Education and threefoldment of the social organism
byMieke Mosmuller
31-08-2022
0 comments
The text below is a literal transcription of the spoken video text.
If we look back: a 20th century demagogue who achieved great ‘success' in the years 33-45 in inverted commas was also very well aware of the fact that the youth, when you have them, you have the future. But then, of course, the question is, what ideas do you have about the future and what ideas do you have about youth development in connection with that. Now, in this goal it is described that the ideal is an education for all children around the world and then a number of quantitative principles are given, such as how many children in the world do not yet have an education. I will leave that aside for the moment, my point is that the question is then that, given this fine goal where it is of course discussed that children who are well-educated have many more opportunities, that this is a weapon in the fight against poverty, etc., it is of course then a question of: what is this education, in fact? What are you giving those children? And what are your ideas about how a child develops and how it should be brought up and what exactly do you do with education? It is, of course, clear that in our time, just as the quantitative has triumphed over the qualitative, so content has triumphed over form. So what is considered good education consists of a whole package of information, which you then offer to children step by step, and the way along which this is done is, of course, also the big question. Some time ago, I read in the same objective, in its description, that one of the major pillars would have to be education via the Internet. Now, after the experiences with corona and home education, the description has changed somewhat. It no longer says that it is such a great ideal, but that it is actually very important that personal education takes place. On the other hand, under the surface you can still read the importance of that one missing goal, namely the goal of introducing artificial intelligence. And you could imagine that, when that is an unspoken but clearly present goal, it plays a very big role in the wish as to how you want to educate the children. And that is why it seemed important to me to look at the development of the child from a different angle than just thinking about gaining as much knowledge as possible. We know, or at least we can know, that the human being has three major dimensions in his being, and you can see this when you see him standing or walking or sitting: he has a head, he has a chest and he has limbs. And so does she. It doesn't matter whether it is a he or a she, all people have a head, a chest and they have a belly and they have limbs. And of course it's interesting to think that those are three different worlds. And you actually know that, people talk about that that way too. When you talk about the head, everybody knows that you are talking about your senses and about your thinking, especially your thinking, and when you talk about the chest, well then you know: what about the chest? That is the rhythm, there you have the breathing and there you have the heart, and the belly that is the metabolism and that is in the limbs, in another form it is the possibility of action. Whether that is walking a distance, whether that is sport, whether that is charity work, whether that is work, you have a system of limbs with which you do things. And these three worlds were found in the three ideals of the French Revolution which have been reborn in Rudolf Steiner's threefold social order, namely the free spiritual life, the equal judicial (political) life, and the fraternal, sisterly will, the action, the cooperation. So these are three different levels, but when you start to delve into them, you soon begin to experience that these worlds are really independent magnitudes. That it is something that you cannot just stir together in a pan and say: well, it is all the same. But that you really are a threefold being as a human being, that you carry three worlds within you and represent them, and that you find them in social cohesion. But in our time it has come to the point that these three parts have indeed been put into a pot and have been mixed together. When you go back to the ideas of the social triad, a very important characteristic of this is that you have to let the three elements stand on their own, as far as that is possible, and of course each element has something of the others in it. But it should never happen, for example, that the state, which belongs to the legal system, should have authority over the free spiritual life, to which education belongs. So the state should never interfere in education, because the state has no knowledge of this at all, education itself has the knowledge, the knowledge of education lies with those who do the educating. And those are the parents, and those are the teachers, and those are the professors, who should be shaping education. The legal system then is only there to, let's say, pay the salaries. But not to have an influence on what the education should be as regards content and form, because the science of the growing child lies with the educator and not with the state. And the same applies to medicine, we can talk about that another time. But the same also applies to commercial life. So where metabolism and the limbs in a human being represent a world of their own, so it is in social life as well, that commerce is something that functions on its own, and to this you could also count the agricultural sector, for example. But anyway, when it comes to raising children, it is of course very important that this is done, that this education is carried out by people who know what a child actually is. And now, of course, you can feel the pain of dealing with educators who have grown up in a system where the state has the upper hand, and it is of course very difficult for a current educator to find back what a child actually is.
