broken human souls

The stands out in contemporary life, is that there are so many broken human souls. Human souls who are struggling, who don’t know what to do with their lives, who keep asking themselves:  what should I do now, what does life want from me? People who start this or that but find no satisfaction therein. There are more and more such problematic personalities. How does this come about? This happens because there is something lacking in the way people are educated. We educate our children without awakening the forces that will help them to tackle life.  What helps to prepare people for life is the opportunity to imitate during the first seven years of life; that he can follow a worthy authority up to the fourteenth year; and that up to the twenty first year he learns to love in the right way –  because these forces can no longer be developed later. What human beings miss when certain forces that need to be developed during specific years of youth, are not awakened, turns them into problematic personalities. We need to understand that!

Source (German): Rudolf Steiner  -GA 296– Die Erziehungsfrage als soziale Frage – Dornach, August 10, 1919 (page 49)
Translated by Nesta Carsten-Krüger