The adult's deliberate work upon his own soul, where the grown person becomes both teacher and pupil, continuing education after childhood is over.
Self-Education in Anthroposophy is the adult's deliberate education of his own soul, the work by which a grown person becomes both educator and pupil. In the lecture of 14 March 1912 in Berlin, gathered in Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation (GA 61), Rudolf Steiner places it after the childhood phases of imitation, authority and ideal, beginning around the twenty-first year. Where a teacher once stood, the I now works upon temperament, will and memory. Steiner roots the practice in the higher self that transcends personality, the same self met in compassion and conscience. The will is schooled through interaction with the outer world, not inner drill, and the intellect through concentration and right forgetting. Today this continuation of education past childhood meets the adult-development psychology of Robert Kegan at Harvard.
In Steiner's Own Words
As soon as the word self-education is uttered, everyone will feel that in a certain sense this word actually implies something contradictory, or at least something whose implementation is fraught with great difficulties. Why is this? Well, for the very simple reason that education actually presupposes reliance on something foreign, something standing above the person being educated. But when we speak of self-education, we naturally mean the education that a person can give themselves, that is, the education in which the person is, in a sense, both educator and pupil. This undoubtedly immediately points to a great difficulty in life.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave this lecture in 1912, two decades before academic psychology took adult change seriously. The closest modern parallel is the constructive-developmental work of Robert Kegan, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, set out in The Evolving Self (1982) and In Over Our Heads (1994). Kegan argues that growth does not stop at adulthood. He maps a movement from the socialized mind, which takes its values from the surrounding group, toward the self-authoring mind, which writes its own, and on rare occasions toward a self-transforming mind that holds its own framework lightly. The structure matches Steiner closely. Steiner's first phases, imitation then authority then ideal, are exactly Kegan's reliance on something foreign and standing above. The twenty-first-year turn, when the person becomes both educator and pupil, is the passage to self-authorship.
The two part company on the engine of change, and the difference is instructive. Kegan describes the change; Steiner prescribes the practice. Thalira synthesis: where Kegan watches the self-authoring mind emerge through life's demands, Steiner has the I deliberately schooling will and intellect, the will through real friction with the world and the intellect through concentration and wise forgetting, so that what Kegan observes happening to a person, Steiner asks the person to do on purpose. For a reader past school age, the practical instruction is plain. Train the will by meeting the resistance of actual circumstances rather than willpower drills, and gather the day's experience into a few governing ideas rather than hoarding it whole.
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