“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then, and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”
– Clive Staples (C. S.) Lewis
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
When we read the accounts that those who lived before us have left behind, there are three basic possibilities for interpretation, as outlined above by the Professor (C. S. Lewis).
Take the pyramids, for instance.
Either the Egyptians were lying--priests "knew" that their gods were an illusion and that the project of spending most of their civilization's GDP on a mountainous cut stone tomb was a manipulative way to control out-of-work farmers (extrapolated from Charles Beard's cynical "economism").
Or the priests--and their followers--were mad because of rye fungus or inbreeding or some other cause and the pyramids are evidence of collective insanity.
Or they were telling the truth--in that time, at that place, a recognition of the demands on human beings in relationship to the spiritual world and the life after death called for an expression that took the form of an intuitively understood, deeply meaningful structure and symbol.
I choose to believe that, because I try to tell the truth, especially about important things and about my perceptions and thoughts about the world, others generally do the same. That collective insanity or duplicity are not the rule for human behavior and human history (yes, we can find collective manias and such). And so I try to read history giving the benefit of the doubt to those recounting their experiences of the world, their perceptions and thoughts about it.
And if their world is alien from mine, as, in history, it inevitably is, that requires me to broaden my perspective and sharpen my interpretive powers to understand more fully what it means to be human.
Curious that the land of Narnia--a glimps into the spiritual world, or one version of it--requires the same interpretive capacities as understanding history. As Owen Barfield says, one of the correctives to the illnesses of modern consciousness--limited, materialistic, bound by notions of cause and effect, subject and object--is the study of history.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
A Restaurant without a Chef
—Do your fuckin’ jobs.
—Understand each other’s jobs.
—Keep talking to one another.
—We’ve all got to pull on the fuckin’ rope.
—Fight for your reputation.
—Consistent quality is key to ensuring repeat business.
—You never, ever throw the towel in on service.
—No matter how good the food is, you’ve really got to understand every aspect of your business.
These are the words of Chef Gordon Ramsay on his BBC television show, “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares,” which presents weekly case studies from which Waldorf schools could learn a lot.
In each episode, Ramsay spends a week with a failing restaurant. He diagnoses the blocks to success, works with owners, staff, and chef to reinvigorate the business, and returns a few weeks later to evaluate the results. These are usually remarkably good.
Ramsay is a famously foul-mouthed, pugnacious, potato-faced perfectionist. The show works because of his passion, energy, expertise, and honesty. It also works because, underneath his brutal exterior, Ramsay cares profoundly about both people and food.
The plot of each episode is the same. A restaurant has lost its direction, passion, pride, and energy. This is generally due to a lack of leadership, a lack of respect and trust among colleagues, a lack of communication, and a lack of clarity regarding roles. These lacks are felt but unaddressed among the human beings in the institution, but they are also apparent in the food, which is poorly cooked, and the menu, which is usually too long and too complex. These lacks are manifest even in the appearance of the kitchen, which is usually filthy, and the restaurant itself, which is usually in need of paint and redecoration. Owners, managers, and chefs hear and register the rare compliments, and don’t hear or rationalize away the more frequent criticisms, direct from customers or implicit in returned food and empty seats. They know they need to change—the business is failing—but are afraid of change, or don’t know what to change, or don’t know how to begin, or, in the most perplexing cases, don’t know when to give up on a failing ideology.
The parts reflect the whole, and Ramsay addresses each part in each episode. There is no top-down reform, from owner to chef to staff; there is also no grassroots activism—patrons simply don’t show up, voting with their pocketbooks and bellies. Ramsay’s reforms attack all aspects of the business simultaneously. Ramsay meets with owners, chefs, and staff, cajoling, threatening, teaching. He is part therapist, part consultant. As wealthy chef-owner of several famous restaurants, Ramsay knows the business and gives simple advice that works. Each episode shows him cooking, painting, observing, rolling up his sleeves wherever necessary to demonstrate change.
Ramsay’s principles can be distilled to these:
· The best measure of success is a restaurant full of satisfied customers.
· Achieve success by offering good food, well cooked and well served, at fair prices (Ramsay almost invariably simplifies the menu and lowers the prices).
· Function as a team.
Owner, chef, manager, and staff must understand and fulfill their roles without overstepping boundaries. Each must treat the others with understanding and respect. (Depending on the person and the restaurant, we see chefs who cannot control or communicate with assistant chefs, owners who cannot help meddling in the kitchen, nervous servers who vacillate between tables and kitchen, not communicating with either, and so on.)
· Respect the customers.
When he is successful in his reforms, which is most of the time, a couple of things stand out:
· The menu is simpler, the food fresher, and prices lower than they had been.
· Employees who appeared at the start to be hopeless, to be begging to be fired, save their jobs and fulfill their roles in the business. Clearly, it is easier to manage the function of someone who knows the business but is underperforming than it is to find someone better. While this may not be Ramsay’s personal view, his show demonstrates that competence is situational and learned. Teach an employee her role, define it clearly, support and respect her in it, and a formerly incompetent person appears almost magically competent.
Other lessons become clear as you watch Ramsay’s show:
· Institutional and cultural change are possible.
· Radical change can occur quickly.
· Simple changes can have large effects.
Time after time, uptight, inefficient, lethargic, unhappy, uncommunicative, incompetent employees in a dirty, ugly restaurant transform themselves into relaxed, efficient, energetic, happy, communicative, competent workers in a clean, attractive restaurant. This is the magic of the show.
The Waldorf Restaurant
The parallels between the restaurant business and Waldorf schools are so clear that they are not even analogies; they are two manifestations of the same phenomenon.
The “owner” is the Board of Trustees. The owner decides what sort of restaurant this is, provides the capital to start and maintain it, and hires the right manager and chef to ensure that it is as good as it can be. The owner should have enough confidence in his or her employees not to meddle in day-to-day affairs and the owner must be willing to invest in the success of the business. (Initially, roles among teachers, board, and parents may overlap; over time, a healthy institution will differentiate appropriate and clearly defined roles for each group.)
The teachers are the kitchen staff, each preparing and presenting his or her portion of the menu as well as possible. When every assistant and sous chef acts like a head chef, however, the dysfunction is immediate and profound. Too many cooks… well, it’s true. When roles are ill-defined, time and energy are wasted, communication suffers, and the menu loses coherence.
The menu is the curriculum, and, more than that, the education as a whole. When everyone understands it, the mission of the restaurant—to deliver this menu as well as possible—is clear.
The “front of the house,” such as the maitre ’d and servers, are the staff of the school, such as the administrator, business manager, admissions director, and development director. They represent the restaurant to the customers, presenting a line of communication (and defense) between the kitchen and the dining room. When they are out of the loop—when they aren’t included in an understanding of the menu and kitchen function, they simply can’t do their jobs.
The parents, as adult proxies for their children and as those who pay the bills, are the customers.
The Missing Chef
But where is the chef? Who created this menu? Who takes responsibility for it? The answer is telling. Rudolf Steiner is the chef, and he died in 1925. I believe this absence is among the greatest obstacles to the success of Waldorf schools. Waldorf schools are like a once-great restaurant that is trying valiantly to maintain its position despite the lack of the creative leadership that it once enjoyed.
How can Waldorf schools address this absence? There is no single right or appropriate model. Democratic or aristocratic, consensus decision-making or mandates, it doesn’t matter. Each school community must solve this conundrum for itself. There are many ways to do this well.
There are several ways to go wrong, too. Slavish adherence to a menu and cooking techniques from 1925 create an anachronism that may succeed as a tourist attraction (Waldorf schools as Colonial Williamsburg) but has lost its vitality. Lack of respect for the chef—lip service, unwillingness to understand and engage with his ideas—will also lead to a restaurant that may succeed for a time, but if it represents itself as a continuation of the old, venerated restaurant will soon be seen to be phony.
Waldorf schools today are not willing to look for a Director (although they could)—the position Steiner held in Stuttgart and the position offered by the Steiner School in New York City in the 1930s to Hermann von Baravalle (he refused). No more headmasters, I’ve been told, although why not is rarely explained. The difficult path forward, if we are not simply to hire someone as chef, however, is to form a committee or a system of committees to negotiate between the original menu and techniques of the master chef and the demands and changes of time and place and technique since then. We can call the committee an executive committee, a Council or College of teachers, it hardly matters.
Imagine, however, a restaurant run by a committee. That’s the challenge that faces Waldorf schools: replacing a chef, a leader in the kitchen, with a group that can work harmoniously to write a clear, coherent menu and deliver delicious, well-prepared, well-served food at a good price.
In a restaurant, if the chef is not performing, the owner can fire him or her. Waldorf teachers too often use ideological excuses to distance the Board from its watchdog role—you aren’t anthroposophists, so you don’t understand; Waldorf schools are supposed to be “faculty run” (they’re not; this is perhaps the most harmful myth regarding Waldorf schools in North America in the 20th century). Without board oversight, a Council or College is asked to hire, support, evaluate and possibly terminate colleagues. These roles contain clear conflicts of interest—mentoring and support should never overlap with evaluation and dismissal—and require equals to assume (temporarily) hierarchical roles that the institution, too often, doesn’t acknowledge. The Board legally empowers one person—a faculty chair, an administrator—or a group—a personnel committee—to serve in this role. If those charged with this responsibility are not doing their job, it is the Board’s right and responsibility to alter the situation. We harm our schools when we pretend this is not so.
Working for Health
Some guidelines for reform or a healthy existence, extensions of Ramsay’s principles, leap to mind:
· Clarify and put in writing roles and processes—job descriptions, committee mandates, governance structure, and decision-making processes. (When in doubt, decide how the institution as a whole will proceed and include all stakeholders in the decision. When in doubt, take a step back; there are few real emergencies.) I have seen too many Waldorf schools, for example, that are simply incapable of drawing a coherent diagram of their own governance structure. Take a simple hypothetical decision—whether or not to fire a particular teacher, for example—and try to determine the precise process, personnel, and communication steps involved in seeing this through. Where does the buck stop? Overlapping circles or diagrams with arrows that ultimately circle back on themselves demonstrate looming dysfunction.
· Empower Board, Administrator, and Council or College to monitor performance—all performance; teachers, staff, administration, and board.
· Support real, documented professional development, especially for new hires.
· Work for clarity of purpose with all employees of the institution. If the person who answers the phone doesn’t represent the school as a whole, the school is losing huge opportunities to advance itself.
· Observe, listen to, and respect the customers, the parents; include them appropriately (but not in decision-making, and don’t lead them to believe they’ll be included). Patrons can request a meal that’s not on the menu in a restaurant, but the restaurant as an institution has to decide whether or not it will provide one, and, if so, how and at what price. And when it communicates its decision, it should do so politely and firmly.
· Put children first.
Schools Are Not Restaurants
Clearly, the complexity, scope, and non-profit status of most Waldorf schools make the parallels between restaurants and schools diverge at some points. A school’s curriculum and methods are far more complex than the wildest menu, and the cost of one year of private education is greater than the most expensive dinner. Parents’ commitments to their children far exceed a restaurant patrons’ commitments to their appetites on any given evening. Also, schools are idealistic—worse, ideological. Also, as non-profit institutions, schools do not measure themselves according to profits and can long ignore the bottom line. A failing restaurant is easy to spot; a failing or dysfunctional school is harder to see. And this makes any acknowledgement of a need for change harder to come by.
Another distinction between the process of reforming a school and the process of rescuing a restaurant is the general absence of a Gordon Ramsay-like figure or outside consultant to effect necessary changes. Schools that can afford them can hire consultants, but good consultants who understand Waldorf education from top to bottom and can offer appropriate guidance while retaining the trust of the institution are vanishingly few. Ramsay spends an intense week at a restaurant, often rewriting the menu himself. Reforming a school takes at least a year, and who besides the teachers can, or should, revise a curriculum?
Some readers may protest that the curriculum and methods are established and merely need to be implemented, but this is not so. Which 7th and 8th grade teachers read Fichte and Schiller with their students, as Steiner recommended? Why are some recommended practices—telling stories that the teacher makes up—virtually ignored while other practices that Steiner never mentioned—circle time—taken as gospel? For curriculum and methods to live, they need to be constantly evaluated and updated and altered to fit.
The standard against which these occur is not the external standard of a consultant, but the internal standard of the relationship of each teacher to Rudolf Steiner himself and to the students in the school. To stand between Steiner, as we may understand him through continual study, and a group of children with whom we live for a period of years is an awesome responsibility. Taking this responsibility seriously is the heart of a school. Working to honor it will grow or reform any Waldorf school.
—Understand each other’s jobs.
—Keep talking to one another.
—We’ve all got to pull on the fuckin’ rope.
—Fight for your reputation.
—Consistent quality is key to ensuring repeat business.
—You never, ever throw the towel in on service.
—No matter how good the food is, you’ve really got to understand every aspect of your business.
These are the words of Chef Gordon Ramsay on his BBC television show, “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares,” which presents weekly case studies from which Waldorf schools could learn a lot.
In each episode, Ramsay spends a week with a failing restaurant. He diagnoses the blocks to success, works with owners, staff, and chef to reinvigorate the business, and returns a few weeks later to evaluate the results. These are usually remarkably good.
Ramsay is a famously foul-mouthed, pugnacious, potato-faced perfectionist. The show works because of his passion, energy, expertise, and honesty. It also works because, underneath his brutal exterior, Ramsay cares profoundly about both people and food.
The plot of each episode is the same. A restaurant has lost its direction, passion, pride, and energy. This is generally due to a lack of leadership, a lack of respect and trust among colleagues, a lack of communication, and a lack of clarity regarding roles. These lacks are felt but unaddressed among the human beings in the institution, but they are also apparent in the food, which is poorly cooked, and the menu, which is usually too long and too complex. These lacks are manifest even in the appearance of the kitchen, which is usually filthy, and the restaurant itself, which is usually in need of paint and redecoration. Owners, managers, and chefs hear and register the rare compliments, and don’t hear or rationalize away the more frequent criticisms, direct from customers or implicit in returned food and empty seats. They know they need to change—the business is failing—but are afraid of change, or don’t know what to change, or don’t know how to begin, or, in the most perplexing cases, don’t know when to give up on a failing ideology.
The parts reflect the whole, and Ramsay addresses each part in each episode. There is no top-down reform, from owner to chef to staff; there is also no grassroots activism—patrons simply don’t show up, voting with their pocketbooks and bellies. Ramsay’s reforms attack all aspects of the business simultaneously. Ramsay meets with owners, chefs, and staff, cajoling, threatening, teaching. He is part therapist, part consultant. As wealthy chef-owner of several famous restaurants, Ramsay knows the business and gives simple advice that works. Each episode shows him cooking, painting, observing, rolling up his sleeves wherever necessary to demonstrate change.
Ramsay’s principles can be distilled to these:
· The best measure of success is a restaurant full of satisfied customers.
· Achieve success by offering good food, well cooked and well served, at fair prices (Ramsay almost invariably simplifies the menu and lowers the prices).
· Function as a team.
Owner, chef, manager, and staff must understand and fulfill their roles without overstepping boundaries. Each must treat the others with understanding and respect. (Depending on the person and the restaurant, we see chefs who cannot control or communicate with assistant chefs, owners who cannot help meddling in the kitchen, nervous servers who vacillate between tables and kitchen, not communicating with either, and so on.)
· Respect the customers.
When he is successful in his reforms, which is most of the time, a couple of things stand out:
· The menu is simpler, the food fresher, and prices lower than they had been.
· Employees who appeared at the start to be hopeless, to be begging to be fired, save their jobs and fulfill their roles in the business. Clearly, it is easier to manage the function of someone who knows the business but is underperforming than it is to find someone better. While this may not be Ramsay’s personal view, his show demonstrates that competence is situational and learned. Teach an employee her role, define it clearly, support and respect her in it, and a formerly incompetent person appears almost magically competent.
Other lessons become clear as you watch Ramsay’s show:
· Institutional and cultural change are possible.
· Radical change can occur quickly.
· Simple changes can have large effects.
Time after time, uptight, inefficient, lethargic, unhappy, uncommunicative, incompetent employees in a dirty, ugly restaurant transform themselves into relaxed, efficient, energetic, happy, communicative, competent workers in a clean, attractive restaurant. This is the magic of the show.
The Waldorf Restaurant
The parallels between the restaurant business and Waldorf schools are so clear that they are not even analogies; they are two manifestations of the same phenomenon.
The “owner” is the Board of Trustees. The owner decides what sort of restaurant this is, provides the capital to start and maintain it, and hires the right manager and chef to ensure that it is as good as it can be. The owner should have enough confidence in his or her employees not to meddle in day-to-day affairs and the owner must be willing to invest in the success of the business. (Initially, roles among teachers, board, and parents may overlap; over time, a healthy institution will differentiate appropriate and clearly defined roles for each group.)
The teachers are the kitchen staff, each preparing and presenting his or her portion of the menu as well as possible. When every assistant and sous chef acts like a head chef, however, the dysfunction is immediate and profound. Too many cooks… well, it’s true. When roles are ill-defined, time and energy are wasted, communication suffers, and the menu loses coherence.
