Charles Kovacs - The Human Being and the Animal World

The contents of this book are taken from Charles Kovacs notes for the Human Being and the Animal World period, which is usually given in Waldorf schools as part of the curriculum for Class Four, for nine to ten-year-old children. Since he was teaching in Edinburgh, the choice of animals has a mainly Scottish theme and teachers in other parts of the world would probably choose to emphasize their own local fauna. Part Two was given in the next school year and unforunately the end of the manuscript has been lost. For the sake of completeness and as a former pupil of Mr Kovacs I have taken the liberty of adding the chapters on the lion and on Buddy the guide dog. Of the art work which originally accompanied the main lesson period, three songs have been included.

Charles Kovacs follows the suggestion made by Rudolf Steiner in speaking of the animals as head-animals or trunk-animals. For a thorough discussion of the science behind this one could hardly do better than refer to the book, Man and Mammals, by Wolfgang Schad and the article Seeing the Animal Whole by Craig Holdrege. The present volume is in no way intended as a textbook which ought to be followed rather the hope is that it might act as a stimulus to the creativity of individual teachers working with their own particular classes.

Howard Copland

Rudolf Steiner, Practical Advice to Teachers, Lecture 7.

From a talk given by Charles Kovacs to the parents of his class.

Quite a big part of the term was taken up by the Human Being and the Animal World period, and I would like to explain the importance we attach to it. Of course on the plainest level one could say: we tell the children of animals at this age simply because they want to hear of them. It is quite an elementary fact that children show an enormous interest in animals. This care for animals often takes quite astonishing forms I once heard a story which is quite typical of the childs attitude to animals. A father took his little boy to a picture gallery where there was one of these large historical paintings showing Christian martyrs thrown to the lions in a Roman circus. The father explained to the boy what the picture was about and spoke at length of the heroism of the martyrs. But he was suddenly interrupted by his offspring who pointed excitedly at one corner of the picture: Look daddy, look, there is a poor lion who hasnt got a martyr!

But now we must make a distinction between the interest in animals which the child has before the age of nine or ten and the quite different interest which grows in the child when it comes to Class Four. The younger child sees and feels the animal rather as something that belongs to the world of the fairy story; the younger child will not regard it as extraordinary if it is told of animals talking and acting as if they were human beings. This is no longer so for the child between nine and ten years of age; now the child awakens to the fact that animals are essentially different from man. In short we now have the beginning, the first realization of the world of nature as distinct from the world of the human being. Now what has happened in the mind of the child to bring about this change?

I would like to explain this change as clearly as possible, first of all because it can be a key to the whole mentality of the child at this age, but also because an understanding of this change also illuminates the working of the adult mind. Now we adults make necessarily and naturally a very clear distinction between two mental functions: rational, logical thought, and imagination. We have to keep these two functions well apart and we would be considered mentally abnormal if we could not do so. But, like two branches, these two functions grow from a common stem, and in the stem they are not divided, but are one. And this division which we take for granted today is, historically speaking, no older than Greek philosophy and Greek science, that is about 500 bc . Before this time even adults had a mind or a mentality in which rational thought and imagination were not two different things, but one. It is no wonder then that these earlier ages had no philosophy and no science as we know it; they had mythologies; they regarded nature not as a modern scientist does, but as filled with beings, gods and monsters.

To some extent the younger child, below the age of nine or ten, still lives in this stage where the rational and the irrational, imaginative, element of the human mind are not divided. For this younger child the statement that a dragon threatened the princess and the statement that two times two equals four are not of different orders, they are taken in as realities of the same kind. And if we induce the younger child as we can to make a sharp distinction between the two, then we do irreparable harm to the child. We force upon the child a speeding up of mental development which will show itself as emotional disturbances at puberty. However, at the age between nine and ten the division begins naturally; now the faculty of rational thought begins to branch away from imagination. And this is the reason why the children now want some food for their intellectual capacity and why they want to hear about animals not in the form of fables and fairy stories, but in the form of more objective descriptions. In fact the child wants to be introduced into the world of science.

This is a very important moment when we lead the child to the portals of science. And now something must certainly be avoided for the child of this age: that we throw at the poor thing the vast conglomeration of theories and hypotheses which are so often mistaken for established scientific truth. And this is particularly the case in relation to the animal world. Ever since the late ninteenth century, many people have mistakenly regarded the animal kingdom as a world ruled only by a ferocious struggle for the survival of the fittest. Many of the books written for children are but watered down forms of this view, in spite of the fact that as a serious scientific theory this over-simple form of Darwinism is already a thing of the past. But if, directly or indirectly, this picture of the animal world were impressed upon the child, we would whether we want it or not implant into the child the seeds of brutal and ruthless egotism; we would educate the amoral and not the moral element in the child.

Thus we try to teach the child to look at the animal always in comparison to the human being. We emphasize not at all that man has a better or more highly developed brain than the animals, but that the thing which lifts man above the beasts is his upright walk, which frees his hands, and that by the things we do with our hands we serve not only our own needs but also the needs of our fellow human beings. In this way we can bring the child to an objective, rational understanding of nature, but at the same time strengthen the social and moral element in the child. So you see that the Human Being and the Animal World period is not merely introduced to meet the natural interest of the child, and not merely for the sake of instruction, but as an important help in the moral education of the child.

Earlier we mentioned the two functions of the mind: rational thought and imagination. I need hardly stress that we do not regard imagination or fantasy as an inferior function and that we want to provide food for it as much as for the other. In Class Four we do this by telling the children the stories of Norse Mythology, the great sagas of Thor and Odin. These stories may appear grim to you, but the children simply love them. Why? Because they feel something in them which will bear fruit only much, much later. In these sagas the everlasting struggle between good and evil in the human soul is, as it were, projected into the cosmos and that which is good is shown not as a dry moral precept but as beautiful beings, the Asas, and evil is shown as monstrous ugliness. Here again we try to work from the moral element, but so that the child learns to love good as something beautiful and to hate evil as something ugly. And these ancient pictures have a much stronger moral force than any preaching of morals could ever have.