I remember that at one point in secondary school, my children had to choose a package, they had to decide on the direction they wanted to take in their lives and based on that they had to choose a certain composition of courses and well, you can do that of course, but at a certain point you also have to pass those courses - yes, you do have to pass them. So there have been times when some despair could be felt in the children and I made an effort to help out a bit and the special thing about that - apart from the fact that you do that - is that you also learn about current education with the help of the textbooks. And I also had them from my own time, which I don't want to praise, because it was already a road to abstraction there as well, but what we still had there at least, was that in algebra and geometry for example, we had a pure form of understanding, and by pure I mean: not applied to the processes in the world. So purely the formula, the proof that it is like that, and then you finally apply it, but that was not really the case in our old education system; it was mainly about learning to navigate within the laws of mathematics and physics. And physics of course has much more applicability, so at a certain point there were questions about how long something would take, or when a ship starts sinking and it weighs so many kilos and so on. But in principle, the emphasis was still very much on the pure concept, i.e. separate from the application. So when I went to look in the textbooks of our children, that had completely disappeared. They weren't at the Waldorf school anymore, but at an ordinary secondary school and they used ordinary textbooks. So something is explained, but what is explained actually goes immediately into the application and you have to imagine these applications and your attention is away from the original pure understanding. Well, that is something like that. If that is what education is supposed to be, then it means that when people grow up, they don't have the opportunity to come to a pure thinking in terms of comprehension. Everything is application, usefulness, functional. It is not important for understanding in itself. That means that when you leave school, you graduate, you go to university and you study medicine, for example, and you do that in Maastricht, you carry on there, because in the first year medical knowledge is applied immediately. So where in the past the first year was spent studying the skeleton and muscles, and perhaps also a bit of the vessels but I think that was the second year of study, and so you gained a very abstract and not at all beautiful knowledge of the human body, it was pure. Just that. And now it's the case that you actually gain knowledge of this along the way, on the basis of problems in medical practice. Side by side. You start with problems that patients face, and if that involves a hip fracture, for example, then you also study the anatomy of the hip joint. But it is not the case that you study the whole anatomy. And I would so wish us to experience that, what a difference that makes. And that is an example for the whole of education. If you look at toddlers, yes, if you look closely, of course, you are inspired by anthroposophy, but I have always looked and even if you don't have an anthroposophy, then in looking at and experiencing a baby, and a toddler who is not yet saying I, you should feel that you can never blame such a child for anything, that doesn't exist at all. Because that child has no naughtiness or unwillingness or resistance of any kind. It only has physical sensations that are unpleasant and it reacts to that, or it feels pleasantly and then it reacts to that too, but there is absolutely no question that you could blame it or that you could say 'foei foei what are you doing now!?' That is ridiculous. And actually you should feel that, that is not in a certain theory or something like that, but that is humanness that every human being has, but covered with all kinds of theories that don't matter and that only spoil your original intuition concerning that very small child, that you lose the intuition because of all kinds of theories. Well, when the child grows up, at a certain moment the change comes to the feeling, to well, now it is really naughty, and if I let this happen and let it go further and further, that is not possible, that is also an experience. In this way you could map out the whole development of the child, yes let's say, and that has happened, that exists, that whole knowledge of the growing child from this point of view can be found. When you lay that at the basis of education, you know that in those first years, before the child goes to primary school, the child is still very much occupied with balancing and perfecting the physical body. And if you start making great demands on the intellectual abilities that seem to be there, then you are pulling away forces that are actually meant for the development of the body. It is not so difficult to see that. But if you start saying: education for all children in the whole world - and you don't have these concepts and you don't see, although you could see it, the state could see it, the globalist institutions could see it too, you don't see that the child is busy gaining knowledge, but that it is playing and that playing is the knowledge capacity in the child until about ten or so, twelve years of age, it is becoming less and less, it is becoming more and more learning, but originally it is only playing and that playing is learning. And if you deprive that child of that by constantly wanting to stuff it full of as much knowledge as possible, as early as possible, then you make the child extremely unhealthy. But yes, I can say this, at the moment there is a gigantic power at work in the world that aims at something certain, namely education for all children, but education as it should not be. Excuse me. And if that becomes the education for all children all over the world, then that is actually a catastrophe. Then it would be better for them not to have any education at all, and just to continue playing with the mud and the water and all the things they have available in all the great poverty that they still have, even if they do have to learn, than to be stuffed full of information that is sickening.