The menu is the curriculum, and, more than that, the education as a whole. When everyone understands it, the mission of the restaurant—to deliver this menu as well as possible—is clear.
The “front of the house,” such as the maitre ’d and servers, are the staff of the school, such as the administrator, business manager, admissions director, and development director. They represent the restaurant to the customers, presenting a line of communication (and defense) between the kitchen and the dining room. When they are out of the loop—when they aren’t included in an understanding of the menu and kitchen function, they simply can’t do their jobs.
The parents, as adult proxies for their children and as those who pay the bills, are the customers.
The Missing Chef
But where is the chef? Who created this menu? Who takes responsibility for it? The answer is telling. Rudolf Steiner is the chef, and he died in 1925. I believe this absence is among the greatest obstacles to the success of Waldorf schools. Waldorf schools are like a once-great restaurant that is trying valiantly to maintain its position despite the lack of the creative leadership that it once enjoyed.
How can Waldorf schools address this absence? There is no single right or appropriate model. Democratic or aristocratic, consensus decision-making or mandates, it doesn’t matter. Each school community must solve this conundrum for itself. There are many ways to do this well.
There are several ways to go wrong, too. Slavish adherence to a menu and cooking techniques from 1925 create an anachronism that may succeed as a tourist attraction (Waldorf schools as Colonial Williamsburg) but has lost its vitality. Lack of respect for the chef—lip service, unwillingness to understand and engage with his ideas—will also lead to a restaurant that may succeed for a time, but if it represents itself as a continuation of the old, venerated restaurant will soon be seen to be phony.
Waldorf schools today are not willing to look for a Director (although they could)—the position Steiner held in Stuttgart and the position offered by the Steiner School in New York City in the 1930s to Hermann von Baravalle (he refused). No more headmasters, I’ve been told, although why not is rarely explained. The difficult path forward, if we are not simply to hire someone as chef, however, is to form a committee or a system of committees to negotiate between the original menu and techniques of the master chef and the demands and changes of time and place and technique since then. We can call the committee an executive committee, a Council or College of teachers, it hardly matters.
Imagine, however, a restaurant run by a committee. That’s the challenge that faces Waldorf schools: replacing a chef, a leader in the kitchen, with a group that can work harmoniously to write a clear, coherent menu and deliver delicious, well-prepared, well-served food at a good price.
In a restaurant, if the chef is not performing, the owner can fire him or her. Waldorf teachers too often use ideological excuses to distance the Board from its watchdog role—you aren’t anthroposophists, so you don’t understand; Waldorf schools are supposed to be “faculty run” (they’re not; this is perhaps the most harmful myth regarding Waldorf schools in North America in the 20th century). Without board oversight, a Council or College is asked to hire, support, evaluate and possibly terminate colleagues. These roles contain clear conflicts of interest—mentoring and support should never overlap with evaluation and dismissal—and require equals to assume (temporarily) hierarchical roles that the institution, too often, doesn’t acknowledge. The Board legally empowers one person—a faculty chair, an administrator—or a group—a personnel committee—to serve in this role. If those charged with this responsibility are not doing their job, it is the Board’s right and responsibility to alter the situation. We harm our schools when we pretend this is not so.
Working for Health
Some guidelines for reform or a healthy existence, extensions of Ramsay’s principles, leap to mind:
· Clarify and put in writing roles and processes—job descriptions, committee mandates, governance structure, and decision-making processes. (When in doubt, decide how the institution as a whole will proceed and include all stakeholders in the decision. When in doubt, take a step back; there are few real emergencies.) I have seen too many Waldorf schools, for example, that are simply incapable of drawing a coherent diagram of their own governance structure. Take a simple hypothetical decision—whether or not to fire a particular teacher, for example—and try to determine the precise process, personnel, and communication steps involved in seeing this through. Where does the buck stop? Overlapping circles or diagrams with arrows that ultimately circle back on themselves demonstrate looming dysfunction.
· Empower Board, Administrator, and Council or College to monitor performance—all performance; teachers, staff, administration, and board.
· Support real, documented professional development, especially for new hires.
· Work for clarity of purpose with all employees of the institution. If the person who answers the phone doesn’t represent the school as a whole, the school is losing huge opportunities to advance itself.
· Observe, listen to, and respect the customers, the parents; include them appropriately (but not in decision-making, and don’t lead them to believe they’ll be included). Patrons can request a meal that’s not on the menu in a restaurant, but the restaurant as an institution has to decide whether or not it will provide one, and, if so, how and at what price. And when it communicates its decision, it should do so politely and firmly.
· Put children first.
Schools Are Not Restaurants
Clearly, the complexity, scope, and non-profit status of most Waldorf schools make the parallels between restaurants and schools diverge at some points. A school’s curriculum and methods are far more complex than the wildest menu, and the cost of one year of private education is greater than the most expensive dinner. Parents’ commitments to their children far exceed a restaurant patrons’ commitments to their appetites on any given evening. Also, schools are idealistic—worse, ideological. Also, as non-profit institutions, schools do not measure themselves according to profits and can long ignore the bottom line. A failing restaurant is easy to spot; a failing or dysfunctional school is harder to see. And this makes any acknowledgement of a need for change harder to come by.
Another distinction between the process of reforming a school and the process of rescuing a restaurant is the general absence of a Gordon Ramsay-like figure or outside consultant to effect necessary changes. Schools that can afford them can hire consultants, but good consultants who understand Waldorf education from top to bottom and can offer appropriate guidance while retaining the trust of the institution are vanishingly few. Ramsay spends an intense week at a restaurant, often rewriting the menu himself. Reforming a school takes at least a year, and who besides the teachers can, or should, revise a curriculum?
Some readers may protest that the curriculum and methods are established and merely need to be implemented, but this is not so. Which 7th and 8th grade teachers read Fichte and Schiller with their students, as Steiner recommended? Why are some recommended practices—telling stories that the teacher makes up—virtually ignored while other practices that Steiner never mentioned—circle time—taken as gospel? For curriculum and methods to live, they need to be constantly evaluated and updated and altered to fit.
The standard against which these occur is not the external standard of a consultant, but the internal standard of the relationship of each teacher to Rudolf Steiner himself and to the students in the school. To stand between Steiner, as we may understand him through continual study, and a group of children with whom we live for a period of years is an awesome responsibility. Taking this responsibility seriously is the heart of a school. Working to honor it will grow or reform any Waldorf school.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Everything May Be Relative
I had a student in a doctoral program in education at Teachers College who was a former police sergeant, a Catholic educated by Jesuits, and a passionate defender of the idea that if we want to value anything we must simultaneously acknowledge a spiritual world as a ground for our values. Without a spiritual ground for values, the concept of value is meaningless. I didn't feel in the class that I could express a personal opinion--I was moderating the discussion--but he was right.
It’s fine for Richard Rorty, Richard Dawkins, my dad, and any number of other highly intelligent persons to claim that we can choose our values through deliberation and conversation and without recourse to any notion of a spiritual world or creator, but, of course, they’re wrong. Any values chosen in this way are, in fact, valueless. Or the value they contain is real but its source is invisible and unacknowledged. As the rabbi said to the atheist, “the God you don’t believe in, I also do not believe in.”
We live, it’s said, in an age of relativism. From Einstein to Derrida and beyond, everything is relative. But to say this is to make an absolute statement, a groundlessly absolute statement. So what we really need to say to each other is that everything may be relative. And it may not be.
It’s fine for Richard Rorty, Richard Dawkins, my dad, and any number of other highly intelligent persons to claim that we can choose our values through deliberation and conversation and without recourse to any notion of a spiritual world or creator, but, of course, they’re wrong. Any values chosen in this way are, in fact, valueless. Or the value they contain is real but its source is invisible and unacknowledged. As the rabbi said to the atheist, “the God you don’t believe in, I also do not believe in.”
We live, it’s said, in an age of relativism. From Einstein to Derrida and beyond, everything is relative. But to say this is to make an absolute statement, a groundlessly absolute statement. So what we really need to say to each other is that everything may be relative. And it may not be.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Geometry as Spiritual Discipline
Art is too materialistic—all that charcoal and clay. Science is too materialistic—all that glassware and goo. Geometry is the most spiritual of all school subjects. Point, line, and plane are pure ideas; only their representations and approximations can be found in the material world—wall meets floor, and we “see” a line. But it is rough, imperfect, tile and wood. It suggests a definition, something of one dimension, length.
Definitions lead to postulates or axioms, propositions that cannot be proved or disproved, but must be accepted as true—parallel lines never meet, for example. And postulates lead to theorems, statements that can be proved to be true by deduction. Present a simple proof of a few steps to a class of tenth graders, however, and some will “see it” immediately. Others may labor over it for days before light dawns.
Because proofs cannot be taught. A teacher can demonstrate, explain, repeat, offer examples… but students must make the intuitive leap, see the pure idea, grasp the truth of the proof for themselves. For that split second, they are entirely on their own, in an undeniable and objective world of ideas. (This makes geometry the perfect subject for fifteen year-olds, who begin to feel entirely on their own but buffeted by the deniable and non-objective demands of a grown-up world for which they are not quite ready.)
Intuitive objectivity? Perhaps for this reason Plato prescribes fifteen years of geometry for the education of the Guardians of his Republic. How common it is, too, that what was holy and reserved for the leading minds of an ancient society is commonplace and mastered by children today.
Definitions lead to postulates or axioms, propositions that cannot be proved or disproved, but must be accepted as true—parallel lines never meet, for example. And postulates lead to theorems, statements that can be proved to be true by deduction. Present a simple proof of a few steps to a class of tenth graders, however, and some will “see it” immediately. Others may labor over it for days before light dawns.
Because proofs cannot be taught. A teacher can demonstrate, explain, repeat, offer examples… but students must make the intuitive leap, see the pure idea, grasp the truth of the proof for themselves. For that split second, they are entirely on their own, in an undeniable and objective world of ideas. (This makes geometry the perfect subject for fifteen year-olds, who begin to feel entirely on their own but buffeted by the deniable and non-objective demands of a grown-up world for which they are not quite ready.)
Intuitive objectivity? Perhaps for this reason Plato prescribes fifteen years of geometry for the education of the Guardians of his Republic. How common it is, too, that what was holy and reserved for the leading minds of an ancient society is commonplace and mastered by children today.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Playing “Steiner Says”: Twenty-two Myths about Waldorf Education
To begin, two stories.
During my first year or two of teaching, our faculty meeting enjoyed the presence of two eminent European Waldorf teachers. My recollection is that one came from the U.K. and one from Germany, but that doesn’t matter. One appeared in the fall and one in the spring. The first, answering a colleague’s question, said, “You should never use tongue-twisters; they trivialize language.”[1] Heads nodded. The second, also in response to a colleague’s question, replied, “Of course, the best possible thing for that is to recite tongue twisters with your class.” Heads nodded again. And there we were, back where we belonged, on our own recognizance. Two experts, two apparently contradictory points of view. Presumably, both were based on considered interpretations of Steiner’s work.
Years later, just when I thought I would be moving on to university teaching, I found myself happily teaching a seventh grade. An otherwise bright girl, who later graduated high in her prep school class, could not multiply or divide fractions. I asked her why not. Her reply: “Because, whenever I try, I just see gnomes dancing and spinning on the page.” What? Somehow I had managed to teach in Waldorf schools for nearly twenty years without encountering “math gnomes,” and their relatives, including “King Plus” and “Queen Minus.” I had read Rudolf Steiner and Hermann von Baravalle on teaching math, and had no recollection of these gnomes or anything like them. It occurred to me that a lot of what we do in Waldorf schools each day—and sometimes have to explain or defend to colleagues or parents—has little or no basis in Steiner’s work. I’ve since said, seriously, that gnomes have better work to do than to teach little boys and girls about arithmetic operations.
Understandably, but not necessarily happily, Waldorf education is known primarily by its external characteristics or trappings, characteristics about which, surprisingly often, Rudolf Steiner himself had little or nothing to say. Or, what he had to say about teaching and learning is not what we find in practice today. Or, what he had to say leaves open many more possibilities than are available in practice today.
Researching what someone—Steiner—did not say is difficult. All one can do is read everything available, using a process of elimination to discover, for example, that Steiner’s work contains no references to math gnomes or their ilk. The possibility remains that someone, somewhere, will discover a previously unknown reference that substantiates a previously unsubstantiated claim. At that point, the task becomes to assess the validity of the reference—was it written by Steiner? Recorded and transcribed? Revised by Steiner or not? Recorded verbatim or as a note? A diary entry? Part of an oral tradition? In what context does this reference sit? Was it given as a specific indication and then generalized beyond its original intent? Is it helpful or harmful that this has happened? On what merit may we adopt or shun this claim about teaching and learning?
Hermit crabs have no shells of their own, so they crawl into shells abandoned by other critters. Similarly, U.S. Waldorf schools, unable or unwilling to find a comfortable home in the plural cultures of the nation, have a tendency to crawl into the shell of a German or central European culture—or a partly remembered, partly imagined notion of that culture. Alternately, U.S. Waldorf schools sometimes crawl into an English shell, following the lead and model of Michael Hall and other established English Waldorf schools, or taking their lead from Anglophone translations of Steiner’s work. I call this process of embellishing a foundational orthodoxy the “Hermit Crab Theory of Institutional History,” because, although I am not concerned with them here, it applies to institutions other than Waldorf schools.
An alternative to hermit crabbing, more challenging, is for Waldorf schools, as they grow and mature, to more consciously forge their own cultures. Each school would better serve its community. Schools would seem less superficially similar but could, in focusing on the essential, remain similar in ways that matter.
What follow are twenty-two myths about Waldorf education, beliefs and practices that we find in many, if not most, Waldorf schools in the United States. I have an even longer list—this is the sort of list that can never really end—but focus here on the most prevalent or most interesting items, or those that may be presented in such a brief essay.
Such a critique of Waldorf school practices immediately begs a central question: If Waldorf education is not to be known by its trappings and myths, where is its core? What is essential to teaching and learning in Waldorf schools? I have given this a lot of thought over the past few years, and will address this question in the next issue of the Bulletin. In the meanwhile, an excellent approach to such a question may be found in Susan Howard’s “The Essentials of Waldorf Early Childhood Education.”[2] It concerns early childhood teachers, but much of the content applies to all teachers. Howard’s method, too, may be fruitful for all teachers.
1. Alternative Education
Steiner’s view was both narrower and broader than what exists in the US today—a collection of small independent schools and an even smaller group of charter schools, in total probably serving no more than 25,000 students. (New York City public schools alone serve one million.) Steiner wanted to promote the development, on the one hand, of model schools, schools that would demonstrate to the world the validity of his method. On the other hand, he wanted to make this method available to whoever wished to implement it.[3] In the 1930s and 1940s, schools in the United States arose more according to this scheme, while today schools are seen largely as an alternative to mainstream or conventional education. The Steiner School in New York City was, with the Dalton School and others, an active member of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) in the 1930s. These schools banded together, for example, to restrict the showing of violent newsreels prior to the start of movies in Upper East Side movie houses. The school also held a number of workshops and lectures, both in conjunction with the PEA and alone, to introduce Steiner’s educational ideas to a broader audience. [4] The Waldorf School of Garden City was founded as a “demonstration school” on the campus of Adelphi University.[5] Further, as late as the 1970s, the Waldorf School of Garden City was a member of the Washington, D.C., based “Council for Educational Freedom,” a group that advocated, among other planks, work toward the separation of school and state. [6]
In the absence of an association like the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), and being low in numbers, it was more necessary for Waldorf schools in the early days to engage with other, non-anthroposophical educational institutions. Such engagement clarifies and strengthens mission and practice.
2. Artistic Teaching vs. Art Teaching
Too often, Steiner’s call for artistic teaching is misunderstood as a call for art teaching. Any subject may be taught and learned in a creative way. A teacher with a particular gift in an art may impart more to her students by offering a broad and deep experience of that art than she would by trying to be all things to all students. Little bits of too much produces dilettantes. Artistic teaching is required especially to teach math, science, and subjects that might otherwise easily lose their vitality.
By artistic teaching I mean teaching that approaches the creative core of any particular subject and that is truly educational and not merely instructive. A full treatment of what I mean by artistic teaching would include a full consideration of what Steiner describes in his work on teaching and learning, what is commonly called Waldorf education.
None of this is to say that teachers should not teach the arts, but that, in the rush to include everything, it is possible for teachers’ gifts to be shortchanged. My daughter’s teacher spent much time teaching her class to play folk music and perform folk dances. To do this, he necessarily reduced time given to the full spectrum of the different art activities normally found in Waldorf schools. My daughter may never play folk music again, or perform the dances she learned, but the experience of learning over several years from a master, of engaging in more than a cursory way in one art, strengthened her in a way for which I will always be grateful.
3. Black
Steiner’s remarks about black, in his color lectures, for example, are not represented in his education lectures. The idea of a prohibition on the use of black, in drawing or in clothing, cannot be found in his education lectures. Steiner himself wore black nearly every day. Children still loved him.
