinerpress.com AWSNA Publications • www.whywaldorfworks.org Completion Press • www.completionpress.com.au Mercury Press • www.mercurypress.org This book was made possible by a grant from the Waldorf Curriculum Fund. Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America 285 Hungry Hollow Rd. Spring Valley, NY 10977 845-352-1690 [email protected] www.waldorfearlychildhood.org For a complete book catalog, contact WECAN or visit our online store at store.waldorfearlychildhood.org All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles.

Contents Preface by Ruth Ker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Educator’s Role: Cultivating the Eyes to See . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 The Nature of the Etheric Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 The Process of the Birth of the Etheric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 The Nature of the Change of Teeth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 The Protection of the Etheric Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 The effect of the caregiver’s temperament . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Experiencing nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Overcoming heredity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Sleep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Educating the Child Prior to the Birth of the Etheric . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Imitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62 Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Play and toys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Music and movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 The battle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Intellectualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 The Kindergarten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Educating the Child During and After the Birth of the Etheric . . . . . 85 Imitation and authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Memory, habits, and choices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Language, voice changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Memory pictures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 The Educator’s Task of Forming Pictures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Other Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Afterword by Ruth Ker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

Preface How do we rise to meet the discouraging, and often economy-driven, compromises to our educational systems worldwide? Although these are signs of our current times, I believe it is imperative that we, as educators, policy-makers, and parents, stand strong and equip ourselves with the deepest of understandings about the mysterious forces inherent in the growth and development of the young child. This will go a long way in fueling our capacities to act responsibly when advocating for the children of our time. In anticipation of the International Waldorf Teacher’s Conference on “Transitions” for both grade school and early childhood educators, taking place at the Goetheanum in Dornach in 2015, this volume was prepared out of the work of the WECAN Older Child in the Kindergarten group and the IASWECE Older Child group. Both groups have spent a significant amount of time studying current research and the work of Rudolf Steiner along with the important strides that anthroposophists of our time have made in understanding the development of the young child, particularly around the threshold of the six/seven-year change. The quotations in this book are taken solely out of the timeless contributions of Rudolf Steiner and are relevant to the work of both early childhood and grade school educators. They are intended to form a comprehensive, but by no means complete, collection of Rudolf Steiner’s words on the topic of the birth(s) of the etheric body. It is my hope that these excerpts will arouse in the reader the desire to delve further into the

From Kindergarten into the Grades • 5

context in which they were given and that this further exploration will lead to more insights. The passages in this book have been compiled mainly with an eye to the nature of the etheric body and its births and how we as adults can support the growing child. From his earliest lectures onward Rudolf Steiner had much to say about the birthing of the etheric body and the detrimental consequences of accelerated “learning” for the young child. Rudolf Steiner indicated in many ways the complicated sojourn that children undergo as they approach this threshold of the sixth-to-seventh year, where they are both imitators and seekers of authority. As educators on this threshold, we have to stretch our capacities to respond to children in ways that reflect their varied needs for loving authority and worthy example. We could consider ourselves bridges between two different worlds as we tend this threshold at a time when the individual child, and childhood in general, is extremely vulnerable in so many ways. How can we find the eyes to witness rightly this invisible mystery and the consequent transformations for the children in our care? Included in this material are also a few quotations by Steiner about the importance of regular, dedicated observations of the individual child and the consequent gift of inspiration for the educator. Surely this will give us the substance out of which we can act rightly in our interactions with children while they are in the midst of these great changes. Perhaps it will even fortify us to stand for the children in our care by having the right kind of informed conversations with those who are in decision-making positions within our schools and in the wider world. While compiling these quotations, I decided to follow Steiner’s references chronologically as he traveled all over Europe during the years from 1906 to 1924, lecturing on this theme to educators, doctors, and lay people. For the most part, you will find the excerpts organized in a chronological order. It amazed me that no two lectures were the same, and that often new insights were offered in each new place. It is no wonder that some people followed him around from place to place, hoping to have more deepening on the topic of their interest. Sometimes he would be speaking to 1500 people or more, as he was when he gave the lectures in Stuttgart in April of 1924, now published in the book The Essentials of Education. To fully explore all sides of this matter, I encourage you to explore the extra referenced quotations in each of the sections. I would also be most grateful for notification of any other relevant research that you discover.

6 • Preface

A delightful outcome for all who read or study this material would be the strengthening of their compassion and understanding for the nature of the birth of the etheric and its effect upon the developing child. It is my hope that reconnecting to the wisdom-words of Rudolf Steiner will help us to grow in our sense of responsibility to stand as protectors for the well-being of childhood.

—Ruth Ker


The Educator’s Role:

Cultivating the Eyes to See

Note: All numbers in brackets (e.g. [1]) refer to the reference list on page 113. On August 31, 1919, in a lecture included in the collection The Spirit of the Waldorf School [18], Rudolf Steiner encouraged his audience to “form a picture of the whole human being in which the body, soul and spirit intertwiningly affect one another. If you wish to teach and educate children as they need, you must form such a picture” (p. 136). In a lecture on the theme “Man’s Becoming, World Soul and World Spirit”

[12], Steiner once again encourages us to cultivate the eyes (“supersensible

visioning”) to observe the forces at work in the biography of the young child. Many references indicate that this is a very grounded and practical exercise that caregivers and teachers must undertake. It surprised me that in just about every lecture Rudolf Steiner mentions this and yet, as educators, many of us lean in the direction of striving for head-knowledge rather than struggling for the insights that can come from observation:

12/29/1921, in Soul Economy [22], p. 104. If you want to fathom the secrets of human nature, you have to observe it with the same precision used to observe the phenomena of outer nature. Here are some more hints as to how to go about this:


8/15/1919, in Education as a Force for Social Change [17], pp. 56-57. The relationship of human beings to the supersensible worlds must completely permeate the teacher. He or she must be able to see in the growing child proof that the child has entered earthly life from the supersensible world through birth, has clothed itself with a physical body. The teacher must be able to see that the child has taken on tasks that the teacher is to assist with here in the physical world because the child could not take on those tasks during the period before rebirth. [Teachers] should perceive each child as a question posed by the supersensible world to the sense-perceptible world.

8/16/1922, in The Spiritual Ground of Education [24], pp. 8-9. Today, the kind of knowledge we develop is called intellectual knowledge, and it is entirely within us. It is the form of knowledge appropriate to our civilization. We believe we comprehend the outer world, but the thoughts and logic to which we limit knowledge dwell within us. Children, on the other hand, live entirely outside themselves. Do we have the right to claim that our intellectual mode of knowledge ever allows us to participate in a child’s experience of the outer worldçthis child who is all sense organ? We cannot do this. We can only hope to achieve this through a kind of cognition that goes beyond itself—one that can enter the nature of all that lives and moves. Intuitional cognition is the only knowledge that can do this. Not intellectual knowledge, which leaves us within ourselves; that knowledge causes us to question every idea in terms of its logic. We need a knowledge that allows spirit to penetrate the depths of life itself—intuitional knowledge. We must consciously acquire intuitional knowledge; only then can we become practical enough to do what we must in relation to spirit in children during their earliest years.

8/13/1924, in The Kingdom of Childhood [30], p. 22. It is indeed so that a true knowledge of the human being loosens and releases the inner life of soul and brings a smile to the face. Sour and grumpy faces come only from lack of knowledge. Certainly, a person can have a diseased organ that leaves traces of illness on the face; this does not matter, for the child is not affected by it. When the inner nature of a person is filled with a living knowledge of what the human being is, this will be expressed in his face, and this is what can make a really good teacher.

10 • The Educator’s Role

See also:

1/16/1920, What Is Necessary in These Urgent Times [9], p. 47. 4/20/1920, The Renewal of Education [20], p. 31.


The Nature of the Etheric Body To begin with a characterization of the four bodies (physical, etheric, astral and ego):

12/13/1906, in Supersensible Knowledge [2], p. 80. In contemplating the human organism from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint, you will realize that the four members are in reality four entities that are completely different from one another. These entities have merged, and work together within human beings right down into the externally visible aspect of a person’s organism. The four members of a person’s being have different values . . . . human development is dependent upon each of them. Steiner gives many names to the etheric body: supersensible forces, formative forces, the life force or vital force, forces of growth, the organizing principle, the life principle, life body, ether body. He speaks about members of the highest hierarchies having given us this gift:

1/14/1913, in Between Death and Rebirth [6], p. 119. We know that the human being received the germ of his physical body from the Thrones, of his etheric body from the Spirits of Wisdom, of his astral body from the Spirits of Movement, and the germinal foundation for the “I” from the Spirits of Form.


Rudolf Steiner tells us that, unlike the physical body, the etheric body takes a long time to be fully born and, that, after some mini-births, it gradually comes to birth around seven years of age. As we read his words, a picture begins to arise of the forming way in which the etheric works on the substances and forces of the physical body and thus brings about the phenomenon of growth, the inner movement of vital body fluids and reproduction. The etheric body is more than just that which animates the physical body. It is the builder and sculptor of the physical body. It is the molder, the inhabitant, and the architect.

12/1/1906, “Education in the Light of Spiritual Science” [2] in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 51-53. . . . . [T]he ether body as the second member of a person’s being . . . is a spiritual organism, considerably more delicate and refined than the physical body. It has nothing to do with physical ether, and is best described as a sum of forces or currents of energy rather than as substance. The ether body is the architect of the physical body. The physical body crystallizes out of the ether body much as ice crystallizes out of water. We must therefore regard everything that constitutes the physical aspect of a person’s being as having evolved from the ether body. Human beings have this member in common with every being endowed with life—that is, with the vegetable and animal kingdoms. In shape and size the ether body coincides with the physical body except for the lower part, which differs in shape from the physical. . . . The human physical body is related to the mineral kingdom, the ether body to the vegetable kingdom and the astral body to the animal kingdom. . . . [I]f we are to understand a person, we must always consider each human being individually.

1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 5-12. The physicist need not take offense at the term etheric body. The word ether in this connection does not mean the same as the hypothetical ether of physics. . . . In that earlier time people would say to themselves, “The substances and forces at work in a mineral cannot, by themselves, form the mineral into a living creature. There

14 • The Nature of the Etheric Body

must also be a peculiar ‘force’ inherent in the living creature.” They called this the vital force and thought of it somewhat as follows: the vital force works in the plant, the animal, and the human body, and produces the phenomena of life, just as magnetic force is present in the magnet that produces the phenomena of attraction. . . . For those who have developed the higher organs of perception, the etheric or life-body is an object of perception and not merely an intellectual deduction. . . The life-body works in a formative way on the substances and forces of the physical body and thus brings about the phenomena of growth, reproduction, and inner movement of vital body fluids. It is therefore the builder and shaper of the physical body, its inhabitant and architect. The physical body may even be spoken of as an image or expression of the life-body. In human beings the two are nearly—though by no means totally—equal in form and size. . . . We must not . . . imagine that the etheric and sentient [astral] bodies consist simply of substances that are finer than those present in the physical body. . . . The etheric body is a force-form; it consists of active forces, and not of matter. The astral or sentient body is a figure of inwardly moving, colored, and luminous pictures. The astral body deviates in both size and shape from the physical body. In human beings it presents an elongated ovoid form in which the physical and etheric bodies are embedded. It projects beyond them—a vivid, luminous figure—on every side. . . . The etheric or life-body is simply the vehicle of the formative forces of life, the forces of growth and reproduction. . . . As human beings work their way up from this stage of development through successive lives or incarnations to higher and higher evolution, the “I” works upon the other members and transforms them. . . . And the etheric or life-body also becomes transformed. It becomes the vehicle of habits, of human beings’ more permanent intent or tendency in life, of the temperament and memory. One whose “I” has not yet worked upon the life-body has no memory of experiences in life. One just lives out what has been implanted by Nature. . . . [W]hen a human being is absorbed in the contemplation of a great work of art the etheric body is being influenced. Through the work of art one divines something higher and more noble than is offered by the ordinary environment of the senses, and in this process one is forming and transforming the life-body. Religion is a powerful way to purify and ennoble the etheric body.


12/13/1906, in Supersensible Knowledge [2], p. 80. . . . [A]ll the organs connected with growth, propagation and digestion are built not only by the physical principle, but also by the ether or life body. Only the organs built according to physical laws are sustained by the physical principle; the processes of digestion, propagation and growth are sustained by the etheric principle.

1/12/1907, in The Christian Mystery (Completion edition) [5], p. 212. The human ether body is the bearer of everything that has lasting nature—habits, character, conscience, memory, temperaments. . . . Just as the child’s external senses should develop up to the seventh year, so his habits, memory, temperament and so on are let go free by the fourteenth year. . . . Steiner speaks repeatedly about the forces at work in the three different seven-year cycles as supersensible forces, as shown by the following excerpts.

10/4/1919, “Social Understanding through Spiritual Scientific Knowledge” [8], pp. 2-3. If you do not regard the human being purely superficially, you will be struck by the fact that the nature of human development is entirely different in the three different seven-year stages. The pushing through of our permanent teeth, as I have often mentioned, is connected with the development of forces that are not merely confined, let us say, to our jaws or their neighboring organs, but fill our whole physical body. There is work in progress within our physical body between birth and the seventh year, and this work comes to an end with the pushing through of our permanent teeth. It is obvious that the forces doing this work of developing the physical body are supersensible, isn’t it? The perceptible body is only the material in which they work. The supersensible forces, active in the whole of the human being’s organization during the first seven years of life, become, as it were, suspended when their purpose has been achieved and the permanent teeth have appeared. At the age of seven these forces go to sleep. They are hidden within the human being; they go to sleep within him. And they can be drawn forth from your being when you do the sort of exercises I describe in How To


Know Higher Worlds as leading to Intuition. For the forces that are applied in the acquisition of intuitive knowledge are the same forces that you grow with at the time of life when this growth culminates in the change of teeth. These sleeping forces that are active within the human body until the seventh year are the forces you use in supersensible knowledge to reach Intuition. Now the forces that are active from the seventh year to the fourteenth year and go to sleep at puberty in the depths of the body, are drawn forth and form the power of Inspiration. And the forces that in bygone times used to be the source of youthful ideals between the fourteenth and the twenty-first year. . . . the forces that create organs in the physical body for these ideals of youth, are the same forces you can draw forth from their state of slumber and use for the acquisition of Imagination. From this you will see that the forces of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are not just any old forces gotten from we do not know where, but are the same forces as those we grow with from our birth to the age of twenty-one. So the forces that live in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are very healthy forces. They are the forces a human being uses for his healthy growth and that go to sleep within his body when the corresponding phases of growth are completed.

9/22/1920, in Balance in Teaching [21], pp. 49-50. Looking at the human constitution you will find . . . on the one hand the physical and the formative force or etheric body; these two never separate between birth and death—they belong together in a certain sense continuously from birth to death. On the other hand, the physical and etheric bodies separate, in falling asleep, from the astral body—first of all, the etheric body from the astral body—and upon awaking they join together again. The etheric and astral bodies, we see, are less closely linked than are, for instance, the physical and etheric bodies.

4/4/1923, in From Limestone to Lucifer [34], pp. 104-6. Now let us take a look at the child. . . . When he is born he differs from an adult not only in the way he looks—the cheeks are different, the whole form; the forehead looks different. . . . Inside, however, he is even more different. The brain mass is more like a brain mush in the infant. And up to the seventh year, up to the time when the child gets his second teeth, this mush, this brain mush, is made into


something truly marvellous. From the seventh year onwards the human brain is quite marvellously structured. . . . the element of soul and spirit has done this inside. But you see, . . . we would be unable to shape and develop this brain in such a marvellous way up to our seventh year if we were not all the time in touch with the world. If you have a child who is born blind, for instance, you’ll immediately see that the nerves of vision and with them a whole part of the brain remain a kind of mush. This is not beautifully developed. When someone is born deaf, the nerves of hearing, nerves that come from the ear and cross here [drawing on the board], after which they go over there, remain a piece of brain mush along this way. It is therefore only because we have the senses that we are able to develop our brain properly in the first seven years of life. But the brain does not develop anything for you that you might reach out and touch. . . . All the matter we can reach and touch therefore does not help you to develop the brain in the first seven years. It needs the most subtle forms of matter, like the subtle matter that lives in light, for example. Ether is what is needed. You see, this is most important. We absorb the ether through all our senses. So what is it that develops all this activity coming from the head? The activity that comes from the head and also extends to the rest of the child’s organism does not come from the physical body. The physical body is not active in the marvellous development of the child’s brain; it is the ether body which is active. The ether body, of which I have told you that we still have it for two or three days after we die, is at work in the child. It makes the human being develop a perfect brain and thus become a thinking human being. We are therefore able to say that the ether body is active in our thinking. With this we have once again found the first supersensible aspect of the human being—the ether body. A child would not be able to develop his brain, he would not be able to have a human brain in him, if he were not able to work with the ether body that is all around.

4/19/1923, in The Child’s Changing Consciousness [25], pp. 105-6. Physical matter exerts pressure. The nature of the etheric has a quality all its own. . . the etheric has the characteristic of being the polar opposite of pressure; it has the effect of suction. It always has the tendency to expedite physical matter out of space, to annihilate


it. This is the characteristic feature of the etheric. Physical matter fills up space and the etheric gets rid of space-occupying matter. . . This applies also to the human etheric body. Our relationship to the physical and etheric bodies consists of our constantly destroying and renewing ourselves. The etheric continually destroys material substance and the physical body builds it up again. Earlier in the lecture excerpted below, Steiner talks about the qualities of the physical body and its propensity to have weight and gravity. He also indicates, once again, the importance of the educator’s striving to develop the imaginative knowledge and capacity to sense the etheric in the growing child.

8/8/1923, in A Modern Art of Education [26], pp. 60-62. At the first stage of exact clairvoyance. . . one can perceive how, besides the forces of the physical body, a suprasensory body is working in us—if you will forgive the paradoxical expression. This is the first suprasensory member of the human being. . . If through imagination we become aware of the suprasensory body, which I call the ether body, or body of formative forces, we find that it cannot be weighed. It weighs nothing; on the contrary, it tends away from the earth in every direction toward cosmic space. It contains forces opposed to gravity, and works perpetually against gravity. . . . [T]hrough imagination, we gain a concept of the relationship between our self-enclosed ether body and the surrounding world. In spring, the force that drives the plants out of the soil toward the cosmos in all directions, and against gravity—the force that organizes plants, brings them into relation to the upward tending stream of light and works in the chemistry of the plant as it strives upward— all this is related to the ether body, just as foods like salt, cabbage, turnips, and meat are related to the physical body. . . Until the change of teeth, the ether body is intimately connected to the physical body. It organizes the physical body from within and is the force that pushes the teeth outward. Once the second teeth arrive, the part of the ether body that pushes the teeth out has finished its purpose in the physical body, and its activity is freed from it. With the change of teeth, these etheric forces are freed, and it is with these forces that we begin to think freely from the seventh year on. The force of the teeth becomes less physical than it was while the teeth acted as the organs of thought; it is now an etheric force. This


same force that produced the teeth now works in the ether body and thinks. When we experience ourselves as thinking beings and feel that thinking arises in the head (many people do not have this experience unless thinking has caused a headache), true knowledge shows us that the force we use to think with is the same as that once contained in the teeth.

4/15/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], pp. 38-39. The etheric body is not subject to gravity—on the contrary, it is always trying to get away. Its tendency is to disperse and to scatter into far cosmic spaces. This is in fact what happens right after death. Our first experience after death is the dispersal of the etheric body. The dead physical body follows the laws of the earth when lowered into the grave; or when cremated, it burns according to physical laws just like any other physical body. This is not true of the etheric body, which works away from Earth, just as the physical body strives toward Earth. The etheric body, however, does not necessarily extend equally in all directions, nor does it strive away from Earth in a uniform way. Now we arrive at something that might seem very strange to you. . . When you look up into the heavens you see that the stars are clustered into definite groups, and that these groups are all different from one another. Those groups of stars attract the etheric human body, drawing it out into the far spaces. [See book for drawing] The different groups of stars are drawing out the etheric body in varying degrees; there is a much stronger attraction from one group of stars than from another, thus the etheric body is not drawn out equally on all sides but to varying degrees in the different directions of space. Consequently, the etheric body is not spherical, but, through this dispersion of the etheric, certain definite forms may arise in the human being through the cosmic forces that work down from the stars. These forms remain in us as long as we live on Earth and have an etheric body within us. Later in the lecture, Steiner goes on to describe the formation of muscle and bone in relation to this.