This is something that I consider a very big drawback to the goal of education, and I could talk about it for hours, but we don't want our videos to be that long, so I'll leave it there and move on to another goal next time, but we'll definitely come back to this.Education and threefoldment of the social organism by Mieke Mosmuller
Who has the youth, has the future. That is, of course, a fact known to all people who care about the development of mankind and the earth, and it is therefore also very understandable that in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, one of the goals focuses on education. After all, what children absorb during that long period of development and how they absorb it determines a great deal for the future and, of course, these are the people who have the future. We increasingly see the state interfering with the form of education. But who determines the content of this education?Watch video on YouTube
If we look back: a 20th century demagogue who achieved great ‘success' in the years 33-45 in inverted commas was also very well aware of the fact that the youth, when you have them, you have the future. But then, of course, the question is, what ideas do you have about the future and what ideas do you have about youth development in connection with that. Now, in this goal it is described that the ideal is an education for all children around the world and then a number of quantitative principles are given, such as how many children in the world do not yet have an education. I will leave that aside for the moment, my point is that the question is then that, given this fine goal where it is of course discussed that children who are well-educated have many more opportunities, that this is a weapon in the fight against poverty, etc., it is of course then a question of: what is this education, in fact? What are you giving those children? And what are your ideas about how a child develops and how it should be brought up and what exactly do you do with education? It is, of course, clear that in our time, just as the quantitative has triumphed over the qualitative, so content has triumphed over form. So what is considered good education consists of a whole package of information, which you then offer to children step by step, and the way along which this is done is, of course, also the big question. Some time ago, I read in the same objective, in its description, that one of the major pillars would have to be education via the Internet. Now, after the experiences with corona and home education, the description has changed somewhat. It no longer says that it is such a great ideal, but that it is actually very important that personal education takes place. On the other hand, under the surface you can still read the importance of that one missing goal, namely the goal of introducing artificial intelligence. And you could imagine that, when that is an unspoken but clearly present goal, it plays a very big role in the wish as to how you want to educate the children. And that is why it seemed important to me to look at the development of the child from a different angle than just thinking about gaining as much knowledge as possible. We know, or at least we can know, that the human being has three major dimensions in his being, and you can see this when you see him standing or walking or sitting: he has a head, he has a chest and he has limbs. And so does she. It doesn't matter whether it is a he or a she, all people have a head, a chest and they have a belly and they have limbs. And of course it's interesting to think that those are three different worlds. And you actually know that, people talk about that that way too. When you talk about the head, everybody knows that you are talking about your senses and about your thinking, especially your thinking, and when you talk about the chest, well then you know: what about the chest? That is the rhythm, there you have the breathing and there you have the heart, and the belly that is the metabolism and that is in the limbs, in another form it is the possibility of action. Whether that is walking a distance, whether that is sport, whether that is charity work, whether that is work, you have a system of limbs with which you do things. And these three worlds were found in the three ideals of the French Revolution which have been reborn in Rudolf Steiner's threefold social order, namely the free spiritual life, the equal judicial (political) life, and the fraternal, sisterly will, the action, the cooperation. So these are three different levels, but when you start to delve into them, you soon begin to experience that these worlds are really independent magnitudes. That it is something that you cannot just stir together in a pan and say: well, it is all the same. But that you really are a threefold being as a human being, that you carry three worlds within you and represent them, and that you find them in social cohesion. But in our time it has come to the point that these three parts have indeed been put into a pot and have been mixed together. When you go back to the ideas of the social triad, a very important characteristic of this is that you have to let the three elements stand on their own, as far as that is possible, and of course each element has something of the others in it. But it should never happen, for example, that the state, which belongs to the legal system, should have authority over the free spiritual life, to which education belongs. So the state should never interfere in education, because the state has no knowledge of this at all, education itself has the knowledge, the knowledge of education lies with those who do the educating. And those are the parents, and those are the teachers, and those are the professors, who should be shaping education. The legal system then is only there to, let's say, pay the salaries. But not to have an influence on what the education should be as regards content and form, because the science of the growing child lies with the educator and not with the state. And the same applies to medicine, we can talk about that another time. But the same also applies to commercial life. So where metabolism and the limbs in a human being represent a world of their own, so it is in social life as well, that commerce is something that functions on its own, and to this you could also count the agricultural sector, for example. But anyway, when it comes to raising children, it is of course very important that this is done, that this education is carried out by people who know what a child actually is. And now, of course, you can feel the pain of dealing with educators who have grown up in a system where the state has the upper hand, and it is of course very difficult for a current educator to find back what a child actually is.
