In his introductory lecture Steiner establishes a direction for the entire course, and sets out the central question to be considered.

To begin with, he emphasizes forcefully that Waldorf education has a new task -- a task that did not exist earlier, having only been constellated in our own era. Or course, our present culture, with its advances in so many fields of knowledge, art, and technical skill, deserves our humble respect. But we need to realize that all true development requires something more than an accumulation of knowledge and skills. Neither old nor new knowledge -- however valuable it may be in its own terms -- can provide an adequate foundation for the future. The future worthy of our hopes is always borne upon new capacities that we must realize within ourselves -- capacities through which fresh knowledge, insight, and skills can then come.

The main task of Waldorf education today -- and therefore the main responsibility for parents and teachers (first of all in their own lives) -- is to develop the particular capacities demanded by the spirit of our time, so that all culture and all knowledge can be renewed. Such inner change is a profoundly serious matter; it's the kind of necessity John the Baptist was pointing to when he proclaimed, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." The meaning of the Greek word for "repent" is "think differently" or "have another mind." There is no other way for the new to take hold of our lives and society. When, on the contrary, we try to receive new knowledge with old capacities, the incompatibility between knowledge and capacity yields an inevitably unhappy result. It's a result pictured in the parable about pouring new wine into old wineskins, whereupon the wineskins burst and the wine is spilled. (Steiner himself remarked about one of his books that we would do better not to read it at all than to read it intellectually, like a cookbook.)

A second thought concerning this new educational task has to do with form. A form for significant work can never be given once and for all at the beginning. It must gradually be found and entered into in a flexible and living way, and by this means it retains its potential for development. Finding a proper correspondence between content and form is an artistic task, for the artist is always struggling to bring a soul or spiritual content "down" into concrete form. Perhaps we can compare a new beginning with a small spring. If we try to contain it within an immediate, finished form, preventing it from shaping its own channels as it moves along, we will have only a swamp. But if we allow it to meander or run swift and deep as the situation requires, it can become in the end a powerful river. Such a river can assume many different forms. It can be a river in the plain, or a mountain river, or a forest river, and so on. It's character depends on the whole configuration.

In the same way, a new social venture depends on the soul, physical, and spiritual landscape. It is important in what country, in what culture, town or village, the venture develops. Not only this, but we also have to reckon with the changes brought by time. A worthy enterprise can be realized within these contexts only so far as we allow the contexts to shape it to their own developing requirements.

The counterbalancing principle is to avoid being "captured" by one's context and therefore being cut off from one's source. Every stream and every social venture needs to retain a connection with its original spring -- with its guiding idea. Otherwise, the undertaking becomes a merely eclectic conglomeration, disconnected from the inspiration giving rise to it.

Steiner goes on to articulate what I would call the moral foundation of education. The basic problem to be reckoned with is that in many different fields of our culture, even in religion, a principle of egotism underlies all else. For example, a primary reason for going to church might be to secure one's own personal immortality. In this way we are invited to be concerned first of all with ourselves. Of course, many people, whether churchgoers or scientists, rise above such egotism in admirable ways, and there is little doubt that many religious people go to church out of love for Christ. But it remains clear that our dominant soul constitution today needs to be changed, so that the center of interest shifts from our own personality to the world -- to people, nature, children. The possibility is open for us to receive all things as gifts of the creative, spiritual world -- gifts of God -- and to participate in their continuing creation through our own human creativity.

Putting the problem of egotism in slightly different terms: a renewed education requires the real presence of the spiritual world in our actions as parents and teachers. We need an awareness of this presence, or at least a striving toward such awareness. This demands a great soul openness on our part, a readiness to accept the reality of the spiritual world and to listen for its voice -- which is to develop a moral-spiritual organ of perception. It's not something we can simply package up in a new pedagogical method and hand over to teachers. The importance of this moral-spiritual capacity can hardly be overestimated; it will lead us beyond ourselves and into an objective connection with the stream of human evolution, so that we will not seek to perform merely our own will, and will not try to realize only our own subjective pictures of the way things should be.

