The seventh-year shedding of the milk teeth, which Steiner read as the moment the body-building forces are freed to serve memory and thinking.
The Change of Teeth in Anthroposophy is the bodily event, around the seventh year, that Rudolf Steiner read as the close of the first life-period and a hidden birth of soul forces. In The Study of Man (GA 293, 1919) he taught that the same formative forces which shaped and hardened the growing body, finishing their work as the milk teeth are pushed out by the second teeth, are then released from the physical organism and become available to the soul as the powers of memory and independent thinking. The shedding of the first teeth is the one outwardly visible sign of this inward turning point. It marks the threshold between early childhood, lived through imitation, and the elementary years, when formal learning may rightly begin.
The Change of Teeth names the point near a child's seventh birthday when the second teeth replace the first. For Steiner this physical milestone is the visible token of an invisible release: the forces that finished moulding the body now withdraw from it and rise into the soul, where they become the child's freshly available capacities for remembering and for thinking in pictures rather than only imitating.
In Steiner's Own Words
What is it that is thus brought to an end? It is the moulding of the form. Man has now poured into his body all the hardening elements, all that gives him form. When we see the second teeth appear we can say that the first stage in man's intercourse with the world has come to an end. He has accomplished the formation of his body, its moulding and configuration. But whilst the head is occupied during this time in giving man his form and figure, something different is happening in the chest system.
What it Means Today
Anthroposophists call the change of teeth a second or etheric birth, and the phrase is meant exactly. Just as physical birth frees the infant from the mother's body, the seventh-year tooth change frees a body of formative life-forces that had been wholly absorbed in growing the organism. Steiner's point is concrete: the very forces that pushed out the second teeth, the strongest growth the body ever makes, are the same forces that now, their sculptural task complete, turn inward and reappear as memory and as the power to form mental pictures. A child cannot lend these forces to school work while they are still building teeth and bone. This is why the first Waldorf school, opened in Stuttgart in September 1919, set formal reading and reckoning to begin only after the teeth have changed, and why Waldorf kindergartens still treat the loss of the first tooth, rather than a birthday or a test score, as the truest sign of readiness for first grade. A teacher noticing wobbling incisors is reading a developmental signal, not a dental one. The same passage from GA 293 warns against the opposite error of drilling letters into a child whose forces are still committed to the body, which Steiner held could quietly drain the vitality the growing organism still needs. Bring the released forces gently to memory and imagination, he taught, and the child meets the elementary years already inwardly ready.
Where to Read More