I remember that at one point in secondary school, my children had to choose a package, they had to decide on the direction they wanted to take in their lives and based on that they had to choose a certain composition of courses and well, you can do that of course, but at a certain point you also have to pass those courses - yes, you do have to pass them. So there have been times when some despair could be felt in the children and I made an effort to help out a bit and the special thing about that - apart from the fact that you do that - is that you also learn about current education with the help of the textbooks. And I also had them from my own time, which I don't want to praise, because it was already a road to abstraction there as well, but what we still had there at least, was that in algebra and geometry for example, we had a pure form of understanding, and by pure I mean: not applied to the processes in the world. So purely the formula, the proof that it is like that, and then you finally apply it, but that was not really the case in our old education system; it was mainly about learning to navigate within the laws of mathematics and physics. And physics of course has much more applicability, so at a certain point there were questions about how long something would take, or when a ship starts sinking and it weighs so many kilos and so on. But in principle, the emphasis was still very much on the pure concept, i.e. separate from the application. So when I went to look in the textbooks of our children, that had completely disappeared. They weren't at the Waldorf school anymore, but at an ordinary secondary school and they used ordinary textbooks. So something is explained, but what is explained actually goes immediately into the application and you have to imagine these applications and your attention is away from the original pure understanding. Well, that is something like that. If that is what education is supposed to be, then it means that when people grow up, they don't have the opportunity to come to a pure thinking in terms of comprehension. Everything is application, usefulness, functional. It is not important for understanding in itself. That means that when you leave school, you graduate, you go to university and you study medicine, for example, and you do that in Maastricht, you carry on there, because in the first year medical knowledge is applied immediately. So where in the past the first year was spent studying the skeleton and muscles, and perhaps also a bit of the vessels but I think that was the second year of study, and so you gained a very abstract and not at all beautiful knowledge of the human body, it was pure. Just that. And now it's the case that you actually gain knowledge of this along the way, on the basis of problems in medical practice. Side by side. You start with problems that patients face, and if that involves a hip fracture, for example, then you also study the anatomy of the hip joint. But it is not the case that you study the whole anatomy. And I would so wish us to experience that, what a difference that makes. And that is an example for the whole of education. If you look at toddlers, yes, if you look closely, of course, you are inspired by anthroposophy, but I have always looked and even if you don't have an anthroposophy, then in looking at and experiencing a baby, and a toddler who is not yet saying I, you should feel that you can never blame such a child for anything, that doesn't exist at all. Because that child has no naughtiness or unwillingness or resistance of any kind. It only has physical sensations that are unpleasant and it reacts to that, or it feels pleasantly and then it reacts to that too, but there is absolutely no question that you could blame it or that you could say 'foei foei what are you doing now!?' That is ridiculous. And actually you should feel that, that is not in a certain theory or something like that, but that is humanness that every human being has, but covered with all kinds of theories that don't matter and that only spoil your original intuition concerning that very small child, that you lose the intuition because of all kinds of theories. Well, when the child grows up, at a certain moment the change comes to the feeling, to well, now it is really naughty, and if I let this happen and let it go further and further, that is not possible, that is also an experience. In this way you could map out the whole development of the child, yes let's say, and that has happened, that exists, that whole knowledge of the growing child from this point of view can be found. When you lay that at the basis of education, you know that in those first years, before the child goes to primary school, the child is still very much occupied with balancing and perfecting the physical body. And if you start making great demands on the intellectual abilities that seem to be there, then you are pulling away forces that are actually meant for the development of the body. It is not so difficult to see that. But if you start saying: education for all children in the whole world - and you don't have these concepts and you don't see, although you could see it, the state could see it, the globalist institutions could see it too, you don't see that the child is busy gaining knowledge, but that it is playing and that playing is the knowledge capacity in the child until about ten or so, twelve years of age, it is becoming less and less, it is becoming more and more learning, but originally it is only playing and that playing is learning. And if you deprive that child of that by constantly wanting to stuff it full of as much knowledge as possible, as early as possible, then you make the child extremely unhealthy. But yes, I can say this, at the moment there is a gigantic power at work in the world that aims at something certain, namely education for all children, but education as it should not be. Excuse me. And if that becomes the education for all children all over the world, then that is actually a catastrophe. Then it would be better for them not to have any education at all, and just to continue playing with the mud and the water and all the things they have available in all the great poverty that they still have, even if they do have to learn, than to be stuffed full of information that is sickening.
This is something that I consider a very big drawback to the goal of education, and I could talk about it for hours, but we don't want our videos to be that long, so I'll leave it there and move on to another goal next time, but we'll definitely come back to this.Education and threefoldment of the social organism by Mieke Mosmuller