This is not to dispute the quality of black as a color or the idea that it may not be an appropriate color for young children to use. When teachers remove black, however, leaving white, pink, and brown in the box of crayons, they create a circumstance in which children with pink skin and brown hair, for example, can draw themselves and their families, but children with black hair cannot. Thoughtful teachers may remove all “earth” colors to induce children to draw with the colors of the rainbow, introducing black at the same time that they introduce other such colors.
4. Circle Time
Rudolf Steiner never spoke about circle time, and his descriptions of “main lesson” do not include corresponding concepts. “Circle time” is an educational phenomenon of the late 1970s and 1980s, especially in the U.K., in public schools in particular, brought into Waldorf schools by an unknown route. The Great Barrington Rudolf Steiner School library contains a book from 1983, Everyday Circle Times, by Liz and Dick Wilmes.[7] It’s a fun book, with a faux Peter Max, feel-good cover, lots of pen and ink illustrations, and suggestions for tons of circle time activities. The school has lots of other books on circle time, including one celebrating 39 different religious festivals. Not one of these books has a connection to Rudolf Steiner’s educational work. A Google search and a search on Amazon.com yield more than 100 “circle time” titles going back to the early 1970s. Few of these references have anything to do with Waldorf education. Clearly, more schools that are not Waldorf schools have circle time than there are Waldorf schools. And it is likely that the form and content of circle time in a Waldorf school is different from elsewhere—like other practices, Waldorf schools adopt and adapt for their own purposes. There’s nothing necessarily or inherently wrong with circle time, but to claim circle time as a unique or necessary part of Waldorf school early childhood and elementary schools is clearly wrong. To believe that it originates in Steiner’s work is also wrong.
5. Consensus
Steiner has little to say about school decision-making and does not use the word consensus or its possible German correlates. When Henry Monges asked Steiner about the process for selecting General Secretaries for the Anthroposophical Societies in various countries, Steiner replied:
This is a further matter which I would not wish to lay down in any way by means of statutes for the various groups all over the world. I can well imagine, for example, that there are national Societies who will most certainly want to employ democratic procedures. I can also imagine that there will be others who will want to be thoroughly aristocratic in their approach... Thus I rather assume that the, shall I say, somewhat aristocratic method I have adopted with regard to appointing the Vorstand may well be imitated. In some quarters, however, this method may be regarded as highly undesirable, and in those quarters the democratic method could be used.[8]
Later, he adds that, because of “mutual recognition,” “...in practice there will be little difference between democracy and aristocracy.... Anyone who is expected to carry out a function must have freedom above all else.”[9] These words on choosing Society leaders translate easily to comment on much decision-making in Waldorf schools. “Consensus” is one form of democracy—republican representation is another, direct voter referendum a third, and we can imagine others—and as such is a valuable concept for making decisions. We should be clear, however, when we adopt this model, that this is a decision we make; we are not following Steiner’s commandment. And when others choose, in mutual recognition, a different model, we must acknowledge their right to do so.
Further, it is clear that we have work to do in implementing an understanding of Steiner’s work on social health. We acknowledge that teachers have the freedom to carry out their functions as teachers, but we are less clear about the role of school administrators and trustees. To take a hypothetical example, it is clear that teachers must be free to admit those students whom they believe they can teach. There is no consensus involved here. It should be equally clear that another administrative body—a rights administration, perhaps consisting of teachers, administrators, and others—must guarantee the rights of the applicant and her family to participate in a fair process, regardless of the final decision. Here, too, legal and ethical requirements reign, regardless of consensus.
6. Drugs
Steiner discusses the effects of drugs common to his time—caffeine, nicotine, even opium—but not marijuana, LSD, amphetamines, and so on. The spread of the use of these drugs, especially among teenagers, should be a prime concern of Waldorf schools, yet they are hardly better controlled or managed here than they are in other schools. Waldorf schools should be at least as concerned about teen drug use as they are about media exposure in the early grades. Schools have media policies that necessarily extend beyond school hours—imagine the parent of a young child saying, “Well, she wasn’t watching TV on school property.” The effects of drugs extend beyond the time of their use, and so should school drug policies. Since the 1960s we sometimes find it convenient to believe that teens “will” experiment with drugs. If this is our belief, we will find it true. If we choose to combat this view, we may count on some success.
7. Early Childhood Education
Few people know that the first school in Stuttgart had a kindergarten for only about 6 months during Steiner’s life; it ceased existence before he died, I believe, because the school needed the space as it grew. Further, Steiner’s educational lectures contain much about the development of young children but little about their actual education. Given his view of child development, it is easy to laud the growth of Waldorf early childhood programs, but their practices—silks, sing-song voices, rosy walls—cannot often be said to represent direct indications of Steiner himself. Consequently, we can imagine other forms of early childhood education that appear different but that equally fulfill Steiner’s intentions. Howard’s essay, referenced above, is a healthy look in the right direction.
8. Eight Years of Elementary School
According to Mark Riccio,[10] who has looked into records from Steiner’s time, an eight year elementary school was a state requirement in Germany and Switzerland, and so the eight year cycle was a compromise; Steiner would have preferred seven. Anyone who has been a class teacher of 8th graders, not that it isn’t fantastically rewarding, can imagine that these students are ready for a different educational form. Knowing this—studying Riccio’s work, for example—can inform middle school teaching in Waldorf schools.
9. Elementary School Admissions
Between 1930 and today, the age at which students were generally welcomed into first grade in Waldorf schools was delayed six months, from turning six by December first to turning six by June first. Steiner’s general description of school-entering age, having to do with losing milk teeth, refers to “the seventh year,” which begins on a child’s sixth birthday and ends on her seventh (a child’s first year occurs from birth until a first birthday). Older children may be easier to manage in first grade, but ninth grade-age students in an eighth grade class setting can present a real challenge. We live in a world in which an often unquestioned assumption is that earlier is better; we should not necessarily substitute the contrasting view that later is always better.
10. Faculty-Run Schools
Steiner simply never said that schools should be “faculty run,” and the first school in Stuttgart was not faculty run. Emil Molt footed the bill and Rudolf Steiner, who was not on the faculty of the school, was the Director.
According to Betty Staley, Stewart Easton, a professor and controversial anthroposophist in New York, determined that the “faculty run” method was appropriate and fostered it, in particular, in his students who were interested in anthroposophy, most especially Ms Staley, who left the more traditionally governed Kimberton Farms Waldorf School for the Sacramento Waldorf School in 1965.[11] Easton’s ideas may have originated in England, or they may be his own interpretation. Steiner described the Waldorf School as “self-administered” (Eigenrat or Selbstverwaltung), not “faculty run.”[12] Literally, schools should take their own advice in self-administration.
Steiner is clear that administrators should be active teachers, not state ministers or civil servants, or even retired teachers.[13] Administration is not governance, however, or not all of it. For Steiner, administration dealt specifically with day-to-day pedagogical operation of the school—pedagogical practice, schedule, calendar—and not necessarily with other governance areas—funding, budget, and legal incorporation in particular. These areas as they are found in independent schools in the U.S. today were hardly conceivable in Germany after World War I. At different times in the life of the school, especially in its first years, different arrangements held sway from time to time. At no time, however, could the first Waldorf school be said to be, or intended to be, faculty run.
I also do not believe it is correct to say that Steiner’s role in the first Waldorf school was an exception—that he was an initiate and therefore could participate in a way closed to the rest of us. Nothing in his work leads to the conclusion that initiates can transcend rules in this way. The point is not, then, that he included himself as Director and attendee at faculty meetings as an exception, but that the possibility is open for schools today to include in faculty meetings (or college meetings) those who do not teach at the school but who add value to its community.
Further, U.S. schools have misinterpreted Steiner’s remarks about a “college of teachers,” or Collegium. According to Uta Taylor-Weaver and to Nancy Parsons Whittaker, the German use of Collegium translates as “faculty.”[14] The British, they say, see a college as an exclusive group; this was not Steiner’s intention. For schools to have a college separate from the faculty, and to have separate weekly meetings for these groups, can foster an exclusivity that Steiner opposed. (See also “Meeting Martyrdom” below.)
11. Festivals
Steiner spoke beautifully, powerfully, repeatedly, and in depth about religious festivals and their meanings. These lectures, however, occur outside the context of his educational lectures. It is not a bad thing that schools participate in annual festivals and rituals as described by Steiner except in two cases: The first is when these are represented as part and parcel of Waldorf education. They are not; as cultures and traditions change, and as schools are founded in non-Christian nations, it is appropriate that the festivals and rituals celebrated at a school will change, too. The second occurs when schools that are multicultural do not recognize this, and marginalize, say, a Jewish segment of the school population through representations of Christian festivals. It is appropriate to include many different festivals in the school, or to move all festivals outside of school hours, or, as in Austria itself, to leave festivals to the local community, separate from the school.[15] (I do not mean to confuse festivals with assemblies; Steiner favored periodic assemblies at which students could demonstrate what they had learned for their parents.)
12. Group Meditation
Group meditation, as practiced and modeled by Georg Kuhlewind, for example, seems not to have been part of Steiner’s repertoire. Steiner’s work on meditation makes it clear that this is largely an individual, private practice. It is not wrong for a group or community to practice group meditation, but it should be clear that this choice is not grounded in Steiner’s practice or indications. Teachers who balk at group meditation should have their views accommodated in a school community.
13. Holism
Again, a word that cannot be found in Steiner’s work. Also, a word that requires work to understand. A materialist—like James Lovelock, inventor of the computer models that are termed the Gaia hypothesis—can be a holist, as can someone who denies the existence of the material world. Holism exists in many forms. Using the word colloquially, on the other hand, can drain it of meaning.
14. Low Academic Standards
Steiner himself had a doctorate, no mean feat in 19th century Germany. A bracing quotation cuts to the quick:
The aim of Waldorf education is to arrange all of the teaching so that within the shortest possible time the maximum amount of material can be presented to students by the simplest possible means.[16]
Schools can work harder to implement “soul economy” and to demonstrate to parents and communities that there is no compromise between a good academic education and a Waldorf school education. This will not mean teaching more material sooner, chasing the local independent day school or aiming for high scores on a standardized test, but teaching more deeply and more consciously.
15. Math Gnomes
As Christine Cox demonstrates in her MSEd thesis,[17] math gnomes and other imaginative, anthropomorphic versions of arithmetic operations such as King Plus actually work against Steiner’s understanding of math teaching. Math, akin to other spiritual activities, which we may picture as belonging to Plato’s eternal “intelligible” or ideal realm, needs to be brought to earth through practical, real-world problems. Steiner advocates beginning to teach arithmetic with the operation of division by bringing a pile of pieces of paper or beans into the classroom.[18]
Math gnomes are an invention of Dorothy Harrer, based on verses by Margaret Peckham, both teachers at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York. These were written by well-regarded class teachers, but teachers who were stronger in the humanities than in math. The wisdom of Steiner and his student, von Baravalle, suggest we should expunge math gnomes from Waldorf school curricula.
16. Meeting Martyrdom
The first Waldorf School had close to 800 pupils and a commensurate number of teachers in its first few years of existence, yet it had only one faculty meeting per week. There was no inner circle, no separate College or Council—although there was an “extended faculty” that included those—we might call them subcontractors today—who taught at the school but were not committed to its mission. Most independent Waldorf schools today have separate faculty and College or Council meetings, in addition to “school” meetings of the early childhood, elementary school, or high school. This is not to mention the plethora of Board and school committees that dedicated teachers attend. Eugene Schwartz has recommended that schools cut in half the number of meetings they hold. Schools with fewer meetings demonstrate greater trust in the work of the faculty and staff and enjoy the fruits of these individual’s initiative.
17. Non-Competitive Games
Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but not based clearly on Steiner’s work, and more likely an outgrowth of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s than a clearly anthroposophical point of view. Healthy competition is a part of the function of the spiritual sphere of the threefold social organism and could find its reflection in healthy competition in schools.
18. Notebooks, Main Lesson Books, Good Books
My suspicion is that notebooks—illustrated, decorated exercise books and textbooks—as found in Waldorf schools are part of German education in the 1920s and not unique to Waldorf schools. Steiner found the readers and textbooks of his age execrable and spoke against their deadening influence. This injunction, however, does not necessarily translate into a dictum to produce illustrated manuals for every main lesson, especially when students may spend hours decorating the borders of pages or slavishly copying a teacher’s notes. Similarly, it is difficult to know what Steiner would say about contemporary textbooks, including those written by Waldorf school teachers, which come in an increasingly broad variety.
19. Pedagogical Stories
Steiner is clear that nature and the world around us provide the raw material for all necessary “pedagogical stories.” Teachers do not have to include such characters as cute elementals or anthropomorphic frogs in order to create interest in the lessons they aim to impart through such stories; children see right through such concoctions. Instead, teachers should try to find the objective truth that they wish to impart in the truth of the world around them. Such an approach to storytelling brings us closer to Barfield’s “final participation,” wherein the inner truth of our metaphors and the truth of the world around us become one.
20. State Control of Schools
The U.S. has always enjoyed greater local control—through taxes, school boards, and local governments suspicious of centralized control—than any other modern nation. We do not have federal or state school inspectors, as Germany did in Steiner’s time, and schools belong to voluntary accrediting organizations. To turn away from engagement with local schools, public or independent, causes Waldorf schools to appear cloistered and out of the mainstream. Why not join with other independent schools—as the Steiner School in New York did in the 1930s—to promote good education for more children? Why not forge alliances with local public schools to share knowledge and resources and to combat the encroachment of such measures as “No Child Left Behind,” which few public school teachers or administrators endorse? The “Alliance for Childhood” provides a recent example of work in this direction.
21. Trademark of “Waldorf” and “Steiner”
The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America has trademarked Rudolf Steiner’s name and the name “Waldorf” as these apply to school names:
Waldorf is a trademark name in the United States and is reserved for independent schools that meet the membership standards established by AWSNA. Only schools that have been accepted as Sponsored or Full Members of AWSNA may represent themselves as Waldorf schools or use the words “Waldorf” or “Rudolf Steiner” in their names or subtitles.[19]
The value of a professional association is undeniable, but Steiner is mum on the question of the protection or trademark, for schools, of his name or the name “Waldorf.” Another point of view might be that anyone courageous enough to pursue education along these lines might be allowed to use these names; that the danger of standardization and dogma is greater than or outweighs the danger of dilution or misrepresentation. Despite recent efforts by AWSNA to clarify the issue, it is difficult to understand how a fledgling or “new initiative” [Waldorf] school could be expected to grow to the point of sustainability, at which time AWSNA would recognize it and allow it to use Steiner’s name or the term “Waldorf” in its name. The dozen or so schools that pre-existed AWSNA between 1928 and 1980, the schools that created AWSNA, did not face this hurdle in their own development.
22. Waldorf Dolls
Steiner advocates tying knots in a handkerchief and adding inkblots to make a doll.[20] This is a far cry from the $56, natural material kits—available from Martha Stewart—from which we now produce our legions of “genuine” Waldorf dolls.
References
Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA). (2005) “Steps to Membership for Waldorf Schools.” Second revision, June. http://www.awsna.org/pdf/StepsMembership6.14.pdf
Cox, Christine. (2006) In Search of Math Gnomes: First Grade Arithmetic in Waldorf Schools. Unpublished MSEd thesis. Sunbridge College, NY.
Gardner, John. (1976) Freedom for Education. Council for Educational Freedom: Washington, D.C.
Howard, Susan. (2006) “The Essentials of Waldorf Early Childhood Education.” In Gateways, 51, Fall/Winter, pp. 6-12. Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America: Spring Valley, NY.
Riccio, Mark-Dominick. (2002) An Outline for a Renewal of Waldorf Education: Rudolf Steiner’s Method of Heart-Thinking and Its Central Role in the Waldorf School. Mercury Press: Spring Valley, NY.
Sagarin, Stephen. (2004) Promise and Compromise: A History of Waldorf Schools in the United States, 1928-1998. Unpublished dissertation. UMI Dissertation Services No. 3129024.
Staley, Betty. (1999) Interview by Stephen Sagarin, cassette tape recording, Great Barrington, MA, March 5 and 17.
Staley, Betty. (1998) “Introduction.” In Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner. Vol. 1: 1919-1922. Lathe, Robert, and Nancy Parsons Whittaker, trans. SteinerBooks: Great Barrington, MA.
Steiner, Rudolf. (2003) Soul Economy: Body, Soul, and Spirit in Waldorf Education. 16 Lectures, Dornach, 1921-1922. CW303. SteinerBooks: Great Barrington, MA.
Steiner, Rudolf. (2000) Practical Advice to Teachers. 14 Lectures, Stuttgart, 1919. CW 294. SteinerBooks: Great Barrington, MA.
Steiner, Rudolf. (1997) The Roots of Education. 5 Lectures, Berne, 1924. CW 309. SteinerBooks: Great Barrington, MA.
Steiner, Rudolf. (1996) The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education: A Collection. SteinerBooks: Great Barrington, MA.
