Steiner's lesson polarity: humour widens the I and astral body outward toward altruism, seriousness draws them into the body. A class has to breathe between both.
Humour and Seriousness in Teaching in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the mood-rhythm a lesson has to breathe through, set out in the seventh lecture of The Renewal of Education (GA 301), given in Basel on 29 April 1920. Steiner treats the two not as personality traits of the teacher but as opposite gestures of the spirit-soul. In smiling and laughing, the I and the astral body loosen and widen out of the physical and etheric bodies while waking consciousness is kept, so the person is turned outward and, in Steiner's own word, becomes more altruistic. In gravity and weeping, those same members compress and bind more closely to the body, and the person becomes more self-enclosed, more egotistic. Neither pole is healthy alone. Steiner sets them beside inhalation and exhalation, eighteen breaths a minute, and asks the teacher to let the prepared material, not the teacher's own mood, decide when the class lightens.
Humour and seriousness in teaching names the alternation Steiner asked every class teacher to carry, and it is a statement about the human members rather than about classroom mood management. Laughter widens the soul out of the body; gravity draws it back in. A teacher who holds only one pole, Steiner told the Basel course in 1920, does damage that surfaces much later in the pupil's life.
In Steiner's Own Words
Let us now look at extreme examples of seriousness, such as crying and becoming sad. In these cases people are more compressed. The spirit-soul is more closely connected with the physical body than it is when we are in a neutral mood. A humorous attitude is an expansion of the soul and spirit, whereas a serious mood brings the spirit-soul aspect of human nature into closer contact with the physical body. We could also say that through laughing, a human being becomes more altruistic, and through seriousness, more egotistic.
What it Means Today
Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, studied laughter the way an ornithologist studies birdsong. Rather than use a laboratory, he and his students walked Baltimore sidewalks and malls and logged 1,200 episodes of laughter as they happened. The results, published in American Scientist in 1996 and expanded in Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (Viking, 2000), took apart the assumption that laughter answers jokes. Fewer than one laugh in five followed anything a comedian would recognise as material. Most followed flat conversational lines. Laughter was roughly thirty times more common in company than in solitude, and the speaker laughed more often than the listeners did. Provine's conclusion: laughter is a social vocalization, largely outside voluntary control, that binds a group rather than signalling amusement.
Set beside GA 301, that is a measurement of Steiner's claim rather than a rebuttal of it. Steiner said the laughing person is turned outward and becomes, for that moment, more altruistic. Provine found that laughter barely occurs when there is nobody to turn toward. Thalira synthesis: what Provine counted from the outside as a social vocalization, Steiner described from the inside as the I and the astral body widening past the boundary of the skin, which is why no teacher can put the moment on a timetable, and why a class that never laughs is a class in which nobody has left themselves. Steiner's instruction in Basel follows. Do not resolve to be funny at ten and grave at eleven. Prepare the material until it, not your mood on the walk to school, sets the rhythm of the hour.
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