7/20/1924, in Human Values in Education [29], p. 72. Where are the forces of the ether body during the first period of life? They are bound up with the physical body and are active in its nourishment and growth. In this first period, children are different


from what they become later. All the forces of the ether body are initially bound up with the physical body. At the end of the first period, they are freed to some extent, just as warmth is freed from a substance with which it had been bound. What happens now? After the change of teeth, only part of the ether body is active in the forces of growth and nourishment; the part that has been liberated now carries on the more intensive development of memory and soul qualities. Because it is a fact, we must learn to speak of the soul as “bound” during the first seven years of life, and to speak of the soul as “liberated” after the seventh year. What we use as soul forces during the second seven-year period of life is, during the first seven years, imperceptibly bound up with the physical body, when nothing psychic can be free of the body. We can gain knowledge of how the soul works during that first seven years by observing the body. Only after the change of teeth can we directly approach what is purely of a soul nature.

8/14/1924, in The Kingdom of Childhood [30], p. 42. . . . [I]n order for human beings to incarnate at all, they have to absorb something that is not yet mineral but is only on the way to becoming mineral, namely the etheric element. See also:

12/13/1906, Supersensible Knowledge [2], p.80. 12/29/1921, Soul Economy [22], pp.106-7. 4/10/1924, The Essentials of Education [27], pp. 45-46.


The Process of the Birth of the Etheric 12/1/1906, “Education in the Light of Spiritual Science” [2], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 54. At the time of the change of teeth an etheric covering loosens itself from the ether body, as the physical covering did at physical birth. That means that the ether body is born and becomes free in all directions. Until then an entity of like nature to itself was attached to it, and spiritual currents flowed from this entity through it just as physical currents flowed from the maternal covering through the child before birth. Thus, the child is born a second time when the ether body is born.

12/29/1921, in Soul Economy [22], pp. 106-7. [A] suprasensory contemplation of the human being will reveal to us—apart from the physical body—another, finer body that we call the ether body, or body of formative forces. This ether body provides not just the forces that sustain nourishment and growth; it is also the source of memory faculties and the ability to create mental images and ideas. It does not become an independent entity until the change of teeth, and its birth is similar to the way the physical body is born from one’s mother. This means that, until the change of teeth, the forces of the ether body work entirely in the processes of a child’s organic growth, whereas after that time—while still remaining active in this realm to a great extent—those forces partially withdraw from


those activities. The released forces of the ether body then begin to work in the soul realm of mental images and memory, as well as in many other nuances of a child’s soul life. The change of teeth is a unique event. The forces needed to push out the second teeth existed prior to this event, but now they are no longer needed. Once the second teeth have appeared, this particular activity of the ether body becomes redundant. The final activity of pushing out the second teeth is an external manifestation of the sort of activity that is happening within a child’s organism. At the end of the first seven-year period, most of these ether forces are released to flow into a child’s soul and spiritual nature. One can recognize these seven-year periods throughout the entire human life, and each again can be seen in three clearly differentiated shorter periods. If we observe the gradual withdrawal of some of these ether forces until approximately the seventh year, we see how during the first two and a half years after physical birth the ether body frees itself from the head region; in the next two and a half years, it frees itself from the chest region; and finally, until the change of teeth, it frees itself from the child’s metabolic-limb system. Thus we see three phases in the gradual withdrawal of ether forces. And we clearly recognize how, while the ether body is still connected with the head region, a child rejects any intentional influence coming from outside.

12/29/1921, in Soul Economy [22], pp. 112-13. At the age of two and a half, the head organization in children is developed far enough so that the forces of the ether body that have been working on it may be released. This gradual withdrawal continues into the area of the chest until about the fifth year, when breathing and blood circulation have also reached a certain stage of completion. Thus, by the time that children learn to speak and walk, the formative forces released from the head (now acting as soul and spiritual forces) join those being released in the chest region. This change can be recognized externally by the emergence of an exceptionally vivid memory and wonderful imagination, which children develop between two and a half and five. However, you must take great care when children develop these two faculties, since they are instrumental in building the soul. Children continue to live by imitation, and therefore we should not attempt to make them remember things we choose. At this stage it is best to leave

24 • The Process of the Birth of the Etheric

the evolving forces of memory alone, allowing children to remember whatever they please. We should never give them memory exercises of any kind, otherwise, through ignorance, we might be responsible for consequences we can see only when viewing the entire course of human life.

12/13/1906, in Supersensible Knowledge [2], p. 81. . . . Then at the age of seven another enveloping sheath is pushed aside. The development of an individual’s being can only be understood when we recognize that at the change of teeth something happens spiritually that is similar to what happens physically at birth. The human being is truly born a second time about the seventh year, for the ether body is born and can begin to work independently, just as was the case with the physical body at its birth. The maternal body acts physically on the embryo before birth; up to the change of teeth the spiritual forces of the ether world act on the human ether body. At about the seventh year they are pushed aside, as was the maternal body at physical birth. Up to the seventh year the ether body remains latent within the physical body. At the time of the change of teeth the situation in regard to the ether body is comparable to a piece of wood being ignited. Up till then it was tied to the physical body; now it is freed and can act independently. The ether body’s release is announced by the change of teeth. Those with deeper insight into human development recognize that the change of teeth is a significant event. Up to the age of seven the physical principle is at work unfettered, while the etheric and astral principles are still latent, that is, not yet born from their spiritual sheaths.

1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 16. . . . Until the change of teeth certain impressions intended for the etheric body can no more reach it than the air and the struggle of the physical world can reach the physical body while it rests in the mother’s womb. Before the change of teeth occurs, the free life-body is not yet at work in human beings. Just as within the body of the mother the physical body receives forces not its own, gradually developing its own forces within the protecting sheath of the mother’s womb, so also are the forces of growth until the change of teeth. During this


first period the etheric body is only developing and shaping its own forces together with those—not its own—it has inherited. While the etheric body is thus working its way toward freedom, the physical body is already independent. The etheric body, as it liberates itself, develops and works out what it has to give to the physical body. The second teeth—that is, the person’s own teeth—that take the place of those inherited, represent the culmination of this work. They are denser than anything else embedded in the physical body and thus appear last at the end of this period. After this point the growth of the human physical body is brought about by one’s own etheric body alone. But this etheric body is still under the influence of an astral body that has not yet escaped its protecting sheath. At the moment the astral body also becomes free, the etheric body concludes another period of its development; this conclusion is expressed in puberty.

9/16/1920, in Balance in Teaching [21], pp. 15-16. Let us call to mind what the change of teeth signifies. Before the change of teeth—that is, between birth and the change of teeth—the physical and etheric bodies in the child’s organism are strongly influenced by the nerve-sense system operating from above downward. Up to about the seventh year the physical body and the etheric body are most effectively influenced from the head. In the head are concentrated the forces that are particularly active in these years— that is, in the years when imitation plays such an important role. And what takes place in the formation of the remaining organism, trunk and limbs, is achieved through what rays down from the head to this other part, to the trunk and the limb organism, to the physical body and the etheric body. What radiates from the head into the physical and etheric bodies of the whole child right into the tips of the fingers and toes, this radiating from the head into the whole child is soul activity, even though it emanates from the physical body. It is the same soul activity that is later active in the soul as intelligence and memory. Only later on, after the change of teeth, children begin to think in such a way that their memories become more conscious. The whole change that takes place in the child’s soul life shows that certain soul forces previously active in the organism become active as soul forces after the seventh year. The whole period up to the change of teeth, while the child is growing, makes use of the same forces that after the seventh year appear as intellectual forces.


Here you have an interplay between soul and body that is quite real; the soul emancipates itself in the seventh year and begins to function—no longer in the body, but independently. At this point, those forces that come newly into being in the body as soul forces begin to be active, and from the seventh year on they are at work well into the next incarnation. Then whatever radiates upward from the body is thrust back, whereas the forces that shoot downward from the head are restrained. Thus, during the time the teeth are changing, the most severe battle is fought between the forces striving downward from above and those shooting upward from below. The change of teeth is the physical expression of this conflict between the two kinds of forces: those that later appear in the child as powers of reasoning and intellect, and those that need to be used particularly in drawing, painting, and writing. We employ upwelling forces when we develop writing out of drawing, for what these forces really strive for is to pass over into sculptural formation, drawing, and so forth. These are the sculptural forces that, ending with the change of teeth, have previously modeled the child’s body. We work with them later, when the second dentition is completed, to lead the child to drawing, to painting, and so on. These are primarily the forces that were placed into the child by the spiritual world in which the child’s soul lived before conception. At first they are active as bodily forces in forming the head, and then from the seventh year on they function as soul forces. See also the section on “The Battle” on page 74.

9/22/1920, in Balance in Teaching [21], pp. 43-45. I have . . . emphasized how the organizing principle in the physical body emerges with the change of teeth, frees itself during this time, and shapes primarily the intelligence. That is one way of describing the process. Another way, however, stated earlier when the whole subject was brought to our understanding from a different standpoint, is to say that the etheric body is born with the change of teeth. The first birth is of the physical body but the birth of the etheric body is not until about the seventh year. What we call the birth of the etheric or formative force body can also be seen as the emancipation of the intelligence from the physical body, a two-sided description of the same phenomenon. We can grasp the matter only by observing two such aspects at the same time. In spiritual science nothing can be characterized without approaching something from


different sides and then combining the different aspects into one comprehensive view. . . . What else happens? Into the etheric body or intelligence, whichever you like to call it, into what has become free streams the ego, which had already descended at birth and now works on the etheric body, bringing it gradually into shape. In this period, therefore, an intermingling takes place between the eternal ego and slowly liberated intelligence or nascent etheric body. Steiner goes on to talk about the freeing of the astral organism from around seven to fourteen, and then continues: . . . But again it is the ego, the eternal element, that unites itself with what is being freed, so that from birth to puberty we have a continuous anchoring of the ego in the entire human organization. After the seventh year the ego settles itself only into the etheric body, whereas previously, while the human being was still an imitator—indeed due precisely to this imitative activity—it worked itself into the physical body, and later, after puberty, it worked itself into the astral body. What we have then is a continuous penetration of the human organization by the ego.

12/31/1921, in Soul Economy [22], pp. 135-136. An important and far-reaching change takes place when children begin to lose their milk, or baby, teeth. This is not just a physical change in the life of a human being, but the whole human organization goes through a transformation. A true art of education demands a thorough appreciation and understanding of this metamorphosis. In our previous meetings, I spoke of the refined body of formative forces, the ether body. These forces are in the process of being freed from certain functions during the time between the change of teeth and puberty. Previously, the ether body worked directly into the physical body of the child, but now it begins to function in the realm of a child’s soul. This means that the physical body of children is held from within in a very different way than it was during the previous stage. . . During the early years, the soul and spiritual life of the child is completely connected to the physical and organic processes, and all of the physical and organic processes have a soul and spiritual quality. All of the shaping and forming of the body at that age is conducted from the head downward. This stage concludes when the second


teeth are being pushed through. At this time, the forces working in the head cease to predominate while soul and spiritual activities enter the lower regions of the body—the rhythmic activities of the heart and breath. Previously, these forces, as they worked especially in the formation of the child’s brain, were also flowing down into the rest of the organism, shaping and molding and entering directly into the physical substances of the body. Here they gave rise to physical processes. All this changes with the coming of the second teeth, and some of these forces begin to work more in the child’s soul and spiritual realm, affecting especially the rhythmic movement of heart and lungs. They are no longer as active in the physical processes themselves, but now they also work in the rhythms of breathing and blood circulation. One can see this physically as the child’s breathing and pulse become noticeably stronger during this time. Children now have a strong desire to experience the emerging life of soul and spirit on waves of rhythm and beat within the body—quite subconsciously, of course. They have a real longing for this interplay of rhythm and beat in their organism. See also:

5/14/1906, “Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight” [4], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 42-43. 4/20/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], pp. 31-32. 11/19/1923, in Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy [23], Volume 2, pp. 167-68.


The Nature of the Change of Teeth 4/15/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], p. 35. The transitions and developments in human life occur slowly and gradually, so to speak of the change of teeth as a single fixed event in time is only approximate. Nevertheless, this point in time manifests in the middle of the child’s development, and we must consider very intensively what takes place at that time.

9/18/1920, in Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms [10], pp. 292-93. Only if one takes seriously all that follows from preexistence will one gain an accurate concept of the connection between the human soul and the human body. . . . If one knows how the prenatal human being incarnates itself in a physical body, then one follows the developing human being in the child quite differently. We find that there are two stages in the developing human being. The first stage is indicated by the change of teeth around age seven. What does this change of teeth signify? It is a much more powerful change in the whole human organism than one usually believes. . . . Until the change of teeth the child does not really form solid, contoured concepts; to be sure, the child remembers a lot but does not retain its memories in concepts; actual intelligence does not yet appear. Just observe a child carefully and


notice how, during the time when the teeth change, the faculty of actual intelligence increasingly emerges. . . . Where was the element of intelligence that emerges after the seventh year? Where was it concealed? It was within the body; it was active in the organism. The same element that emancipates itself at age seven and turns into intelligence was within the body, was forming the body, and the culmination point of its activity of shaping the body is reached when the second teeth appear. The power that thrusts itself into being with the second teeth has been active in the whole organism. It is, however, a power that is active in the body only up to the seventh year. After that it has nothing more to do with the body; it then becomes intelligence. It already was intelligence earlier; as such, however, it was at work in the body. . . . Through birth, intelligence descended. At first it was not active as intelligence, as soul being; it becomes active in this way gradually after the seventh year. Here you have a concrete view . . . . of what works throughout seven years in blood and nerves, in muscles and bones, and then becomes the child’s intelligence. In many places in Steiner’s lectures he elaborates on the fact that second dentition is only one outward manifestation of the many changes that occur for the child at this time. When he refers to the change of teeth in his lectures, as we can see by the quotation below, there are many other soul-spiritual and bodily changes that are occurring at the same time for the child.

4/9/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], p. 16. The first stage of life ends with the change of teeth. Now I know that there is a certain amount of awareness these days concerning the changes that occur in the body and soul of children at this stage of life. Nevertheless, it is not sufficient to enable perception of all that happens in the human being at this tender age; we must come to understand this in order to become educators. The appearance of teeth—not the inherited, baby teeth—is merely the most obvious sign of a complete transformation of the whole human being. Much more is happening within the organism, though not as perceptible outwardly; its most radical expression is the appearance of the second teeth.

1/14/1913, in Between Death and Rebirth [6], p. 116. The appearance of the second teeth is . . . the final act of what may be called the formative principle. The last contribution made by the

32 • The Nature of the Change of Teeth

forces that give the human being his form is when they drive out the second teeth. That is the culmination of the formative process, for the principle which builds up the human form is no longer in action. With the seventh year the formative principle ceases to be active. What comes about later on is only an expansion of what has already been established as form. After the seventh year there is no more remodelling of the brain. All that happens is growth of what is already established as basic form. Therefore we can say that the principle of form unfolds its activity specifically in the first seven years of the life of a human being. The principle of form stems from the Spirits of Form; thus these Spirits of Form are active in the human being during the first seven years of his life. . . . The basis for the form has been established by the seventh year, and the second teeth are what the formative principle still produces out of the human being.

4/11/1920, in Mystery of the Universe [11], p. 32. We have, first of all, in respect to one series of facts, the world organism projected into the human being in the formation of his milk teeth. And then, when we look at the permanent teeth, we find that these are the human being’s own production. An inner human cosmic system places them into the outer cosmic system. Here we have the first herald of potential human freedom, in the fact that the human being engages in something which clearly shows his independence from the universe. This process retains the sequence of the universe within it but the human being slows it down within him, giving the same process a different velocity, seven times as slow, thus taking seven times as long. Here we have a contrast between what takes place within us and the outer being of the universe. Steiner earlier says that the first teething happens in the cycle of a year, actually generally within the second year of the child’s life, if one counts the nine months of gestation and the first three months after birth as the first year. He says this shows that “the universe is obviously working in the child then.” On April 20, 1920, in a lecture delivered in Basel, Switzerland, Steiner expresses this again in a different light:

4/20/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], p. 25. A year or so after birth, the human organism forms the first teeth, not out of just the upper or lower jaw, but out of the entire organism. This is also repeated around the age of seven. Here we can see that


the human organism needs a much longer time to express its hardest structure, the teeth, than it needed to produce the baby teeth in early childhood. . . . At the same time, you need to see how the entire nature of the human being, including its soul aspects, changes with every week from the eruption of the baby teeth to that of the permanent teeth. . . . [T]he life of the soul exists in an entirely different way before the change of teeth than it does afterward.

4/20/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], p. 28. . . . [T]he permanent teeth have a much closer connection with the individual than the baby teeth, which are based more upon heredity.

5/1/1920, in Mystery of the Universe [11], pp. 96-7. If you consider the first and second dentition you will see that the second takes place after a cycle that is seven times as long as the cycle of the first dentition. We may say that the one-year cycle in respect to the first dentition relates to the developmental cycle active until the second dentition in the same way as the day relates to the week. The ancients felt this to be true, because they rightly understood another thing. They understood that the first dentition was primarily the result of heredity. You only need to look at the embryo to realize that its development proceeds out of the headorganization, and the remainder of the organization is added later. . . . [T]hey saw a connection of the formation of the first teeth with the head and of the second teeth with the whole human organism. And today we must arrive at the same result if we consider these phenomena objectively. The first teeth are connected with the forces of the human head, the second with the forces that work from the rest of the organism and penetrate into the head.

5/11/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], pp. 235-36. The change of teeth indicates that certain forces, which previously permeated the entire organism and gave it strength, have now become free and have become . . . the forces of independent thinking. We certainly cannot strictly encapsulate everything that occurs in the organism, as that would certainly be contrary to the way things develop. The things that are primary during one period of human development continue to exist, but to a much lesser extent. We grow wisdom teeth much later because at a later time


in the life of our organism there is something that continues to work that was particularly active up to the age of seven. Some small amount must still remain. If everything were suddenly completed, then people would experience a very strong jolt every time they would want to begin thinking of something. When we begin to think about something, we voluntarily activate those forces that were involuntarily active in the organism before the age of seven. Those things must exist as a bridge between the separated realms of the spirit soul. What was organic at that time must continue to exist. . . . For imaginative thinking we need to become independent, but at the same time we still need to be connected to our organism. In many places Rudolf Steiner speaks about growth spurts. The natural scientific opinion of his time, he said, did not believe that human growth took leaps. He spoke of the time of the change of teeth as a time when the human condition does take such a leap. Here is one such statement:

2/24/1921, in Education, Teaching, and Practical Life [19], pp. 18-19. After all, does not nature take a leap when it develops the green leaf? And later, is there not something leap-like in the development of the sepals and the colorful flower petals and then again of the stamina? And it is the same with human life: anyone objectively observing this evolving human life in the child, out of the suggestions and impulses provided by anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science, will find first of all—not on some mystical basis, but based on faithful observation—a leap in the child’s development around the seventh year, when the child’s second teeth start developing. . . . Now, if we really apply the necessary objectivity to our observation, we can see that the child only really begins to form distinctly contoured features when he comes to the seventh year, whereas before that, he did not have such features. We can see for the first time the possibility for him to think true thoughts—no matter how childish they may be. We can see that something emerges from the child’s soul that was previously concealed in the human organism. If we have a trained spiritual eye for these things, we can see that the child’s soul life completely changes with the change of teeth; something is rising to the surface of the soul from the deepest recesses. Before that, where was this thing, which now emerges in the form of sharply delineated thinking, a clear life of representations? It was there all along, as a force of growth in the human being, permeating the entire organism. It was alive as the


soul-spirit in growth, and it reached its conclusion when, from the inside, new teeth were pushed out and displaced the earlier teeth. When this growth spurt ends, what remains in place is the result of a process for which such intensive forces are no longer needed. We can see that what is present later in the child as (true) thinking was once an inner organic force of growth and that this organic force of growth has metamorphosed into a soul force.