Steiner, Rudolf. (1992) Towards Social Renewal: Basic Issues of the Social Question. Frank Smith, trans. Rudolf Steiner Press: Bristol, UK.
Steiner, Rudolf. (1990) The Christmas Conference for the Foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society, 1923-1924. Johanna Collis, trans. Anthroposophic Press: Hudson, NY.
Taylor-Weaver, Uta. (Undated) “Faculty Meetings--College of Teachers.” Accessed at http://www.bobnancy.com/bobnancy.html.
Whittaker, Nancy Parsons. (2001) Post to subscribers of the list server Waldorf@maelstrom.stjohns.edu. Feb. 11. Referenced with author’s permission.
Wilmes, Liz, and Dick Wilmes. (1983) Everyday Circle Times. Building Blocks: No city of publication specified.
[1] Steiner advocated speech exercises that are, in fact, tongue twisters. I don’t know the context in which one expert opposed their use. Perhaps he or she had observed this particular teacher in action, or believed the rhymes in use were not doing the job Steiner intended. In any case, context is necessary to understand a recommendation without implementing it as a prescription, from which it is a small step to orthodoxy.
[2] Howard 2006.
[3] Steiner 1997, p. 18.
[4] Sagarin 2004.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid and Gardner 1976.
[7] Building Blocks: No city of publication listed.
[8] 1990, pp. 89-90.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Riccio 2002.
[11] Staley 1999.
[12] Staley 1998, pp. xxiii-xxvi in particular.
[13] Steiner 1992, p. 12.
[14] Taylor-Weaver [Undated]; Parsons Whittaker 2001.
[15] I am indebted to Michael D’Aleo for describing his experience of community festivals in Austria.
[16] Steiner 2003, p. 118.
[17] Cox 2006.
[18] Steiner 2000, p. 7.
[19] Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA) 2005.
[20] Steiner 1996, p. 19. Anyone who has actually tried to follow the directions Steiner outlines knows that this technique is almost impossible; it is intended as a “for instance” and not as a prescription.
During my first year or two of teaching, our faculty meeting enjoyed the presence of two eminent European Waldorf teachers. My recollection is that one came from the U.K. and one from Germany, but that doesn’t matter. One appeared in the fall and one in the spring. The first, answering a colleague’s question, said, “You should never use tongue-twisters; they trivialize language.”[1] Heads nodded. The second, also in response to a colleague’s question, replied, “Of course, the best possible thing for that is to recite tongue twisters with your class.” Heads nodded again. And there we were, back where we belonged, on our own recognizance. Two experts, two apparently contradictory points of view. Presumably, both were based on considered interpretations of Steiner’s work.
Years later, just when I thought I would be moving on to university teaching, I found myself happily teaching a seventh grade. An otherwise bright girl, who later graduated high in her prep school class, could not multiply or divide fractions. I asked her why not. Her reply: “Because, whenever I try, I just see gnomes dancing and spinning on the page.” What? Somehow I had managed to teach in Waldorf schools for nearly twenty years without encountering “math gnomes,” and their relatives, including “King Plus” and “Queen Minus.” I had read Rudolf Steiner and Hermann von Baravalle on teaching math, and had no recollection of these gnomes or anything like them. It occurred to me that a lot of what we do in Waldorf schools each day—and sometimes have to explain or defend to colleagues or parents—has little or no basis in Steiner’s work. I’ve since said, seriously, that gnomes have better work to do than to teach little boys and girls about arithmetic operations.
Understandably, but not necessarily happily, Waldorf education is known primarily by its external characteristics or trappings, characteristics about which, surprisingly often, Rudolf Steiner himself had little or nothing to say. Or, what he had to say about teaching and learning is not what we find in practice today. Or, what he had to say leaves open many more possibilities than are available in practice today.
Researching what someone—Steiner—did not say is difficult. All one can do is read everything available, using a process of elimination to discover, for example, that Steiner’s work contains no references to math gnomes or their ilk. The possibility remains that someone, somewhere, will discover a previously unknown reference that substantiates a previously unsubstantiated claim. At that point, the task becomes to assess the validity of the reference—was it written by Steiner? Recorded and transcribed? Revised by Steiner or not? Recorded verbatim or as a note? A diary entry? Part of an oral tradition? In what context does this reference sit? Was it given as a specific indication and then generalized beyond its original intent? Is it helpful or harmful that this has happened? On what merit may we adopt or shun this claim about teaching and learning?
Hermit crabs have no shells of their own, so they crawl into shells abandoned by other critters. Similarly, U.S. Waldorf schools, unable or unwilling to find a comfortable home in the plural cultures of the nation, have a tendency to crawl into the shell of a German or central European culture—or a partly remembered, partly imagined notion of that culture. Alternately, U.S. Waldorf schools sometimes crawl into an English shell, following the lead and model of Michael Hall and other established English Waldorf schools, or taking their lead from Anglophone translations of Steiner’s work. I call this process of embellishing a foundational orthodoxy the “Hermit Crab Theory of Institutional History,” because, although I am not concerned with them here, it applies to institutions other than Waldorf schools.
An alternative to hermit crabbing, more challenging, is for Waldorf schools, as they grow and mature, to more consciously forge their own cultures. Each school would better serve its community. Schools would seem less superficially similar but could, in focusing on the essential, remain similar in ways that matter.
What follow are twenty-two myths about Waldorf education, beliefs and practices that we find in many, if not most, Waldorf schools in the United States. I have an even longer list—this is the sort of list that can never really end—but focus here on the most prevalent or most interesting items, or those that may be presented in such a brief essay.
Such a critique of Waldorf school practices immediately begs a central question: If Waldorf education is not to be known by its trappings and myths, where is its core? What is essential to teaching and learning in Waldorf schools? I have given this a lot of thought over the past few years, and will address this question in the next issue of the Bulletin. In the meanwhile, an excellent approach to such a question may be found in Susan Howard’s “The Essentials of Waldorf Early Childhood Education.”[2] It concerns early childhood teachers, but much of the content applies to all teachers. Howard’s method, too, may be fruitful for all teachers.
1. Alternative Education
Steiner’s view was both narrower and broader than what exists in the US today—a collection of small independent schools and an even smaller group of charter schools, in total probably serving no more than 25,000 students. (New York City public schools alone serve one million.) Steiner wanted to promote the development, on the one hand, of model schools, schools that would demonstrate to the world the validity of his method. On the other hand, he wanted to make this method available to whoever wished to implement it.[3] In the 1930s and 1940s, schools in the United States arose more according to this scheme, while today schools are seen largely as an alternative to mainstream or conventional education. The Steiner School in New York City was, with the Dalton School and others, an active member of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) in the 1930s. These schools banded together, for example, to restrict the showing of violent newsreels prior to the start of movies in Upper East Side movie houses. The school also held a number of workshops and lectures, both in conjunction with the PEA and alone, to introduce Steiner’s educational ideas to a broader audience. [4] The Waldorf School of Garden City was founded as a “demonstration school” on the campus of Adelphi University.[5] Further, as late as the 1970s, the Waldorf School of Garden City was a member of the Washington, D.C., based “Council for Educational Freedom,” a group that advocated, among other planks, work toward the separation of school and state. [6]
In the absence of an association like the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), and being low in numbers, it was more necessary for Waldorf schools in the early days to engage with other, non-anthroposophical educational institutions. Such engagement clarifies and strengthens mission and practice.
2. Artistic Teaching vs. Art Teaching
Too often, Steiner’s call for artistic teaching is misunderstood as a call for art teaching. Any subject may be taught and learned in a creative way. A teacher with a particular gift in an art may impart more to her students by offering a broad and deep experience of that art than she would by trying to be all things to all students. Little bits of too much produces dilettantes. Artistic teaching is required especially to teach math, science, and subjects that might otherwise easily lose their vitality.
By artistic teaching I mean teaching that approaches the creative core of any particular subject and that is truly educational and not merely instructive. A full treatment of what I mean by artistic teaching would include a full consideration of what Steiner describes in his work on teaching and learning, what is commonly called Waldorf education.
None of this is to say that teachers should not teach the arts, but that, in the rush to include everything, it is possible for teachers’ gifts to be shortchanged. My daughter’s teacher spent much time teaching her class to play folk music and perform folk dances. To do this, he necessarily reduced time given to the full spectrum of the different art activities normally found in Waldorf schools. My daughter may never play folk music again, or perform the dances she learned, but the experience of learning over several years from a master, of engaging in more than a cursory way in one art, strengthened her in a way for which I will always be grateful.
3. Black
Steiner’s remarks about black, in his color lectures, for example, are not represented in his education lectures. The idea of a prohibition on the use of black, in drawing or in clothing, cannot be found in his education lectures. Steiner himself wore black nearly every day. Children still loved him.
This is not to dispute the quality of black as a color or the idea that it may not be an appropriate color for young children to use. When teachers remove black, however, leaving white, pink, and brown in the box of crayons, they create a circumstance in which children with pink skin and brown hair, for example, can draw themselves and their families, but children with black hair cannot. Thoughtful teachers may remove all “earth” colors to induce children to draw with the colors of the rainbow, introducing black at the same time that they introduce other such colors.
4. Circle Time
Rudolf Steiner never spoke about circle time, and his descriptions of “main lesson” do not include corresponding concepts. “Circle time” is an educational phenomenon of the late 1970s and 1980s, especially in the U.K., in public schools in particular, brought into Waldorf schools by an unknown route. The Great Barrington Rudolf Steiner School library contains a book from 1983, Everyday Circle Times, by Liz and Dick Wilmes.[7] It’s a fun book, with a faux Peter Max, feel-good cover, lots of pen and ink illustrations, and suggestions for tons of circle time activities. The school has lots of other books on circle time, including one celebrating 39 different religious festivals. Not one of these books has a connection to Rudolf Steiner’s educational work. A Google search and a search on Amazon.com yield more than 100 “circle time” titles going back to the early 1970s. Few of these references have anything to do with Waldorf education. Clearly, more schools that are not Waldorf schools have circle time than there are Waldorf schools. And it is likely that the form and content of circle time in a Waldorf school is different from elsewhere—like other practices, Waldorf schools adopt and adapt for their own purposes. There’s nothing necessarily or inherently wrong with circle time, but to claim circle time as a unique or necessary part of Waldorf school early childhood and elementary schools is clearly wrong. To believe that it originates in Steiner’s work is also wrong.
5. Consensus
Steiner has little to say about school decision-making and does not use the word consensus or its possible German correlates. When Henry Monges asked Steiner about the process for selecting General Secretaries for the Anthroposophical Societies in various countries, Steiner replied:
This is a further matter which I would not wish to lay down in any way by means of statutes for the various groups all over the world. I can well imagine, for example, that there are national Societies who will most certainly want to employ democratic procedures. I can also imagine that there will be others who will want to be thoroughly aristocratic in their approach... Thus I rather assume that the, shall I say, somewhat aristocratic method I have adopted with regard to appointing the Vorstand may well be imitated. In some quarters, however, this method may be regarded as highly undesirable, and in those quarters the democratic method could be used.[8]
Later, he adds that, because of “mutual recognition,” “...in practice there will be little difference between democracy and aristocracy.... Anyone who is expected to carry out a function must have freedom above all else.”[9] These words on choosing Society leaders translate easily to comment on much decision-making in Waldorf schools. “Consensus” is one form of democracy—republican representation is another, direct voter referendum a third, and we can imagine others—and as such is a valuable concept for making decisions. We should be clear, however, when we adopt this model, that this is a decision we make; we are not following Steiner’s commandment. And when others choose, in mutual recognition, a different model, we must acknowledge their right to do so.
Further, it is clear that we have work to do in implementing an understanding of Steiner’s work on social health. We acknowledge that teachers have the freedom to carry out their functions as teachers, but we are less clear about the role of school administrators and trustees. To take a hypothetical example, it is clear that teachers must be free to admit those students whom they believe they can teach. There is no consensus involved here. It should be equally clear that another administrative body—a rights administration, perhaps consisting of teachers, administrators, and others—must guarantee the rights of the applicant and her family to participate in a fair process, regardless of the final decision. Here, too, legal and ethical requirements reign, regardless of consensus.
6. Drugs
Steiner discusses the effects of drugs common to his time—caffeine, nicotine, even opium—but not marijuana, LSD, amphetamines, and so on. The spread of the use of these drugs, especially among teenagers, should be a prime concern of Waldorf schools, yet they are hardly better controlled or managed here than they are in other schools. Waldorf schools should be at least as concerned about teen drug use as they are about media exposure in the early grades. Schools have media policies that necessarily extend beyond school hours—imagine the parent of a young child saying, “Well, she wasn’t watching TV on school property.” The effects of drugs extend beyond the time of their use, and so should school drug policies. Since the 1960s we sometimes find it convenient to believe that teens “will” experiment with drugs. If this is our belief, we will find it true. If we choose to combat this view, we may count on some success.
7. Early Childhood Education
Few people know that the first school in Stuttgart had a kindergarten for only about 6 months during Steiner’s life; it ceased existence before he died, I believe, because the school needed the space as it grew. Further, Steiner’s educational lectures contain much about the development of young children but little about their actual education. Given his view of child development, it is easy to laud the growth of Waldorf early childhood programs, but their practices—silks, sing-song voices, rosy walls—cannot often be said to represent direct indications of Steiner himself. Consequently, we can imagine other forms of early childhood education that appear different but that equally fulfill Steiner’s intentions. Howard’s essay, referenced above, is a healthy look in the right direction.
8. Eight Years of Elementary School
According to Mark Riccio,[10] who has looked into records from Steiner’s time, an eight year elementary school was a state requirement in Germany and Switzerland, and so the eight year cycle was a compromise; Steiner would have preferred seven. Anyone who has been a class teacher of 8th graders, not that it isn’t fantastically rewarding, can imagine that these students are ready for a different educational form. Knowing this—studying Riccio’s work, for example—can inform middle school teaching in Waldorf schools.
9. Elementary School Admissions
Between 1930 and today, the age at which students were generally welcomed into first grade in Waldorf schools was delayed six months, from turning six by December first to turning six by June first. Steiner’s general description of school-entering age, having to do with losing milk teeth, refers to “the seventh year,” which begins on a child’s sixth birthday and ends on her seventh (a child’s first year occurs from birth until a first birthday). Older children may be easier to manage in first grade, but ninth grade-age students in an eighth grade class setting can present a real challenge. We live in a world in which an often unquestioned assumption is that earlier is better; we should not necessarily substitute the contrasting view that later is always better.
10. Faculty-Run Schools
Steiner simply never said that schools should be “faculty run,” and the first school in Stuttgart was not faculty run. Emil Molt footed the bill and Rudolf Steiner, who was not on the faculty of the school, was the Director.
According to Betty Staley, Stewart Easton, a professor and controversial anthroposophist in New York, determined that the “faculty run” method was appropriate and fostered it, in particular, in his students who were interested in anthroposophy, most especially Ms Staley, who left the more traditionally governed Kimberton Farms Waldorf School for the Sacramento Waldorf School in 1965.[11] Easton’s ideas may have originated in England, or they may be his own interpretation. Steiner described the Waldorf School as “self-administered” (Eigenrat or Selbstverwaltung), not “faculty run.”[12] Literally, schools should take their own advice in self-administration.
Steiner is clear that administrators should be active teachers, not state ministers or civil servants, or even retired teachers.[13] Administration is not governance, however, or not all of it. For Steiner, administration dealt specifically with day-to-day pedagogical operation of the school—pedagogical practice, schedule, calendar—and not necessarily with other governance areas—funding, budget, and legal incorporation in particular. These areas as they are found in independent schools in the U.S. today were hardly conceivable in Germany after World War I. At different times in the life of the school, especially in its first years, different arrangements held sway from time to time. At no time, however, could the first Waldorf school be said to be, or intended to be, faculty run.
I also do not believe it is correct to say that Steiner’s role in the first Waldorf school was an exception—that he was an initiate and therefore could participate in a way closed to the rest of us. Nothing in his work leads to the conclusion that initiates can transcend rules in this way. The point is not, then, that he included himself as Director and attendee at faculty meetings as an exception, but that the possibility is open for schools today to include in faculty meetings (or college meetings) those who do not teach at the school but who add value to its community.
Further, U.S. schools have misinterpreted Steiner’s remarks about a “college of teachers,” or Collegium. According to Uta Taylor-Weaver and to Nancy Parsons Whittaker, the German use of Collegium translates as “faculty.”[14] The British, they say, see a college as an exclusive group; this was not Steiner’s intention. For schools to have a college separate from the faculty, and to have separate weekly meetings for these groups, can foster an exclusivity that Steiner opposed. (See also “Meeting Martyrdom” below.)
