The Sixth Grade Crisis

But now it comes with greater force increasingly to children at age 12 and a half, 13, whereas it used to wait for age 14, even 15, to appear here in all its splendor and its particular difficulties and challenges. And indeed, we can trace in this century the work of this astral body in a very simple way. You can look at 10 year reports of the average age of menses for girls in Europe and in the United States. Whereas in the year 1900, the average age was 14 years two months. In our time, it¹s closer to 11 years, 11 months. It¹s a general national picture in the United States. That is to say that girls become women, they become physically able to reproduce their own kind nearly three years earlier, than they did at the turn of the century. Project that to the turn of the year 2100, let¹s say, imagine what would happen. Of course there are certain things that would prevent that, but we can imagine. It¹s as if this astral body is not content with just burning one candle, wants to jump the gap and begin to burn the other candle as well.
In our century, a poet, a woman, in fact a poetess, Edna St. Vincent Millay gave us a picture of this in one of her sonnets.
   ³I¹m burning my candle at both ends.
     It shall not last the night.²
And this is what we see in children today. We feel that they are burning two candles instead of one. That¹s something about adolescence that¹s accelerated, shows up earlier and is often a great burden for them and a burden for the parents who aren¹t expecting it at this age. Now I should mention, lest you get too worried about this, at least in Germany where careful statistics have been kept, the average onset of menses in German Waldorf schools is closer to 13 years, one month. That is to say, it¹s a good year, even more, than it is in the schools in general, in State girls. So Waldorf schools seem to have a way of holding back the incursion, the astrality, this early urge to grow up.
What does the astral body bring? The etheric body brings light and form, the astral body brings death and destruction of form. The etheric body is anabolic, it has to do with the building up processes in our body. It¹s because of the etheric body that whatever we eat finally becomes the substance of our own body. It¹s due to the astral body that whatever we eat is broken down completely so that we don¹t all look like cows or sheep or artichokes or whatever we happen to eat. That¹s the work of the astral body. It destroys everything that comes into us so that we can take the laborious task of making it our very own.. So the astral body actually brings forces of death into the life of the child. And we see this in the menstrual cycle. The etheric body is responsible for the first 14 days - the building up processes. The astral body is responsible for the breaking down. In order for a girl to be able to experience this, she has to put on a certain amount of weight. She has to weigh about 104 pounds. She has to have about 20% fat in her body in order to be able to deal with these powerful destructive forces that arise. And in our weight conscious time, this is often a real problem for girls starting to put on this weight, take on this substance.
So we can see there is something of a real conflict here, something of a real crisis that is built in to being a human being. For the first 11 years of our life, we experience ourselves as being built up. As vain as it were, we¹re growing and proliferating.
I¹ll show you a picture from a 5th grader¹s book that gives us some sense of this. Two versions of the Hindu god, Brahma, from 5th grade history - 8 arms, 5 heads. This is the etheric body. It builds and builds; it just can¹t stop building. It¹s the astral body that breaks things down, that holds things to one form and no other. The etheric body would give us tremendous forces of growth and life at all times. But the astral body comes and brings forces that are no longer outwardly exploding but are inwardly imploding, that are no longer extroverted but introverted. That no longer go out, as it were, and take hold of the world but start to awaken how important it is to take hold of oneself along with this.
There is a kind of rhythmical vacillation that we see in the grade school. Every odd grade tends to be an outwardly directed grade. 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th grades. The children tend to be outwards in their orientation.   The even numbered grades, they¹re far more inward - 2nd grade, 4th, 6th brings us to a culmination, 8th grade. In high school, the reverse happens. 9th grade is inward, 10th grade outward. 11th grade inward, 12th grade outward.
And if you don¹t believe me, I don¹t know if Green Meadow still does this, maybe Maria can tell us. When the shepherd¹s plays are presented, in order to fit everybody into the auditorium, they had to give two performances. So in order to divide up the school, one performance was for the odd grades, the other was for the even grades. Go to both those performances. When the hilarious jokes are cracked by the shepherds, in the even grade performances, nobody laughs. But when Mary is accepting the little child into her being or when Joseph is bemoaning the difficulty of finding an inn, you feel the audience is really rapt, they¹re really present at that time. Whereas, when you have the odd numbered grades, the hilarity is great and everyone is chattering, even in the most solemn moments. So it¹s very interesting.
But the 6th grade is the absolutely quintessential even grade, in which the astral forces bring a great deal of inwardness.