4/15/1923, in The Child’s Changing Consciousness [25], p. 18. With the change of teeth, the forces that cause an inner firmness, an inner consolidation and support, have reached a certain climax. From the moment when the child can stand upright until the inner hardening processes manifest in the change of teeth, the child inwardly tries, although unconsciously, “body geometry” as an activity akin to drawing. When the teeth change, this becomes a soul activity—that is, it enters the realm of the child’s soul. We might understand this transformation better through an analogy; just as a sediment falls to the bottom when a chemical solution cools, and leaves the upper part clearer, so there is also a physiological aspect to the hardening process—the sediment, as well as its counterpart: the clear solution within the child’s soul realm, which manifests as a faculty for geometrizing, for drawing, and so on.

8/8/1923, in A Modern Art of Education [26], pp. 58-59. [A] child develops teeth not only for eating and speaking, but also for another purpose. As strange as it sounds, a child develops teeth for the purpose of thinking. Modern science is unaware that our teeth are the most important of all our organs of thought. . . Children, through their interaction with the environment, spontaneously find their way into thinking. As thinking rises from the dim life of sleep and dreams of infancy, the whole process is related to the teeth pressing through in the head. The forces that press the teeth out of the jaw are also the inner soul forces that now bring thinking to the surface from the unformed sleep and dreams of childhood. A child learns to think with the same intensity as that used to teethe. So how do children learn to think? They learn to think because they are imitative beings and, as such, are completely surrendered to the world around them. At the very core of their being, they imitate events in their surroundings, including what happens because of the impulses of thinking. And then, to the same degree that thought


arises in a child, the teeth emerge. In effect, the force that appears in the soul as thinking is also within these teeth. Let us now follow childhood development further. Around the seventh year, children go through the change of teeth and the second teeth emerge. I said that this force that produces the first and second teeth was present in the child’s whole organism, but manifests strongest in the head. The second teeth come only once. The forces that drive those teeth out of the child’s organism do not work again as physical forces during earthly life. They become soul and spirit powers; they enliven the soul’s inner being. When we observe children around the seventh to fourteenth years—with particular attention to soul qualities—we find that those soul qualities between the seventh and fourteenth years, especially thinking, were organic forces until the seventh year. They were active in the physical organism, culminating as a physical force that pushed out the teeth, and finally becoming soul activity.

8/8/1923, in A Modern Art of Education [26], pp. 62-63. Thus our knowledge brings us close to the unity of the human being. We . . . learn how the physical connects with the soul. We know that children first think with the forces of the teeth, and this is why teething troubles are so connected inwardly with the whole life of a child. Consider all that occurs as a child is teething. All those troubles arise from the process of teething because of its connection to thinking; it is intimately connected with the innermost spirituality of a child. The formative forces of the teeth are liberated and become the independent forces of human thinking. If we have the necessary gift of observation, we can see that process of gaining independence; we can see how, along with the change of teeth, thinking frees itself from the body. And then what happens? To begin with, the teeth come to the aid of speech. The teeth, which initially had the independent task of growth according to the forces of thought, are now forced down a stage, so to speak. Thinking no longer takes place in the physical body but in the ether body, so it descends one stage. This was happening during the first seven years as well, since the whole process is sequential, merely culminating with the second teeth. Then, when thinking seeks expression in speech, the teeth become helpers of thought. So, we look at a human being and we see the head. In the head the formative forces of the teeth free themselves and become the force


of thinking. Then, pressed down, as it were, into speech, we have all the processes for which the teeth are no longer directly responsible, because the ether body now assumes the responsibility, and the teeth come to the aid of speech. Here, their relationship to thinking is still obvious. Once we understand how dental sounds find their way into the process of thinking, we see the task performed by the teeth—how we use the teeth to make the sounds of “d” or “t” and bring the specific thought element into speech. . . We see how thought works in the head where the teeth lie, and how thought develops from the first to the second teeth.

4/9/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], pp. 21-22. We only need to perceive. . . the difference in the ways the second teeth and the first are formed. In this way, we have a tangible expression of the processes occurring in the human being between birth and the change of teeth. During this stage the forces of heredity hold sway in the physical body, and the whole human being becomes a kind of model with which the spirit and soul element work, imitating the surrounding impressions. If we place ourselves in the soul of a child relative to the environment and realize how every spiritual impulse is absorbed into the whole being—how with every movement of the hand, every expression, every look in the eyes of another the child senses the spirit inherent in the adult and allows it to flow in—then we will also perceive how, during the first seven years, another being is building itself on the foundation of the model provided by heredity. As human beings, the earthly world actually gives us, through hereditary forces, a model on which to build the second human being, who is really born with the change of teeth. The first teeth in the body are eliminated by what wants to replace them; this new element, which belongs to the human being’s individuality, advances and casts off heredity. This is true of the whole human organism. During the first seven years of life, the organism was a product of earthly forces and a kind of model. As such it is cast off, just as we get rid of the body’s outgrowths by cutting our nails, hair, and so on. The human being is molded anew with the change of teeth just as our outer form is perpetually eliminated. In this case, however, the first being, or product of physical heredity, is completely replaced by a second, who develops under the influence of the forces that the human being brings from pre-earthly life.


4/21/1924, in Course for Young Doctors [31], pp. 127-29. . . . With the change of teeth the human being really renews his whole physical body. This must be taken as a fundamental fact. That the human being gets second teeth is really only the most external symptom of all, merely, a fragment of what is going on. Just as the so-called milk teeth are replaced, so is the whole human organism replaced. After the change of teeth, so far as his physical substance is concerned, the human being is entirely new in comparison to what he was when he was born. The modern view which jumbles everything together is that the human being is born, passes through a metamorphosis with the change of teeth and then goes on developing. It is not like this. The truth is that when the human being comes physically into the world he has, as well as the so-called milk teeth, a body that is the product of hereditary development. He has received a body that is the product of what is contained in the whole line of ancestry. The physical body of the first seven years comes from here. From the seventh to the fourteenth year the human being has a physical body too, but this body has not been produced from the first by transformation. What the human being has brought with him to the earth has intervened here. Picture it as follows: the human being has had his body. This body which has come to him from the line of heredity is a model; he has it as a model. Into this body he takes earthly substance. If he were to work only with the forces he brings with him from pre-earthly existence he would elaborate this earthly substance which he takes into his body in the first seven years into quite a different form. He does not come at birth with the tendency to give form to a being with eyes, ears, nose, like the being who stands on the earth. He enters with the tendency to structure the human being in such a way that very little is structured by way of the head through his preearthly being; it is especially upon everything else that the greatest care is expended. What is stunted in the embryonic life is developed in the astral, in the ego organization. Of the physical embryo, therefore, we must say: Physical nature in the embryo is developed in a wonderful way but the pre-earthly human has very little indeed to do with it. On the other hand the pre-earthly human being plays the very greatest part in all that lies around the embryo. It lives in what is demolished in the physical world, amnion, chorion, and so on. Within this lives the pre-earthly human.


You can picture it rather like this. To begin with, the cosmos is copied. This is what the human being wants, in reality, to do when he has come down from the pre-earthly into earthly existence. Why does he not do it? Because a model is already provided. And in accordance with this model, with the substances received, he transforms the pre-earthly during the first seven years of life. His inherent tendency would be to form a more spherical being, a being organized into a sphere. This is transformed in accordance with the model and so the pre-earthly forces work out this second physical human being who is there from the seventh to the fourteenth years, but to begin with, by adhering to the model which comes from the forces of heredity. See also:

12/13/1906, in Supersensible Knowledge [2], pp. 81-82. 4/20/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], p. 30. 9/16/1920, in Balance in Teaching [21], pp. 15-16. 4/4/1924, in Education, Teaching and Practical Life: Education and Teaching as the Basis of a True Knowledge of the Human Being [19], p. 137. On the implications of the change of teeth:

4/10/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], pp. 40-41. 7/18/1924, in Human Values in Education [29], pp. 35-36.


The Protection of the Etheric Body In Steiner’s lectures, he continually speaks about the interrelationships of the physical, etheric and astral births. He refers to the need of nurturing each one in a timely way and says that the human being’s destiny is dependent upon fostering the healthy unfolding of each body, giving the requisite time for consolidation.

5/14/1906, “Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight,” in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, [4], p. 43. You need to be aware that we may not place any particular demands on the etheric body until the age of seven, nor on the astral body until the age of fourteen. Exposing the baby’s etheric body to the brutal demands of the world would be the same as exposing the fetus to the physical world in the fifth month of pregnancy, although we could not see it so readily. The same is true of exposing the astral body before the age of fourteen. Allow me to restate what I have just said. Until the age of seven, only the physical body is developed well enough to withstand the full effects of the world. Until that time, the etheric body is so occupied with its own development that it would be detrimental to try to affect it. Until then, we may, therefore, work only with the physical body. From the age of seven until fourteen, we may take up the development of the etheric body, and only beginning with the age of fifteen can we work upon the astral body.


1/12/1907, in The Christian Mystery (Completion edition) [5], pp. 211-12. In the seventh year of life, at about the time when the second teeth emerge, an enveloping ether form separates from the ether body, just as at physical birth the maternal organism separates from the child’s physical body. The child is thus gradually born a second time, this time etherically. . . . And just as it is impossible to bring external light to the child in the womb, so we should avoid letting external influences reach the ether body from outside before it has come free of its protective envelope. Influences should not reach the ether body before the changing of the teeth. . . . Up to the seventh year of life we can only educate the human being in the right way by influencing him in his physical aspect. Just as the care given to the mother is intimately bound up with the well-being of the embryo, so we have to respect the inviolability and sacredness of the child’s protective ether envelope if the child is to develop and thrive. Up to the changing of the teeth, only the physical body is open to external influences and only the physical body can therefore be educated. If we bring anything external to the child’s ether body, we commit a sin against it.

1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 17-18. With the physical birth the physical human body is exposed to the physical environment of the external world. Before birth it was surrounded by the protecting envelope of the mother’s body. What the forces and fluids of the enveloping mother-body have done for it thus far, must from now on be done by the forces and benevolence of the external physical world. Before the change of teeth in the seventh year the human body has to accomplish a task on itself that is essentially different from the tasks of any other period of life. In this period the physical organs must form themselves into definite shapes; their whole structural nature must receive particular tendencies and directions. Growth takes place in later periods as well; but throughout the whole succeeding life growth is based on the forces developed in this first life-period. If true forms were developed, true forces would grow; if misshapen forms were developed, misshapen forms would grow. We can never repair what we have neglected as educators in the first seven years; just as

42 • The Protection of the Etheric Body

nature causes the proper environment for the physical human body before birth, so after birth the educator must provide for the proper physical environment. The right physical environment alone works on the child in such a way that the physical organs correctly shape themselves. Two “magic” words indicate how children enter into relationship with their environment. These words are imitation and example. . . . Children imitate what happens in their physical environment, and in this process of imitation their physical organs are cast in the forms that thus become permanent. “Physical environment” must, however, be understood in the widest sense imaginable. It includes not just what happens around children in the material sense, but everything that occurs in their environment—everything that can be perceived by their senses, that can work on the inner powers of children from the surrounding physical space. This includes all moral or immoral actions, all wise or foolish actions that children see.

1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 21-22. One thing must be thoroughly and fully recognized for this age in a child’s life: the physical body creates its own scale of measurement for what is beneficial to it. It does this by properly developing craving and desire. Generally speaking, we may say that the healthy physical body desires what is good for it. In the growing human being, so long as it is the physical body that is important, we should pay the closest attention to what healthy, craving desire and delight require. Pleasure and delight are the forces that most properly enliven and call forth the organs’ physical forms. In this matter it is all too easy to do harm by failing to bring children into the proper physical relationship with their environment. This may happen especially in regard to their instincts for food. Children may be overfed with things that make them lose completely their healthy instinct for food, whereas by giving them the proper nourishment, the instinct can be preserved so that they always want what is wholesome for them under the circumstances, even a glass of water, and this works just as surely with what would do harm. . . . The children who live in such an atmosphere of love and warmth, and who have around them truly good examples to imitate, are living in


their proper element. One should thus strictly guard against anything being done in the children’s presence that they should not imitate. One should not do anything that one would then have to say to a child, “You should not do that.” The strength of children’s tendency to imitate can be recognized by observing how they paint and scribble written signs and letters long before they understand them. Indeed, it is good that they paint the letters first by imitation and only later learn to understand their meaning. For imitation belongs to the time when the physical body is developing, while meaning speaks to the etheric, and the etheric body should not be worked on until after the change of teeth, after the outer etheric envelope has fallen away.

12/29/1921, in Soul Economy [22], pp. 103-105. If you come to understand what happens in a child between birth and the change of teeth—during the first seven years—you will realize how vulnerable young children are and how deeply we can affect their being. . . The change of teeth represents a decisive turning point in the life of children. Close observation reveals that, after the seventh year, an entirely new interrelationship emerges between the child’s thinking, feeling, and willing. . . .Just as latent heat can be set free by material processes, similarly, soul and spirit forces are set free after the change of teeth, forces that have thus far been bound up with the organism and instrumental for its growth. Freed from processes of growth and nourishment, however, these forces go to work in the child’s soul; they are transformed into soul forces. . . . [A]fter approximately the seventh year, forces that were engaged in building the physical organism of the child are now transformed into soul forces that will determine a child’s relationship to the outer world. If we wish to find out what the soul of a child is like between birth and the seventh year, we have to observe the child’s development from the seventh year onward. For then, in the child’s soul, we are able to observe the very same forces which previously were active in its physical organization. And we shall find that their hidden organic activity of molding and shaping the child’s brain as well as its remaining organization is of a very special significance. For, through birth or conception, the child carries down into its physical


organization what it has brought with it from the worlds of soul and spirit. When children are fully engaged in building up the physical organs in this way, they must be left free to do so, and consequently the doors leading to the outer world remain closed. It is essential that we refrain from interfering in our clumsy ways with these inner activities in children, because they are doing what they have to do and are thus inaccessible to outer will forces. We must also realize, however, that despite the preoccupation of children with their processes of growth, everything we do around them nevertheless makes deep and distinct impressions on them . . . we must not forget that everything at work within the child’s soul after the seventh year was directly involved in the process of building organs up to that age. This means that until the seventh year, the impressions coming from the outer world directly affect their physical constitution—the lungs, stomach, liver, and other organs. In children at this age, the soul has not yet become free of the physical organization, where it is still actively engaged. Because of this, all of the impressions they receive from us through our general conduct have a decisive effect on their future constitution of health or illness. See also:

5/14/1906, “Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight” [4], in Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 42-43.


The effect of the caregiver’s temperament 4/8/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], pp. 13-14. When we understand the interrelationship between teacher and child in terms of the temperaments, we see that, during this first stage of life, what we [as individuals] have learned is relatively unimportant to teaching and educating a child. The most important considerations have to do with the kind of person one is, what impressions the child receives, and whether or not one is worthy of imitation. . . . [I]t is obvious that what I have learned is totally irrelevant in terms of my ability to effectively teach a child before the change of teeth. . . . For the small child before the change of teeth, the most important thing in education is the teacher’s own being.

4/4/1924, in Education, Teaching and Practical Life [19], pp. 137-38. . . . The appearance of the second teeth is not simply a localized process in the human organism. When the first teeth fall out and the second teeth appear, something is taking place in the entire organism. Until that point, the soul and spirit are still very much a unity, actively involved in the formation of the body. As a result, the entire human being is like a comprehending sense organ. What later becomes concentrated in the particular senses is still, at this point, active in the entire human being. . . . The will works like a reflection of all happenings in the environment. Thus, it is only possible to educate children at that age if the educator behaves in such a way that the child can copy everything that one does. This must be understood in the widest possible sense. Imponderable factors are at work between the educator and the child. The child gets impressions, not just of what it perceives with his outer senses, but also what he senses in people’s behavior: their disposition, their character, their good or bad will. Therefore, the educator active near the child must focus on purity of life, down to his very thoughts and feelings, so that the child can legitimately become like the educator. But one should also be conscious that one’s conduct affects the body, not just the soul. Whatever the child takes in and reflexively allows to stream into his willing goes on reverberating in his bodily


organization. For example, an irascible educator’s effect on the child will be to make the child’s bodily organization brittle, more sensitive to morbid influences later in life. How one educates in this direction will appear later in the health of the grown man. . . . [T]he physical body can only develop rightly if the spiritual element in the body is developing in the right way.

4/9/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], p. 28. Children are aware, whenever we do something in their environment, of the thoughts behind a hand-gesture or facial expression. Children intuit them: they do not, obviously, interpret facial features, since what operates instead is a much more powerful inner connection between the child and adult than will exist later between adults. Consequently, we must never allow ourselves to feel or think anything around children that should not be allowed to ripple on within the child. The rule of thumb for all relationships in early education must be this: Whether in perception, feeling, or thought, whatever we do around children must be done in such a way that it may be allowed to continue vibrating [in] their souls. . . . [A]nything that makes an impression on the child, anything that causes the soul’s response, continues in the blood circulation and digestion, becoming a part of the foundation of health in later years. Due to the imitative nature of the child, whenever we educate the spirit and soul of the child, we also educate the body and physical nature of the child. This is the wonderful metamorphosis—that whatever approaches children, touching their spirit and soul, becomes their physical, organic organization, and their predisposition to health or illness in later life.

4/13/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], pp. 8-10. Subconsciously—even unconsciously—children have a delicate and intimate capacity for perceiving what is expressed in every movement and act of those around them. If a choleric person expresses fury in the presence of a child and allows the child to see this in the unconscious way I described, then, believe me, we are very mistaken to believe that the child sees only the outer activity. Children have a clear impression of what is contained within these moral acts, even when it is an unconscious impression. Sense impressions of the eye are also unconscious. Sense impressions that are not strictly sensory impressions, but expressions of the moral and soul life, flow into a


child exactly the way colours flow into the eye, because the child’s organism is a sense organ. This organism, however, has such a delicate structure that every impression permeates all of it. The first impression a child receives from any moral manifestation is a soul impression. For a child, however, the soul always works down into the bodily nature. Whether it be fear or joy or delight that a child experiences in the environment, all this passes—not crudely but in a subtle and delicate way—into the processes of growth, circulation and digestion. Children who live in constant terror of what may come their way as expressions of fury and anger from a choleric person, experience something in the soul that immediately penetrates the breathing, the circulation of the blood, and even the digestive activities. This is tremendously significant. In childhood we cannot speak only of physical education, because soul education also means educating the body; everything in the soul element is metamorphosed into the body—it becomes body. . . As educators, whatever we allow to flow into children during their first phase of life will work down into the blood, breathing and digestion; it is like a seed that may come to fruition only in the form of health or sickness when they are forty or fifty years old. It is in fact true that the way that educators act toward the little child creates the predispositions for happiness or unhappiness, sickness or health. In this lecture, Steiner goes on to speak of the “lasting effects of the teacher’s actions” and the impact of individual temperaments on the growing child (see pages 11-12).

8/13/1924, in The Kingdom of Childhood [30], p. 17-18. . . . [T]he child during the first seven years is really an eye. If something takes place in the child’s environment, let us say, to take an example, a fit of temper when someone becomes furiously angry, then the whole child will have an internalized picture of this outburst of rage. The etheric body makes a picture of it. From it something passes over into the entire circulation of the blood and the metabolic system, something that is related to this outburst of anger. This is so in the first seven years, and the organism adjusts itself accordingly. Naturally these are not crude happenings, they are delicate processes. But if a child grows up with an angry father or a hot-tempered teacher, then the vascular system, the blood vessels, will


follow the line of the anger. The results of this implanted tendency in the early years will then remain through the whole rest of life. These are the things that matter most for young children. What you say, what you teach, does not yet make an impression, except insofar as children imitate what you say in their own speech. But it is what you are that matters; if you are good this goodness will appear in your gestures; and if you are bad-tempered this also will appear in your gestures—in short, everything that you do yourself passes over into the children and makes its way within them. This is the essential point. Children are wholly sense-organ, and react to all the impressions of the people around them. Therefore the essential thing is not to imagine that children can learn what is good or bad, that they can learn this or that, but to know that everything that is done in their presence is transformed in their childish organisms into spirit, soul and body. The health of children for their whole life depends on how you conduct yourself in their presence. The inclinations that children develop depend on how you behave in their presence.

