Human Values in Education is the lecture course catalogued as GA 310 in the collected edition of Rudolf Steiner's work, published in German as Der pädagogische Wert der Menschenerkenntnis und der Kulturwert der Pädagogik. It gathers ten lectures given at Arnhem in the Netherlands across eight days in July 1924, arranged as a summer course by Dutch anthroposophists for teachers, parents, and a general public curious about the schools that had begun to appear. The subject is not curriculum in any administrative sense. It is the growing human being: what alters at the change of teeth, what alters again at puberty, and what the adult standing in front of a class must become in order to meet those alterations without doing damage. Steiner's claim throughout is that a genuine art of teaching cannot be assembled from method alone, but has to grow out of an accurate reading of the child.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 310 belongs to the last full year of Steiner's activity. He fell ill in September 1924 and died the following March, so this course sits near the close of a body of educational lecturing that began in August 1919 with the founding of the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart. Between those two points he spoke on education perhaps two dozen times, in courses now catalogued from GA 293 through GA 311. The Arnhem lectures fall between the Bern course of April 1924 and the Torquay course of August 1924, and they carry the tone of a man who has watched five years of practice test his own ideas.
That timing shapes the content in two ways worth noticing. First, the volume is unusually willing to report failures. Steiner tells the Dutch audience outright that the Waldorf school has shadow sides, and describes what goes wrong when a teacher handles a class only as a chorus and lets the individual child disappear inside it. Second, the course arrives after the Christmas Conference of 1923, when the Anthroposophical Society was refounded and Steiner had begun speaking extensively about karma. The closing lecture reflects that shift: the art of education is presented not as a programme somebody decided to launch, but as something that arose out of the movement by necessity, in the same way that eurythmy and the medical work arose.
For a reader working through the education material, GA 310 functions well as an entry point. It is compact, it was given to non-specialists, and it moves from principle to classroom detail to institutional structure inside a single arc, which the longer teacher-training courses do not do.
Themes and Structure
The opening lecture sets a diagnosis before it sets a method. Steiner argues that modern culture has split theory from practice so completely that people routinely carry ideas into life that reality cannot support. He takes his examples from business and from medicine, where a plan can fail slowly and invisibly, and contrasts them with bridge-building, where a miscalculation announces itself at once. Education, he suggests, is the field where the delay between a bad idea and its consequence is longest of all, which is exactly why it needs a knowledge of the whole human being, body and soul and spirit together, rather than a theory of one part.
The second lecture turns to biography as evidence. Steiner reads Goethe and Schiller side by side as two contrasting cases of how a soul meets the body it inherits: Goethe's harmony of form against Schiller's lifelong physical struggle, the disorder of circulation and breathing that produced the cramps and pain that governed his working hours. The point is not literary appreciation. It is a demonstration that the inherited body is a given condition a person must work with, and that the working relationship between spirit and inheritance can be read in a life.
Lectures three and four carry the developmental core. Steiner describes the first seven years as a period in which the child is not yet met directly by the outer world, and in which the physical body received from parents and ancestors serves a temporary purpose:
"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 the second physical body is fashioned by the etheric body."
From this follows his account of imitation. If the small child builds a second body on the pattern of the first while absorbing everything in the surrounding environment, then the moral quality of what stands around the child is a physiological matter, not merely an ethical one. He digresses, memorably, into the calculating horses that were a public sensation in Germany at the time, using them to argue that a living creature can read minute unconscious signals from its surroundings far more finely than the observer believes possible.
The middle of the course leaves developmental theory for the practical arrangements of a school. Steiner names the teachers' conference as the soul of everything the Waldorf school does, describes the college of teachers meeting regularly to discuss individual children rather than timetables, and warns against the psychological shallowness of calling a quick child gifted, since early facility may point toward genius or toward illness. He explains the arrangement of teaching in periods, with one subject held through the long morning main lesson so that a child can enter a discipline instead of being shuttled between fragments of them. A further lecture takes up meetings between parents and teachers as a necessary part of the same structure.
The later lectures widen again. One treats diet for children in connection with the four temperaments, on the principle that nourishment reaches soul disposition and not only tissue. One treats the shaping of the body through movement, and explains why eurythmy is set alongside gymnastics rather than in place of it, since gymnastics addresses the physical body while eurythmy asks the whole human being to make itself visible. The ninth lecture sets out a historical sequence of educational styles: the Greek gymnast, who formed a complete human being through the body; the Roman rhetorician, who centred all training on public speech; and the modern professor, whose authority rests on transmitted knowledge. Steiner uses the sequence to ask what the present age actually requires, rather than to recommend a return. The final lecture places the whole art of teaching inside the anthroposophical movement, and closes with his account of what the teacher's own inner preparation demands.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Ten entries in the Thalira glossary draw their source material from GA 310. Read together they trace the course's own path, from the constitution of the young child through the daily shape of the school day to the inner requirements placed on the teacher.
Where to Read It
The full English text of the course is freely available online. You can read the complete lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the 1971 Rudolf Steiner Press translation together with the German original and per-lecture navigation. Search the archive for GA 310 or for the English title to reach the table of contents.
For a printed copy, or to check which editions are currently available, search the publisher's catalogue at SteinerBooks. Note that the English title has appeared in more than one edition since 1971, so it is worth comparing the lecture dates in any copy you find against the Arnhem sequence of 17 to 24 July 1924 to be sure you have GA 310 and not one of the neighbouring education courses.
Continue Your Study
- Work through the source terms. Each of the ten entries above expands one passage of the Arnhem course into a standalone explanation with its context restored. Start with the model body if you want the developmental foundation first.
- Browse the wider vocabulary. The full Thalira glossary places these educational terms next to the anthroposophical concepts they depend on, including the etheric and astral members of the human being.
- Compare neighbouring volumes. The GA Work Library collects study guides to Steiner's other courses, so you can set the Arnhem lectures beside the longer teacher-training cycles they compress.
- Follow a structured route. If you would rather read in sequence than by topic, the paths to knowledge lay out ordered reading routes through the material.