11. Festivals
Steiner spoke beautifully, powerfully, repeatedly, and in depth about religious festivals and their meanings. These lectures, however, occur outside the context of his educational lectures. It is not a bad thing that schools participate in annual festivals and rituals as described by Steiner except in two cases: The first is when these are represented as part and parcel of Waldorf education. They are not; as cultures and traditions change, and as schools are founded in non-Christian nations, it is appropriate that the festivals and rituals celebrated at a school will change, too. The second occurs when schools that are multicultural do not recognize this, and marginalize, say, a Jewish segment of the school population through representations of Christian festivals. It is appropriate to include many different festivals in the school, or to move all festivals outside of school hours, or, as in Austria itself, to leave festivals to the local community, separate from the school.[15] (I do not mean to confuse festivals with assemblies; Steiner favored periodic assemblies at which students could demonstrate what they had learned for their parents.)
12. Group Meditation
Group meditation, as practiced and modeled by Georg Kuhlewind, for example, seems not to have been part of Steiner’s repertoire. Steiner’s work on meditation makes it clear that this is largely an individual, private practice. It is not wrong for a group or community to practice group meditation, but it should be clear that this choice is not grounded in Steiner’s practice or indications. Teachers who balk at group meditation should have their views accommodated in a school community.
13. Holism
Again, a word that cannot be found in Steiner’s work. Also, a word that requires work to understand. A materialist—like James Lovelock, inventor of the computer models that are termed the Gaia hypothesis—can be a holist, as can someone who denies the existence of the material world. Holism exists in many forms. Using the word colloquially, on the other hand, can drain it of meaning.
14. Low Academic Standards
Steiner himself had a doctorate, no mean feat in 19th century Germany. A bracing quotation cuts to the quick:
The aim of Waldorf education is to arrange all of the teaching so that within the shortest possible time the maximum amount of material can be presented to students by the simplest possible means.[16]
Schools can work harder to implement “soul economy” and to demonstrate to parents and communities that there is no compromise between a good academic education and a Waldorf school education. This will not mean teaching more material sooner, chasing the local independent day school or aiming for high scores on a standardized test, but teaching more deeply and more consciously.
15. Math Gnomes
As Christine Cox demonstrates in her MSEd thesis,[17] math gnomes and other imaginative, anthropomorphic versions of arithmetic operations such as King Plus actually work against Steiner’s understanding of math teaching. Math, akin to other spiritual activities, which we may picture as belonging to Plato’s eternal “intelligible” or ideal realm, needs to be brought to earth through practical, real-world problems. Steiner advocates beginning to teach arithmetic with the operation of division by bringing a pile of pieces of paper or beans into the classroom.[18]
Math gnomes are an invention of Dorothy Harrer, based on verses by Margaret Peckham, both teachers at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York. These were written by well-regarded class teachers, but teachers who were stronger in the humanities than in math. The wisdom of Steiner and his student, von Baravalle, suggest we should expunge math gnomes from Waldorf school curricula.
16. Meeting Martyrdom
The first Waldorf School had close to 800 pupils and a commensurate number of teachers in its first few years of existence, yet it had only one faculty meeting per week. There was no inner circle, no separate College or Council—although there was an “extended faculty” that included those—we might call them subcontractors today—who taught at the school but were not committed to its mission. Most independent Waldorf schools today have separate faculty and College or Council meetings, in addition to “school” meetings of the early childhood, elementary school, or high school. This is not to mention the plethora of Board and school committees that dedicated teachers attend. Eugene Schwartz has recommended that schools cut in half the number of meetings they hold. Schools with fewer meetings demonstrate greater trust in the work of the faculty and staff and enjoy the fruits of these individual’s initiative.
17. Non-Competitive Games
Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but not based clearly on Steiner’s work, and more likely an outgrowth of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s than a clearly anthroposophical point of view. Healthy competition is a part of the function of the spiritual sphere of the threefold social organism and could find its reflection in healthy competition in schools.
18. Notebooks, Main Lesson Books, Good Books
My suspicion is that notebooks—illustrated, decorated exercise books and textbooks—as found in Waldorf schools are part of German education in the 1920s and not unique to Waldorf schools. Steiner found the readers and textbooks of his age execrable and spoke against their deadening influence. This injunction, however, does not necessarily translate into a dictum to produce illustrated manuals for every main lesson, especially when students may spend hours decorating the borders of pages or slavishly copying a teacher’s notes. Similarly, it is difficult to know what Steiner would say about contemporary textbooks, including those written by Waldorf school teachers, which come in an increasingly broad variety.
19. Pedagogical Stories
Steiner is clear that nature and the world around us provide the raw material for all necessary “pedagogical stories.” Teachers do not have to include such characters as cute elementals or anthropomorphic frogs in order to create interest in the lessons they aim to impart through such stories; children see right through such concoctions. Instead, teachers should try to find the objective truth that they wish to impart in the truth of the world around them. Such an approach to storytelling brings us closer to Barfield’s “final participation,” wherein the inner truth of our metaphors and the truth of the world around us become one.
20. State Control of Schools
The U.S. has always enjoyed greater local control—through taxes, school boards, and local governments suspicious of centralized control—than any other modern nation. We do not have federal or state school inspectors, as Germany did in Steiner’s time, and schools belong to voluntary accrediting organizations. To turn away from engagement with local schools, public or independent, causes Waldorf schools to appear cloistered and out of the mainstream. Why not join with other independent schools—as the Steiner School in New York did in the 1930s—to promote good education for more children? Why not forge alliances with local public schools to share knowledge and resources and to combat the encroachment of such measures as “No Child Left Behind,” which few public school teachers or administrators endorse? The “Alliance for Childhood” provides a recent example of work in this direction.
21. Trademark of “Waldorf” and “Steiner”
The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America has trademarked Rudolf Steiner’s name and the name “Waldorf” as these apply to school names:
Waldorf is a trademark name in the United States and is reserved for independent schools that meet the membership standards established by AWSNA. Only schools that have been accepted as Sponsored or Full Members of AWSNA may represent themselves as Waldorf schools or use the words “Waldorf” or “Rudolf Steiner” in their names or subtitles.[19]
The value of a professional association is undeniable, but Steiner is mum on the question of the protection or trademark, for schools, of his name or the name “Waldorf.” Another point of view might be that anyone courageous enough to pursue education along these lines might be allowed to use these names; that the danger of standardization and dogma is greater than or outweighs the danger of dilution or misrepresentation. Despite recent efforts by AWSNA to clarify the issue, it is difficult to understand how a fledgling or “new initiative” [Waldorf] school could be expected to grow to the point of sustainability, at which time AWSNA would recognize it and allow it to use Steiner’s name or the term “Waldorf” in its name. The dozen or so schools that pre-existed AWSNA between 1928 and 1980, the schools that created AWSNA, did not face this hurdle in their own development.
22. Waldorf Dolls
Steiner advocates tying knots in a handkerchief and adding inkblots to make a doll.[20] This is a far cry from the $56, natural material kits—available from Martha Stewart—from which we now produce our legions of “genuine” Waldorf dolls.
References
Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA). (2005) “Steps to Membership for Waldorf Schools.” Second revision, June. http://www.awsna.org/pdf/StepsMembership6.14.pdf
Cox, Christine. (2006) In Search of Math Gnomes: First Grade Arithmetic in Waldorf Schools. Unpublished MSEd thesis. Sunbridge College, NY.
Gardner, John. (1976) Freedom for Education. Council for Educational Freedom: Washington, D.C.
Howard, Susan. (2006) “The Essentials of Waldorf Early Childhood Education.” In Gateways, 51, Fall/Winter, pp. 6-12. Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America: Spring Valley, NY.
Riccio, Mark-Dominick. (2002) An Outline for a Renewal of Waldorf Education: Rudolf Steiner’s Method of Heart-Thinking and Its Central Role in the Waldorf School. Mercury Press: Spring Valley, NY.
Sagarin, Stephen. (2004) Promise and Compromise: A History of Waldorf Schools in the United States, 1928-1998. Unpublished dissertation. UMI Dissertation Services No. 3129024.
Staley, Betty. (1999) Interview by Stephen Sagarin, cassette tape recording, Great Barrington, MA, March 5 and 17.
Staley, Betty. (1998) “Introduction.” In Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner. Vol. 1: 1919-1922. Lathe, Robert, and Nancy Parsons Whittaker, trans. SteinerBooks: Great Barrington, MA.
Steiner, Rudolf. (2003) Soul Economy: Body, Soul, and Spirit in Waldorf Education. 16 Lectures, Dornach, 1921-1922. CW303. SteinerBooks: Great Barrington, MA.
Steiner, Rudolf. (2000) Practical Advice to Teachers. 14 Lectures, Stuttgart, 1919. CW 294. SteinerBooks: Great Barrington, MA.
Steiner, Rudolf. (1997) The Roots of Education. 5 Lectures, Berne, 1924. CW 309. SteinerBooks: Great Barrington, MA.
Steiner, Rudolf. (1996) The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education: A Collection. SteinerBooks: Great Barrington, MA.
Steiner, Rudolf. (1992) Towards Social Renewal: Basic Issues of the Social Question. Frank Smith, trans. Rudolf Steiner Press: Bristol, UK.
Steiner, Rudolf. (1990) The Christmas Conference for the Foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society, 1923-1924. Johanna Collis, trans. Anthroposophic Press: Hudson, NY.
Taylor-Weaver, Uta. (Undated) “Faculty Meetings--College of Teachers.” Accessed at http://www.bobnancy.com/bobnancy.html.
Whittaker, Nancy Parsons. (2001) Post to subscribers of the list server Waldorf@maelstrom.stjohns.edu. Feb. 11. Referenced with author’s permission.
Wilmes, Liz, and Dick Wilmes. (1983) Everyday Circle Times. Building Blocks: No city of publication specified.
[1] Steiner advocated speech exercises that are, in fact, tongue twisters. I don’t know the context in which one expert opposed their use. Perhaps he or she had observed this particular teacher in action, or believed the rhymes in use were not doing the job Steiner intended. In any case, context is necessary to understand a recommendation without implementing it as a prescription, from which it is a small step to orthodoxy.
[2] Howard 2006.
[3] Steiner 1997, p. 18.
[4] Sagarin 2004.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid and Gardner 1976.
[7] Building Blocks: No city of publication listed.
[8] 1990, pp. 89-90.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Riccio 2002.
[11] Staley 1999.
[12] Staley 1998, pp. xxiii-xxvi in particular.
[13] Steiner 1992, p. 12.
[14] Taylor-Weaver [Undated]; Parsons Whittaker 2001.
[15] I am indebted to Michael D’Aleo for describing his experience of community festivals in Austria.
[16] Steiner 2003, p. 118.
[17] Cox 2006.
[18] Steiner 2000, p. 7.
[19] Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA) 2005.
[20] Steiner 1996, p. 19. Anyone who has actually tried to follow the directions Steiner outlines knows that this technique is almost impossible; it is intended as a “for instance” and not as a prescription.
Creative Balance
We have written child-labor laws and we have outlawed, for the most part, physical torture, but we subject our children daily, with all good intentions, to soul torture. Young children, who should be imbibing the world through all their senses, are taught to read before their minds are fruitfully prepared for this. Older students are increasingly subject to standardized tests, indoctrinated in the blinkered thinking that these require. Recent studies and expert opinions add to the growing evidence, evidence we seem as a nation unable to assimilate in our classrooms, that creative experience is humanizing and should be at the heart of any educational program. An opinion in EdWeek by Robert Sternberg[1] and a study from the UK by Sue Rogers[2] neatly bookend the problem.
Sternberg, having segued in his career from studying intelligence to studying creativity—not that there’s a bright line dividing these—sees creativity as a habit, a perspective that is shared in one way or another by others who study creativity, including especially Howard Gruber, for whom “a long and well-worked through apprenticeship is vital to the development of a creative life.”[3]
Yes, “eureka” or “ah hah” moments occur, but they occur only after long periods of learning and application. They occur in a context of knowledge and work. As Sternberg says, “Knowledge is a necessary, but in no way sufficient, condition for creativity.” You and I may be bombarded every moment by a hail of mathematical insights direct from Plato’s intelligible realm. But unless we apply ourselves to learn sufficient math, we will remain forever ignorant of these. Archimedes leapt from his bath not because he was lucky but because he had devoted his life to studies that enabled an insight previously granted to no one else.
Creativity involves discipline and hard work. For Sternberg, this work has the character of habit—the paradox, virtually an Aristotelian balance, of “routinely approach[ing] problems in novel ways.” Routine without novelty leads quickly to death. Novelty without routine leads to dilettantism and the illusion of creativity.
Habits can be encouraged or discouraged. And Sternberg sees the pressure toward standardized tests and machine grading of essays as—inadvertently—profoundly discouraging the habit of creativity, treating it as a bad habit rather than as a good one.
Further, encouraging creativity by making opportunities, encouraging students to be creative, and rewarding those who are creative does not necessarily mean the end of assessment or evaluation. Sternberg’s research, supported by others such as Teresa Amabile, demonstrates possibilities for assessing or evaluating creative work—originality, quality, and appropriateness are dimensions of a creative project that teachers can reliably assess.
Sternberg sees creativity as necessary for problem solving, but this raises an ethical question: Is the solution to the problem of flying an airplane into a building, for example, really creative? As we can form a concept of miseducation to describe, say, the influence of advertisements that “educate” us—transmitting knowledge and culture—can we form a concept of “mis-creativity” that acknowledges that the choice of problem to solve involves an ethical choice? Or do we need, as some researchers have done, to describe positive creativity with a qualifier like “moral?” Clearly, not every problem requires a creative solution. Not so clear, but open to question, does all creativity involve problem-solving?
Play is a key to the development of creativity in children. Sue Rogers at the University of Plymouth, UK, led research that shows that “Children are being denied the chance to develop at school through imaginative play because they spend so much time learning to read and write.” Ignoring the necessity for social, creative play leads to deficits in development of social skills and intellect.
Roger’s study confirms a sad fact about early childhood education in the UK—and we may believe the situation is similar in the US—but does not delve into the reasons why imaginative, social play is healthful and even necessary. For research on this question, turn to Sara Smilansky,[4] whose work in Israel has demonstrated powerfully the health-giving effects of what she calls “sociodramatic” play, play in which children pretend to be something that they are not—mother, pirate, or postal carrier, for example. Children allowed to play creatively gain in language acquisition and use, social skills, and mutual understanding. Learning these, we can see, guides children toward understanding and harmony; in the end, perhaps, alleviating suffering and even saving lives.
For Sternberg, creativity is important “because the world is changing at a far greater pace than it ever has before… We need to think creatively to thrive, and, at time, even to survive.” For Rogers and Smilansky, children’s creative play opens to door to the development of skills that support thriving and surviving. From free play to development of the good habit and hard work of self-directed creativity, our children deserve better from us.
As Waldorf schools have demonstrated for decades, it is not necessary to compromise knowledge and achievement in order to sustain human development with creative learning. On the other hand, as Waldorf schools champion creative learning and creative experience, they, too, must beware the traps of routine and of dilettantism that lie on either side of the path they walk.
[1] http://www.edweek.org/tb/2006/02/21/426.html
[2] http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/PO/releases/2005/september/curriculum.aspx
[3] Gruber, Howard. “The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work.” In Wallace and Gruber, Creative People at Work: Twelve Case Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
[4] Smilansky, Sara. “Sociodramatic Play.” In Children’s Play and Learning, Edgar Klugman and Sara Smilansky, eds. Teachers College Press: New York. 1990.
Sternberg, having segued in his career from studying intelligence to studying creativity—not that there’s a bright line dividing these—sees creativity as a habit, a perspective that is shared in one way or another by others who study creativity, including especially Howard Gruber, for whom “a long and well-worked through apprenticeship is vital to the development of a creative life.”[3]
Yes, “eureka” or “ah hah” moments occur, but they occur only after long periods of learning and application. They occur in a context of knowledge and work. As Sternberg says, “Knowledge is a necessary, but in no way sufficient, condition for creativity.” You and I may be bombarded every moment by a hail of mathematical insights direct from Plato’s intelligible realm. But unless we apply ourselves to learn sufficient math, we will remain forever ignorant of these. Archimedes leapt from his bath not because he was lucky but because he had devoted his life to studies that enabled an insight previously granted to no one else.
Creativity involves discipline and hard work. For Sternberg, this work has the character of habit—the paradox, virtually an Aristotelian balance, of “routinely approach[ing] problems in novel ways.” Routine without novelty leads quickly to death. Novelty without routine leads to dilettantism and the illusion of creativity.
Habits can be encouraged or discouraged. And Sternberg sees the pressure toward standardized tests and machine grading of essays as—inadvertently—profoundly discouraging the habit of creativity, treating it as a bad habit rather than as a good one.
Further, encouraging creativity by making opportunities, encouraging students to be creative, and rewarding those who are creative does not necessarily mean the end of assessment or evaluation. Sternberg’s research, supported by others such as Teresa Amabile, demonstrates possibilities for assessing or evaluating creative work—originality, quality, and appropriateness are dimensions of a creative project that teachers can reliably assess.
Sternberg sees creativity as necessary for problem solving, but this raises an ethical question: Is the solution to the problem of flying an airplane into a building, for example, really creative? As we can form a concept of miseducation to describe, say, the influence of advertisements that “educate” us—transmitting knowledge and culture—can we form a concept of “mis-creativity” that acknowledges that the choice of problem to solve involves an ethical choice? Or do we need, as some researchers have done, to describe positive creativity with a qualifier like “moral?” Clearly, not every problem requires a creative solution. Not so clear, but open to question, does all creativity involve problem-solving?