8/19/1922, in The Spiritual Ground of Education [24], pp. 47-50. [W]e must closely observe the inner struggle that takes place during children’s early years, between heredity and adaptation to the environment. Try to study with the greatest human devotion the wonderful process in which the first teeth are replaced by the second. The first teeth are inherited; they seem almost unsuitable for the outer world. Gradually, above each inherited tooth, another tooth forms. In shaping each tooth, the form of the first is used, but the form of the second, permanent tooth is adapted to the world. I always refer to this process of changing teeth as characteristic of this particular period of life, up to the seventh year. But it is only one indication; what happens to the teeth is conspicuous, because teeth are hard organs, but the process takes place throughout the organism. When we are born into this world, we carry within us an inherited organism. During the first seven years of life, we form a new organism over it. The whole process is physical. But although it is physical, it is the work of spirit and soul within a child. And those of us who are close to children must try to guide them in soul and spirit, so that their inner being goes with, rather than against, the health of the organism. We must therefore know what spirit and soul processes are needed for a child to form a healthy organism to replace the inherited organism. We must be able to understand and


work spiritually to promote the physical. In this lecture and in some others, Steiner speaks of the deep imitation of the adult’s soul condition that the child recapitulates. So much so, that a child can deeply take into his being the bitter taste, parched tongue, and sour attitudes of the melancholic adult, for instance. This, then, can become a part of the child’s demeanor because his organism has incorporated these habitual characteristics, even though it is not a part of his real temperament or disposition. These can then become developmental obstacles for the child, obstacles that could stand in the way of achieving prebirth intentions. If we realize the full significance of this, we might tell ourselves that a teacher’s primary task is to nurture the body to be as healthy as possible. This means that we use every spiritual measure to ensure that in later life a person’s body will be the least possible hindrance to the will of one’s spirit. If we make this our purpose in school, we can develop the forces that lead to an education for freedom. . . . As teachers, we must recognize that, to the degree that we allow children to imitate our own sorrow and grief, our bearing greatly damages their digestive system. . . Hence, in young children, until the seventh year, we are concerned with recognizing the pervasive interplay of sensory and nerve activity, the rhythmic activity of breathing and circulation, and the activity of movement and metabolism. And it is the nerve and sensory activity that predominates and has the upper hand; thus sensory activity in children always affects their breathing. If they have to look at a face furrowed by grief, it affects their senses first, then their breathing and, in turn, their whole movement and metabolic system. In children after the change of teeth around the seventh year, we find that the nervous system no longer dominates; it has become more separate and is turned more toward the outer world. In these children, until puberty, it is the rhythmic system that dominates and takes the upper hand. See also:

12/29/1921, in Soul Economy [22], pp. 103-4. 8/9/1919, in Education as a Force for Social Change [17], pp. 10-12.


Memory 1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 15. . . . Even as human beings are surrounded by the physical envelope of the mother-body until the moment of birth, so until the time of the change of teeth—until approximately the seventh year—they are surrounded by etheric and astral envelopes. It is only during the change of teeth that the etheric envelope liberates the etheric body. And an astral envelope remains until puberty when the astral or sentient body also becomes free on all sides, even as the physical body becomes free at physical birth adn the etheric body at the change of teeth. The following is a footnote to the above statement: To object that the child has memory and so on before the change of teeth, or that a child has the faculties connected with the astral body before puberty would indicate a misunderstanding of what is being said here. We must clearly understand that the etheric and astral bodies are present from the beginning, but that they are within their protecting envelopes. It is indeed the protecting envelope that allows the etheric body, for example, to evolve and manifest the qualities of memory very obviously before the change of teeth. But the physical eyes are also present before birth within the protecting envelope of the mother’s womb. The eyes are protected in the embryo, and external physical sunlight must not be allowed to affect their development. In exactly the same sense external education must not endeavor to train or influence the shaping of memory before the change of teeth. If, however, we simply nourish it and do not try as yet to develop it externally, we will come to see how memory unfolds during this period, freely and on its own.

11/19/1923, in Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy Volume 2 [23], p. 166. . . . [I]f one has an eye for what is happening during the change of teeth, when the child undergoes its first important metamorphosis in life, one cannot help realizing that at this point the child’s entire soul life goes through a great change. Previously, the child’s representations


emerged in an elemental, dreamy way. During this stage of life, we witness the development of memory; good observers will notice a transformation of the memory during, or because of, the change of teeth. Observation shows that until the change of teeth, the inner activity involved in remembering—that is, the inner activity that lives in memory—is really in the nature of a habit developed through the physical body. The child remembers—indeed, remembers remarkably well. This remembering, however, feels more like practiced repetition of an activity that has become an acquired skill. Indeed, memory as a whole during the first period of life really is an inner skill, the development of an inner habit. Only from the change of teeth onward, does a child start looking back on past experiences—that is, surveying past experiences in its mind—in a kind of review. In the evolving of memory, the soul life of the child undergoes a radical change.

4/15/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], pp. 48-49. . . . [W]e see, for example, the radical and far-reaching changes that occur with the coming of the second teeth, when the memory becomes a pictorial memory, no longer related to the physical body but to the etheric body. In actuality, what is it that causes the second teeth? It is the fact that, until this time, the etheric is almost completely connected with the physical body; and when the first teeth are forced out, something separates from the physical body. If this were not the case, we would get new teeth every seven years. . . When the etheric body is separated, what formerly worked in the physical body now works in the soul realm. . . . You can examine a child’s second teeth and find that they have been formed by the etheric body into a modeled image of the memory; and the shape of the teeth created by the etheric will indicate how the memory of the child will develop. Except for slight alterations in position here or there, you cannot physically change the second teeth once they are through . . . . When the etheric body is loosened and exists on its own after the change of teeth, the building of memory leaves the physical realm and remains almost entirely in the element of soul; indeed, this fact can put teachers on the right track. Before this change, the soul and spirit formed a unity with the physical and etheric. After this, the physical—previously acting in conjunction with the soul—is expressed as the second teeth, and what collaborated with the physical in this process separates and manifests as an increased power to form ideas


and as formation and reliability of memory.

Experiencing nature 11/25/1923, in Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centers [14], pp. 42-43. . . . Through our own core of being we are connected by intimate ties with the inmost essence of Nature. But because the child until his seventh year has a body that is wholly inherited, nothing of his Ego, nothing of his physiognomy and gestures, pass over into Nature. It is only at the time of the change of teeth that we begin to approach these realities. Hence it is only then—after the change of teeth— that we are mature enough gradually to begin to reflect about any phenomenon of Nature. Until that time it is only arbitrary thoughts that arise in a child, thoughts which really have not very much to do with Nature, and for that very reason are so full of charm. The best way to make contact with a child is to be poetical when we are talking to him, calling the stars the eyes of heaven and so on, when the things of which we speak are as remote as possible from the outer physical reality. It is only after the change of teeth that the child gradually “grows into” Nature in such a way that his thoughts can gradually comprehend thoughts of Nature. Fundamentally speaking, the child’s life from the seventh to the fourteenth year is a period during which he “grows into Nature.” During this period, in addition to his memories he also carries into the realm of Nature his gestures and physiognomy. And this then continues through the whole of life. It is not until the change of teeth that we have any relationship with the inner core of Nature as single human individuals. For this reason the beings I have called Elementals—Gnomes and Undines—listen so eagerly when a human being narrates something about childhood as it was before the age of seven. It is only at the time of the change of teeth that a human being is really born as far as these elemental beings are concerned. . . . Before that time a human being is to the Gnomes and Undines a being “on the other side”; it is for them something of an enigma that humans should appear at this age almost as a completed being.

4/9/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], p. 29. Our initial approach to life had a religious quality in that we related to


nature as naturally religious beings, surrendered to the world.

4/16/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], p. 62. With regard to religion, we must be clear that young children are naturally religious. At the change of teeth, when the soul and spirit become more free of the body, this close relationship with nature falls away, and thus what was formerly natural religion must be lifted to a religion of the soul. Only after puberty does religious understanding arise, and then, once the spirit has become free, what was formerly expressed in imitation of the father or mother must be surrendered to the invisible, supersensible forces. Thus, what has always been present in the child as a seed gradually develops in a concrete way. Nothing is grafted onto the child; it arises from the child’s own being.

Overcoming heredity 11/25/1923, in Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centers [14], p. 40. In the first seven years of life the child’s whole bodily make-up is inherited, including, therefore, the first teeth; all the material substance we have within us during this period is, in essence, inherited. But after approximately seven years all the material substance has been thrust out, has fallen away and is renewed. The human being himself remains as a spirit-form. His material components are thrown out and after seven or eight years everything that was previously there, has gone. And so when we have reached the age of nine our whole bodily make-up has been renewed. We then shape it in accordance with external impressions. It is very important indeed that in the early epochs of life the child should be in a position to build his new body—not the inherited body, but the one developed from within himself—in accordance with good impressions from the environment and by a healthy process of adaptation. Whereas the body the child has when he comes into the world depends upon whether the forces of heredity are good or not so good, the later body he bears is very dependent indeed upon the impressions he receives from his environment. Invariably, however, after seven years the body is renewed. Now it is the “I,” the Ego, that is responsible for this. Although it is true the Ego is not yet born in the seven-year-old child as


far as the external world is concerned—for it is born at a later age—nevertheless it is at work, since it is naturally connected with the body and is responsible for its formation. It is the Ego that is responsible for the development of what then appears as physiognomy and gesture, as the outer, material manifestation of man’s soul-and-spirit.

4/13/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], pp. 6-7. [W]hen we consider the child between birth and the change of teeth we can say that the physical body’s existence is due to physical inheritance alone. But, two other forces then combine to work on this physical body. First is the force of those elements the human being brought with it to Earth; the second is assimilated from the matter and substance of the Earth itself. By the time the teeth change, the human being has fashioned a second body modelled after the inherited body, and that second body is the product of the human soul and spirit. . . One is bound to ask: Can’t you see that a likeness to the parents often appears after the change of teeth—that, therefore, a person is still subject to the laws of inheritance, even after the change of teeth? . . . . . . We have a model that comes from the stream of inheritance. On this model the spirit and soul develop the second human being. But when something is built from a model we don’t expect to find a complete dissimilarity to the model; thus, it should be clear that the human spirit and soul use the model’s existence to build up the second human organism in its likeness. Nevertheless, when you can perceive and recognize what really occurs, you discover something. Certain children come into their second organism between nine and eleven, and this second body is almost identical to the initial, inherited organism. With other children, one may notice a dissimilarity between the second organism and the first, and it is clear that something very different is working its way from the center of their being. In truth, we see every variation between these two extremes. While the human spirit and soul aspect is developing the second organism, it tries most of all to conform to the being it brings with it from the realm of spirit and soul. A conflict thus arises between what is intended to built as the second organism and what the first organism received through inheritance. Depending on whether they have had a stronger or weaker spiritual


and soul existence . . . human beings can either give their second organism an individual form that is strongly impregnated with soul forces, or, if they descend from the spiritual world with weaker forces, stay as closely as possible to the model.

8/12/1924, in The Kingdom of Childhood [30], pp. 9-11. . . . Now when a human being is to descend, a body must be chosen on the earth. And indeed this body has been prepared throughout generations. Some father and mother had a son or a daughter, and there again a son or a daughter, and so on. Thus through heredity a body is produced that must now be occupied. The spirit must draw into it and dwell in it; but in so doing it is suddenly faced with quite different conditions. It clothes itself in a body that has been prepared by a number of generations. Of course, even from the spiritual world the human being can work on the body so that it may not be altogether unsuitable, yet as a rule the body received is not so very suitable after all. For the most part a soul does not fit at all easily into such a body. If a glove were to fit your hand as badly as the body generally fits the soul, you would discard it at once. You would never think of putting it on. But when you come down from the spiritual world needing a body, you just have to take one; and you keep this body until the change of teeth. For it is a fact that every seven or eight years our external physical substance is completely changed, at least in the essentials, though not in all respects. Our first teeth for instance are changed, the second set remain. This is not the case with all the members of the human organism; some parts, even more important than the teeth, undergo change every seven years as long as a person is on the earth. . . . Thus certain hard organs remain, but the softer ones are constantly being renewed. In the first seven years of our life we have a body that is given to us by outer nature, by our parents, and so on; it is a model. The soul occupies the same relation to this body as an artist to a model that he has to copy. We gradually shape the second body out of the first body up to the change of teeth. It takes seven years to complete the process. This second body that we ourselves have fashioned on the model given us by our parents only appears at the end of the first seven years of life. . . . In reality we receive at birth a model body that is with us for seven years, although during the very first years of life it begins to die out and fall away. The process continues, until at the change of teeth we have our second body.


Now there are weak individualities who are weakly when they descend to earth; these form their second body, in which they will live after the change of teeth, as an exact copy of the first one. People say that they take after their parents by inheritance, but this is not true. They make their own second body according to the inherited model. It is only during our first seven years of life that the body is really inherited, but naturally many are weak individualities and copy a great deal. There are also strong individualities descending to earth, and they too inherit a good deal in the first seven years, which can be observed in their teeth. The first teeth are still soft and subject to heredity, but when they are strong individualities, developing in the proper way, these children will have good strong second teeth. There are children who at ten years of age are just like children of four—mere imitators. Others are quite different, strong individuality stirs within them. The model is used, but afterward they form an individual body for themselves. Rudolf Steiner speaks more about this later in this same lecture cycle and then adds the following statement, which is also repeated in a similar way in Lecture 6 of the same cycle (pp. 91-92):

8/13/1924, in The Kingdom of Childhood [30], p. 16. . . . If the individual is strong, then we see how in the period between the change of teeth and puberty, from seven years until about fourteen, a kind of victory is gradually achieved over the inherited characteristics. Children become quite different, and they change even in their outward bodily form.

Sleep 8/7/1921, “Man’s Becoming, World Soul and World Spirit” [12], pp. 1-3. . . . [W]e come to the view that within these seven years a soul force works in the human being which, to a certain extent, with the change of teeth concludes its working in the organism. . . . we can see how the whole soul constitution of the child is transformed in this period of life . . . and there appears [around age seven] the capacity to form up contoured images and other soul capacities also appear. . . We come to a real viewing of what works in an important way in the first seven years of life of the human being. To a certain extent,


we see what is hidden there up to this time, and then becomes free, now appearing as forces of the soul. We have only to acquire a gift in observation for such things, then at this period in human life, just in the first seven years, we shall see a certain system of forces working to a certain degree in a bodily way, and after this period of life, we shall see it coming forth as an element of soul. . . One can also observe how the child still sleeps in a certain way differently, than the human being who then grows out of the child after the change of teeth. To be sure, the difference is not so obvious but it is there. In its sleep condition, up to its seventh year, the child—in the condition which is inherent in the soul in its sleep condition—cannot yet send into it with the same strength, what it sends into it at the later stage in the way of soul forces, for these forces still have to do with the body element, just with the bodily organism. Therefore the child does not yet send sharply contoured concepts into its sleep condition. It still sends into the sleep condition less sharply outlined concepts, less sharply outlined representations, but these less sharply outlined representations have the particular characteristic that they can comprise the real soul-spiritual element in a better way than the sharply outlined representations. That is something important; the more sharply contoured our concepts are for the waking life of day, the less we send into the sleep condition so as to take hold of the realities there. For this reason it occurs in very many cases, in actual facts, the child brings a certain knowing about spiritual reality out of his sleep condition. That then ceases to the same degree that the forces described as coming with the change of teeth are freed, and sharply outlined concepts appear, and these then influence the life in sleep. These sharply outlined concepts damp down so to speak, the gaze upon spiritual realities among which we live between going to sleep and awaking.

1/4/1922, in Soul Economy [22], pp. 214-15. When young children sleep, the soul and spiritual members leave the physical sheaths (just as in any adult) and reenter at the moment of awaking. In children, however, there is still no significant difference between conscious experiences while awake and unconscious experiences during sleep. Normally, if no memories of daytime events enter the world of sleep (and this rarely happens in childhood), the


sleeping life of children moves within realms far beyond the earthly sphere. From these higher worlds, active forces are drawn that then work during the waking state, from the brain down into a child’s whole organism. During the second dentition, certain soul and spiritual forces in children are released from working entirely in the organic sphere. They begin to assume an independent, soul-spiritual quality. Between the change of teeth and puberty, thinking, feeling, and willing in children begin to work more freely. Children are no longer imitators but, through a natural feeling for authority, they develop the consciousness they need to connect with the world. This faith in adult authority is essential, because outer conditions are not enough to ensure that children connect sufficiently with the world. The way adults confront one another, whether verbally or by other means, is very different from the way children encounter adults. Children need the additional support that a sense of authority provides. Consequently, experiences while awake will enter their soul-spiritual life during sleep. So, teachers have the possibility of reaching children through education between the change of teeth and puberty to the same extent that earthly experiences enter children’s sleep and replace those of the spiritual world.

8/16/1922, in The Spiritual Ground of Education [24], pp. 7-8. As with a single sense organ (say, the eye), so goes the whole human being. Children need a great deal of sleep because they are like a whole sense organ; they would otherwise be unable to endure the dazzle and noise of the outer world. Just as the eye must close to the dazzling sunlight, likewise this sense organ— the child—must shut itself off against the world. Because children are like an entire sense organ, they must sleep a great deal. Whenever children are confronted with the world, they have to observe and converse inwardly. Every sound of speech arises from an inner gesture. . . . [S]peech is formed out of gesture through imitation of the environment, using an inner, secret connection between blood, nerves, and brain convolutions. . . . Thus children live in their environment in the same way that, in later years, one’s eye lives in its environment. The eye is formed from the general organization of the head. It lies in a separate cavity so that it can participate in the life of the outer world. Likewise, children


participate in the life of the outer world; they live entirely within the external world and do not yet sense themselves.


Educating the Child Prior to the Birth of the Etheric 4/13/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], p. 7. Consider what we must deal with to educate children during the first period of life between birth and the change of teeth. We are inspired with great reverence when we see how divine spiritual forces work down from supersensible realms! We witness them working daily and weekly, from month to month and year to year, during the first phases of children’s lives, and we see how such work carries them through to forming a second individual body. In education we participate in this work of spirit and soul; for human physical existence, we continue what divine spiritual forces began. We participate in divine labor.

8/30/1919, in The Foundations of Human Experience [15], p. 156. Human beings want to bring what they previously lived through in the spiritual world to the reality of the physical world. Before the change of teeth, human beings are, in a sense, focused upon the past. Human beings are still filled with the devotion developed in the spiritual world. . . . [W]hen people enter the world . . . there is a tendency to begin with an unconscious belief [that] the world is moral. Until the change of teeth, and to an extent, beyond, it is good for education that we take this unconscious belief into account.


In many of his lectures, Rudolf Steiner reiterated that the way to protect the etheric body during the first seven years of life is to allow for this period of gestation to be undisturbed. Also, he repeatedly states that helping the physical body mature through imitation, rhythm, repetition, and right example is the way to foster the proper environment for the young child, thus enabling the etheric to proceed with its task of working on the physical. Steiner called upon the educator to also develop the eyes to see the whole child and to constantly refine these observations and skills. Repeated reminders to teachers to strive diligently to take practical, common-sense steps to develop these organs of perception are prevalent in most of Rudolf Steiner’s educational lectures, so strong was his plea. In this book, I have included only some of these words of appeal.

4/11/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], p. 69. Our task therefore is to work around children—to the degree that we control our very thoughts and feelings—so that children may become beings who imitate goodness, truth, beauty and wisdom. When we think in this way, life flows into our interactions with children; education very obviously becomes a part of that life through our interactions with them. Education, therefore, is not something we work at in isolated activities, but something lived. Children develop in the right way in their growth to adulthood only when education is lived with children and not forced on them.