When the development of teachers becomes above all a moral-spiritual education, the free "I" of the human being looks for and accepts what is higher than itself. We measure our own thinking, feeling, and willing against the wisdom of the spiritual world. This makes it clear enough that what is demanded of us is not a particular philosophical understanding or a sum of knowledge, but rather an ability to see, hear, think, and act in a different way. Of course, the spirit "moves where it wills," and some people have this capacity as a gift and can use it intuitively. But it's important for Waldorf teachers to develop it in a conscious manner.

Moral education -- education that frees us from egotism -- finds its continuation in the development of a kind of thinking that is faithful to the world in a new and deeper way. (Steiner elsewhere calls it "thinking in reality.") Usually we feel that our thoughts belong to us, and we can do with them whatever we wish. We can think what we want. The need, by contrast, is to learn to look into and listen to thoughts, hearing what they speak to us and entering more fully into their reality. We can call such thinking moral, because we shed the egotistic need to think our own thoughts and we begin to experience what it means to think with the world. It should be clear that such thinking is not thinking about morality, but rather a thinking that is moral in its inner essence.

The path toward this goal requires us to enliven our normal, abstract images by bringing will and movement into them. (Steiner illustrates the need by pointing out, in the example of the wheel tracks caused by a passing carriage, that lifeless, abstract thinking -- thinking about causes in general rather than thinking in terms of concrete images -- leads to an endless regress of explanations, with no stopping place.) Artistic exercises can help us enliven our thinking in the necessary way. For example, we can try to see the will or soul gesture behind the outer movement of the body or the miming of the face. Similarly, we can look for the inner gesture coming to outward expression in each phenomenon of the world -- sun, night, rock, flower, particular words, and so on. Or we can explore metaphor whereby two different images are united through their inner gestures: eyes and stars are connected through the gesture of radiation; rain and sadness are connected through the gesture of a heavy descent.

As a result of such exercises, the whole world begins to speak to us. It becomes alive and ensouled. We find ourselves touched, penetrated, and transformed by the world. Each perception or thought evokes feelings that become part of our soul life. It proves extremely important that what becomes part of us in this way is not an element of our personal, egotistical life, but comes from the objective world. When we allow the world to sound within ourselves through exercises of this sort, our personal, egotism decreases, giving place to what is both objective and spiritual. In art, in meditation, in prayer, we have other examples of such activity. We experience the soul or spirit of the world. Instead of feeling only ourselves, we encompass and participate in the Other through our feelings. Such feelings we can call moral. At the end of the lecture Steiner strongly emphasizes this moral quality, and he insists that who the teacher is -- what she brings as the capacity of her own soul -- matters a great deal more in the classroom than what she does in an outward sense.

An important additional feature of the teacher's inner character is openness of will -- the readiness to accept the world as it is, along with all its vexing difficulties. We can learn to consider difficulties as part of ourselves, as belonging to our fate and our work -- just (Steiner says) as a heavy rain that begins falling when we venture outside without an umbrella is part of the situation in which we find ourselves, and not something to be complained about as a personal affront. Accepting what comes to us in this way, we learn to feel ourselves as part of the world, so that the stream of its will flows through us. We can call this moral will.

So already in this first lecture Steiner indicates the way of teacher training: it is moral development of thinking, feeling, and willing.

We come, then, to what Steiner described as the main task of education, which he will develop in further lectures: to connect the spiritual-moral man with the man of nature so that they can become a unity. We carry in ourselves a spiritual-moral part, a creative part ("spirit-soul" in Steiner's terms) in the deepest and most all-embracing meaning of "creative." It is transformative and eternal. But we also carry within ourselves an already-formed part of our being, which is natural and perishable. Regarding this bodily aspect, we can distinguish the forming forces and functions (Steiner mentions the astral, life, and physical bodies, which together shape our bodily form) and the substances that fill out this form -- substances, for example, that we ingest as food from the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. Our bodies are what separate us from the world and make us separate beings.