Play is a key to the development of creativity in children. Sue Rogers at the University of Plymouth, UK, led research that shows that “Children are being denied the chance to develop at school through imaginative play because they spend so much time learning to read and write.” Ignoring the necessity for social, creative play leads to deficits in development of social skills and intellect.
Roger’s study confirms a sad fact about early childhood education in the UK—and we may believe the situation is similar in the US—but does not delve into the reasons why imaginative, social play is healthful and even necessary. For research on this question, turn to Sara Smilansky,[4] whose work in Israel has demonstrated powerfully the health-giving effects of what she calls “sociodramatic” play, play in which children pretend to be something that they are not—mother, pirate, or postal carrier, for example. Children allowed to play creatively gain in language acquisition and use, social skills, and mutual understanding. Learning these, we can see, guides children toward understanding and harmony; in the end, perhaps, alleviating suffering and even saving lives.
For Sternberg, creativity is important “because the world is changing at a far greater pace than it ever has before… We need to think creatively to thrive, and, at time, even to survive.” For Rogers and Smilansky, children’s creative play opens to door to the development of skills that support thriving and surviving. From free play to development of the good habit and hard work of self-directed creativity, our children deserve better from us.
As Waldorf schools have demonstrated for decades, it is not necessary to compromise knowledge and achievement in order to sustain human development with creative learning. On the other hand, as Waldorf schools champion creative learning and creative experience, they, too, must beware the traps of routine and of dilettantism that lie on either side of the path they walk.
[1] http://www.edweek.org/tb/2006/02/21/426.html
[2] http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/PO/releases/2005/september/curriculum.aspx
[3] Gruber, Howard. “The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work.” In Wallace and Gruber, Creative People at Work: Twelve Case Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
[4] Smilansky, Sara. “Sociodramatic Play.” In Children’s Play and Learning, Edgar Klugman and Sara Smilansky, eds. Teachers College Press: New York. 1990.
In Defense of Unwholesome, Disaffected Risk-Takers
Granville Stanley Hall, turn-of-the-century psychologist and founder and first president of the American Psychological Association, helped to establish the contemporary view of adolescents as unwholesome, disaffected risk-takers. Since then, piles of research and popular opinion have helped to create the underclass of teens that annoy, scare, and puzzle us grownups. We too often say good-bye to our children as they enter, say, seventh grade, hoping to see them again as human beings when they reach their late teens or early twenties.
No doubt teens are an enigma in our adolescent age—advertisers wish to sexualize and accelerate the development of children to that point in adolescence in which they realize their desires, can argue for them, but haven’t developed the forebrain skill of judgment necessary for the beginnings of wisdom. Advertisers then wish to keep all of us in this adolescent state until we die, consuming without thinking. You could say we are a culture obsessed with adolescence because we understand it so little, and that we understand it so little because we have created a culture that keeps us too close to it.
Because of their developmental stage, teens will usually act as we expect they will. Treat them with fear, and they’ll repay your trust; treat them with respect, and you’ll discover that they are more respectable than many of the adults you know. (These statements hold true for adults, too, but adults have enough self-control occasionally to ignore your trust—or your censure—if they choose.)
Teens, on the threshold of adulthood, defend themselves as they enter this new territory. Risk-taking is a mirror of idealism; what task or quest is worth putting myself on the line for? Disaffection is a mirror of feeling—life means so much; I can’t let it show. If we can see through the fronts that teens present, we discover intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful young men and women. I’ve taught four-year olds to swim and fifty-year olds social science research methods, but I enjoy and am privileged to teach open-minded, energetic, idealistic, humorous teenagers. Thanks, kids.
No doubt teens are an enigma in our adolescent age—advertisers wish to sexualize and accelerate the development of children to that point in adolescence in which they realize their desires, can argue for them, but haven’t developed the forebrain skill of judgment necessary for the beginnings of wisdom. Advertisers then wish to keep all of us in this adolescent state until we die, consuming without thinking. You could say we are a culture obsessed with adolescence because we understand it so little, and that we understand it so little because we have created a culture that keeps us too close to it.
Because of their developmental stage, teens will usually act as we expect they will. Treat them with fear, and they’ll repay your trust; treat them with respect, and you’ll discover that they are more respectable than many of the adults you know. (These statements hold true for adults, too, but adults have enough self-control occasionally to ignore your trust—or your censure—if they choose.)
Teens, on the threshold of adulthood, defend themselves as they enter this new territory. Risk-taking is a mirror of idealism; what task or quest is worth putting myself on the line for? Disaffection is a mirror of feeling—life means so much; I can’t let it show. If we can see through the fronts that teens present, we discover intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful young men and women. I’ve taught four-year olds to swim and fifty-year olds social science research methods, but I enjoy and am privileged to teach open-minded, energetic, idealistic, humorous teenagers. Thanks, kids.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Teachers Teaching Well
Given the billions of dollars spent on ineffective school reform, reform that centered around everything that wasn't a teacher (and that included, among other idiocies, the concept of a "teacher-proof" curriculum), the idea that we may as a nation actually put teaching quality at the center of a discussion of education reform is revolutionary, no matter how "duh" it appears to those within the profession.
Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Most Likely to Succeed,” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell), is a step in this direction. Here’s what I take from his article:
What makes good teachers good? According to Gladwell’s piece, there are four basic, research-supported qualities of good teaching:
Despite my own experience, I used to try to stop students from doodling in my classes. A few years ago, I recalled my own experience, reflected on it, and decided to allow doodling—even to encourage it—in my classes. And, if students want to knit through a lecture or discussion, that’s fine, too. As long as quiet activity doesn’t disrupt the class, it seems actually to contribute to learning.
The point is, we all (I hope) had at least one teacher whom we revered, a teacher we remember as a bright light among the rest. If we ourselves are to teach, we do well to hew close to these memories, and to emulate those we remember so well.
We can also learn, of course, from those who treat us badly. I carry bitterness to this day for a 6th grade teacher who falsely accused me of something—I can’t even remember what—,kept me after school to write fifty times that I wouldn’t do again what I hadn’t done to begin with, and then doubled the workload when she, again falsely, thought I was giggling when I wasn’t. Her patent lack of fairness has remained with me, and I know that I try to be unfailingly fair to my students as a sort of immaterial memorial to her obtuseness.
Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Most Likely to Succeed,” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell), is a step in this direction. Here’s what I take from his article:
- Quality of teaching is most important.
What makes good teachers good? According to Gladwell’s piece, there are four basic, research-supported qualities of good teaching:
- Good teachers have genuine regard for student engagement. They allow a class to be active (learning is an activity) without becoming a free-for-all.
Despite my own experience, I used to try to stop students from doodling in my classes. A few years ago, I recalled my own experience, reflected on it, and decided to allow doodling—even to encourage it—in my classes. And, if students want to knit through a lecture or discussion, that’s fine, too. As long as quiet activity doesn’t disrupt the class, it seems actually to contribute to learning.
- Good teachers promote a “lively affect” in the classroom and do this, in part, by demonstrating high regard for student perspective.
- Good teachers give students immediate, personal feedback.
- Good teachers are “with it;” they attend to students and let them know, nonverbally, while teaching, that they know what’s going on. They manage discipline before it becomes an issue.
- Good teachers teach to the best students or the “top of the class,” and then work like hell to keep the rest of the group up to speed.
- Good teachers make crystal clear their expectations for behavior, classwork, homework, thinking, participating, and other aspects of their classes.
- Good teachers are fair.
- Good teachers are authentically themselves (you might be surprised how many adults—including teachers—find it difficult simply to be themselves in front of a group of middle or high school students).
- Good teachers change themselves and their own habits before asking students to do the same.
- Good teachers create a sense of anticipation for what comes next.
- Good teachers have a light touch and know what to overlook, and when to overlook it, in their classes.
- Good teachers have a sense of humor.
- Good teachers “see” their students for who they are and respect them completely and unsentimentally.
- Good teachers are organized and prepared for their classes.
- Good teachers know what they’re talking about and, if they don’t know, don’t talk about it.
The point is, we all (I hope) had at least one teacher whom we revered, a teacher we remember as a bright light among the rest. If we ourselves are to teach, we do well to hew close to these memories, and to emulate those we remember so well.
We can also learn, of course, from those who treat us badly. I carry bitterness to this day for a 6th grade teacher who falsely accused me of something—I can’t even remember what—,kept me after school to write fifty times that I wouldn’t do again what I hadn’t done to begin with, and then doubled the workload when she, again falsely, thought I was giggling when I wasn’t. Her patent lack of fairness has remained with me, and I know that I try to be unfailingly fair to my students as a sort of immaterial memorial to her obtuseness.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
In Praise of Really Small Schools
Research shows that, for education, there’s no such thing as a school that’s too small. Sit next to Socrates on a stump in the woods near Athens, and you’ll get an education. Ross Perot was a political kook, but the little red schoolhouse to which he kept referring educated many persons well. My grandfather grew up in an unorganized territory in North Dakota, went to a one-room schoolhouse, and then on to Brown when he was fifteen.
I’m not exactly sure of these numbers, but it sticks in my mind that the U.S. once had as many as 140,000 schools, mostly so-called one room schoolhouses, and now has around 14,000 centralized school districts. Anyway, the order of magnitude is correct.
Michael Katz makes clear (in “Alternative Models for American Education”) that large urban and, eventually, suburban schools arose because of movements toward bureaucracy and the professionalization of education. The decisions by which incipient bureaucracy became the triumphant model for public education had much to do with processing hordes of immigrants and those moving from farms to cities and little to do with the actual quality of education.
It’s similarly clear that the “corporate volunteer” model—the model for contemporary independent schools and private colleges and universities—and the model of “democratic localism,” which fostered community control of schools—educated students more thoroughly and more humanely.
Who benefits from large schools, if not the students? Today, somewhat tongue in cheek, I’d say there are two primary beneficiaries: Textbook publishers and football coaches. Alexander Stille, writing in the “New York Review of Books” in 1998, discloses the degree to which high school history textbooks are manipulated by Texas and California public school districts and school boards—the largest districts, on average, in the country, therefore the largest purchasers of books, and the most ideologically driven in that school boards represent groups that inspect prospective texts and submit lists of demands (including the elimination of the word “imagination;” some Christian fundamentalists locate its root near that of “magic,” a practice they associate with the devil…).
Similarly, if you want to field a good football team, the larger the pool of potential players, the better.
But, for actual quality of teaching, why not think of Deep Springs College in Nevada, quirkily devoted to teaching two dozen—and only two dozen—first and second year college students? Why? Because a “teacher proof” curriculum, and the leveling dross-making of textbook publishing, work against the conversations at the actual heart of teaching and learning.
(For how NCLB hurts small public schools, see http://www.matr.net/article-30517.html)
I’m not exactly sure of these numbers, but it sticks in my mind that the U.S. once had as many as 140,000 schools, mostly so-called one room schoolhouses, and now has around 14,000 centralized school districts. Anyway, the order of magnitude is correct.
Michael Katz makes clear (in “Alternative Models for American Education”) that large urban and, eventually, suburban schools arose because of movements toward bureaucracy and the professionalization of education. The decisions by which incipient bureaucracy became the triumphant model for public education had much to do with processing hordes of immigrants and those moving from farms to cities and little to do with the actual quality of education.
It’s similarly clear that the “corporate volunteer” model—the model for contemporary independent schools and private colleges and universities—and the model of “democratic localism,” which fostered community control of schools—educated students more thoroughly and more humanely.
Who benefits from large schools, if not the students? Today, somewhat tongue in cheek, I’d say there are two primary beneficiaries: Textbook publishers and football coaches. Alexander Stille, writing in the “New York Review of Books” in 1998, discloses the degree to which high school history textbooks are manipulated by Texas and California public school districts and school boards—the largest districts, on average, in the country, therefore the largest purchasers of books, and the most ideologically driven in that school boards represent groups that inspect prospective texts and submit lists of demands (including the elimination of the word “imagination;” some Christian fundamentalists locate its root near that of “magic,” a practice they associate with the devil…).
Similarly, if you want to field a good football team, the larger the pool of potential players, the better.
But, for actual quality of teaching, why not think of Deep Springs College in Nevada, quirkily devoted to teaching two dozen—and only two dozen—first and second year college students? Why? Because a “teacher proof” curriculum, and the leveling dross-making of textbook publishing, work against the conversations at the actual heart of teaching and learning.
(For how NCLB hurts small public schools, see http://www.matr.net/article-30517.html)
Saturday, December 6, 2008
My Name is Steve, and I'm a Cheater
“Surveys show that cheating in school… has soared since researchers first measured the phenomenon on a broad scale at 99 colleges in the mid-1960s.”
—Maura J. Casey, “Digging out Roots of Cheating in High School,” NY Times, Oct. 13, 2008
In high school—I went to a Waldorf high school—I cheated all the time. I gave out lots of answers, and received plenty, including in a German class that consisted of two students and an excellent teacher.
We loved Dr. Macht, his warmth, his war stories. But when it came to testing, he was terrible. He’d doze off, or leave the room. He wouldn’t notice that we’d written all the answers on the blackboard and then patted the eraser lightly over them. The board looked clean, but it was filthy with vocabulary.
I acknowledge my moral failing in cheating in his class. But Dr. Macht didn’t really care, so we didn’t care. The whole thing seems to have been a collusion between Dr. Macht and us—“I have to test you, but this won’t really do much to improve your language skills, so I’ll disengage myself, and you can do what you like.” I learned German anyway, passing a translation exam for my doctorate fifteen years later without studying. But the learning and the testing were clearly in different categories.
In middle school we taught each other cool ways to cheat. You can take a penknife, carve a bit of the paint off a pencil, and write a few helpful answers in tiny letters on the bare wood. You can tape a cheat-sheet to the back of the chair of the student in front of you. You can write on the white rubber of your converse sneakers, or on your jeans, or on your hand, although that’s the first and, often, only place a teacher will look. This was before cell phones and texting.
In high school we were just brazen—we whispered or mouthed answers across the rows, exchanged papers or tests, or just talked to each other when a teacher left the room. We prepared answer sheets in advance, then slipped them into our test booklets or piles of scrap paper.
Not everyone cheated, but most did, regardless of intelligence. I’d say more boys than girls cheated, but, then, I was a boy.
After high school, I went to a college that had a strict honor code. To this day, I remember it—we had to write it and sign it on every exam: “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.” I didn’t cheat in college, I wasn’t tempted to, and I never witnessed anyone else cheating. Professors placed piles of exams at the front of the room, then left. We students took the exams in the allotted time and handed them in. We could stretch out in the hall, return to our rooms, do what we liked, as long as the exam was in on time.
What was the difference? I was older in college, possibly more mature (although, living away from home, possible less), and the stakes may have been higher. But, really, the difference was in school and teacher expectations.
The consequences for cheating in high school were minimal—warning, admonishment, a lower grade. In high school, teachers—even good teachers, of which I had more than my fair share—were too self-involved or too careless. If they didn’t really care, neither did we. Why did they give tests? To appease parents or colleagues? Because it was something that teachers do? Usually, their hearts weren’t in it.
Those teachers who cared made it clear, and, for the most part, we took them seriously. “Hey. You really have to study for Mr. Madsen’s tests.” We did study, and we didn’t cheat, and we respected Mr. Madsen.
In college, it was clear, we could be expelled for cheating or plagiarizing. In college, the teachers weren’t necessarily less self-involved or careless, they didn’t necessarily believe in the educational efficacy of testing. The institution, the community of the school, however, made expectations and consequences clear, beyond any idiosyncrasies of our (sometimes very) idiosyncratic teachers. The school cared, so the individual teachers didn’t have to. The community of the school—teachers, students, administrators—took the question of cheating seriously, wrote a simple code, empanelled students and teachers to deal with violations, and secured “buy in” from everyone.
Today I work in a tiny high school of twenty students. It’s easy to police a test or exam, but I suspect some students still cheat. I tell my students about my high school experience, however, and also about my college experience. I let them know that I take cheating seriously, and that I will fail them for the course (not just for the test or the assignment) if they cheat. I also tell them that if I give them a test it will be designed fairly to allow them to demonstrate what they know, not to trip them up or to require cramming irrelevant facts. I also sit in the back of the room, behind them, so I can see them and they can’t see me. This makes illicit behavior easier to spot.
Writing a “real” test, one that fairly assesses knowledge and ability and that makes cheating difficult, is a chore, but it’s a worthwhile chore. If the answers aren’t things that can be whispered between students, or copied onto a crib sheet, students will find it harder to cheat, even if they want to. If they know that their teachers respect them and their mutual educational work, they’ll be less prone to cheating. If they know that teachers and school take cheating seriously, too, they’ll be less willing to risk the consequences.