Imitation 5/14/1906, “Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight” [4], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 44. Who you are in the presence of the child, what the child sees or hears, is important. The child will become a good person when surrounded by good people. Children imitate their surroundings. We must place particular value upon learning by example and the child’s capacity to imitate. Thus, the correct thing to do is to act so the child can imitate as much as possible. In that sense, we must emphasize the child’s physical development between the first and seventh year. During that period we cannot affect the higher bodies through educational methods, quite certainly not through conscious education. You affect these bodies through who you are insofar

62 • Educating the Child Prior to the Birth of the Etheric

as they are not occupied with their own development. People can activate the child’s good sense through their own good sense. Just as the mother’s healthy body has a healthy effect upon the child’s body, the teacher must attempt to be a well-rounded and self-contained person, to have high and good thoughts while in the presence of the child.

4/22/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], pp. 65-66. We need to differentiate human life before the change of teeth and then again until puberty. I have attempted to characterize how different the forces are during the first period of human life in comparison to the second. It requires a very different kind of soul experience for these two periods, for the simple reason that the forces connected with imaginative thinking are directed toward an inner hardening of the human body during the first period of life. This activity culminates in the change of teeth at about the age of seven. The most important means of communicating with human beings during that time lies in the principle of imitating the surroundings. . . . [I]mitation is directly connected with the same forces that produce the second set of teeth. They are the same forces, and, as we have seen, they are the forces of thinking, of inwardly picturing and understanding the world around us. Thus the forces associated with representational thinking are also the forces connected with physical development. These are the forces active in the child’s motive for imitation.

1/12/1907, in The Christian Mystery (Completion edition) [5], pp. 212-13. In the science of the spirit we thus have quite definite rules for educating children in these different stages of life. Care of everything connected to the physical body is what counts up to the seventh year. This includes harmonious development of the organs by influencing the child’s senses. The physical body is what matters, therefore, and needs to be educated. We do this by offering everything to the child that encourages development through the senses. . . . The child is . . . an imitator, everything is for him under the sign of imitating things he hears and sees. Dictates and prohibitions carry little weight at this age. The greatest significance attaches to example, and this is how the environment must awaken the child’s senses. What matters is the way we are, and adults must carefully


observe everything they do and do not do. They should not do anything the child would not be allowed to imitate, for the child believes that everything it sees is something it is allowed to imitate. . . . Up to the changing of the teeth, education exists in being an example to be imitated. Because of this, anyone bringing up a child must be in every respect an example to the child up to his seventh year. It would also be wrong to make the child learn the significance of letters up to that age. A child can merely copy their shapes, for the power to grasp their significance belongs to the ether body. In these years, when the organs of the child should develop and the foundations are laid for health, everything that happens around the child in moral terms is also most important. It is far from immaterial if the child sees pain and sorrow or joy and pleasures in his world, for joy and pleasures lay sound foundations in the physical body. Everything around the child should breathe pleasure and joy, and those bringing him up should make it their concern to create them, even in the color of clothes, wall paper and objects.

4/9/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], pp. 40-41. Let’s look into the nature of the human being before the change of teeth. The teeth are the outer expression of something developing within the human organism as a whole. . . There is a “shooting up” into form—the human soul is working on the second bodily nature, like a sculptor working at shaping the material. An inner, unconscious shaping process is in fact happening. The only way this can be influenced externally is to allow children to imitate what we do. Anything I do—any movement I make with my own hand—passes into the children’s soul building processes when they perceive it, and my hand movement causes an unconscious shaping activity that “shoots up” into the form. This process depends completely on the element of movement in the child. Children make movements, their will impulses change from chaotic irregularity into inner order, and they work on themselves sculpturally from without. This plastic activity largely moves toward the inner being.


1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 18-19. It is not moralistic talk or wise admonitions that influence children. . . but it is, rather, what adults do visibly before their eyes. The effect of admonition is that it shapes the forms—not of the physical, but of the etheric body; and the etheric body, as we saw, is surrounded until the seventh year by a protecting etheric envelope. . . . Everything that must evolve in the etheric body before the seventh year—ideas, habits, memory, and so on—all of this must develop “by itself,” just as the eyes and ears develop within the mother-body without the influence of external light. . . . Children, however, do not learn by instruction or admonition, but through imitation. The physical organs shape themselves through the influence of the physical environment. Good sight will be developed in children if their environment has the proper conditions of light and color, while in the brain and blood circulation the physical foundations will be laid for a healthy moral sense if children see moral actions in their environment. If before their seventh year children see only foolish actions in their surroundings, the brain will assume the forms that adapt it to foolishness in later life. As the muscles of the hand grow firm and strong through doing the work for which they are suited, so the brain and other organs of the physical body of human beings are guided into the correct course of development if they receive proper impressions from their environment.

12/29/1921, [22], in Soul Economy, p. 110. During the first two and a half years, children have a similar rapport with the mother or with others they are closely connected with as long as their attitude and conduct make this possible. Then children become perfect mimics and imitators. This imposes a moral duty on adults to become worthy of such imitation, which is far less comfortable then exerting one’s will on children. Children take in all that we do, such as the ways we act and move. They are equally susceptible to our feelings and thoughts. They imitate us, and even if this is not outwardly noticeable, they nevertheless do this by developing tendencies for imitation that, through their organic soul forces, they press down into the physical organism. Therefore, education during these first two and a half years should be confined


to the self-education of the adults in charge, who should think, feel, and act in a way that, when perceived by children, will cause them no harm. Fundamentally, the stage of imitation continues until the change of teeth, and thus children will be strongly influenced by their environment later on as well.

12/29/1921, [22], in Soul Economy, pp. 115-16. When children approach the fifth year, the ether forces of the body—which have thus far been building the breathing and the blood circulation—now become available for other activities. Likewise, up to the change of teeth, ether forces will struggle free and, after completing their task within the metabolic-limb system, become redundant. At that time, new spiritual and soul forces gradually awaken and emerge fully after the seventh year. However, these forces already shine with a dawning light in this third and final period, which concludes the first seven-year period of human life. When ether forces from the chest area reappear as soul and spiritual forces, children are becoming amenable to exhortations and to a sense of authority. Previously, unable to understand what they should or should not do, they could only imitate, but now, little by little, they begin to listen to and believe what adults say. Only toward the fifth year is it possible to awaken a sense of right and wrong in children. We can educate children correctly only by realizing that, during this first seven-year period until the change of teeth, children live by imitation, and only gradually do they develop imagination and memory and a first belief in what adults say. Faith in the adult induces a feeling of authority, especially for teachers with whom children have a very close relationship. However, at this stage, children are too young for any formal education. It pains me to know that the sixth year has been fixed as the official school age. Children should not enter elementary school before their seventh year.

4/22/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], pp. 65-66. . . . The most important means of communicating with human beings during [the period from birth to age seven] lies in the principle of imitating the surroundings. Everything a person does during the years before the change of teeth is done out of imitation. What occurs in the surroundings of a child


is enormously important, since the child only imitates. Imitation is one of the strengths of children at that age, and that imitation is directly connected with the same forces that produce the second set of teeth. They are the same forces, and, as we have seen, they are forces of thinking, of inwardly picturing and understanding the world around us. Thus the forces associated with representational thinking are also the forces connected with physical development. These are the forces active in the child’s motive for imitation. . . . [W]hen I do something in front of a child who is not yet seven years old, not only do I do it for myself, but my doing also enters the child’s doing. My deeds do not exist for me alone. I am not alone with my deeds, with my willing, with my feeling. I am not alone with my thinking; there are intangibles that also have an effect. There is a difference in whether I live alongside a child with a good attitude and allow the child to grow up alongside of me, or whether I do it with a poor attitude. These intangibles have an effect. . . . If we do not honor the connection between spirit-soul and individual physical human organs, then we do not honor what exists between human beings as a real force, the spirit-soul itself.

8/16/1922, in The Spiritual Ground of Education [24], pp. 6-7. In this case, children up to the seventh or eighth year, when the change of teeth begins, are fundamentally different from what they are later on. . . We are confronted by very significant questions when we try to sink deep into a child’s life. How do soul and spirit work on children up to the change of teeth? . . . How should we cooperate with soul and spirit? We see, for example, that speech develops instinctively during the first period of life, up to the change of teethçinstinctively, as far as children are concerned and regarding their surroundings. . . But how do children actually learn to speak? Do they have some sort of instinct whereby they lay claim to the sounds they hear? Or do they derive the impulse for speech from some other connection with their environment? If we look more deeply into childhood life, we can see that children learn to speak by imitating what they observe unconsciously in their surroundings, using the senses. The whole life of children, up to the seventh year, is a continuous imitation of events in their environment. And the moment they perceive something, whether a movement or a sound, an impulse arises as an inner gesture to relive, with the intensity of their whole inner nature, what has been perceived.


We can understand children only when we contemplate them as we would the eye or ear of an older person, because the whole being of a child is a sense organ. Blood pulses through a child’s body in a far livelier way than it does later on in life. By means of a fine physiology, we can perceive the basis for the development of our sense organs— the eye, for example. During the very early years, blood assumes primacy in the process of the eye’s development. Later, the nerves begin to predominate more and more. The structure of the human senses develops from blood circulation to nerve activity. It is possible to acquire a delicate faculty for perceiving how the blood system gradually leads into the nervous system. As with a single sense organ (say, the eye), so goes the whole human being.

11/4/1922, in Education, Teaching and Practical Life [19], p. 119. . . . [T]he most important thing for the educator is that in the early years up to the change of teeth, the child is a completely imitative being, completely open to the world. The way the child relates to the outer world in the first seven years—and I am not saying this to be paradoxical but to elaborate something quite real—for more or less seven years the child is almost completely a sense organ, perceiving its environment not just with her eyes, with her ears, but through her entire organism, yielding to the world as only the sense organs do. Just as the images of outer objects and processes are prepared in the sense organs, and then reproduced in the inner soul, so too the child wants to copy inwardly all that she senses on the outside. The child wishes to give himself altogether to the external world, to imitate inwardly everything that is presented on the outside. The child as a totality is a sense organ. And if one were able to look into the child’s organism with . . . clairvoyant sensing . . . he would see that the sense of taste, for instance, which in the adult is limited to the tongue and palate, goes far deeper into the child’s organism. One does not overexaggerate when one says that the nursing child tastes her mother’s milk with her entire body. These are the kinds of intimate and intricate details of human physical life that one must observe if one really wishes for the delicate knowledge required by an art of education.


11/27/1919, in The Spirit of the Waldorf School [18], pp. 137. Around the age of six or seven. . . [t]he constitution of [children’s] body and soul is such that they totally devote themselves to their surroundings. They feel their way into their surroundings. They develop themselves from the center of their will so that they mold force lines and force rays of their will exactly to what occurs in their surroundings. See also:

6/19/1919, “The Tasks of Schools and the Threefold Social Organism” [32], in Education as a Force for Social Change, pp. 195-97. 8/9/1919, in Education as a Force for Social Change [17], pp. 10-12. 11/27/1919, in The Spirit of the Waldorf School [18], pp. 136-40.

Environment 5/14/1906, “Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight” [4], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 43-44. To affect the human physical body means to provide the child with external stimuli. Such impressions act to develop the physical body, and for this reason, we can hardly compensate for things neglected before the age of seven. Until the age of seven, the physical body exists in a state that requires external sense impressions to develop it. If a child’s eye sees only beautiful things until the age of seven, the eye will develop so that it retains a feeling for beauty throughout life. Afterward, the child’s sense of beauty can no longer develop in the same way. What you say to a child and what you do until the age of seven are much less important than the environment you create, what the child sees and hears. During this time, we must use external stimuli to support the child’s inner growth. The child’s free spirit creates a human figure from a piece of wood using only a couple of holes and some marks for the eyes, nose and mouth. If you give a child a beautiful doll, then the child becomes bound to it. The child’s inner spirit clings to it and cannot develop its own activity; in this way, children almost entirely lose their imaginative powers.


It is essentially the same with all impressions of the sense-perceptible world. Who you are in the presence of the child, what the child sees or hears, is important. The child will become a good person when surrounded by good people. Children imitate their surroundings. We must place particular value upon learning by example and the child’s capacity to imitate. Thus, the correct thing to do is to act so the child can imitate as much as possible. In that sense, we must emphasize the child’s physical development between the first and seventh year. During that period we cannot affect the higher bodies through educational methods, quite certainly not through conscious education. You affect these bodies through who you are insofar as they are not occupied with their own development. People can activate the child’s good sense through their own good sense. Just as the mother’s healthy body has a healthy effect upon the child’s body, the teacher must attempt to be a well-rounded and self-contained person, to have high and good thoughts while in the presence of the child.

1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 20-21. . . . With regard to the environment, “nervous” children, that is, excitable children, should be treated differently from those who are quiet and lethargic. Everything comes into consideration, from the color of the room and the various objects that are generally around the child, to the color of the clothes they wear. . . . Excitable children should be surrounded by and dressed in red or reddish-yellow colors, while lethargic children should be surrounded by blue or bluish-green shades of color. The important thing is the complementary color that is created within the child. In the case of red it is green, and in the case of blue, orange-yellow. . . . The physical organs of the child create this contrary or complementary color, and this is what causes the corresponding organic structures that the child needs. If excitable children have a red color around them, they will inwardly create the opposite, the green; and this activity of creating green has a calming effect. The organs assume a tendency of calmness.


1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 22. The joy of children in and with their environment, must therefore be counted among the forces that build and shape the physical organs. They need teachers that look and act with happiness and, most of all, with honest unaffected love. Such a love that streams, as it were, with warmth through the physical environment of the children may be said to literally “hatch” the forms of the physical organs.

Play and toys Steiner reveals that the fruits of the activities in children’s play from birth to the age of seven become apparent only at the age of twenty.

5/10/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], pp. 219-20. . . . What we gain in play from birth until the change of teeth, what children experience in a dreamy way, are forces of the still-unborn spirituality of the human being, which is still not yet absorbed into, or perhaps more properly said, reabsorbed into the human body. . . . I have already discussed how the same forces that act organically upon the human being until the change of teeth become, when the teeth are born, an independent imaginative or thinking capacity, so that in a certain sense something is removed from the physical body. On the other hand, what is active within a child through play and has no connection with life and contains no usefulness is something that is not yet fully connected with the human body. Thus the child has an activity of the soul that is active within the body until the change of teeth and then becomes apparent as a capacity for forming concepts that can be remembered. The child also has a spiritual-soul activity that in a certain sense still hovers in an etheric way over the child. It is active in play in much the same way that dreams are active throughout the child’s entire life. In children, however, this activity occurs not simply in dreams, it occurs also in play, which develops in external reality. What thus develops in external reality subsides in a certain sense. In just the same way that the seed-forming forces of a plant subside in the leaf and flower petal and only reappear in the fruit, what a child uses in play also only reappears at about the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, as independent reasoning gathering experiences in life.


. . .This means the various kinds of human beings differ in their independent reasoning after the age of twenty in just the same way that children differ in their play before the change of teeth.

1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 20. . . . This work of [the young child’s] imagination shapes and builds the forms of the brain. The brain unfolds as the muscles of the hand unfold when they do the work they are suited for. By giving the child the so-called “pretty” doll, the brain has nothing more to do. Instead of unfolding, it becomes stunted and dried up. If people could look into the brain as a spiritual investigator can, and see how it builds its forms, they would certainly give their children only the toys that stimulate and enliven its formative activity. Toys with dead mathematical forms alone have a desolating and killing effect on the formative forces of children; on the other hand whatever kindles the imagination of living things works in the proper way. In the following quotation, Steiner’s opening words about teaching are in relation to the period between ages seven to fourteen.

12/1/1906, “Education in the Light of Spiritual Science” [2], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 61. . . . Whatever is taught in a lively interesting manner benefits the child’s ether body. There should be much activity and doing, which has a quickening effect on the spirit. This is also true when it comes to play. The old kind of picture books have a stimulating effect because they contain figures that can be pulled by strings and suggest movement and inner life. Nothing has a more deadening effect on the child’s spirit than putting together and fixing some structure, using finished geometrical shapes. That is why building blocks should not be used; the child should create everything from the beginning, learning to bring to life what is thus formed from the lifeless. Our materialistic age extinguishes life through mass-produced lifeless objects. Much dies in the young developing brain when the child has to do meaningless things like, for example, braiding. Talents are stifled and much that is unhealthy in our modern society can be traced back to the nursery. Inartistic lifeless toys do not foster trust in spiritual life. A fundamental connection exists between today’s lack of religious belief and the way young children are taught.


See also:

On the Play of the Child: Indications by Rudolf Steiner for Working with Young Children, second English edition, edited by Freya Jaffke (WECAN, 2012).

Music and movement 8/21/1919, in Practical Advice to Teachers [16], p. 12. . . . We must face the fact that certain capacities can unfold only between the seventh and fourteenth years in such a way that a person can cope with life later on. If such capacities are not developed during this period, people cannot contend with life’s later struggles. . . . As teachers, we must provide those we educate with the ability to artistically assume their place in the activities of the world. Human nature . . . is such that we are, in a way, born musicians. If people were sufficiently agile, they would dance and move in some way with all little children. We are born into the world in a way that makes us want to join the world with our own bodily nature in a musical rhythm and relationship; this inner musical capacity is strongest in children during their third and fourth years. Parents could do a great deal if they would simply notice this, starting not so much with external musicality but with an attunement of the physical body and the element of dance. It is exactly during this period of life that an infinite amount of good can be gained by permeating the bodies of little children with elementary eurythmy. If only parents learned to do eurythmy with their children, something very different would arise in them than is usual. They would overcome a kind of heaviness that lives in the limbs. We all have this heaviness in the limbs today, and this could be overcome. When children change their teeth, the foundation for everything musical would thus remain in them. The individual senses arise from this musical element—a musically attuned ear or an eye for shapes and forms. A musically attuned ear and an eye that appreciates line and form are specializations of the whole musical human being.


1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 22-23. . . . All learning associated with speech in these years should be especially through imitation. Children will best learn to speak through hearing; no rules or artificial instruction of any kind can be good for this. It is important to realize the value of children’s songs . . . as a means of education in early childhood. They must make pretty and rhythmical impressions on the senses; the beauty of sound is of greater value than the meaning. The more alive the impression on eye and ear the better. Dancing movements in musical rhythm have a powerful influence in building up the physical organs, and this should also not be undervalued.

The battle Steiner makes many references in his lectures to the “battle” that occurs at the threshold time during the change of teeth. Knowing that the child’s organism is a battleground around this time and during the three phases of the birthing of the etheric between birth and seven can help the educators who are present during this time of the child’s biography. A compassionate response from kindergarten and grade-school educators is important. On page 100 of The Karma of Vocation, Rudolf Steiner speaks about the work of the bodies in transforming the inheritance of the child’s previous vocations. He says if this were not done then this “would be detrimental to the child.” Here he speaks about the interplay of the physical, etheric, and astral bodies, which he repeatedly tells us overlap in their working into the human being. Steiner then goes on to say that the astral body works back on the forms that the etheric body has assisted.

11/13/1916, in The Karma of Vocation [7], pp. 99-101. If we observe a human being in those years when . . . the physical body and especially the etheric body are primarily coming into development, if we observe the development of children from approximately the seventh to the fourteenth years, we shall note that at just this time certain characteristics appear in them that are especially typical of this period. Certain things consolidate themselves in a way, although many things overlap one another so


that much that appears during the first seven years can be more thoroughly and profoundly observed only between the seventh and the fourteenth. It will be found that something appears in a more definite way in the developing child that we may call, in a sense, the inner peculiarities that are consolidated through the character and demeanor of the corporeality. This is so, however, only insofar as they come to expression in the posture and gestures of the physical being, and in the entire bearing of his life. I refer to what is there taking solid form; not all, to be sure, but a great part of what causes a human being to be stocky and short, or to have a taller body that causes him or her to walk in a particular way such as with a firm step or a dancing gait, to mention radical contrasts. As I have said, not all, but a great part of what thus appears in the developing child is derived from karma and is the effect of the vocation of his preceding incarnation. . . . In other words, two antagonistic forces struggle with each other in the child. One group of forces gives him form; these come more from the etheric body. The other group, coming more from the astral body, works against these and in part paralyzes them, so that he is compelled to transform what has been forced upon him by the vocational karma of his previous incarnation. In other words, we may say that the etheric body works in a formative way; that is, what is manifested as the bearing of the physical body, as one’s carriage, is derived from the etheric body. The astral body works in a transforming way. Through the interplay of these two forces, which are really in bitter conflict with each other, much comes to expression that has to do with the working of vocational karma.

