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.
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