The Internet has made it easier to cheat on papers—copying and pasting replace thinking and writing—but it’s also made it easy to catch cheaters. A few years ago, one of my students wrote a biography of Che Guevara. I suspected that the work wasn’t the student’s own. I chose five words from his paper that seemed like words he might not use, typed them into Google, and was directed instantly to the obscure paper, posted to the web, from which he had copied. It took me about fifteen seconds. I tell my current students this story, too.
I don’t know for certain that my students don’t cheat on tests, but I’m pretty sure they’re better behaved than I was at their age. Part of my teaching today is to avoid the mistakes my own teachers and I made a long time ago.
—Maura J. Casey, “Digging out Roots of Cheating in High School,” NY Times, Oct. 13, 2008
In high school—I went to a Waldorf high school—I cheated all the time. I gave out lots of answers, and received plenty, including in a German class that consisted of two students and an excellent teacher.
We loved Dr. Macht, his warmth, his war stories. But when it came to testing, he was terrible. He’d doze off, or leave the room. He wouldn’t notice that we’d written all the answers on the blackboard and then patted the eraser lightly over them. The board looked clean, but it was filthy with vocabulary.
I acknowledge my moral failing in cheating in his class. But Dr. Macht didn’t really care, so we didn’t care. The whole thing seems to have been a collusion between Dr. Macht and us—“I have to test you, but this won’t really do much to improve your language skills, so I’ll disengage myself, and you can do what you like.” I learned German anyway, passing a translation exam for my doctorate fifteen years later without studying. But the learning and the testing were clearly in different categories.
In middle school we taught each other cool ways to cheat. You can take a penknife, carve a bit of the paint off a pencil, and write a few helpful answers in tiny letters on the bare wood. You can tape a cheat-sheet to the back of the chair of the student in front of you. You can write on the white rubber of your converse sneakers, or on your jeans, or on your hand, although that’s the first and, often, only place a teacher will look. This was before cell phones and texting.
In high school we were just brazen—we whispered or mouthed answers across the rows, exchanged papers or tests, or just talked to each other when a teacher left the room. We prepared answer sheets in advance, then slipped them into our test booklets or piles of scrap paper.
Not everyone cheated, but most did, regardless of intelligence. I’d say more boys than girls cheated, but, then, I was a boy.
After high school, I went to a college that had a strict honor code. To this day, I remember it—we had to write it and sign it on every exam: “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.” I didn’t cheat in college, I wasn’t tempted to, and I never witnessed anyone else cheating. Professors placed piles of exams at the front of the room, then left. We students took the exams in the allotted time and handed them in. We could stretch out in the hall, return to our rooms, do what we liked, as long as the exam was in on time.
What was the difference? I was older in college, possibly more mature (although, living away from home, possible less), and the stakes may have been higher. But, really, the difference was in school and teacher expectations.
The consequences for cheating in high school were minimal—warning, admonishment, a lower grade. In high school, teachers—even good teachers, of which I had more than my fair share—were too self-involved or too careless. If they didn’t really care, neither did we. Why did they give tests? To appease parents or colleagues? Because it was something that teachers do? Usually, their hearts weren’t in it.
Those teachers who cared made it clear, and, for the most part, we took them seriously. “Hey. You really have to study for Mr. Madsen’s tests.” We did study, and we didn’t cheat, and we respected Mr. Madsen.
In college, it was clear, we could be expelled for cheating or plagiarizing. In college, the teachers weren’t necessarily less self-involved or careless, they didn’t necessarily believe in the educational efficacy of testing. The institution, the community of the school, however, made expectations and consequences clear, beyond any idiosyncrasies of our (sometimes very) idiosyncratic teachers. The school cared, so the individual teachers didn’t have to. The community of the school—teachers, students, administrators—took the question of cheating seriously, wrote a simple code, empanelled students and teachers to deal with violations, and secured “buy in” from everyone.
Today I work in a tiny high school of twenty students. It’s easy to police a test or exam, but I suspect some students still cheat. I tell my students about my high school experience, however, and also about my college experience. I let them know that I take cheating seriously, and that I will fail them for the course (not just for the test or the assignment) if they cheat. I also tell them that if I give them a test it will be designed fairly to allow them to demonstrate what they know, not to trip them up or to require cramming irrelevant facts. I also sit in the back of the room, behind them, so I can see them and they can’t see me. This makes illicit behavior easier to spot.
Writing a “real” test, one that fairly assesses knowledge and ability and that makes cheating difficult, is a chore, but it’s a worthwhile chore. If the answers aren’t things that can be whispered between students, or copied onto a crib sheet, students will find it harder to cheat, even if they want to. If they know that their teachers respect them and their mutual educational work, they’ll be less prone to cheating. If they know that teachers and school take cheating seriously, too, they’ll be less willing to risk the consequences.
The Internet has made it easier to cheat on papers—copying and pasting replace thinking and writing—but it’s also made it easy to catch cheaters. A few years ago, one of my students wrote a biography of Che Guevara. I suspected that the work wasn’t the student’s own. I chose five words from his paper that seemed like words he might not use, typed them into Google, and was directed instantly to the obscure paper, posted to the web, from which he had copied. It took me about fifteen seconds. I tell my current students this story, too.
I don’t know for certain that my students don’t cheat on tests, but I’m pretty sure they’re better behaved than I was at their age. Part of my teaching today is to avoid the mistakes my own teachers and I made a long time ago.
Friday, December 5, 2008
The Fruitfulness of Forgetting and Teacher Education
In August 1988, before the start of my third year of teaching, I dreamed I stood before a difficult class in the school library. I wore my shirt, jacket and tie, but nothing else; this was embarrassing. No one noticed, but I was uncomfortable and tried to find excuses to leave. The class became more and more unruly until I walked over and slapped a student—he shall remain nameless, but he was someone very specific—across the face, hard.
Fortunately, these anxiety dreams tend to pass as we mature as teachers. We begin to forget about ourselves. Beginning teachers tend to focus on themselves. This is almost a first stage in becoming a teacher. Is my dress appropriate? My manner? My technique? My hair? Am I adequate for this job? Try to learn to forget about yourself.
In the next stage, many teachers become preoccupied with their subject, with the material of their class. What should I teach? What can I leave out? What is important? I have 14 topics and only five days left in the course... Gradually, we forget about the subject. When we are learning to play the piano, we think about playing the piano, and it is difficult to make music. When we have learned to play the piano, we forget the piano and begin to play. Try to learn to forget your subject. At the end of life, who will say, “Gee, I wish I had learned just a bit more algebra. I wish I had been a better speller?”
I recently read something that included the beautiful phrase, the “fruitfulness of forgetting.” Apply the fruitfulness of forgetting to your work. Part of the value of forgetting is that our attention is freed to engage the world anew. A third stage in the development of a teacher occurs when your attention goes, finally, where it belongs: To your students. Learn to attend to your students. Forget the rest.
Fortunately, these anxiety dreams tend to pass as we mature as teachers. We begin to forget about ourselves. Beginning teachers tend to focus on themselves. This is almost a first stage in becoming a teacher. Is my dress appropriate? My manner? My technique? My hair? Am I adequate for this job? Try to learn to forget about yourself.
In the next stage, many teachers become preoccupied with their subject, with the material of their class. What should I teach? What can I leave out? What is important? I have 14 topics and only five days left in the course... Gradually, we forget about the subject. When we are learning to play the piano, we think about playing the piano, and it is difficult to make music. When we have learned to play the piano, we forget the piano and begin to play. Try to learn to forget your subject. At the end of life, who will say, “Gee, I wish I had learned just a bit more algebra. I wish I had been a better speller?”
I recently read something that included the beautiful phrase, the “fruitfulness of forgetting.” Apply the fruitfulness of forgetting to your work. Part of the value of forgetting is that our attention is freed to engage the world anew. A third stage in the development of a teacher occurs when your attention goes, finally, where it belongs: To your students. Learn to attend to your students. Forget the rest.
A Strong Stand Against Drug Use
Warning teenagers about the physiological and even the emotional effects of drug use has little value; who feels more immortal and invincible than a teen? Over twenty years of teaching, I have come to believe strongly, however, that a description of the spiritual effects of drug experimentation can help teenagers choose not to use mind-altering drugs.
Regardless of points of view and interpretation, we teachers in Waldorf schools and Steiner schools share a unity of purpose and vision, and this centers around an understanding of the existence of a spiritual dimension to our world. When we experience truth—as in the truth of a geometric proof –or beauty—as in a piece of music—we partake of the non-physical, of the spiritual. A piano produces vibrations, but a human being hears music.
Our perceptions of the world can lead us to understand spiritual perception. Anything we do, then, that distorts our perception of the world makes it more difficult to follow a path that will lead to understanding of the truly spiritual. This is especially true if the distortion has the quality of spiritual experience, as it does under the influence of mind-altering drugs. It is not that hallucinations, mild or profound, are illusory because they are false. They are dangerous precisely because they are unearned, unmoored openings into truth and beauty. And who, shown an easy path, will choose the harder one, especially if the ends are unknown?
Some students are open to the ideas expressed above but then assume that anyone who shares my view must judge harshly anyone who uses drugs—a relative, a friend. I point out, then, that you needn’t love someone less who has a different view of the world, and you needn’t enter that person’s experience in order to love or support them—this is the value of imagination. If a friend suffers from epilepsy, we don’t love her less because of it or feel the need to induce seizures in ourselves in order to share her experience. This analogy is not perfect because the illusions of drug use lead to disagreements about their value, whereas we mutually agree that we should not be sick if that is not our lot.
Regardless of points of view and interpretation, we teachers in Waldorf schools and Steiner schools share a unity of purpose and vision, and this centers around an understanding of the existence of a spiritual dimension to our world. When we experience truth—as in the truth of a geometric proof –or beauty—as in a piece of music—we partake of the non-physical, of the spiritual. A piano produces vibrations, but a human being hears music.
Our perceptions of the world can lead us to understand spiritual perception. Anything we do, then, that distorts our perception of the world makes it more difficult to follow a path that will lead to understanding of the truly spiritual. This is especially true if the distortion has the quality of spiritual experience, as it does under the influence of mind-altering drugs. It is not that hallucinations, mild or profound, are illusory because they are false. They are dangerous precisely because they are unearned, unmoored openings into truth and beauty. And who, shown an easy path, will choose the harder one, especially if the ends are unknown?
Some students are open to the ideas expressed above but then assume that anyone who shares my view must judge harshly anyone who uses drugs—a relative, a friend. I point out, then, that you needn’t love someone less who has a different view of the world, and you needn’t enter that person’s experience in order to love or support them—this is the value of imagination. If a friend suffers from epilepsy, we don’t love her less because of it or feel the need to induce seizures in ourselves in order to share her experience. This analogy is not perfect because the illusions of drug use lead to disagreements about their value, whereas we mutually agree that we should not be sick if that is not our lot.
The First Waldorf Schools in the United States
Picture yourself in Irene Brown’s living room on East 39th Street in New York City in 1928. You are looking for a building for your tiny new school with its 13 students, the Rudolf Steiner School. You will find one on West 73rd Street and its doors will open in October 1929, one of the least auspicious months in the 20th century in which to start a school.
Try to look forward through the corridor of what will be history. Can you imagine a time, less than a hundred years later, when there will be roughly 200 schools in the U.S. that use Steiner’s method? Through your membership in the Progressive Education Association (PEA) and your friendship with Helen Parkhurst, founder of the Dalton School, who heard Steiner lecture in England, you picture something different from what we today experience as Waldorf education. You imagine that Steiner’s method will gradually become a preferred method in American education in general.
It has not been part of any discussion whether or not to call your school a “Waldorf” school; The Waldorf School is in Stuttgart. Here we must find a new name, and the name of the man whose method the school will demonstrate suits well.
For a decade, your school is the only school using this method in the United States. You stay active in the PEA, inviting other private schools to visit and visiting them to lecture and demonstrate your new educational method. You form a coalition with other independent schools to prevail on cinemas not to show violent newsreels before matinee features.
Your school, alone, represents the first generation in the United States of what will come to be called Waldorf schools. I call this generation “The Europeans.” Americans traveled to Europe and returned to found the Steiner School, but the teachers and advisors, the language and proto-jargon of the work of this school bear a European stamp when compared with later generations. You call therapeutic eurythmy “Heil Eurythmy;” you call the verse with which you begin each faculty meeting a “Sprüch.”
You hear of an experiment that Beulah Emmet is conducting at the Edgewood School in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her faculty, on hearing of Steiner’s method, votes unanimously to adopt it, and begins teaching students using this method in January 1938. You have offered Hermann von Baravalle the position of Director of the Steiner School, but he has declined for reasons that are so far lost to history. He moves to Connecticut to help Mrs. Emmet.
“Director” was Rudolf Steiner’s own title at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. He did not teach at the school, but he trained the teachers, hired them, and, when necessary, fired them. If someone told you that your school should be “faculty run” or that it should use a “consensus decision-making model,” you would scoff. Your school is independent in the tradition of good American schools and consistent with what you might read in Steiner’s work.
You hear of a respectable family in Boston, the Roger Hales, who have been to Switzerland, who are enthusiastic about anthroposophy, and who wish to start a small school based on Steiner’s methods at their dairy farm and logging camp in Vanceboro, Maine. In 1941 they try this experiment, but it fails in three or four years. This, the third “Waldorf” school in the United States, never really had a chance.
From Connecticut, Baravalle moves to Kimberton, Pennsylvania, to help a wealthy Swedish industrialist, Alarik Myrin, open a school for displaced European children. The children never arrive, but the Kimberton Farms School opens in 1941 anyway, training local teachers to teach local children using Steiner’s method.
During the early years of World War II the Edgewood School’s faculty splits, and Mrs. Emmet, in 1942, opens the High Mowing School in Wilton, New Hampshire. It is a high school only, a boarding school on an old family farm. Over the years it attracts some graduates of the Steiner School in New York and even, briefly, Judson Hale, son of Roger. Judson Hale grows up to become long-time editor of Yankee magazine, just down the road in Dublin, New Hampshire. It must seem like things are finally growing and moving.
And Dr. von Baravalle is everywhere, lecturing and advising. He accepts a position as a professor of mathematics at Adelphi College, a women’s college that has just become coeducational, in bucolic Garden City, New York. Alarik Myrin is on the Board of Trustees. Adelphi faces a fiscal crisis; it can’t pay its mortgage. Mr. Myrin bails out the college on the condition that they start an experimental school in order that their teacher trainees have a place to practice. It must be a school using Steiner’s method and so, in 1947, the Waldorf Demonstration School of Adelphi College, is founded.
Baravalle lectures at Ralph Courtney’s Threefold Farm in the 1940s, and, in 1950 the Green Meadow Waldorf School opens. The Highland Hall school, in Los Angeles, also visited by Baravalle, which has been using Steiner’s method since the late 1940s, rededicates itself in 1955 as a school devoted to Steiner’s method. The Sacramento Waldorf School opens in 1959, the Honolulu Waldorf School in 1961, Detroit in 1965 or 1966, and the second generation of Waldorf schools in the United States is complete. I don’t know that Baravalle made it to Hawaii, but he did lecture in Sacramento and Detroit.
I call this second generation, the generation that begins in World War II and ends in the mid 1960s, “The Americans.” This generation saw its task as forming a specifically American version of Waldorf education. For Baravalle, the chief proponent or “Johnny Appleseed” of this generation, this often meant leaving aside Steiner’s esotericism in favor of a more practically-oriented understanding of Waldorf school teaching methods. For Alarik Myrin, it meant hiring American teachers and training them, rather than looking to Europe for imported teachers. For others, it meant attempts to Americanize curriculum, including especially the Transcendentalists and American writers.
Two generations of schools have succeeded the ones I have written about here. “The Alternatives,” from 1965 to the present, see Waldorf schools as alternatives to conventional educational models and seek less to have an impact on the broader world of education in the United States. This generation introduces the idea of “faculty run” schools and consensus decision-making. This is also the generation that produces our stereotypes of Waldorf schools as friendly to hippies and new-agers.
The last generation I hesitantly call “Variations.” This generation is characterized by attempts to re-engage Steiner’s ideas about the social mission of schools. Charter Waldorf schools, the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School, the Wolakota Waldorf School on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and other attempts to bring Waldorf education to disadvantaged families fit here. Unfortunately, within these experiments, “Waldorf education” itself as an object is rarely called into question.
The first generations of Waldorf and Steiner schools, distinct from these last generations, are characterized by a willingness to experiment and adapt. There were few precedents, nothing carved in stone, nothing objectified… Recovering that spontaneity in light of what we know now would be an admirable project.
Try to look forward through the corridor of what will be history. Can you imagine a time, less than a hundred years later, when there will be roughly 200 schools in the U.S. that use Steiner’s method? Through your membership in the Progressive Education Association (PEA) and your friendship with Helen Parkhurst, founder of the Dalton School, who heard Steiner lecture in England, you picture something different from what we today experience as Waldorf education. You imagine that Steiner’s method will gradually become a preferred method in American education in general.
It has not been part of any discussion whether or not to call your school a “Waldorf” school; The Waldorf School is in Stuttgart. Here we must find a new name, and the name of the man whose method the school will demonstrate suits well.