8/7/1921, “Man’s Becoming, World Soul and World Spirit” [12], pp. 4-5. In those interesting states that run their course in the child between the change of teeth and puberty, there we see that actually in the human being, in the process of becoming, a strong battle takes place. In this period of life the etheric body, that goes through its own organizing process up to puberty . . . battles against the astral body. It is a real battle condition that occurs in the child. And when we look at the physical correlation corresponding to this battle condition, then we can say: in this period of the child’s life, to a very marked degree, there is a battle between the forces of growth, and those forces that play into us through the physical inhalation (in-spiration) through the breathing. . . . For that which is partially freed through


the change of teeth, is indeed the forces of growth. Of course, the main part of these growth forces still remains in the bodily element and takes care of the growth; at the change of teeth a portion is freed, and this appears as forces in the soul. That which continues to function as growth forces in the child, this is opposed to what now appears in the child, essentially through the process of breathing. What here appears through the breathing process could not appear previously. The breathing process is certainly also present in the child, but so long as the child has his forces in the general growing and organizing of the body, which then come out at the change of teeth, just so long does nothing occur in the organism of the child, in regard to what is later brought about so strikingly and significantly, in the actual breathing process in the human body. . . . As I have said, before the change of teeth has occurred what the breathing actually has to do for us, cannot become activated in the human organism. But then a battle begins, of the forces that have still remained as growth forces, against the breaking in of what intrudes out of the breathing forces into the human being.

9/16/1920, in Balance in Teaching [21], pp. 15-17. The whole change that takes place in the child’s soul life shows that certain soul forces previously active in the organism become active as soul forces after the seventh year. The whole period up to the change of teeth, while the child is growing, makes use of the same forces that after the seventh year appear as intellectual forces. Here you have an interplay between soul and body that is quite real; the soul emancipates itself in the seventh year and begins to function—no longer in the body, but independently. At this point, those forces that come newly into being in the body as soul forces begin to be active, and from the seventh year on they are at work well into the next incarnation. Then whatever radiates upward from the body is thrust back, whereas the forces that shoot downward from the head are restrained. Thus, during the time the teeth are changing, the most severe battle is fought between the forces striving downward from above and those shooting upward from below. The change of teeth is the physical expression of this conflict between the two kinds of forces: those that later appear in the child as powers of reasoning and intellect, and those that need to be used


particularly in drawing, painting, and writing. We employ upwelling forces when we develop writing out of drawing, for what these forces really strive for is to pass over into sculptural formation, drawing, and so forth. These are the sculptural forces that, ending with the change of teeth, have previously modeled the child’s body. We work with them later, when the second dentition is completed, to lead the child to drawing, to painting, and so on. These are primarily the forces that were placed into the child by the spiritual world in which the child’s soul lived before conception. At first they are active as bodily forces in forming the head, and then from the seventh year on they function as soul forces. . . During the child’s change of teeth, then, transference of spiritual forces is being enacted, forces that move from the spiritual world through the child and into the physical world.

9/16/1920, in Balance in Teaching [21], pp. 18-19. Up to the seventh year the human being is permeated on the whole more by sculptural and less by musical forces—that is, less by the inspiring music and speech forces that enkindle the whole organism. But beginning with the seventh year, music and speech become particularly active in the etheric body. Then the ego and the astral body turn against this; an element of will battles from outside against a similar element from within, and this becomes visible at puberty.

9/16/1920, in Balance in Teaching [21], pp. 24-25. Everything that descends from the head until the seventh year appears as an attack on what is coming to it from within in the nature of upbuilding forces. And everything that works outward from within upwards to the head, countering the stream emanating from the head, is like a defense opposed to the downward stream which could be considered as an attack . . . In recognizing the interplay between attack and defense, we must remember that defense occurs in us on two levels. The first is within ourselves, where a warding off appears in the change of teeth in the seventh year. The second is what we have received from music and speech when this wards off what tends to rise up within us. Both battlefields are within the human being; what comes from music and speech is more toward the periphery, toward the outer world, and the sculptural tends more toward the inner world.


But there is still a third battlefield, and that lies on the boundary between the etheric body and the outer world. The etheric body is always larger than the physical body, reaching out beyond it in all directions and here too is a battlefield. Here the battle is fought more consciously, whereas the other two proceed more in the subconscious.

4/9/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], p. 22. The human being is molded anew with the change of teeth just as our outer form is perpetually eliminated. In this case, however, the first being, or product of physical heredity, is completely replaced by a second, who develops under the influence of the forces that the human being brings from pre-earthly life. Thus, during the period between birth and the change of teeth, the human hereditary forces related to the physical evolutionary stream fight against the forces of a pre-earthly existence, which accompany the individuality of each human being from the previous earthly life. . . . If we understand what is happening from the perspective of a child, we find that the soul-being of the child—with everything brought from pre-earthly life from the realm of soul and spirit—is entirely devoted to the physical activities of human beings in the surroundings. This relationship can be described only as a religious one.

4/9/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], p. 29. During the initial phase of life, human beings win for themselves a second being through what resulted of a purely spiritual life between death and rebirth. During the second stage of life, however, between the change of teeth and puberty, the influences of the outer world struggle with what must be incorporated into the individuality of the human being. During this second stage, external influences grow more powerful. The inner human being is strengthened, however, since at this point it no longer allows every influence in the environment to continue vibrating in the body organization as though it were mainly a sense organ. Sensory perception begins to be more concentrated at the surface, or periphery, of the being.


4/21/1924, in Course for Young Doctors [31], pp. 130-32. . . . [W]hen we come to the earth as beings of spirit and soul, our wish, to begin with, is to form quite a different organization. We want to build a sphere and to generate all kinds of configurations within this sphere, but we have no wish for this being with whom the cosmos itself can do nothing. This being is given us as a model and we build up the second human being in accordance with this model. In the first life-period, therefore, there is a perpetual struggle between what comes from us out of the previous incarnation and what comes from hereditary development; the two elements fight with each other. The illnesses of childhood are the expression of this fight. Just think how intimately the whole inner being of soul and spirit is bound up with the physical organization during early childhood. When the second teeth appear you can see how they push up against the first, how they still have tussles with each other, and in this same way the whole second human being has tussles with the first. But within the second human being there is the superearthly being; in the first a foreign, earthly model. These two work into one another and if you observe this inter-working truly you can see how, if the inner human being, who as a being of soul and spirit was present in pre-earthly existence, has too much the upper hand for a time, working into the physical very strongly and having, willynilly, to adjust itself by dint of effort to the model, that it damages the model by striking up against it everywhere, saying: I want to get this particular form out of you—then the fight expresses itself as scarlet fever. If the inner human being is tender, so that there is a continual shrinking back, a wish to mold the in-taken substances more in accordance with their own nature, and resistance is put up to the model, the struggle comes out as measles. What is, in reality, a mutual struggle expresses itself in the illnesses of childhood. . . . Steiner refers to the question of why a child can retain his hereditary inheritance as he grows: . . . The fact is that one being is weaker, directs himself more in accordance with the forces of heredity, builds up the second human being with a greater resemblance to the model. This naturally comes out in the appearance, but the same thing has been going on when the being has adjusted itself more in accordance with the model. On the other hand, there are human beings who after the change of teeth become very unlike what they were before. In such cases what


comes from the pre-earthly life of soul and spirit is strong and they adhere less to the model.

8/12/1924, in The Kingdom of Childhood [30], pp. 11-12. The soul nature that comes down from the spiritual world is very strong in us, and it is clumsy at first because it has to become accustomed to external nature. Yet in reality everything about a child, even the worst naughtiness, is very fascinating. Of course we must follow the conventions to some extent and not allow all naughtiness to pass unreproved; but we can see better in children than anywhere else how the spirit of the human being is tormented by the demons of degeneracy that are present in the world. The child has to enter a world into which it so often does not fit. If you were conscious of this process, you would see how terribly tragic it is. When you know something of initiation, and are able to consciously observe what lays hold of the child’s body, it really is terrible to see how the child must find a way into all the complications of bones and ligaments that have to be formed. It really is a tragic sight. The child knows nothing of this, for the Guardian of the Threshold protects the child from any such knowledge. But teachers should be aware of it and look on with the deepest reverence, knowing that here a being whose nature is of God and the spirit has descended to earth. The essential thing is that you should know this, that you should fill your hearts with this knowledge, and from this starting point undertake your work as educators.

Intellectualization 6/8/1922, in The Tension Between East and West [3], p. 106. . . . [N]either the infant in its first years of life, nor the child of primary school age, nor even the adolescent below the age of twenty, lives fully within the intellectualized mode of thought that has emerged in the course of human development.

8/12/1924, in The Kingdom of Childhood [30], pp. 12-14. A longing for knowledge, curiosity, a passionate desire for knowledge of the external life was not ours before our birth or descent to earth; we did not know it at all. That is why the young child has it only in so slight a degree.


What we do experience, on the other hand, is to live right in and with our environment. Before descending to earth we live entirely in the outer world. The whole world is then our inner being and there exist no such distinctions as outer and inner world. Therefore we are not curious about what is external, for that is all within us. We have no curiosity about it, we bear it within us, and it is an obvious and natural thing that we experience. So in the first seven years of life a child learns to walk, to speak, and to think, out of the same manner of living it had before descending to earth. If you try to arouse curiosity in a child about some particular word, you will find that you thereby entirely drive out the child’s wish to learn that word. If you count on a longing for knowledge or curiosity you drive out just what the child ought to have. You must not reckon on a child’s curiosity, but rather on something else, namely, that the child becomes merged into you as it were, and you really live in the child. All that the child enjoys must live and be as though it were the child’s own inner nature. You must make the same impression on the child as its own arm makes. You must, so to say, be only the continuation of its own body. Then later, when the child has passed through the change of teeth and gradually enters the period between seven and fourteen years old, you must observe how, little by little, curiosity and a longing for knowledge begin to show themselves; you must be tactful and careful, and pay attention to the way in which curiosity gradually stirs into being within the child. The small child is still only a clumsy little creature, who does not ask questions, and you can only make an impression by being something yourself. . . . It is only at the change of teeth that the situation alters. You must notice the way the child now begins to ask questions. “What is that? What do the stars see with?” . . . The child now asks all kinds of questions and begins to be curious about surrounding things. You must have a delicate perception and note the gradual beginnings of curiosity and attention that appear with the second teeth. These are the years when these qualities appear and you must be ready to meet them. You must allow the child’s inner nature to decide what you ought to be doing; I mean, you must take the keenest interest in what is awakening with the change of teeth.


4/20/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], pp. 25-27. . . . [W]e will need to understand what happens to human intellectual nature, to our imaginative nature, before and during the change of teeth! . . . [W]hen we look at the configuration of the intellect, the most important years for forming the human intellect, for forming the capacity to reason, are those first years of life before the change of teeth. We should also try to gain a genuine sense of what changes in the soul. . . . [H]ow little we remember prior to the change of teeth; that is, how little people can collect concepts to retain in their memory before the change of teeth. We can thus conclude that the less the organism has to use those strong forces to create the adult teeth, the more a human being will be able to form its thoughts into firm pictures that can remain in memory. . . . It is important that we return to actually seeing how the spiritsoul affects the physical body. . . . The same forces that are active in conceptualizing, in picturing our world, work to form our teeth.

4/16/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], pp. 54-55. . . . If you can inwardly understand the relationship of soul and spirit to the physical body at the change of teeth, you will not only see the truth of what has been said, but you will be also able to work it out in practical details. Until the change of teeth, a human being lives entirely in the senses. A child surrenders entirely to the environment and is thus by nature a religious being. At the change of teeth, however, the senses, which permeate a small child’s whole being, now come to the surface; they disengage from the rest of the organism and go their separate ways, so to speak. This means that the soul and spirit are freed from the physical body and the child can inwardly develop as an individual. Soul and spirit become independent, but you must bear in mind that the soul and spirit do not really become intellectual until puberty, because the intellect does not assume its natural place in a child’s development before then. Before that time, a child lacks the forces to meet an appeal to the intellect. Between the change of teeth and puberty, the forces of comprehension and the whole activity of soul have a pictorial quality. It is a kind of aesthetic comprehension that may be characterized


in this way: until the change of teeth children want to imitate what happens around them, what is done in front of them. Their motor systems are exerted in such a way—both in general and individually— that they enter an inner, loving relationship with all that surrounds them. This alters at the change of teeth, when the child no longer goes by what is seen, but by what is revealed in the feelings and soul mood of the educator or teacher. The young child’s soul before the change of teeth is not yet guided by the authority of a teacher. Naturally, such transitions are gradual rather than sudden; but, typically, a small child plays little attention to the subject or meaning of what is said; a child lives much more in the sound of words—in the whole way the speech is formulated. Closer observation shows that when you simply lay down the law and say to a child, “You must not do this,” it makes very little impression. But when, with its own conviction, as it were, your mouth says, “Do this,” or another time, “Don’t do that,” there should be a noticeable difference in how these words are spoken. The child will notice the difference between saying “You should not do that” with a certain intonation, and “That’s right, you may do that.” The intonation reveals the activity of speech, which acts as a guide for the very young child. Children are unconcerned with the meaning of words and, indeed, with any manifestation of the world around them, until after the change of teeth. Even then, it is not yet the intellectual aspect that concerns them, but an element of feeling. See also:

6/7/1922, in The Tension between East and West [3], pp. 107-8.

The Kindergarten 7/19/1924, in Human Values in Education [29], p. 51. Kindergarten education should rely on the principle of imitation exclusively. Kindergarten teachers must sit with the children and do only what they wish the children to do, so that the they simply have to imitate the teacher. All education before the change of teeth must be based on this principle.


8/13/1924, in The Kingdom of Childhood [30], pp. 18-19. But all the things that you are usually advised to do with kindergarten children [in mainstream education] are quite worthless. The things that are introduced as kindergarten education are usually extraordinarily “clever.” You could be quite fascinated by what has been thought out for kindergartens . . . . The children certainly learn a great deal there, they almost learn to read. They are supplied with letters of the alphabet which they have to fit into cut out letters. It all looks very clever and you can be easily tempted to believe that it really is something suitable for children, but it is of no use at all. It really has no value whatsoever, and the soul of the child is impaired by it. The child is damaged even down into the body, right down into physical health. Such kindergarten methods breed weaklings in body and soul for later life. At this time in Germany the children remained in the kindergarten until their seventh year, so that the above remarks apply to all school life up to this time. On the other hand, if you simply have the children there in the kindergarten and conduct yourselves so that they can imitate you, if you do all kind of things that the children can copy out of their own inner impulse of soul, as they had been accustomed to do in preearthly existence, then indeed the children will become like yourself, but it is for you to see that you are worthy of this imitation. This is what you must pay attention to during the first seven years of life and not what you express outwardly in words as a moral idea.


Educating the Child During and After the Birth of the Etheric

Kindergarten and first grade educators work on the threshold, bridging the time before, during, and after the birth of the etheric. Careful observations and the understanding of Rudolf Steiner’s indications about this period can help us to ascertain the rightful placement for the child. Does the child need consolidation time in the kindergarten or is the child showing readiness for first grade? Rudolf Steiner in many of his lectures encourages us to develop careful observation practices to witness what is happening in the child at this time.

2/24/1921, in Education, Teaching and the Practical Life [19], p. 18. . . . What actually changes in the human being when it crosses the biographical threshold of the change of teeth?

9/22/1920, in Balance in Teaching [21], p. 44. If we consider the next period, from the seventh year to the fourteenth, or puberty, we can say that in a sense an element of will, a musical element, is being absorbed. Described from this angle, what happens is best described by the word “absorbed,” for the musical element really has its being in the outer world. The musical tone element being absorbed is indeed permeated by a pulsating, vibrating impulse coming from what spiritual science calls the astral forces.


It’s important to recognize that in the six/seven-year-old this activity is also present. The child may still be in the kindergarten at this time, or already beginning the journey to the grade school. The educator must be prepared to look for these signs and accommodate this new need in the child. Many educators experience the phenomenon of the “bubbling pot” in the behavior of the six-year-old. What is it that we are actually seeing?

4/11/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], p. 70. We get close to children during this stage of life only by placing them in the context of natural authority. Children who cannot yet understand abstractly beauty, truth, goodness and so on may develop this impulse through a sense that the teacher acts as the incarnation of goodness, truth and beauty. When we understand children correctly, we understand that they have not gained any abstract, intellectual understanding for the revelations of wisdom, beauty and goodness. Nevertheless, children see what lives in the teacher’s gestures, and they hear something revealed in how the teacher’s words are spoken. It is the teacher whom the child calls—without saying it—truth, beauty, and goodness as revealed in the heart.

1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 33-34. Teachers [of children around six or seven to fourteen] can have the tact to meet any occasion that arises only when they have a conscious and clear understanding of how various subjects and methods of education work in the proper way on growing children. They have to know how to treat the various faculties of the soul— thinking, feeling, and willing—so that their development can react on the etheric body, which during this time between the change of teeth and puberty can attain more and more perfect form under external influences. By a proper application of fundamental educational principles during the first seven years of childhood, the foundation is laid for the development of a strong and healthy will; for a strong and healthy will must have its support in well-developed forms of the physical body. Then, from the change of teeth on, the etheric body that is now developing must bring to the physical body the forces whereby it can make its forms firm and inwardly complete. Whatever makes

86 • Educating the Child During and After the Birth of the Etheric

the strongest impression on the etheric body also works most powerfully toward consolidating the physical body. The strongest of all the impulses that can work on the etheric body come from the feelings and thoughts through which human beings consciously divine and experience their relationship to the Eternal Powers—that is, they come from religious experience. . . .

Imitation and authority 4/20/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], p. 28. To not admit that one of the basic forces and basic needs of children from ages of six or seven until fourteen or fifteen is the desire to have an authority in their lives is to completely misunderstand human nature. . . . [T]his kind of authority, freely chosen through the children’s perception, an authority outside but alongside the children, is one of the most important aspects of human life.

4/22/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], p. 66-67. [From the period around the change of teeth until puberty,] something wants to enter the physical body from the will; something wants to become firmer. There is more than simply a desire to imitate, although . . . that remains important in the curriculum until the age of nine. Something more than simple imitation wants to develop, and that is the desire to honor authority. [The child wants to develop] . . . the experience of having older people nearby, people who, as genuine authorities, are to educate and raise the child. . . . We now come to the role of love in education and upbringing. One of the intangibles we are justified in exercising in educating a growing child is authority over that child, and that our authority be accepted as a naturally effective force. We will not have that authority if we are not permeated in a certain way by what we have to present to the child. If, as teachers, we carry our knowledge within us just as some dry, memorized facts, if we teach only out of a sense of duty, then we have a different effect upon children than when we have an inner warmth, an enthusiasm for what we are to teach them. If we are active in every fiber of our soul, and identify ourselves with that knowledge, then the love for what we carry in our souls is just as much a means of communication as demonstrations and language.


3/18/1920, in Social Issues [33], pp. 122-23. Now, the phase between the second dentition and the onset of puberty is when children are taught in school; these are their elementary school years. There are also other stages, sub-phases, so to speak, we can distinguish in this second phase between the ages of seven and fourteen. The drive to imitate, which governs the children’s first seven years in their innermost being, weakens after age seven; yet it is still there and is evident more or less strongly into their ninth year. Through spiritual science we can develop a lively sense for this interplay between the children’s capacity to imitate and their need for an authority figure to look up to, and then we will see each child as a unique challenge to our teaching abilities, regardless of how large the classes are.

8/16/1922, in The Spiritual Ground of Education [24], p. 9. Now, as children gradually change teeth, and in place of the inherited teeth they begin to show those that were formed during the first period of life, a change comes about in their life as a whole. Now they are no longer entirely sense organ, but they are given up more to a soul element than to their sensory impressions. Children of elementary school age no longer absorb what they observe in their environment; now they take in what lives in the objects of observation. They enter a stage that should be based primarily on the principle of authority—the authority children encounter in teachers.