Spirit, on the other hand (Steiner speaks about the seed of spirit in us), is something that unites us with the world and, through our higher moral and creative activity, makes us imperishable. The mission of Christianity -- the meaning of all human evolution -- is to connect these two parts, bringing the eternal creative word into our perishable nature so as to transform this nature. This seed of the spirit, bearing the potential to transform the perishable body, will be developed in the future. The task of education is to make this transforming work possible by connecting the two parts of the human being -- spiritual-soul part and physical part -- in a harmonious way. This is required so that the spirit can freely and creatively express itself through the body without being weakened or darkened by the body. The body needs to be developed in a healthy, human way under the guiding and forming impulses of spirit and soul, rather than merely as a physical and animal entity.

We all know to what degree our soul and spirit depend on the state of the body, and how impulses coming from the body can darken our soul, resulting in sickness or unhealthy desires. And, conversely, we know how a healthy plasticity of body can depend on the state of soul and spirit, and how unhealthy passions of the soul or nervousness of the mind can result in bodily sickness. To harmonize spirit, soul, and body -- we can easily speak of its necessity, but its achievement is difficult.

The practical way to harmony is through rhythm. The musical rhythm of nature -- and music as such -- is the source of beauty and harmony. In our physiology, the rhythm of breathing is the foundation of our bodily harmony. This breathing occurs between the upper and lower poles of our being (between head and limbs), and also between the human being and the world. From a spiritual-soul point of view, we breathe out in our perception: in perceiving something, we momentarily forget ourselves and are united with the world. Then we breathe in, awakening within ourselves and bringing to consciousness what we perceive.

The child still lives completely in perception, which is to say, in union with the world. The first task of the pedagog is to help the child come into his body, where there can be a gradual awakening of his consciousness, and to make this process rhythmical, soft, gradual, harmonious. Awaking the child too early and abruptly leads to a hardening or cooling of the nervous system and a rigidity of the consciousness it mediates. But neither must we awake the child too late, lest he become stuck in an infantile consciousness (vague, dreamy, not fully awake). We have to create a gentle "staircase" for him to descend from the world of perception (which for the child, not yet "here," is a world of spirit) into the physical consciousness of a growing human being. Without this step-by-step process, the child may lose all liveliness of perception in adult life. We achieve the goal by bringing movement and rhythm into the images, words, and thoughts of the child. This is the way of living knowledge. Steiner called it: how to teach children to breathe.

The second task is moral and concerns the rhythm of sleep and wakefulness. In sleep we live in the spiritual-moral world. All the things we experience during the day -- all situations, all impressions, all difficulties and joys -- undergo unconscious moral judgment in our sleep, leading toward moral strength and clarity. In Russia we have a saying that "morning is wiser than evening." In the morning we bring different eyes to ourselves and to the people and situations we dealt with yesterday. We have the opportunity to take a different attitude toward things. Steiner suggested as an exercise toward this end that we practice observing ourselves from outside so as to evaluate our experience from a moral point of view and thereby to transform it.

A child cannot yet do this. His body is alive -- everything that comes from the body, his wishing, his instincts, is not yet under the direction of his own spirit. The teacher's task is to connect the child's moral part with his bodily part so that the lower can obey the higher. The child can gain this moral stance only through an adult -- first by imitating, then through respect for authority, and finally through his own free, mature judgment. This process, we can say, creates a moral staircase for the earthly development of the child's spirit. If the child begins to judge purely out of his own childlike nature, without ascending this staircase, he gains a false freedom, because he doesn't yet have within himself this moral part. Steiner called this task: teaching children how to sleep in a right way.

So in the first lecture Steiner sets out two tasks for the whole course: how to keep knowledge alive; and how to transform the bodily aspects through the moral. It is clear that art should play an important role in education just because of the fact that rhythm is central to art, and in art we try on one hand to ensoul our perception of the world, and on the other hand to look on our own personal experience from outside and in this way to use it as material for artistic creation. Working in these two directions, the educator will strive to realize the main educational task: to unite the spiritual and natural parts of our being.