For a decade, your school is the only school using this method in the United States. You stay active in the PEA, inviting other private schools to visit and visiting them to lecture and demonstrate your new educational method. You form a coalition with other independent schools to prevail on cinemas not to show violent newsreels before matinee features.
Your school, alone, represents the first generation in the United States of what will come to be called Waldorf schools. I call this generation “The Europeans.” Americans traveled to Europe and returned to found the Steiner School, but the teachers and advisors, the language and proto-jargon of the work of this school bear a European stamp when compared with later generations. You call therapeutic eurythmy “Heil Eurythmy;” you call the verse with which you begin each faculty meeting a “Sprüch.”
You hear of an experiment that Beulah Emmet is conducting at the Edgewood School in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her faculty, on hearing of Steiner’s method, votes unanimously to adopt it, and begins teaching students using this method in January 1938. You have offered Hermann von Baravalle the position of Director of the Steiner School, but he has declined for reasons that are so far lost to history. He moves to Connecticut to help Mrs. Emmet.
“Director” was Rudolf Steiner’s own title at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. He did not teach at the school, but he trained the teachers, hired them, and, when necessary, fired them. If someone told you that your school should be “faculty run” or that it should use a “consensus decision-making model,” you would scoff. Your school is independent in the tradition of good American schools and consistent with what you might read in Steiner’s work.
You hear of a respectable family in Boston, the Roger Hales, who have been to Switzerland, who are enthusiastic about anthroposophy, and who wish to start a small school based on Steiner’s methods at their dairy farm and logging camp in Vanceboro, Maine. In 1941 they try this experiment, but it fails in three or four years. This, the third “Waldorf” school in the United States, never really had a chance.
From Connecticut, Baravalle moves to Kimberton, Pennsylvania, to help a wealthy Swedish industrialist, Alarik Myrin, open a school for displaced European children. The children never arrive, but the Kimberton Farms School opens in 1941 anyway, training local teachers to teach local children using Steiner’s method.
During the early years of World War II the Edgewood School’s faculty splits, and Mrs. Emmet, in 1942, opens the High Mowing School in Wilton, New Hampshire. It is a high school only, a boarding school on an old family farm. Over the years it attracts some graduates of the Steiner School in New York and even, briefly, Judson Hale, son of Roger. Judson Hale grows up to become long-time editor of Yankee magazine, just down the road in Dublin, New Hampshire. It must seem like things are finally growing and moving.
And Dr. von Baravalle is everywhere, lecturing and advising. He accepts a position as a professor of mathematics at Adelphi College, a women’s college that has just become coeducational, in bucolic Garden City, New York. Alarik Myrin is on the Board of Trustees. Adelphi faces a fiscal crisis; it can’t pay its mortgage. Mr. Myrin bails out the college on the condition that they start an experimental school in order that their teacher trainees have a place to practice. It must be a school using Steiner’s method and so, in 1947, the Waldorf Demonstration School of Adelphi College, is founded.
Baravalle lectures at Ralph Courtney’s Threefold Farm in the 1940s, and, in 1950 the Green Meadow Waldorf School opens. The Highland Hall school, in Los Angeles, also visited by Baravalle, which has been using Steiner’s method since the late 1940s, rededicates itself in 1955 as a school devoted to Steiner’s method. The Sacramento Waldorf School opens in 1959, the Honolulu Waldorf School in 1961, Detroit in 1965 or 1966, and the second generation of Waldorf schools in the United States is complete. I don’t know that Baravalle made it to Hawaii, but he did lecture in Sacramento and Detroit.
I call this second generation, the generation that begins in World War II and ends in the mid 1960s, “The Americans.” This generation saw its task as forming a specifically American version of Waldorf education. For Baravalle, the chief proponent or “Johnny Appleseed” of this generation, this often meant leaving aside Steiner’s esotericism in favor of a more practically-oriented understanding of Waldorf school teaching methods. For Alarik Myrin, it meant hiring American teachers and training them, rather than looking to Europe for imported teachers. For others, it meant attempts to Americanize curriculum, including especially the Transcendentalists and American writers.
Two generations of schools have succeeded the ones I have written about here. “The Alternatives,” from 1965 to the present, see Waldorf schools as alternatives to conventional educational models and seek less to have an impact on the broader world of education in the United States. This generation introduces the idea of “faculty run” schools and consensus decision-making. This is also the generation that produces our stereotypes of Waldorf schools as friendly to hippies and new-agers.
The last generation I hesitantly call “Variations.” This generation is characterized by attempts to re-engage Steiner’s ideas about the social mission of schools. Charter Waldorf schools, the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School, the Wolakota Waldorf School on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and other attempts to bring Waldorf education to disadvantaged families fit here. Unfortunately, within these experiments, “Waldorf education” itself as an object is rarely called into question.
The first generations of Waldorf and Steiner schools, distinct from these last generations, are characterized by a willingness to experiment and adapt. There were few precedents, nothing carved in stone, nothing objectified… Recovering that spontaneity in light of what we know now would be an admirable project.
History and Genius
How does the world change? Not the natural, forest fire-earthquake-volcano part of the world, but the world of ideas and events, the human world. The simple answer is that change comes through the work of human beings. This is not to deny the effects of unintended consequences. Louis XIV centralized power in France, drawing nobles away from the provinces and their fiefdoms to serve him at Versailles. One effect of this policy? Nobility itself became trivial and weak, laying part of the groundwork for the French Revolution. On the other hand, the bureaucracy that Louis and his cardinals furthered is still in place in France despite the Revolution.
Another example shows the place of genius in history. Galileo altered our view of the heavens, cementing in place Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system and demonstrating the power of a scientific, mathematical worldview. He, and others, provided the raw material from which Isaac Newton, for example, fashioned his description of gravity. But here’s the rub: Knowing everything that Galileo and his contemporaries knew, could you or I have become Newton. Could we have built Newton’s edifice? Unlikely. Newton famously said, “If I have seen farther, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” Well, those shoulders were available to many people, but the only one who could climb on them was Newton. To use outdated language, paradigm shifts require two things. The first is a necessary history. Without Galileo, no Newton. The second is a necessary innovator.
Another example shows the place of genius in history. Galileo altered our view of the heavens, cementing in place Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system and demonstrating the power of a scientific, mathematical worldview. He, and others, provided the raw material from which Isaac Newton, for example, fashioned his description of gravity. But here’s the rub: Knowing everything that Galileo and his contemporaries knew, could you or I have become Newton. Could we have built Newton’s edifice? Unlikely. Newton famously said, “If I have seen farther, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” Well, those shoulders were available to many people, but the only one who could climb on them was Newton. To use outdated language, paradigm shifts require two things. The first is a necessary history. Without Galileo, no Newton. The second is a necessary innovator.
Rootless Skittering Through Life
I nod to a heavy woman who leans on a cane, then push open the glass door of the gas station convenience store. It’s 10 p.m. I’ve been on the road or teaching or meeting for eleven hours, half a sandwich and a cup of coffee nine hours ago. I grab a bottle of water and a sandwich, pay for them, and start for my car. I want to get home and go to bed.
“Can I get a ride? I really need to get away from here.” The woman stands inside the door now, next to two old suitcases.
“Pardon me?” I ask, to focus and gain time. She’s about my age, or older, red-faced, round. A knit hat and frizzy hair; a crumpled face. “Where are you heading?”
“Which way are you going?” She asks.
“North,” I say.
“Fine. To a city?”
“No. Rural Massachusetts .”
“That’s good. I’ve got to get away from cities.” Is she picturing a bucolic life in the hills? It’s snowing pretty hard. “I don’t have any money.”
“That’s okay,” I say.
“I’m going to Maine.”
I look at her, hard. I’m a pushover, but I try not to act like it. “Where will you stay tonight?”
“We can work that out. Maybe I can sleep on your floor. You have a girlfriend? You could call her.”
“I’m married,” I say, and hold out my hand to show my wedding ring. Does she think a woman will be softer on her?
“Or an all-night gas station. I just need to get away from here.” Is she running away? I picture an angry man, violence.
“Where’s your car? Can you carry my suitcases?”
She spreads a green wool camp blanket on my car seat and hoists herself in.
“I’m a prune and I scar easily,” she says.
“Sorry?”
“I’m a prude and I scare easily.”
“Oh.” If I were—the opposite of a prude—and wanted to show her, and wanted to scare her, would her saying these things make me less likely to act? “Okay,” I say.
I share my tuna salad sandwich with her. She’s Marjorie. I’m Steve. I teach; she used to teach. I have two kids. So does she, although obviously nowhere nearby. If I was a fireman, I believe she would have used to be a fireman.
“I can’t take people stealing my Social Security number any more,” Marjorie says.
“Uh huh,” I say. I think, if I were going to steal someone’s number, I’d probably choose someone of greater means.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
“Duchess County,” she says. Who names a county when you ask them where they’re from? It’s the county we’re in, that’s all.
“I don’t want them to steal my number any more. I hate cities. I hate Maine. I’m going to take a nap, if that’s okay,” she says.
“Fine.”
I drive through the snow in silence.
What the hell am I going to do with her? She’s not sleeping on my floor, and we’re headed to the middle of nowhere. I picture a truck stop, twenty minutes north of my house. I guess that’s it.
Marjorie holds herself still for a while, not really sleeping, but then gives in and starts snoring softly.
I call a friend on my cell phone; my wife is asleep already.
“So I’ve got a hitchhiker named Marjorie next to me and I don’t know where to drop her.”
“You picked up a homeless person?” This is when it dawns on me. I’ve picked up a homeless person. She’s not running away, she’s not headed to Maine. She’s sleeping in my car and what comes next she’ll figure out next.
I wake her after a while. “What shall I do with you?”
“I can’t stay on your floor?”
“No. Sorry.” I’m not even going to ask my wife. We both have to get up in six hours to go to work. “What about a shelter?” I picture a shelter in a small city half an hour north.
“No. No shelters. Too dangerous. A truck stop, I guess. Or what about a church?”
I call my friend. “What about a church? Can you check the yellow pages?”
“I’ll go on Google.” He’s laughing at me driving through a snowstorm, sucker, with a sleeping homeless woman next to me. “Really nothing. I’ll call the police.” Later, “Hey! Police say there’s a shelter in our town. Who knew? No churches open though.” He names an address on a side street I’ve never been down. Twenty minutes later, we pull up outside.
“Marjorie, end of the line.”
“Where are we?”
“A shelter. Look, it’s a small town. Very safe, friendly.” The shelter does look safe and friendly, new construction, a small house with a wheelchair ramp and handicapped parking, well lit. Large windows show a spare common room inside. Better maintained than my old house, I think. Lower heating bills.
“No. I don’t do shelters.” Pride? A criminal record? It doesn’t matter, she’s not going. Beggars can’t be choosers, I think, and then feel bad for thinking it, bad for her. And it’s not true, because I’m about to drive her to the truck stop. She falls asleep again.
Thankfully, the truck stop is open. I pull up short of the door. How will we do this? I wake Marjorie. She asks some questions about the truck stop, but I don’t know any answers. I put her suitcases on the sidewalk under the eaves, out of the snow. She gets out, hooks her blanket off the seat with her cane. Will I take her suitcases inside? Sure. A compact man in a red shirt and a girl are talking back by the dairy case. I get the suitcases inside, squeeze $20 into Marjorie’s hand, and say good bye.
But she’s done with me, now that I’m abandoning her here. She’s looking for a place to sit down and smoke. She doesn’t say good-bye, or make eye contact. She turns and walks down a hallway past screeching video game stations. I don’t hurry, but I don’t stick around.
As I get in my car and take off, the man in the red shirt accelerates to the front of the store, eyes swiveling between Marjorie and me. He comes to the door and looks out, but I’m gone. Marjorie is his now.
I drive home, alone, and think about how little any of us can really do for anyone else. And I think of us—those of us willing to help, briefly, and those of us unwilling to help but unable to harm, thrust unwittingly into the role of Marjorie’s helpers, passing her from hand to hand, hour to hour, as she rootless skitters through life.
“Can I get a ride? I really need to get away from here.” The woman stands inside the door now, next to two old suitcases.
“Pardon me?” I ask, to focus and gain time. She’s about my age, or older, red-faced, round. A knit hat and frizzy hair; a crumpled face. “Where are you heading?”
“Which way are you going?” She asks.
“North,” I say.
“Fine. To a city?”
“No. Rural Massachusetts .”
“That’s good. I’ve got to get away from cities.” Is she picturing a bucolic life in the hills? It’s snowing pretty hard. “I don’t have any money.”
“That’s okay,” I say.
“I’m going to Maine.”
I look at her, hard. I’m a pushover, but I try not to act like it. “Where will you stay tonight?”
“We can work that out. Maybe I can sleep on your floor. You have a girlfriend? You could call her.”
“I’m married,” I say, and hold out my hand to show my wedding ring. Does she think a woman will be softer on her?
“Or an all-night gas station. I just need to get away from here.” Is she running away? I picture an angry man, violence.
“Where’s your car? Can you carry my suitcases?”
She spreads a green wool camp blanket on my car seat and hoists herself in.
“I’m a prune and I scar easily,” she says.
“Sorry?”
“I’m a prude and I scare easily.”
“Oh.” If I were—the opposite of a prude—and wanted to show her, and wanted to scare her, would her saying these things make me less likely to act? “Okay,” I say.
I share my tuna salad sandwich with her. She’s Marjorie. I’m Steve. I teach; she used to teach. I have two kids. So does she, although obviously nowhere nearby. If I was a fireman, I believe she would have used to be a fireman.
“I can’t take people stealing my Social Security number any more,” Marjorie says.
“Uh huh,” I say. I think, if I were going to steal someone’s number, I’d probably choose someone of greater means.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
“Duchess County,” she says. Who names a county when you ask them where they’re from? It’s the county we’re in, that’s all.
“I don’t want them to steal my number any more. I hate cities. I hate Maine. I’m going to take a nap, if that’s okay,” she says.
“Fine.”
I drive through the snow in silence.
What the hell am I going to do with her? She’s not sleeping on my floor, and we’re headed to the middle of nowhere. I picture a truck stop, twenty minutes north of my house. I guess that’s it.
Marjorie holds herself still for a while, not really sleeping, but then gives in and starts snoring softly.
I call a friend on my cell phone; my wife is asleep already.
“So I’ve got a hitchhiker named Marjorie next to me and I don’t know where to drop her.”
“You picked up a homeless person?” This is when it dawns on me. I’ve picked up a homeless person. She’s not running away, she’s not headed to Maine. She’s sleeping in my car and what comes next she’ll figure out next.
I wake her after a while. “What shall I do with you?”
“I can’t stay on your floor?”
“No. Sorry.” I’m not even going to ask my wife. We both have to get up in six hours to go to work. “What about a shelter?” I picture a shelter in a small city half an hour north.
“No. No shelters. Too dangerous. A truck stop, I guess. Or what about a church?”
I call my friend. “What about a church? Can you check the yellow pages?”
“I’ll go on Google.” He’s laughing at me driving through a snowstorm, sucker, with a sleeping homeless woman next to me. “Really nothing. I’ll call the police.” Later, “Hey! Police say there’s a shelter in our town. Who knew? No churches open though.” He names an address on a side street I’ve never been down. Twenty minutes later, we pull up outside.
“Marjorie, end of the line.”
“Where are we?”
“A shelter. Look, it’s a small town. Very safe, friendly.” The shelter does look safe and friendly, new construction, a small house with a wheelchair ramp and handicapped parking, well lit. Large windows show a spare common room inside. Better maintained than my old house, I think. Lower heating bills.
“No. I don’t do shelters.” Pride? A criminal record? It doesn’t matter, she’s not going. Beggars can’t be choosers, I think, and then feel bad for thinking it, bad for her. And it’s not true, because I’m about to drive her to the truck stop. She falls asleep again.
Thankfully, the truck stop is open. I pull up short of the door. How will we do this? I wake Marjorie. She asks some questions about the truck stop, but I don’t know any answers. I put her suitcases on the sidewalk under the eaves, out of the snow. She gets out, hooks her blanket off the seat with her cane. Will I take her suitcases inside? Sure. A compact man in a red shirt and a girl are talking back by the dairy case. I get the suitcases inside, squeeze $20 into Marjorie’s hand, and say good bye.
But she’s done with me, now that I’m abandoning her here. She’s looking for a place to sit down and smoke. She doesn’t say good-bye, or make eye contact. She turns and walks down a hallway past screeching video game stations. I don’t hurry, but I don’t stick around.
As I get in my car and take off, the man in the red shirt accelerates to the front of the store, eyes swiveling between Marjorie and me. He comes to the door and looks out, but I’m gone. Marjorie is his now.
I drive home, alone, and think about how little any of us can really do for anyone else. And I think of us—those of us willing to help, briefly, and those of us unwilling to help but unable to harm, thrust unwittingly into the role of Marjorie’s helpers, passing her from hand to hand, hour to hour, as she rootless skitters through life.
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