4/26/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], pp. 91-92. . . . [I]t is important to see that a child at the age of six, seven, or eight has no tendency whatsoever to differentiate itself from its surroundings as an I-being. In a certain way, we take something away from the healthy nature of the human being when we develop this difference between the I-being and its surroundings too early. . . . Human beings continue to imitate beyond the age of seven up to the age of nine or so, and this principle of imitation affects the feeling for authority. From the age of nine, this principle of authority develops in a purer form. Beginning at the age of twelve, it is again mixed with something new: the capacity to judge. It is of fundamental significance for all education that we do not force developing human beings to judge at too early an age.


1/12/1907, in The Christian Mystery (Completion edition) [5], p. 213. Towards the seventh year, as the second teeth are gradually emerging, the protective ether forms around the ether body fall away and now the teacher must bring in everything that develops the ether body and influences it so that it evolves. But the teacher must still be careful not to put too much emphasis on developing the mind and the intellect. During this period, between the seventh and twelfth years, what matters most is authority, belief, trust, respect.

1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 24. . . . [I]t is most important that boys and girls should have for their teachers people who can awaken in them, as they observe them, the proper intellectual and moral powers. As imitation and example were . . . the magic words for education in the first years of childhood, for the years of this second period, the magic words are discipleship and authority. What children see directly in their educators with inner perception must, for them, become authority—not authority compelled by force, but authority that they accept naturally without question. Through this they will build up their conscience, habits, and inclinations. They will bring their temperament along an ordered path. . . . Veneration and reverence are forces whereby the etheric body grows in the right way. If it were not possible during these years to look up to another person with unbounded reverence, one would have to suffer for this loss throughout all of later life. Where reverence is lacking, the living forces of the etheric body are stunted in their growth. Rudolf Steiner goes on to give indications which apply to the time of education while the child is in the grade school curriculum—storytelling, providing stories of outstanding people in history, overcoming the child’s bad habits through inspiring examples and parables, and much more. It is worthwhile to read onward into The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. For the purposes of this publication we are focusing on the threshold time before, during, and slightly after the change of teeth. Here are some further references to help us understand how to bridge this time when the child is operating out of two very different orientations, affected by the interplay that happens between the inclination to imitate and the need for authority:


8/31/1919, in The Spirit of the Waldorf School [18], pp. 35-37. 11/25/1919, in The Spirit of the Waldorf School [18], pp. 106-7. 3/18/1920, in Social Issues [33], pp. 121-23. 4/4/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], pp. 27-28.

Memory, habits, and choices 1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 28-29, 31. A force of soul that has particular value for this period of human development is memory. The developing of memory is connected with the shaping of the etheric body. Since this shaping occurs so that the etheric body becomes liberated between the change of teeth and puberty, so this is also the time for conscious attention from outside toward the growth and cultivation of the memory. If what is due to human beings at this time has been neglected, their memory will always have less value than it would have had otherwise. It is not possible to make up for later what was left undone. . . . [O]ther forces of the soul are at least as necessary as the intellect to comprehend things. . . . [P]eople can understand with their feeling, their sentiment, their inner disposition, as well as their intellect. . . . . . . Until puberty children should be storing in their memories the treasures of thought on which humankind has pondered; later intellectual understanding may penetrate what has already been well imprinted in memory during the earlier years. . . .

5/14/1906, “Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight” [4], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 45. At the age of seven the period begins when you can deliberately affect the etheric body. Here, two things connected with the development of the etheric body come into consideration—that is to say, habit and memory. The development of the etheric body depends on habits and remembrances. For this reason you should try to give children a firm foundation for life anchored in good habits. People who act differently every day, who lack a stable basis for their deeds, will later lack character. The task to fulfil between the ages of


seven and fourteen is to create a basic set of habits and to stimulate memory development. Children need to learn upright habits and to have a rich store of memorized knowledge. It is an erroneous belief of our materialistic times that very young children should learn to decide for themselves. On the contrary, we should do everything possible to hinder that. During this period of childhood, children should learn through authority. During the second seven-year period, people should instruct children and not teach through example. We form a strong memory, not by explaining all the “whys” and “wherefores,” but through authority. We must surround children with people they can count on, people they can trust— people who can awaken in children a belief in the authority they hold. Only after this stage of life [seven to fourteen] should we guide children into their capacity for judgment and independent reason. By freeing the child from the limitations imposed by authority, you rob the etheric body of the possibility of a well-rounded development.

12/1/1906, “Education in the Light of Spiritual Science” [2], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, pp. 58-61. The development of the ether body occurs in the period from the seventh until the sixteenth year in boys, and until the fourteenth year in girls. It is important for the rest of a person’s life that feelings of respect and veneration are fostered during this period. . . . People around the children, with whom they have contact, must be their ideals; children must also choose such ideals from history and literature: “Everyone must choose the hero whose path to Olympus they will follow,” is a true saying. . . . At this time it is important that memory be developed. This is done best in a purely mechanical way. However, calculators should not be used. . . . This is the age when memory, habit and character must be established, and this is achieved through authority. If the foundation of these traits is not laid during this period, it will result in behavioral shortcomings later. . . . Whatever flows from the educator to children forms and develops conscience, character and even the temperament—their lasting dispositions. During these years allegories and symbols act formatively on the ether body of children because such things manifest the world-spirit. Fairy tales, legends, and descriptions of heroes are a true blessing.


During this period, the ether body must receive as much care as the physical body. During the earlier period [birth to seven] happiness and joy influenced the forming of the organs; from seven until fourteen—in this case boys until sixteen—the emphasis must be on everything that promotes feelings of health and vigor. Hence, the value of gymnastics. However, the desired effect will not be attained if the instructor aims at movements that solely benefit the physical body. It is important that the teacher can intuitively enter into how children inwardly sense themselves, and in this way to know which movements will promote inner sensations of health, strength, wellbeing, and pleasure in the bodily constitution. . . . Anything artistic has a strong influence on the ether body, as well as the astral body. Excellent vocal and instrumental music is particularly important, especially for the ether body. And there should be many objects of true artistic beauty in the child’s environment. Most important of all is religious instruction. Images of things supersensible are deeply imprinted in the ether body. The pupil’s ability to have an opinion about religious faith is not important, but receiving descriptions of the supersensible, of what extends beyond the temporal. All religious subjects must be presented pictorially. Great care must be taken that teaching is brought to life. Much is spoiled in the child if it is burdened with too much that is dull and lifeless. Whatever is taught in a lively interesting manner benefits the child’s ether body.

1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 23. With the change of teeth, when the etheric body lays aside its outer etheric envelope, the time begins when the etheric body can be worked on through external education. We must be very clear about what works on the etheric body from the outside. The formation and growth of the etheric body means the shaping and developing of inclinations and habits, of the conscience, character, memory and temperament.


Beauty 1/24/1907, “Education and Spiritual Science” [2], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 69. Between the seventh and fourteenth years is also the time to foster the sense for beauty. Through this sense we grasp symbolic meaning. But most important is that the child is not burdened with abstract concepts; what is taught should have a direct connection with life. The spirit of nature—in other words the facts themselves existing behind the sense-perceptible—must have spoken to the child, who should have a natural appreciation of things before abstract theories are introduced; this should only be done after puberty. There is no need to be concerned that what is learned may be forgotten once school is finished; what matters is that what one teaches bears fruit and forms the character. What the child has inwardly experienced will also be retained; details may vanish but the essential, the universal, will remain and grow.

8/30/1919, in The Foundations of Human Experience [15], p. 157. After human beings have gone through the change of teeth, they actually live constantly in the present, and until puberty are interested in things of the present. . . . We should not miss the opportunity to teach in such a way that the education is something that is rather enjoyable for children, not animalistically enjoyable, but enjoyable in a higher sense, and not something that evokes antipathy and repulsion. . . . [A]s teachers, we always want to raise ourselves above the mundane, the pedantic, the narrow-minded. We can accomplish this only if we maintain a living relationship to art. . . . From the time of the change of teeth until puberty, children also unconsciously assume that they may find the world to be beautiful. . . . [W]e must . . . delve into artistic experience so that we permeate education, particularly in this time, with the artistic.

Language, voice changes 4/20/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], pp. 28-29. . . . [J]ust as we receive our first teeth through a kind of inheritance from our parents, we receive language through the influences of our external surroundings. That is, we receive language through the principle of imitation. . . .


[T]he language we learn then, that we speak until the age of four, five, or six, has the same relationship to the entire human being as baby teeth have to the entire human being. What people speak after they have reached puberty, that is, after the age of fourteen or fifteen, what is active within them as they speak is something they achieve for a second time. It is something they very recently achieved, something they accomplished for themselves in just the same way that they grew their second set of teeth. In boys, we can see this externally in their change of voice. In girls, the development is more inward. It is nevertheless present. Since these forces act differently upon the larynx of a boy, they are externally visible. This is a revelation of what occurs in the entire human being during [the time of six/seven to fourteen], not simply in the human body nor in the human soul, but in the entire soul-body, in the body-soul. It occurs continuously from year to year, from month to month, and is connected with the inner development of what we already learned as language from our environment during our early childhood.

Memory pictures 4/15/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], pp. 35-36. A child’s memory is very different before and after the change of teeth. . . When we observe a very young child, we find that the capacity to remember has the quality of a soul habit. When a child recalls something during that first period of life until the change of teeth, such remembering is a kind of habit or skill. We might say that when, as a child, I acquire a certain accomplishment—let us say, writing—it arises largely from a certain suppleness of my physical constitution, a suppleness that I have gradually acquired. When you watch a small child taking hold of something, you have found a good illustration of the concept of habit. A child gradually discovers how to move the limbs this way or that way, and this becomes habit and skill. Out of a child’s imitative actions, the soul develops skillfulness, which permeates the child’s finer and more delicate organizations. A child will imitate something one day, then do the same thing again the next day and the next; this activity is performed outwardly, but also—and importantly—within the innermost parts of the physical body. This forms the basis for memory in the early years. After the change of teeth, the memory is very different, because by then, as I have said, spirit and soul are freed from the body, and


picture content can arise that relates to what was experienced in the soul—a formation of images unrelated to bodily nature. Every time we meet the same thing or process, whether due to something outer or inner, the same picture is recalled. The small child does not yet produce these inward pictures. No image emerges for that child when remembering something. When an older child has a thought or idea about some past experience, it arises again as a remembered thought, a thought “made inward.” Prior to the age of seven, children live in their habits, which are not inwardly visualized in this way. This is significant for all of human life after the change of teeth.

7/19/1924, in Human Values in Education [29], pp. 51-52. After the change of teeth all this becomes quite different. The soul life of the child is now completely changed. No longer does he perceive merely the single gestures, but now he sees the way in which these gestures accord with one another. For instance, whereas previously he only had a feeling for a definite line, now he has a feeling for co-ordination, for symmetry. The feeling is awakened for what is co-ordinated or unco-ordinated, and in his soul the child acquires the possibility of perceiving what is formative. As soon as this perception is awakened there appears simultaneously an interest in speech. During the first seven years of life there is an interest in gesture, in everything connected with movement; in the years between seven and fourteen there is an interest in everything connected with the pictorial form, and speech is pre-eminently pictorial and formative. After the change of teeth the child’s interest passes over from gesture to speech, and in the lower school years from seven to fourteen we can work most advantageously through everything that lies in speech, above all through the moral element underlying speech. For just as a child before this age has a religious attitude towards the gesture which meets him in the surrounding world, so now he relates himself in a moral sense—his religious feeling being gradually refined into a soul experience—to everything which approaches him through speech. After the change of teeth, this changes, and a child’s soul life is completely different. Children now perceive more than single gestures; they see how gestures work together. For example, previously children had a sense of only a certain line; now they have a feeling for coordination, or symmetry. A feeling is awakened for whether something is coordinated, and a child’s soul acquires


the ability to perceive formative qualities. Once this perception is awakened, an interest in speech is simultaneously awakened. During the first seven years of life, there is an interest in gesture and everything related to movement. During the time between seven and fourteen, there is an interest in everything related to image, and speech is primarily pictorial and formative. After the change of teeth, children’s interest shifts from gesture to speech, and in the early school years, between seven and fourteen, it is best to work with everything involved in speech, and, above all, through the moral element behind speech. Before this age, children have a “religious” attitude toward the gestures they encounter in the surrounding world; now that their “religious” feeling has gradually refined into a soul experience, they relate in a moral way to everything they encounter through speech.

4/20/1920, in The Renewal of Education [20], p. 26. . . . [T]here is something that runs parallel with those forces in the body that in a certain sense culminate in producing the second set of teeth. In tandem with this process, there is a firming of those forces in the soul that transform the pictures we would otherwise lose into firmly contoured concepts, that remain as a treasure in the human soul. . . . Can those forces that give rise to the teeth be in some way connected to the pictorial aspects of thinking? Isn’t it as though the soul needs to give the child’s body the use of certain bodily forces during the first seven years, until the change of teeth, so that the teeth can form? When they are complete, a metamorphosis occurs and the child transforms these forces so that they become forces for conceptualization in the soul. Can we not see how the soul, the conceptualizing soul, works to form the teeth? When the formation of teeth, that is, when the use of certain soul forces in the conceptualizing soul is finished, that is, after the teeth have erupted, these same forces begin to affect the soul.

11/19/1923, in Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy Volume 2 [23], pp. 166-67. . . . Only from the change of teeth onward, does a child start looking back on past experiences—that is, surveying past experiences in its mind—in a kind of review. In the evolving of memory, the soul life of the child undergoes a radical change.


The child’s ability to form representations presents us with the same picture. When you look without bias at a young child’s mental imagery, you will find that the will forces are very active. The child under seven cannot yet separate inner will experience from the experience of will in thinking. This separation begins during the change of teeth. In other words, with the change of teeth, the child’s soul life goes through a complete metamorphosis. But what has actually happened? What is revealed as the child’s true soul life after the change of teeth obviously couldn’t have appeared from nothing. It must have been there already, but it did not manifest in the same way as during the later stage. It was active in the organic forces of growth and nourishment. It was an organic force that transformed into the force of memory, into freed soul forces. See also:

11/4/1922, in Education, Teaching and Practical Life [19], pp. 118-19.


The Educator’s Task of Forming Pictures 11/4/1922, in Education, Teaching and Practical Life [19], p. 120. After the change of teeth, the child’s soul life changes. Not only do we see the child beginning to follow his sense impressions, to adapt himself somehow to them and to change himself according to what he sees on the outside, but he also begins to listen, to pick up on representations conveyed verbally. But the child still needs for the surrounding world to be conveyed by human personalities. Therefore we can say: Until the change of teeth, the child is an imitating being; after the change of teeth, and more or less all the way to puberty, not only does he imitate, but he starts to prick up his ears to take in the mental pictures expressed verbally by persons in his environment. Teachers and educators must see to it that what they tell the children is a guiding line. After the change of teeth, children go from a life of imitation to a stage where their natural sense of lawfulness wishes to follow the example of an unquestionable (self-evident) authority. This unquestioned sense of authority will guide all instruction and all education during this second stage of life, from the change of teeth to puberty. At this age, the child takes as true what a beloved “authority” individual considers true. The child perceives with sympathy what is beautiful, what is good, or else he obeys, relying upon the authority of the beloved educator. And if we want to bring to the child between seven and fourteen-fifteen something that will


bear fruit for the rest of his life, then everything we bring to the child must be clothed in this authoritative element.

1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 23. . . . The etheric body is worked on through pictures and examples— that is, through a child’s carefully guided imagination. Just as before the age of seven we have to give the child the actual physical pattern to copy, so between the time of the change of teeth and puberty we must bring into the child’s environment things that have the proper inner meaning and value. Growing children will now take guidance from the inner meaning and value of things. Whatever is filled with deep meaning that works through pictures and allegories is proper for these years. The etheric body will unfold its forces if a well-ordered imagination is allowed to take guidance from the inner meaning it discovers for itself in pictures and allegories—whether seen in real life or communicated to the mind. It is not abstract concepts that work in the right way on the growing etheric body, but rather what is seen and perceived—indeed, not with external senses, but with the mind’s eye. Such seeing and perceiving is the proper means of education for these years.

1907, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science” [1], in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, p. 25. . . . One fact must always be remembered—that abstract ideas do not influence the developing etheric body but rather, living pictures that are seen and comprehended inwardly. . . .

4/17/1923, in The Child’s Changing Consciousness [25], pp. 53-54. Something entirely different is required when one is faced with children between the change of teeth and puberty. Here one has to consider that at this age their thinking is not yet logical, but has a completely pictorial character. True to nature, such children reject a logical approach. They want to live in pictures. Highly intelligent adults make little impression on children aged seven, nine, eleven, even thirteen. At that age, they feel indifferent toward intellectual accomplishment. On the other hand, adults with an inner freshness (which does not, however, exclude a sense of discretion), people

100 • The Educator’s Task of Forming Pictures

of a friendly and kindly disposition do make a deep impression on children. People whose voices have a ring of tenderness, as if their words were caressing the child, expressing approval and praise, reach the child’s soul. This personal impact is what matters because with the change of teeth the child no longer surrenders to surrounding activities. Now a new openness awakens to what people are actually saying, to what adults say with the natural authority that they have developed. . . Children at this particular stage of life who have not learned to look up with a natural sense of surrender to the authority of the adults who brought them up, the adults who educated them, cannot grow into free human beings. Freedom is won only through a voluntary surrender to authority during childhood.

4/4/1924, in Education, Teaching and Practical Life [19], p. 138. With the change of teeth, a complete metamorphosis is taking place. What was previously deep in the bodily organization and active there becomes autonomous soul being and the physical body is left more on its own. Therefore, from the age when children first go to school, one must deal with their soul in such a way that one meets forces that previously were creative forces of the body. Education and meaningful instruction are possible only if the teacher keeps this in sight. The child at that age does not have an abstract understanding of things; he wishes to experience images in the same way he had worked previously on his own body out of images. This takes place only if educators and teachers relate artistically to the child through the senses. They cannot count on the child understanding intellectually what is being taught. They should work in such a way that images which unfold in an artistic fashion are allowed to resonate in the child’s soul. . . . More on the topic of authority follows this excerpt, if you wish to read further in the lecture.

4/8/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], p. 14. . . . After the change of teeth, the teacher’s knowledge begins to have some significance; but this is again lost, if I merely impart what I learned as it lives in me. It must all be transformed artistically and made into images . . . . I must awaken invisible forces between the child and myself. In the second life period, between the change of teeth and puberty, it is much more important that I transform my knowledge into visual


imagery and living forms, unfolding it and allowing it to flow into the child. What a person has learned is important only for children after puberty until the early twenties.

4/9/1924, in The Essentials of Education [27], p. 29-30. Our initial approach to life had a religious quality in that we related to nature as naturally religious beings, surrendered to the world. In this second stage, however, we are no longer obligated to merely accept passively everything coming from our environment, allowing it to vibrate in us physically; rather, we transform it creatively into images. Between the change of teeth and puberty, children are artists, though in a childish way, just as in the first phase of life, children were homo religiosus— naturally religious human beings. Now that the child demands everything in a creative, artistic way, the teachers and educators who encounter the child must present everything from the perspective of an artist. Our contemporary culture demands this of teachers, and this is what must flow into the art of education; at this point, interactions between the growing human being and educators must take an artistic form. In this respect, we face great obstacles as teachers. Our civilization and the culture all around us have reached the point where they are geared only to the intellect, not to the artistic nature.

4/15/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], p. 50. . . . If teachers can acquire a true knowledge of the human being, they will become aware of how, when the etheric body is freed at the change of teeth, the child has an inner urge to receive everything in the form of images. The child’s own inner being wants to become “image.” During the first stage of life, impressions lack this pictureforming tendency; they are transformed instead into habits and skills in the child; memory itself is habit and skill. Children want to imitate, through the movement of the limbs, everything they see happening around them; they have no desire to form any inner images. But after the change of teeth, you will notice how children come to know things very differently. Now they want to experience pictures arising in the soul; consequently, teachers must bring everything into a pictorial element in their lessons. Creating images is the most important thing for teachers to understand.


