The Esoteric Background of Waldorf Education

Book excerpt: The Leitmotif of this book is inspired by passages from the fifth lecture of Rudolf Steiner's Education as a Social Problem, given shortly before the opening of the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart: One should not look superficially at the so-called cultural phenomena of our age, nor should one doubt that modern human beings have to arouse themselves to real comprehension of the Christ Impulse if evolution is to go forward in a healthy way.... This is something future educators and teachers must take into their consciousness.... One must teach from awareness that one has to bring about salvation in the case of every individual child; one has to steer children toward finding the Christ impulse in the course of life, toward finding a rebirth within themselves.... Such things must not live in the teacher as mere theory; they can be introduced into one's teaching only if one is strongly taken hold of by them in one's own soul.... "The best in me as a human being of this and following incarnations is what I find in myself as the Christ Impulse."... We should be clear, however, that this Christ impulse must not become the dogmatism of some religious body.... Human intelligence, left to itself, travels the path toward the ahrimanic; it can become active for the good only through taking in the true Christ impulse.