4/16/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], p. 55. Children are unconcerned with the meaning of words and, indeed, with any manifestation of the world around them, until after the change of teeth. Even then, it is not yet the intellectual aspect that concerns them, but an element of feeling. They take it in as one takes anything from acknowledged authority. Before puberty, a child cannot intellectually determine right and wrong. People may speculate about these things as much as they like, but direct observation shows what I have said to be true. This is why all moral concepts brought before a child must be pictorial in nature.

4/16/1924, in The Roots of Education [28], pp. 60-61. It is very different when we come to the change of teeth. Now, with their individuality, but on the model delivered by its inheritance, children make their own bodies. At this age, a child acquires for the first time a body formed from the individuality. Human beings come to Earth with a remembered tendency; this then develops into a more pictorial and plastic memory. Therefore, what is produced from the impulses of former earthly lives causes life between the change of teeth and puberty to seem familiar. It is very important for us to realize that a child’s experience at this age is like recognizing an acquaintance on the street. This experience—lowered one level into the subconscious—is what happens in the physical and moral nature of a child at this age. The child experiences what is learned as old and familiar. The more we can appeal to that feeling, recognizing that we are giving the child old and familiar knowledge, the more pictorial and imaginative we can make our teaching, and the better we will teach, because that individual saw these things as images in the spiritual life and knows that his or her own being rests within these images; they can be understood because they are already well known. The child has not yet developed any clearly defined or individual sympathies and antipathies, but has a general feeling of sympathy or antipathy toward what is found on the Earth, just as I might feel sympathy if I meet a friend or antipathy if I meet someone who once struck me on the head. If we keep in mind that these general feelings are there, and if we work on this hypothesis, our teaching will be on the right track.


7/20/1924, in Human Values in Education [29], pp. 73-74. So, during the second period of life between the change of teeth and puberty, the human ether body is our main concern in education. Above all, both teacher and child need the forces at work in the ether body, because they release the child’s feeling life, not judgment and thought. Deeply embedded in the nature of children between the change of teeth and puberty is the third member of the human being, the astral body, which bears all feelings and sensations. During this period, the astral body is still deeply embedded in the ether body. Thus, because the ether body has now become relatively free, it is our task to develop it so that it can follow its own tendencies, which are helped by education, not hindered. When can it be helped? This happens when we teach children through pictures, in the broadest sense; everything we wish them to absorb we build imaginatively and in images. The ether body is the body of formative forces; it models the wonderful forms of the organs—the heart, lungs, liver, and so on. The physical body, which we inherit, acts only as a model; after the first seven years—after the change of teeth—it is laid aside, and a second physical body is formed by the etheric body. This is why, at this age, our educational methods must be adapted to the formative forces of the ether body.

8/13/1924, in The Kingdom of Childhood [30], pp. 22-23. Do not forget that around the change of teeth children pass over into the period of imagination and fantasy. It is not the intellect but fantasy that fills life at this age. You as teachers must also be able to develop this life of fantasy, and those who bear a true knowledge of the human being in their souls are able to do this. . . . And so between the change of teeth and puberty you must educate out of the very essence of imagination. For the quality that makes a child under seven so wholly into a sense-organ now becomes more inward; it enters the soul life. The sense-organs do not think; they perceive pictures, or rather they form pictures from the external objects. And even when the child’s sense experiences have already a quality of soul, it is not a thought that emerges but an image, albeit a soul image, an imaginative picture. Therefore in your teaching you must work in pictures, in images.


Other Considerations 12/31/1921, in Soul Economy [22], pp. 136-37. All this changes with the coming of the second teeth, and some of these forces begin to work more in the child’s soul and spiritual realm, affecting especially the rhythmic movement of heart and lungs. They are no longer as active in the physical processes themselves, but now they also work in the rhythms of breathing and blood circulation. One can see this physically as the child’s breathing and pulse become noticeably stronger during this time. Children now have a strong desire to experience the emerging life of soul and spirit on waves of rhythm and beat within the body—quite subconsciously, of course. They have a real longing for this interplay of rhythm and beat in their organism. Consequently, adults must realize that whatever they bring to children after the change of teeth must be given with an inherent quality of rhythm and beat. Everything addressed to a child at this time must be imbued with these qualities. Educators must be able to get into the element of rhythm to the degree that whatever they present makes an impression on the children and allows them to live in their own musical element. This is also the beginning of something else. If, at this stage, the rhythm of breathing and blood circulation is not treated properly, harm may result and extend irreparably into later life. Many weaknesses and unhealthy conditions of the respiratory and


circulatory systems in adult life are the consequences of an improper education during these early school years.

7/20/1924, in Human Values in Education [29], p. 74-75. We teach children by means of pictures, and they learn to write through painting and drawing; indeed, it is never too early to introduce children to the arts, since all our teaching must be imbued with a feeling for art. In the same way, we must also keep this in mind: Just as the ether body is inseparable from the human formative and pictorial aspects, the astral body, which underlies the life of feelings and sensations, tends toward the musical nature of a person. So what do we look for when observing children? Because the astral body is embedded in the physical and etheric bodies of children between the change of teeth and puberty, if the soul life is healthy it is also deeply musical. Every healthy child is profoundly musical. To invoke this musicality, we need only call on the children’s own natural liveliness and sense of movement. Artistic teaching, from the very beginning of school life, should thus employ both the visual arts and music. We should never emphasize abstraction; an artistic approach is most important, and children must be led to comprehend the world out of the artistic.

8/12/1924, in The Kingdom of Childhood [30], p. 14. A very great deal is awakening then [at the change of teeth]. The child is curious, but not with an intellectual curiosity, for as yet the child has no reasoning powers; and anyone who tries to appeal to the intellect of a child of seven is quite on the wrong lines. The child has fantasy, and this fantasy is what we must engage. 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 its food and every other necessary substance is contained in the milk that the child consumes. And when children come to school at the age of the changing of the teeth it is again milk that you must give them, but now, milk for the soul. That is to say, your teaching must not be made up of isolated units, but all that the children receive must be a unity; after the change of teeth children must have “soul milk.” . . .

8/18/1924, in The Kingdom of Childhood [30], pp. 92-94. We must be clear in our minds that the independent activity of the etheric body only really begins at the change of teeth. The etheric

106 • Other Considerations

body in the first seven years has to put forward all the independent activity of which it is capable to build up the second physical body. Thus, this etheric body is preeminently an inward artist in the child in the first seven years; it is a modeler, a sculptor. And this modeling force, applied to the physical body by the etheric body, becomes free, emancipates itself with the change of teeth at the seventh year. It can then work as an activity of soul. This is why the child has an impulse to model forms or to paint them. For the first seven years of life the etheric body has been carrying out modeling and painting within the physical body. Now that it has nothing further to do regarding the physical body, or at least not as much as before, it wants to carry its activity outside. . . . This is an inner urge, an inner longing of the etheric body, to be at work in modeling or painting.


Afterword As you can see from the material collected in this book, Rudolf Steiner was quite emphatic about the care and attention that the young child needs during the transformation of the final birthing of the etheric “around” the age of seven. He speaks of the etheric body as a force form of mighty sculptural forces whose actual shape is influenced by the connection these forces have with the stars. He is emphatic that the health of these forces affects the child’s later capacities, even the ability to experience imagination, intuition, and inspiration in later life. Above, the word “around” has been used because it seems that there is a lot of controversy about when the birth of the etheric or the change of teeth actually happens. And consequently, when is it appropriate for the child to go into first grade? From the material in this document you will see that Steiner talks about the nature and exact timing of this transition phase as being individually driven. Although he predominantly mentions “at age seven” he also uses phrases like “in the seventh year,” and, in some places, even mentions age eight (see The Spiritual Ground of Education [24], p. 6). He mentions that boys and girls may have different timing with this too (see “Education in the Light of Spiritual Science” [2], pp. 58-61). Rudolf Steiner is very clear that it is not just the teeth that are changing at the time of the final birth of the etheric but that there are changes going on throughout the whole organism. In fact, he says that the birth of the etheric signifies not an elaboration of the physical body but rather a


replacement of the entire physical inherited substance, the whole human organism. And, he also says that to the same degree of intensity that the child teethes, the child learns to think. These remarks remind me of a conversation that was relayed to me from a parent whose only child was going through this transformation at the age of six-and-a-half . The child said, as she was looking out the window of her car on the way to school, “Mom, everything’s changing. The trees look different, you’re different and even Harlequin the cat is different. And, Mom, I don’t know how to play anymore.” Rudolf Steiner goes on to say, on pages 58-60 of A Modern Art of Education [26], that these powerful soul and spiritual forces, the etheric forces that bring about the change of teeth, also go on to “enliven the soul’s inner being.” What we witness as we accompany the child through this threshold time of the six/seven-year change are the outer manifestations of mighty processes at work, processes that are influenced by the stars themselves. Educators who are present at this threshold time for the children can easily be misled by the behaviors that arise out of the children—the bubbling-up activity; racing around; emotional agitations; giddiness; the accidental bumping into others when children lose their sense of their place in space; the critical, removed gaze; the distancing from play; the statements of boredom. . . All of these can be unnerving to the teacher and parent. These behaviors and many more could undermine the adult’s confidence and could lead to all kinds of assumptions about the school’s or teacher’s or parents’ ineffectiveness with the child, when really the child is simply outwardly reacting to inner changes. For years it has been the practice in many Waldorf schools that a child enters first grade when he or she is turning seven years old. Government legislation, aimed at lowering the age of school entrance, has begun to influence educational policy in many countries in recent years, and there have been varied responses from Waldorf/Steiner schools worldwide. In some countries, it is legislated that children, even in Waldorf schools, must go into grade one when they are five or six. (You will read in the section “The Protection of the Etheric Body,” Rudolf Steiner’s lament, “It pains me to know that the sixth year has been fixed as the official school age. Children should not enter elementary school before their seventh year.”) Early academics, testing, inappropriate activities, limits to play and outdoor experience are all a growing part of the agenda of some mainstream policy-makers. In an attempt to meet government restrictions and not compromise the development of the child too much, some Waldorf

110 • Afterword

schools in the world are introducing “zero classes.” These classes provide six-year-old children with a place to be that tries to embrace some aspects of the kindergarten and some aspects of first grade before they enter a first grade class around the age of seven. It could be the kindergarten teacher or the grade school teacher who must rise to the occasion and work with the genuine needs of the child in this kind of environment. At this time in the history of early childhood education, when so many varied influences could have adverse affects on the future of childhood, when, as developmental psychologists like Gordon Neufeld and social educators like Kim John Payne say, “childhood is under attack,” it becomes ever more important to understand what is happening in the development of young children and how to protect them. We can make headway in our own understanding by looking at the wisdom of Rudolf Steiner and by beginning to cultivate our own observational capacities for seeing into the developmental changes that young children undergo. Our colleagues and helpmates in this discovery process are the anthroposophical doctors in our communities. Unfortunately the phenomenon of having an anthroposophical doctor connected with a Waldorf school, which is fairly common in Europe, is a rarity in the United States and Canada. This makes it even more important that educators take up the challenge and recognize the need to protect the young child. As educators of six-and seven-year-olds, we stand at a doorway, as midwives at the second birth that the child undergoes. Accompanying the child through this process is both an honor and a call for understanding and compassion. In some places, Steiner calls this challenging time for the child “a battleground” (see excerpts in the section “Educating the Child Prior to the Birth of the Etheric”) and he emphasizes that who we are as educators is extremely important to the child. Are we worthy models who can care for the child’s physical body? Can we also be present for the children when they become gradually amenable to a sense of natural unquestioned authority? In a lecture given in Torquay in August, 1924, teachers were encouraged to reflect on the child’s need for “soul milk” at this time in their development (see The Kingdom of Childhood [30], p. 14). Perhaps one question we could carry forward in our work with the children is, “What is the nature of soul milk?” Many approaches to this question can be found within the text of the book you are holding in your hands. Blessings on all the children making this courageous, transformational journey, and on all the midwives who accompany them. —Ruth Ker, Michaelmas, 2013


References The quotations in this book are all taken from Rudolf Steiner’s works. Each of these works has a standard number in the collected works of Rudolf Steiner, the Gesamtausgabe, published by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland. In the list of English titles below, the corresponding “GA number” is given. Where possible, the titles of the most recent translations are used. Throughout the text, reference is made to this list of thirty-four works through the numbers in brackets. Where page numbers are indicated in the text, the reference is to the particular English edition listed here.

[1] Die Erzieuhung des Kindes vom Geschictspunkte der

Getisteswissenschaft, from Lucifer-Gnosis; Grundlegende Aufsätze zur Anthroposophie und Berichte aus den Zeitschriften «Luzifer» und «Lucifer – Gnosis» 1903 – 1908, GA 34. This 1907 essay, “The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science,” is included in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, Anthroposophic Press, 1996.

[2] Die Erkenntnis des Übersinnlichen in unserer Zeit und deren Bedeutung für das heutige Leben (13 lectures, Berlin/Cologne, 1906-7), GA 55. Supersensible Knowledge, Anthroposophic Press, 1987. The lecture of 12/1/1906, “Education in the Light of Spiritual Science,” and the lecture of 1/24/1907, “Education and Spiritual Science,” are


also included in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, Anthroposophic Press, 1996; this edition is quoted for these two lectures.

[3] Westliche und östliche Weltgegensätzlichkeit - Wege zu ihre

Verständigung durch Anthroposophie (10 lectures, Vienna, 1922), GA 83. The Tension Between East and West, Anthroposophic Press, 1983.

[4] Ursprungsimpulse der Geisteswissenschaft. Christliche Esoterik im

Lichte neuer Geist-Erkenntnis (20 lectures, Berlin, 1906-7), GA 96. Original Impulses for the Science of the Spirit, Completion Press, 2001. The lecture of 5/14/1906, “Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight,” is also included in The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, Anthroposophic Press, 1996; this is the edition quoted for this lecture.

[5] Das christliche Mysterium, GA 97 (31 lectures, various cities, 1906-7).

The Christian Mystery (Completion Edition), Completion Press, 2000.

[6] Das Leben zwischen dem Tode und der neuen Geburt im Verhältnis

zu den kosmischen Tatsachen (10 lectures, Berlin, 1912-13), GA 141. Between Death and Rebirth, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1975.

[7] Das Karma des Berufes des Menschen in Anknüpfung an Gothes

Leben. Kosmische und Menschliche Geschichte Band III (10 lectures, Dornach, 1916), GA 172. The Karma of Vocation, Anthroposophic Press, 1984.

[8] Soziales Verstandnis aus geisteswissenschaftlichen Erkentnis Die

Geistige Hintergründe der Sozialen Frage - Band III (15 lectures, Dornach, 1919), GA 191. Lecture of 10/4/1919 published as “Social Understanding Through Spiritual Scientific Knowledge,” Anthroposophic Press, 1982.

[9] Geisitige und soziale Wandlungen in der Menschheitsentwikelung (18

lectures, Dornach, 1920), GA 196. What is Necessary in These Urgent Times, SteinerBooks, 2010.

[10] Geisteswissenschaft als Erkenntnis der Grundimpulse sozialer

Gestaltung (17 lectures, Dornach, 1920), GA 199. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms, Anthroposophic Press, 1986.

[11] Der Mensch in Zusammenhang mit dem Kosmos 1: Entsprechung zwischen Mikrokosmos und Makrokosmos Der Mensch—Eine Heiroglype des Weltenalls (16 lectures, Dornach, 1920), GA 201. Mystery of the Universe, Rudolf Steiner Press, 2001.

114 • References

[12] Der Mensch in Zusammenhang mit dem Kosmos 6: Menschenwerden, Weltenseele und Weltengeist - Zweiter Teil: Der Mensch als geistiges Wesen im historischen Werdegang (11 lectures, Dornach, 1921), GA 206. Typescript of translation of August 7, 1921 lecture, “Man’s Becoming, World Soul, and World Spirit,” Rudolf Steiner Library, Ghent, NY (undated).

[13] Geistige Zusammenhänge in der Gestaltung des menschlichen

Organismus (16 lectures, various locations, 1922), GA 218. Two lectures are included in Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy, Volume 2, Anthroposophic Press, 1996 (see also GA 304a, reference list number [23]).

[14] Mysteriengestaltungen (14 lectures, Dornach, 1923), GA 232. Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centers, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973.

[15] Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Pädagogik (14 lectures, Stuttgart, 1919), GA 293. The Foundations of Human Experience, Anthroposophic Press, 1996.

[16] Erziehungskunst, Methodisch-Didaktisches (14 lectures, Stuttgart,

1919), GA 294. Practical Advice to Teachers, Anthroposophic Press, 2000.

[17] Die Erziehungsfrage als soziale Frage (6 lectures, Dornach, 1919),

GA 296. The six lectures of this volume, collectively titled Education as a Social Problem, are included in Education as a Force for Social Change, Anthroposophic Press, 1997. See also GA 331, reference list number [32].

[18] Die Waldorfschule und ihr Geist (6 lectures, various locations, 1919-

20), GA 297. The Spirit of the Waldorf School, Anthroposophic Press, 1995.

[19] Erziehung zum Leben: Selbsterziehung und pädagogische Praxis (6

lectures, various locations, 1921-24), GA 297a. Education, Teaching, and Practical Life, AWSNA Publications, 2007.

[20] Die Erneuerung der pädagogisch-didaktischen Kunst durch

Geisteswissenschaft (14 lectures, Basel/Dornach, 1920), GA 301. The Renewal of Education, Anthroposophic Press, 2001.

[21] Erziehung und Unterricht aus Menschenerkenntnis (9 lectures,

Stuttgart, 1920-23), GA 302a. Balance in Teaching, Anthroposophic Press, 2007.


[22] Die gesunde Entwickelung des Menschenwesens (16 lectures, Dornach, 1921-22), GA 303. Soul Economy, Anthroposophic Press, 2003.

[23] Anthroposophische Menschenkunde und Pädagogik (9 lectures, various locations, 1923-24), GA 304a. Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy, Volume 2, Anthroposophic Press, 1996.

[24] Die geistig-seelischen Grundkräfte der Erziehungskunst. Spirituelle

Werte in Erziehung und sozialem Leben (12 lectures, Oxford, 1922), GA 305. Spiritual Ground of Education, Anthroposophic Press, 2004.

[25] Die pädagogische Praxis vom Gesichtspunkte geisteswissenschaftlicher

Menschenerkenntnis. Die Erziehung des Kindes und jüngerer Menschen (8 lectures, Dornach, 1923), GA 306. The Child’s Changing Consciousness, Anthroposophic Press, 1996.

[26] Gegenwärtiges Geistesleben und Erziehung (14 lectures, Ilkley, 1923), GA 307. A Modern Art of Education, Anthroposophic Press, 2004.

[27] Die Methodik des Lehrens und die Lebensbedingungen des Erziehens (5 lectures, Stuttgart, 1924), GA 308. The Essentials of Education, Anthroposophic Press, 1997.

[28] Anthroposophische Pädagogik und ihre Voraussetzungen (5 lectures,

Bern, 1924), GA 309. The Roots of Education, Anthroposophic Press, 1997.

[29] Der pädagogische Wert der Menschenerkenntnis und der Kulturwert

der Pädagogik (10 lectures, Arnheim, 1924), GA 310. Human Values in Education, Anthroposophic Press, 2004.

[30] Die Kunst des Erziehens aus dem Erfassen der Menschenwesenheit (7 lectures, Torquay, 1924), GA 311. The Kingdom of Childhood, Anthroposophic Press, 1995.

[31] Meditative Betrachtungen und Anleitungen zur Vertiefung der

Heilkunst (13 lectures, Dornach, 1924), GA 316. Course for Young Doctors, Mercury Press, 1994.

[32] Neugestaltung des sozialen Organismus (14 lectures, Stuttgart, 1919), GA 330. The lecture of 6/19/19, “The Tasks of Schools and the Threefold Social Organism” is included in Education as a Force for Social Change, Anthroposophic Press, 1997 (see also reference list number [17].

116 • References

[33] Vom Einheitsstaat zum dreigliedrigen sozialen Organismus

(11 lectures, various locations, 1920), GA 334. Social Issues, Anthroposophic Press, 1991.

[34] Vom Leben des Menschen und der Erde. Über das Wesen des

Christentums (13 lectures, Dornach, 1923), GA 349. From Limestone to Lucifer, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999.


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